A recent Twitter comment highlights a significant issue with modern storytelling and the misguided analysis of a lot of pop culture commentators.
The tweet reads:
“Furiosa was the worst-performing film for Memorial Day weekend in 30 years. It needs over 500 million just to break even after marketing.
Despite great reviews, it made just 31 million and barely beat a Garfield movie nobody knew about.
People are sick of female protagonists.”
This sentiment is wrong. People are not sick of female protagonists; they are tired of poorly written ones. Studios lazily injecting feminism into every action title is not a winning strategy. People crave compelling characters, regardless of gender.
Nobody rejects characters like Ripley from “Alien” or Sarah Connor from “Terminator.” It’s not their gender- it’s their compelling nature and logical actions within their stories. What audiences are fed up with is the forced injection of female protagonists in existing franchises who act like men.
“The Brotherhood of the Wolf” offers rare examples of well-crafted female characters. Like their male counterparts, our female characters are flawed, complex, and possess skills that make sense within the story’s context. This is the thoughtful character development you as a reader crave.
We just finished pencils on the first page of our “yomikiri“—a type of short story in the manga industry. Titled “The Lesser Evil: Where Angels Fall, Monsters Rise,” it features two women as major characters. When you read it later this summer, inshAllah, you will find them fascinating, relatable, and tragic. But at no point do they act like men!
Want something to laugh at? Here is a meme about how Arab countries–or any Muslim country for that matter–- are portrayed in U.S. movies. It highlights that whenever an Arab country appears, they always play Oriental music….. in the context of a desert scene, of course.
