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« on: July 05, 2012, 04:18:44 PM »
At the risk of being chewed out here, does it really matter if a single author can't bass the Bechdel test? I would think it more of an issue that the entertainment industry as a whole can't. For instance, I like a cheesy popcorn book series called the destroyer series (the movie Remo Williams is based off this). Clearly it is meant to be campy male fantasy, and this is okay. That's the idea. If however, every book or movie followed the formula of the destroyer series books, then we would have a problem.
So at what point do we start yelling at authors for not intentionally setting out to make their books pass the bechdel test?
At what point do we ask they change their own works to be politically correct in other ways? and at what point will going out of the way to satisfy these requirements actually start to interrupt the story? Worst case scenario, I can see these scenes sticking out like a bad product placement. Hell, why not just make the female-female conversation a feminine hygeine commercial and do both?
I'm not trying to play devil's advocate here, I just want to make the point that if too many people have to throw in their two cents on the creative process we get a story by committee without a cohesive focus. Which is bound to suck. I'd rather read the Dresden Files than a political statement.