I’m just going to say that I have zero interest in a supposedly feminist analysis/critique of art that involves pedantically counting the number of lines spoken. It’s a shallow and meaningless, reductive way to talk about anything.

Representation matters, female characters matter, female protagonists with agency matter. But if all you can say is “I counted the lines and the women spoke less” you’re just providing a shallow caricature of a more substantive potentially interesting critique.

Also probably not a popular opinion but fuck it; judging storytelling primarily by its adherence to idealized social justice values is doing a disservice both to those values and the possibilities of storytelling.

The Bechdel Test, Simone’s Women in Refrigerators list, all of these popular metrics for assessing the representation of women in popular media are good tools but they aren’t sufficient on their own to be a critique or to understand the worth of a piece of art/media.

The tropification of media criticism is really unfortunate; people rattle off these buzzword shibboleths and cross their arms like they’ve completely dismantled something and it’s just so smug and undeserved. It’s okay to dislike something. But you gotta bring more to it.

Good media criticism illuminates why something does/doesn’t work, what it fails to do, how it succeeds or misses the mark. It increases our understanding of culture, of politics, of culture, of storytelling and its potential for pleasure, connection or even propaganda.

Shallow checklists of tropes or line-counting or hollow, performative social justice critiques (not all SJ critiques are hollow at all, some are very justified) just don’t meet that standard and weaken the (important) work of examining art and artistry in media.