Moments when a piece of entertainment completely lost you.

[Mask_De_H]

You complain about the dumbest shit, Prak.

It offends me.

[phlapjackage]

So the opening of Episode 4 and Luke's treatment of R2-D2 and the faulty droid that precedes him is supposed to show that Luke is a casual slaver bad guy?

For fun, yeah you could say Luke is a casual slaver, a symptom of being part of the Empire and the societal ills brought by the Empire as a whole. It's part of his redemption arc to break out of this as he starts seeing R2 as a friend and equal as the movies progress and he becomes more a part of the Rebellion.

[erik]

You complain about the dumbest shit, Prak.

It offends me.

That might be a bit harsh. But yeah. What the fuck'r ya going on about Prak?
(rhetorical question to emote my bafflement at your peeve. please don't actually explain)

[Whipstitch]

I'm pretty cool with lazy if it gives me a chance in hell of keeping track of who is who in the inevitable action scenes.

[Leress]

You complain about the dumbest shit, Prak.

It offends me.

That might be a bit harsh. But yeah. What the fuck'r ya going on about Prak?
(rhetorical question to emote my bafflement at your peeve. please don't actually explain)

I actually need an explanation about this. I have an idea, but I rather not make assumptions.

[Prak]

You complain about the dumbest shit, Prak.

It offends me.

That might be a bit harsh. But yeah. What the fuck'r ya going on about Prak?
(rhetorical question to emote my bafflement at your peeve. please don't actually explain)

I actually need an explanation about this. I have an idea, but I rather not make assumptions.

Yeah, I got no life, so I get pissed off about dumb stuff in movies.

So, there's a trope, or kind of a collection of tropes, where the male and female of a given species are kind of color-coded, and the male is always darker, and the female is always paler or lighter colored. Think Buster and Babs Bunny (no relation) from Tiny Toons, or the gorillas in the Disney animated Tarzan movie, or Stitch and Angel from the Lilo and Stitch series.

It just bugs me, because it's lazy, and... sexist isn't the right word, but it, and the tendency for female creatures to have softer, less angular designs*, is based on the idea of women being passive, weak, etc.

I want to make a snide comment about Frank getting pissed off by some "that's implicitly not possible in this universe, otherwise it'd have been a thing before" thing in Star Wars, but honestly, this is way dumber than that.

*Ok, yes, at least in humans, women have a higher average body fat, so they actually are softer than men, on average

[Username17]

The implication in A New Hope is that most droids were severely sub-human and actually were pretty much tools. The fact that C3PO and R2D2 had thoughts and opinions was something that took Luke by surprise. And when C3PO tries to start a conversation with other droids, they mostly seem pretty much inert.

The idea that sapient droids were anything other than extremely rare appears to have just sort of crept in to the series. The R2 unit with a bad motivator that Luke almost bought instead of R2-D2 appeared to be completely non-sapient. But by TFA, every droid is a character.

But yes, if sapient Droids are common, the entire thing about droid slavery is extremely ick.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

My big problem is that the whole "pale female/dark male" trope is bullshit.

So.... you're opposed to interracial marriage?

That might be a bit harsh. But yeah. What the fuck'r ya going on about Prak?
(rhetorical question to emote my bafflement at your peeve. please don't actually explain)

I actually need an explanation about this. I have an idea, but I rather not make assumptions.

Yeah, I got no life, so I get pissed off about dumb stuff in movies.

So, there's a trope, or kind of a collection of tropes, where the male and female of a given species are kind of color-coded, and the male is always darker, and the female is always paler or lighter colored. Think Buster and Babs Bunny (no relation) from Tiny Toons, or the gorillas in the Disney animated Tarzan movie, or Stitch and Angel from the Lilo and Stitch series.

It just bugs me, because it's lazy, and... sexist isn't the right word, but it, and the tendency for female creatures to have softer, less angular designs*, is based on the idea of women being passive, weak, etc.

I want to make a snide comment about Frank getting pissed off by some "that's implicitly not possible in this universe, otherwise it'd have been a thing before" thing in Star Wars, but honestly, this is way dumber than that.

*Ok, yes, at least in humans, women have a higher average body fat, so they actually are softer than men, on average

Maybe it's just because I download porn for a guy who loves interracial (yes, I do this professionally and get paid), but I look at it a completely different way.

[Prak]

The implication in A New Hope is that most droids were severely sub-human and actually were pretty much tools. The fact that C3PO and R2D2 had thoughts and opinions was something that took Luke by surprise. And when C3PO tries to start a conversation with other droids, they mostly seem pretty much inert.

The idea that sapient droids were anything other than extremely rare appears to have just sort of crept in to the series. The R2 unit with a bad motivator that Luke almost bought instead of R2-D2 appeared to be completely non-sapient. But by TFA, every droid is a character.

But yes, if sapient Droids are common, the entire thing about droid slavery is extremely ick.

-Username17

I meant the relativistic weapon thing.

My big problem is that the whole "pale female/dark male" trope is bullshit.

So.... you're opposed to interracial marriage?

HA!

[DSMatticus]

I refuse to believe the people bitching about Prak's rant aren't aware of the thriving interracial porn industry which is mostly just black dudes banging white girls. Obviously, How To Train Your Dragon is not trying to capitalize on that market, and whatever, I'm not particularly comfortable judging people based on what they beat their meat to anyway. But point is that's not a porn trope, it's an everything trope. It's really common for media to associate 'whiteness' with 'beauty' (especially feminine beauty), and the implications, history, and effects of that on young children are all just super fucking sketchy.

A studio executive said a white dragon would make a better love interest because white is more 'feminine'. That's literally what happened. That's exactly why that poster is what it is. From the standpoint of marketing to their audience, they're not even wrong, but we're trying to not be such creepy racists about this sort of shit anymore and that requires a smidge of self-awareness and being willing to bite the bullet for awhile. Tropes don't magically disappear, you either have to stop proliferating them or make their subversions the new norm. And the color-coding of femininity is a trope that really needs to be a thing that goes the way of "wow, this makes me super uncomfortable."

Of course, as with all criticism of widespread cultural patterns, no specific work is really responsible for wrong-doing. There's fundamentally nothing wrong with a story about dating an albino. It's not like albino are soulless unhumans (undragons?). It is entirely the pattern that is problematic, and the best you can do is grumble at all the examples that show the pattern's still kicking.

So.... you're opposed to interracial marriage?

I bet you can name more black guy / white girl couples in media than you can white guy / black girl couples. There's no reason to deliberately misinterpret this shit so you can find offense. It's really obvious that this is an actual thing. Or to put it another way; when it comes to having positive icons to represent them, black women are at the intersection of two entirely different piles of unfair bullshit.

tl;dr we need less albino black girldragons and more drow princesses.

[Username17]

We're on like movie 4 of the How to Train Your Dragon series. Toothless is black. That is the color that he is. there is literally zero chance of a Toothless love interest dragon not being a lighter color, because the previously established male character is already literally the darkest color. For fuck's sake.

While in general I agree that the world needs more examples of dark skinned females being presented as beautiful, the HtTYD series already has an established dragon that is literally black. To be visually distinct, the female dragon has to be a lighter color. It's not up for debate. It's not an example of a worrying trend. It simply has to be like that.

Now in the broader sense, the fact that we have "masculine" and "feminine" colors is pretty weird. It's totally unsurprising, but super weird. The assignment of masculinity and femininity is also basically totally random and changes wildly from culture to culture and even from generation. Pink has only stayed a girl color for the last 70 years because of color photography.

The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.

The whole pink/blue thing jumped back and forth several times at the beginning of the century, and only became ossified as girls in pink and boys in blue because color photography in the 40s made boomer culture perpetual. In the previous century, and for several centuries before that, boys and girls would wear white dresses until the age of 6.

In any case, the correlation (coloration?) of masculine and feminine of White and Black is highly contingent. If you're Chinese, you probably associate black with girls and white with boys because that is how the whole Yin/Yang thing is supposed to work.



-Username17

[Prak]

It's just an annoying trope.

You're right, Frank, there was pretty much no way the female dragon wasn't going to be lighter than Toothless. I cannot honestly say I wouldn't have been irritated by it if they had chosen, say, dark blue. Because they didn't, and if someone went and changed it, my perception would be colored by having first seen the white version. But at least that would have been a more reasonable color for a dragon that is established as an aerial nocturnal ambush predator.

I mean, obviously they're not putting that kind of thought into the dragon designs, and they don't need to. I'm just being overly analytical. But they still could have made Fem!Toothless closer in color to Toothless. Hell, they could have made her black, but give her display markings in other colors. That would be visually distinct, and would not play into a bullshit trope. They could also have read a fucking book with even the barest chapter on sexual dimorphism and made Fem!Toothless visually distinct in form rather than color.

[Starmaker]

They could also have read a fucking book with even the barest chapter on sexual dimorphism and made Fem!Toothless visually distinct in form rather than color.

The movies already have a fuckton of different dragon designs which are presumably different species. Some aren't even sapient. Toothless' girlfriend has to visually be the same species and have the same form.

[Prak]

I mean... this doesn't really contradict my point. Say female nightfuries have two pairs of wings, or substantially different shaped tail fins, or extra fin structures, or actual horns, or more axolotl-like feeler things.

[DSMatticus]

It is important to be aware that this shit gets made by people. There are meetings. People go to them and words at one another. There were discussions about that character's design. As white obviously isn't the only solution to the problem of visual distinctiveness, there are reasons beyond random chance that the end result was that particular design and not any of the other possible solutions. And the two most plausible reasons for that are:

1) Someone thought the contrast of it looked cool. Polar opposites and all that jazz. Badass. And they're not wrong. It's just unfortunate that in this particular instance that that lands neatly in the bucket "white = feminine." In fact, the entire discussion could have gone "well, we've sort of fucked ourselves here. This breed of dragon is canonically black. We need them to be visually distinct. Wat do?" "... Albino?" "Hey, that's kind of awesome." I mean, it's a little bit OC donut steele, but it's also for children, so fuck it have fun. Still unfortunate that it lands in that bucket, though. It's not their fault that the bucket exists. They're presumably not trying to fill the bucket as part of some horrible racist agenda. In fact, we're always going to need some things in that bucket because emptying the bucket entirely is racist as fuck for different reasons. But right now too many goddamn people are putting goddamn things in that goddamn bucket and it'd be really nice if the other buckets got some attention.

2) Someone thought a white dragon would be the most marketable love interest, that a feminine purple dragon or a blue dragon or a pink dragon would come off as comical while a feminine white dragon would get a "wow, so pretty!" And they're also probably not wrong, but the reason they're not wrong is because they're playing to a popular trope - and that trope is super fucking sketchy and if we ever want to fix it we do have to stop giving in to the dollar signs and admit we did a bad and bite the bullet on fixing the bad. Our children don't have to grow up on the same things the people currently working at DreamWorks grew up on. They don't.

It is reasonable to look at that poster and be disappointed. Pure motivations and reasonable justifications don't actually stop it from being part of a wider problem. They stop the creators being assholes, of course - it's not like it's their job to singlehandedly solve the world's problems with How To Train Your Dragons 3. But collectively, it's still a "FUCK! We did it again!" moment.

[Username17]

They could also have read a fucking book with even the barest chapter on sexual dimorphism and made Fem!Toothless visually distinct in form rather than color.

The movies already have a fuckton of different dragon designs which are presumably different species. Some aren't even sapient. Toothless' girlfriend has to visually be the same species and have the same form.

This.

For fuck's sake, these are the main characters and the dragons that they ride:

Visually distinct in form is already a thing which in-world means "different type of dragon." The only way to distinguish two dragons of the same type is to have them be different colors. That is literally the only way. Toothless is Black. He's the darkest color. Any other night fury has to be a lighter color in order to visually distinguish it from Toothless. That is literally and specifically the only possible way for the graphic artist to do it. They've been completely boxed in on this from the previous movies. There is no other way to draw a female night fury.

Considering how much bizarre sexism there is all over the place in our culture, getting pissed off about shit like this that is completely meaningless and is not inherently gender biased in any way is fucking retarded and you should stop! If they introduced an evil Night Fury or a long lost brother night fury, it would also have to be a different color. Because that is how it fucking works in visual storytelling. Fuck.

-Username17

[Prak]

Here ya go, took me maybe ten minutes in photoshop, and it's a nightfury that is visually distinct from Toothless-


I added a few more axolotl feeler things on the jaw line, extended the top things into more like horns (because actually adding horns would take a lot longer than I wanted to put into this), and altered the hue to make it a purple-based black, rather than blue. Because purple makes a good base for black, and I like purple*. I also altered the color of the eyes. Someone with better photoshop skills/more interest in investing time into this could do even better.

*and that kind of backs into the thing I'm bitching about, since part of the reason I like purple is that I'm genderqueer, and purple is a vaguely feminine color, but not so feminine that I would get shit for it in high school


For reference, here's the original image, showing that toothless is a blue-black, rather than pure black:

[Omegonthesane]

It didn't specifically have to be "literally white". If it had been red or blue or literally anything other than fucking white then this wouldn't be part of that particular pattern.

And, they already have distinguished it from Toothless with a more rounded, less scaly design.

[Username17]

Here ya go, took me maybe ten minutes in photoshop, and it's a nightfury that is visually distinct from Toothless-

Are you honestly trying to tell me you would not have been annoyed if the Female Night Fury had been purple? Shut up.

Just shut up. That is obviously bullshit and I am not going to treat that as a serious claim.

-Username17

[Prak]

Less upset. It would have been better than fucking white.

[Username17]

Less upset. It would have been better than fucking white.

No. It would not have been better than white. Purple is a "girl color." Gay men wear purple to signify stuff. You wear purple to celebrate International Women's Day. It's a gendered color. White is not a gendered color. It's fucking white. In Asia, where white is a gendered color, its color is masculine. Please shut the fuck up forever.

-Username17

[Prak]

Oh for fuck sake. It's not "white is female" it's "female non-humans in movies/cartoons are SO FUCKING OFTEN a lighter color than the male," it's a whole fucking trope.

Fuck, it's like THREE FUCKING TROPES.
Pale Females, Dark Males
Light Girl, Dark Boy
Pink Girl, Blue Boy

Purple, while ostensibly feminine (lavender is feminine, eggplant or concord is just ostentatious) can be equally dark as the blue-black of Toothless, and does not fall into bullshit tropes (it is vaguely similar to "Pink Girl, Blue Boy," but just like a red female of the same value as Toothless' blue would not be pink, a purple of the same value avoids all three of these tropes).

Also, OH LOOK, a person with degrees in Animation and Animal and Veterinary Science has the same fucking problem with this lazy bullshit.

Edit:
And, really, here's the thing that makes this piss me off so much, rather than just seeing it, sighing and rolling my eyes, and moving onL

And I’m not complaining just for the sake of complaining. I promise. This poster irritated me so much because HTTYD over the past 2 movies has had some stellar design. ESPECIALLY with it’s female characters. Astrid and Ruffnut are such courageous designs to me, because they’re not your classically beautiful disney knock off. Ruffnut is harsh looking. She has angles. She makes gross faces. These are all privileges that have traditionally been reserved for villains or men. Astrid is introduced in the first film like she’s some incredibly beautiful bombshell… but she really looks like a little girl. She’s kind of scrawny. She has only the smallest hint of a bust. She has a weak chin and her ears stick out, but it doesn’t matter because Hiccup thinks she is stunning.

Like, I couldn't articulate this, it's been a long fucking week, but it was in the back of my mind, spurring the trope-focused objection. But HTTYD gave us female characters that looked feminine, but were allowed to be more than just a stereotypical token girl character. Fuck, for like, half the fucking first movie, Astrid kicks more ass than any other character? Hiccup's mom in #2 is revealed to be, well, a woman, in a scene where you seriously couldn't really tell, because she wore actual fucking protective clothing.

[Username17]

Oh for fuck sake. It's not "white is female" it's "female non-humans in movies/cartoons are SO FUCKING OFTEN a lighter color than the male," it's a whole fucking trope.

Toothless is BLACK, you fucking idiot. There is literally no color that isn't lighter. It's the darkest color. The new Night Fury had to be a different color, all colors are lighter. You do not get to object to this, because it's fucking stupid.

Like, I couldn't articulate this, it's been a long fucking week, but it was in the back of my mind, spurring the trope-focused objection. But HTTYD gave us female characters that looked feminine, but were allowed to be more than just a stereotypical token girl character

You have no idea what the context or stereotypical or not nature of the female night fury is. Like, you honestly have no fucking idea. Maybe she does a bunch of offensive "girl stuff" to make you know she has lady parts, but maybe she doesn't. You don't fucking know.

All you know is that she's white, which is honestly the best color for her to be. Having her be an albino makes her chromatically distinct from the original character without having her be a "girl color." You getting upset about this makes you stupid. The end.

Remember:

This is Masculine.


This is Feminine.

Do not answer with links to fucking TV Tropes. Do not answer at all. Admit that you said a stupid thing to yourself, and fucking walk away from this incredibly stupid conversation.

-Username17

[Starmaker]

Toothless is BLACK, you fucking idiot. There is literally no color that isn't lighter. It's the darkest color. The new Night Fury had to be a different color, all colors are lighter. You do not get to object to this, because it's fucking stupid.

Also, Night Furies are black. It's THE main distinguishing trait of the species that has been established all the way back in the first movie. They hunt at night and are black, which allegedly makes them invisible against the night sky (not that any other color would be easier to see before artificial lighting, but it's a kids' movie based on a read-aloud book for preschoolers, night + black = stealthy = awesome).

The only way to make the girlfriend Night Fury visually distinct without fucking up the setting bible / toy line is to make her an albino. It's an action-adventure movie, they aren't going to stop the reel so that moviegoers can count axolotl feelers. Some of them can't fucking count.

Oh and by the way:

Apparently there may be some "oh, she's just albino" ass covering, but that's bullshit, too, what with the fucking blue eyes.

https://www.albinism.org/information-bu ... -albinism/

A common myth is that people with albinism have red eyes. Although lighting conditions can allow the blood vessels at the back of the eye to be seen, which can cause the eyes to look reddish or violet, most people with albinism have blue eyes, and some have hazel or brown eyes. There are different types of albinism and the amount of pigment in the eyes varies; however, vision problems are associated with albinism.

[deaddmwalking]

Just so everyone can hate me, I'm going to weigh in.

Prak, in general, it makes sense that you're bothered by this trope. There are situations (like the female rabbit in Bambi) that didn't HAVE to go that way, but they did. However, in this instance, it's really not justified. As a series, How to Train Your Dragon has done a good job of portraying females in a positive way. Give them the credit they're due for mostly getting it right and give them a little leeway. To be consistent with the norms established in the movie to this point, they either had to make this Night Fury identical to Toothless, or they had to make her albino. I have young kids and I'm pretty sure that I remember dragon riders couldn't even tell their steed from another of the same species. Like, they're so identical, that even if you spend ever day with them, you can't tell them apart visually. Clearly, that's not going to work for a two-hour movie where knowing which one is which is important for the audience.

Like, it's okay to be bothered by this in general, but it really is that this specific case isn't a problem at all.

I mean, compare this dragon to the Shrek dragon...