Misogyny Is Not a Background Decoration

All too often when engaging with fantasy worlds, female characters are hard to come by. Sadly, when they are introduced, they’re often nowhere near as well written as their male counterparts. Female characters tend to have less agency than other characters, and their motivation and development as a result can be rather unrealistic. There are most definitely numerous reasons for this. One of them, though, is the use of misogyny as a background decoration. What I mean by this is that writers are often too busy including pointless misogyny to spend any actual time developing their female characters, because misogyny simply offers them an excuse to include gratuitous sexism without considering what message their story is going to send.

Trigger warning for rape and sexual violence ahead.

The Shannara Chronicles TV Show and Poor Worldbuilding

Before watching Stranger Things, I found myself sitting down to enjoy The Shannara Chronicles. I knew nothing about the story going in, and Saika had yet to write her post on one of the books, so little did I know just how bad this story was going to be. I don’t mean that the story is bad in the sense that it’s irredeemable—I mean that it’s bad because it’s lazy. Despite being based on a subpar book series, I think that The Shannara Chronicles really had a lot of potential that it could have reached had more time and thought been dedicated to it. Unfortunately, while the show has a lot of things I love in stories—queer representation, enemies becoming friends, fantasy in general, and discussions of racism—all too often it felt as if the story was simply running through a checklist and didn’t actually know how to use any of its material.

Spoilers up ahead.