To the Skylars and the Cerseis

I just came back from watching How to Train Your Dragon 2 tonight. It was fun, the 3D was amazing, the dragons were exciting to look at, and several scenes drove me to tears so that when the lights came back on, I had a pile of tissues balled up in my lap. Great time. Recommending to everyone, go see it.

There's nothing like a derpy dragon smile to win over your heart.

Anyway, there's a character in How to Train your Dragon 2 who is voiced by Kit Harrington a.k.a. Juhn Snuhh from Game of Thrones. He starts off as a dragon poacher who switches sides once he learns how good-natured and loyal dragons can actually be, and goes from hunting them for bounty to helping the ragtag bunch of dragon riders save the captured dragons. Classic bad guy gone good, am I right?

Just please don't let the patterned beard shave thing become a thing.

Except when I was younger, there weren't many stories of bad girls gone good, let alone bad guys gone good - at least not in my immediate memory. I remember watching plenty of Disney movies and other shows as a child, but not many of them featured a villain gone good. Jafar was and remained a power-hungry lecher, Gaston was and remained a burly egoistic barge, and Scar was and remained a kinslaying hyena mob boss until he became hyena dinner. The boundaries between good and evil are quite clear-cut in a child's mind.

But children grow up. They become adults and learn that although stealing is wrong, there's a grey area in that it could be excused if a man breaks into a bakery to steal a loaf of bread for his starving family. Murder is wrong, but could be excused if it was in self-defense. Sometimes evil is necessary, and it only becomes more so when we begin to justify it. We learn that people do drastic things in the face of death, lust, love.

Suddenly nothing is clear-cut anymore and, as grown people with some semblance of a brain, we should know this by now: humans are complicated and complex creatures who sometimes do the wrong things for reasons which they think are right. We cheer on Walter White as he battles cancer and rises to power as a prominent meth kingpin, even though the things he does becomes more and more wildly illegal. We cheer on the pompous Jaime Lannister as he loses his hand, desperate to get back to King's Landing - even if he has to murder a few innocents along the way.

So why do female antagonists and anti-heroes draw such horrible reactions from their audience that their male counterparts never elicit on the same level?

A couple of rockin' boss-ass bitches.

Unless you've been living under a goddamn rock, you'd recognize both of these women.

For those fond of living the life of Patrick Star, Skyler White (above), played by Anna Gunn, is the wife of the cancer-stricken high school chemistry teacher Walter White, who starts dipping his toes into the Albuquerque (this show is also the only reason I know how to spell Albuquerque properly, thanks for the spelling lesson Breaking Bad) meth industry so he can pool a lot of money in a short period of time to leave for his family for when he succumbs to his cancer. Cersei Lannister (below), played by Lena Headey, is the Queen Regent of King's Landing, where she fights to secure her children's place on the throne as well as the weight of her house name against several other kingdoms who are looking to usurp the throne from her family. Stuck in a loveless marriage, she maintains a decades-long incestuous relationship with her twin brother Jaime.

Both women are complex characters. Cersei would do anything for her children, but schemes and plots to have her own flesh-and-blood brother Tyrion killed. She loves Jaime and endures being married to a man she despises for the sake of her family, yet in the same breath would allow Joffrey to routinely beat and abuse his fiancee Sansa Stark. Skyler cares about her family and obviously cares about her husband, but by the later seasons has fewer qualms about helping her husband get away with his drug-related crimes as she dives deeper into the meth industry. She becomes just as ruthless as her husband while battling feelings of regret and guilt, all the while trying to support her family as best as she can.

All this meth could probably settle my student debts. I'm clearly in the wrong industry here...

Yet on many occasions I've had the pleasure of seeing repetitive, misogynistic comments about both female characters - how they are power hungry, manipulative bitch wives who are cold and uncaring and don't deserve the men in their respective lives. I've actually stopped arguing with these kinds of posters long ago, because they've already made their minds up. To them, there is no such thing as a complex female character, and she can't be seen as sympathetic unless she has a terrible back story that explains how broken she is before a hero comes to rescue and fix her.

Mini bomb-ass in the making. I'm rootin' for you! Woot! 

Take Arya Stark, for example.

A huge fan favourite, she's seen as the scrappy girl who bends genders and will do whatever it takes for her and her friends to stay alive. She'll chop off her hair, backtalk grown men, and confront red witches while practicing her swordsmanship to kill about half of Westeros to avenge her family.

Might I add that Arya is supposed to be nine years old? I think I was peeling dried glue off my fingers and eating chicken strips with milk when I was nine. I wasn't keeping a murdery hit list of people I want dead. Arya's parents are both dead, her sister is presumed missing, three of her brothers are dead (as far as she knows), and her pet direwolf was chased off. She witnesses not only her father's beheading, but the mutilated body of her brother Robb. That's a pretty tragic back story for a nine-year-old girl.

But even then, with an orphaned young girl who does the best she can to toughen up in the wild you get this sort of reaction from viewers once it becomes clear that she is no longer Arya the naive little girl: (pulled straight from discussion boards)

"She has way too much attitude for her own good, and she also is getting too big for her boots." 

"I hate her because she's ugly. It's clear at this point that she's not going to become attractive as she ages, she'll look no different at 30 than she does now. Mannish face, toneless stick body, no ass." 

"I hope her throat is cut and she's thrown overboard." 

Maisie Williams, accomplished 17-year-old child actress.
It's just too bad user douchen00b69 doesn't approve of her ass. 

Arya Stark, the character, is nine years old. Maisie Williams, the actress who plays her, is all but seventeen.

Gotta start breaking them down young, right?

Right.

How quickly do we stick women and female characters into black and white boxes? We should have all learned by now that nothing in this world is black and white - we're not watching Disney movies here.

And while similar horrible things have been said about the insanely talented Jack Gleeson (who plays psychodouche King Joffrey) - "looking at his face makes me want to punch him, I hate Joffrey so much I wish bad things upon the actor, and is Jack Gleeson actually as much of a dick as he is in Game of Thrones?" Joffrey isn't hated because his sex determined that he should act a certain way and he went against the status quo. People hate Joffrey because he is a terrible person, period. No one hates Joffrey for not being 'man' enough or having the wrong number of freckles across his nose.

A terrible person who also loves puppies!

"The things I do for love," says another fan favourite Jaime Lannister before he throws Bran out the window, crippling him for life. Yet I was able to sympathize with him in his inner struggles - being a Lannister doesn't buy your way out of trouble, it's hard doing the right thing but being seen as a cold-hearted monster in return, and knowing that the only way you can be with the person you love is to constantly sneak around and lie and kill to make that happen - and not once did I dislike Jaime Lannister "because he has too much attitude for his own good." I had moments of strong dislike towards him, but I also felt incredibly bad for him in other scenes and was happy for him when he got his groove back.

You know, sort of like how you would see any person you interact with in real life.

Women like Cersei Lannister and Skyler White are fictional characters, yes. But it's not a stretch to make a connection that people who claim that they 'hate' a certain character because they, for whatever reason, believe that female characters on television can only ever be tropes of the nagging, shrill bitch and can't be sympathized with at the same time (and you better look good while doing it) would judge and rate the women around them with the exact same misogynist lenses.

So now I watch and listen. I listen to how we talk about fictional female characters, and though I don't even try to persuade keyboard warriors to think about the character as her own person and not just a means to propel and decorate the male protagonists' storylines, I have enough instances in real life where I feel the need to school people who have set ideas of how women should be and where they belong in a story meant for female and male audiences alike. I hope we have more of Skylars and Cerseis in film and television. I hope we have more complex characters, both male and  female, who can carry strengths and weaknesses without being watered down to a dumb punchline stereotype.

If you hurl misogynist insults about a well-fleshed, well-written female character and extend those insults to the actresses who play them, I wonder what sorts of mighty judgement you pass on not only women you barely know, but the women who are closest to you. I'm not about to argue with you about the fact that Cersei or Skylar can be terrible, conniving characters. That much is clear. But if you find yourself unable to sympathize with their characters in their darkest moments and instead turn to predictable insults of them being uppity women who don't know their place, I'll silently question your mental maturity and wonder whether that's how you think of women in general. All the better to avoid you, my dears.