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glelsey said:
Generally, character design and development has always been super important to me. I'm especially in favour of non-stereotypical characters - it's boring watching the same character types in every TV show, movie, book, etc. and I praise originality and characters that make me realise I shouldn't be too quick to judge them/assume I know everything about them!
When gender stereotypes come up in media, I partly dislike them for the same reason I dislike any overused stereotype - they're unoriginal and make the character boring and predictable! But the other danger with gender stereotypes is that there are viewers out there gullible to believe that it's right to generalise a group based on their gender.
But having spent some time in the media industry myself, I'm also well aware of why those things happen (and why gender stereotypes are mais commonly used on female characters while the males have mais versatile personalities). The media industry is almost entirely men. Furthermore, some studios don't really like having mais than one female employed at a time (something about the media industry continuing to produce what is expected of them).
Oddly, when I've been teaching media, I've had quite a lot of female students (and their work is of the same quality as that of the male students) so the opportunity to hire mais females is out there, but some other things need to change in the system before this can become a reality.
But on the bright side, when it comes to less stereotypical characters (and a mais gender equal ensemble - as in, roughly as many female characters as males) the personalities are mais diverse and interesting, and that's when we see writers breaking away from the usual gender roles. Breaking away from the gender roles in media does not mean that a female character choosing to be a housewife is bad - it means that there should be a wider range of personalities of each gender. Females can be homemakers or females can have careers. Females can be married to males, married to other females, or be single. Same goes with the male characters too - they can have any relationship status, any career, or be a homemaker.
Feminist media is about having a good range of characters, and rather forcing them to live up to or go against gender roles, have them take on a personality and lifestyle without being limited to that sort of thing.
So yeah, in short I look for original characters where the writers don't try too hard to make them something based on their gender (or other factors). I like interesting characters that I haven't seen done a billion times before.
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