The CW is planning it's annual crossover event for this coming December. More than likely they will introduce Batwoman there. If she is well received then we should see the pilot early in 2019.

Lothic wrote:

Well in keeping with the latest Hollyweird trend to produce "all-female cast" movies (like the 2016 Ghostbusters and Ocean's 8) it looks like we're going to get a new [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_of_Prey_%28comics%29#Potential_film]DCU Birds of Prey[/url] movie.

According to [url=https://www.thewrap.com/birds-of-prey-black-canary-huntress-cassandra-cain-renee-montoya/]one article[/url] it looks like it'll be centered around Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn and include Black Canary, Huntress, Cassandra Cain and Renee Montoya. It'll also reportedly have a "main villain" from the Batman universe that we supposedly haven't seen in the movies yet. One would assume this would be yet another female but I suppose that doesn't necessarily have to be the case.

As long as any given movie is good I don't usually care what proportion of the cast is male or female. It just seems a tiny bit coincidental that this movie is apparently jumping on the "all-female cast" bandwagon just for the sake of jumping on.

Frankly I'd rather see Joss Whedon's version of Batgirl before this, but all things being equal I'm sure I'll probably see this movie once it's released.

Don't worry, the vast majority of all movies are still total sausage fests ;)

Regarding the Birds of Prey, for most of its runtime as a comic it was an all female cast. It started out as that being the series' gimmick, but once Gail Simone took over writing duties, she turned it into the series' strength. It allowed her to bring up subjects in a (semi) realistic way that couldn't be broached with a male cast for stupid and outdated stereotypical gender expectations. Subjects like loss, grief, fear and assault, but also having a life and friendship outside the superhero gig.
How many male superheroes are written to be close personal friends, and even shown as such? When did we ever see a team leader setting up dream jobs for her team members, to remind them that while crime fighting is important, so is having an actual life and doing things that you enjoy.

That isn't to say that the series didn't have its problematic aspects. There were those stereotypical gender expectations that restricted what the writers could do with a female cast (e.g. the dream jobs for the female superheroes were florist and junior high school teacher...) and the writer could poke fun at wildly impractical superhero outfits for women (like complaining about being gawked at for wearing fishnet stockings and a swimsuit on a motorbike, or needing to do 500 stomach crunches a day to maintain the washboard abs that midriff a baring crop top required), but the artists couldn't (and I suspect wouldn't) change those outfits. There's also a fair bit of male superhero worship in the series too (as in, no matter how good the women are at their job, they will never measure up to the men).

Which in a roundabout way is me saying that complaining that Birds of Prey has an all female cast is complaining about the only comic series that always had an all female cast.

The cynic in me agrees with yout that likely the stuffed suits at DC picked Birds of Prey to greenlight for a movie because of that all female cast(*) and that the writer they (will) pick for the script probably has no idea why the series was critically acclaimed, and instead will opt for a generic 'dark and gritty' stupid DC plot that completely misses the point of the comics. I hope I will be pleasantly surprised, but I am not holding out much hope.

(* though less so because it is 'the' thing to do, which really isn't a thing in Hollywood as much as the vocal minority of 'womenz taking over our comics' would have it, and more because Wonderwoman ended up being one of their biggest successes lately )and these men in charge of DC seem to have no clue as to /wny/ that movie did so much better critically and commercially than anything else the studio churned out

Brand X wrote:

I don't believe there was any complaining about the all female cast of BoP. Lothic just said they're jumping on the bandwagon to get an all female cast movie out there.

Lothric broadly hinted(*) that the Birds of Prey movie was greenlight for the same reason that some movie franchises got a reboot with an all female cast (all two of them) and why some others got a female lead. And there certainly is a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over /that/. (and with the most vocal complainers making it painfully obvious that they object to the changes for no other reason than objecting to having a female lead in any genre but chick flicks)
Which was why I (and others, including Lothric) pointed out that Birds of Prey is about the only IP for which that particular attack does not work.

Of course the comic series worked only in the hand of competent writers (just like every comics series!) who knew what changes an all female or a female lead cast brought to the possible dynamics of the stories and the interactions. I am not holding out much (if any) hope that DC and WB have the competent writers they need nor that they will allow the creative freedom to the writing team to prevent them from writing a story where some of the cast are men who happen to have boobs and skimpy costumes. After all, neither harley quinn nor the enchantress was written as anything but eye candy in suicide squad, and womder woman may have had a decent story and characterisation in her stand alone movie, but it was back to square one for her and the amazons in justice league.

(* or at least suggested that was the common belief)

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Personally, I found some of the stuff face palm worthy.

Comments like "I got stared at for wearing fishnet stocking and a leotard" is the writer being stupid. Plain and simple. Of course she was being stared at, that's the point of the outfit. Have to work out to maintain abs? Well, they're not super powered and the male abs are showing threw their spandex, even if they don't have a window there
Basically, it was bad writing, no matter how much praise she got.

Please keep in mind that this was me paraphrasing and summarising a conversation, not the actual quotes.
That said, the point that was being brought up, subtly, is the meta question to the reader: why must female heroes dress sexy and skimpily? And by extenstion, why does our culture demand the same of all women?
Most of all though, it was just two women commisserating how much effort they had to put in and how much discomfort they had to endure just to conform to gender stereotypes. Even if it never gets anywhere, that's not a bad point to bring up in the most problematic media every now and then. (and while awareness that this is something of a problem slowly creeps in, artists and directors still very much want to have their cake and eat it. In movies it used to be that the camera panned lovingly over the undressed or undressing body of an actress. Nowadays they still do that and only after the pandering shots does the female character get to complain about the ogling. It sends a problematic boys will be boys message to the audience while pretending to be progressive and feminist about it).

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As for male hero worship. I have to wonder, are they trying to spin a real life aspect into it or not. There's a reason Ronda Rousey doesn't fight male MMA fighters, and it's not because she's bad. There's a reason Serena Williams' loses to the lower ranking male players.

It's not this, even if the writers allude to at least some of the female cast, heroes and villains, being able to go toe to toe in martial arts with almost alll men, short of superman. The problematic aspect is that the writing kind of implicitely assumes that whenever a male character shows up he is automatically better at the job. That's lingering traces of patriarchy that we are culturally barely aware of. Of course men can grow stronger than women, but that is mostly upper body strength. Lower body strength the difference is much less pronounced and when it comes to endurance rather than peak strength the only reason men perform better is because of the smaller average frame for women. When it comes to resistance to extremes women on average do better than men. In the brain department there are no differences. Or rather, given how mutable the brain is to stimuli while developing there is no ethical experiment possible to determine how much of the observable differences are genetic rather than environmental. At least when it comes to chess the top female players operate on the same skill level as the top male players (with the best female players capable of defeating the (male) world champion in a tournament setting. (btw. cultural infuences can be empirically observed here with observational evidence that women perform worse against players when they know they are male than when they believe their opponent is another woman.)

Which really is me getting sidetracked and verging dangerously close to giving a feminist lecture :)

Point I was trying to make is that there are some problematic aspects of the writing and that Birds of Prey is sensitive about its female cast, and uses them well to address story points, conflicts and after action effects that the format of a male dominated superhero story (with all of its gender stereotypes) can not. And that against all 'common industry wisdom' the audience didn't care and loved the stories and the series.

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Now, this is going by the idea of no super powers to make up for the real world aspects or just ignoring such real world aspects, which comics usually did, but people (not sure if readers) seem to want that real world aspect. Why we lose good outfits for crap ones.

The question you should ask yourself here is /why are the stereotypical outfits for female characters considered 'good', and why do they somehow become 'crap' when they no longer are better suited for the beach?

Mind, that is not at the heart of most of the fire and fury over female lead movies and series, it is just the argument that makes the darker motivations appear more reasonable, and through that draws in a larger number of people who support the superficious arguments and thereby shield from scrutiny and criticism the deeper and creepier underlying reasons.
I don't want to make assumptions about your reasoning, so I will only argue that for the most part for the men who make this, and similar, arguments it boils down to: I like to watch beautiful women wearing very little clothing. Which is a perfectly fine thing to like, but they never ask themselves the corrolary question of: Where is the fun in that for the women?

And at the end of the day we are seeing female led movies and series more nowadays because the studios, finally, realise that half the population is female and that they don't all like the same pink bubblegum movies. As a games research company stated it: "Women like to murderise you too. They just prefer to use magic to do it rather than guns".
In the case of movies it is all about representation. Neither The Force Awakens nor The Last Jedi really does anything with the fact that Rey is a woman. They could have cast a male actor for the role and literally wouldn't have had to chance a word in the script (as long as that male character had been calle Rey too, of course). But for the women watching the movie the difference was profound. They were watching one of the very few movies where the hero of the story could be them. That's a powerful feeling that you can not really 'get' if the cultural and social default is you.
The writers followed rule one of 'writing for gender and minority awareness': After you wrote the first draft of the script go over each and every character and ask yourself: why is this character male, white, straight and classically handsome (because chances are high that you wrote him that way without thinking about it). If you can't think of a good reason why, consider changing one or more of these characteristics.
Of course they fell short of the second rule: If you change a character away from the default, consider the gender and cultural stereotypes and how these affect the expectations and experience both of the character and of the audience, then include at least some of that in the script.

If we go back to the subject of Rey and consider her backstory ... she grew up from the age five or so on a near lawless scavenger planet without much of anything in the way of protection. She was effectively bought (i.e. enslaved) by a criminal. Just thinking about that for a minute makes you realise that her life would /not/ have been that of a scavenger who goes out into the desert to find valuable pieces of technology from the wreckage of space battles. Instead he likely would have used her as another way to get back the money he had to pay out to the scavengers (to phrase it delicately). Now I fully understand that the writers didn't want anything that dark in their retalling of A New Hope, but it is an example of how changing the gender of a character may have profound implications for the story. And even if they never got to going into detail of the why, they could have used that minute of thinking to realise that the character of the girl Rey would have to be a lot more distrustful of men (not as competition as a male character in that situation would see them, but as a clear and present danger to her health and relative freedom)
Similarly men and women are treated differently. Subtly or not so. Again, it doesn't have to be the, or even /a/, focus of the story, but a subtle reference here and there would have added depth to the story and made the character of Rey more 'real' to the audience (even though that is not saying anything complimentary of our culture)

And this is what the writers of Birds of Prey tried to do, and occassionally succeeded at, with that series. And what I don't expect the writers of the movie to grasp, never mind get right.

--
In closing, I said what I wanted to say, and hopefully I managed to express it without too many misunderstandings and confusion. If anything I wrote upsets or offends you, please be assured that this is the result of my poor way of expressing myself and not of any negative opinion I hold of anybody.
Also, this got way more political than I am comfortable with so I think I will bow out of the rest of this discussion, if there is to be one and I didn't scare everybody away :)

Brand X wrote:

Now I'm curious if the ancient Romans considered it laughable!

The ancient romans didn't have leotards

They also didn't object to male bare legs. For their soldiers and lower classes at least. Once you got into Pater Familias and Senatorial (or other higher) ranks, it was floor length robes for men and women.
For women in fact, their attitude to what could and could not be seen was more 'Saudi Arabia' and not a lot of 'American Nightclub'
That said, they also were a practical people and knew those floor length robes wouldn't do on the -- not so clean -- streets. They invented the elevated sidewalks and elevated pedestrian crossings for a number of good reasons. They also understood and accepted that for farmers and people doing the heavy manual labour long robes instead of knee length tunica were both impractical and a safety hazard.

Generally speaking making fun of somebody's choice of attire is(*) a form of social control. It is meant to keep people from wearing things that are socially considered inappropriate. Given that homosexuality is one of the greatest taboos (especially in western and derived cultures which is what we are most familiar with) anything that looks like it might cross the deep chasm of a line between masculine and feminine will be subject to ridicule.
Now female clothing is, in our culture, designed to put women's secondary sex characteristics on display along with showing off an indication of the general health. It doesn't quite put the primary sex characteristics on display, but it often does a good job of drawing attention to it.
If you look at male clothing you can see that it does almost nothing of that (almost, some styles of male clothing do artificially widen the shoulders, and there are shirts that show off the chest and arm muscles, but those tend to be seen as gauche and low class. Go ever so slightly over that line in showing off a male body and gay namecalling and bashing will commence.

The ridicule and inease we are taught to feel around men in dress or skirts, tanga cut swiming trunks or all the other clothing that are inspired by and patterned on feminine clothing, is because the mean wearing that are not conforming to the male gender stereotype, and we don't like it if the status quo is challenged. Especially not if it is done so blatantly.

The reason why women are not ridiculed for wearing masculine clothing is threefold.
First of all, most of those clothes follow the same general feminine cut as more traditional women's clothes. They may be patterned on male clothing, but in execution they adhere a lot closer to other women's clothing.
Second, women who wear male clothing are ridiculed. They just aren't ridiculed where the typical man learns of it. And frequently it is done with subtle enough words and actions that the average man doesn't realise it even if he hears what is being said. The snide put down is not weaponry that boys typically learn to use with any precision or subtlety. It is still true that a woman who comes (or tries) to close to presenting as male will be subject to ridicule and possible violence. Presenting it as a joke (during Halloween when dressing up ridiculously is encouraged) may make it acceptable, but it is still possible that there will be long term repercusions. This applies to both genders by the way.
Third, women do get a greater freedom in what they choose to wear (as long as whatever their society deemed 'obscene' about their bodies remains covered up), but this was, and to large extent still is, because socially and culturally women were inconsequential.

Finally, it is important in reality to understand that our gender stereotypes, quirks and taboos, have formed from millenia of cultural indoctrination, and that they are subject to whims and fashion, that they vary between class and profession.
There are cultures where even a single hair is too much to show in public, Others where a toe is too risquee. The Japanese Geisha had those deep cutouts on their back for the same reason why american women wear deep scoop neck tees and bare shoulder tops. And on the other end of the spectrum there were cultures (the missionaries took care of erradicating those) that didn't even have the concept of nudity. Call a skirt a kilt or a dress a thoube, or pick a tunica, and it is perfectly acceptable for men to wear those, but call them by their female clothing names and men, as you said, are subject to ridicule and worse for putting them on in public.

It would be a good think, generally speaking, if our entertainment would break out of that tired old western american focus and expand its horizons a little. Especially if it can do so without immediately jumping two feet first in the very shallow indeed pool of bad parody.

(or at least can be, some of the cases are just people having no fashion sense at all and wearing things that are plain ugly)

Lothic wrote:

[
Did you really seriously expect much better than this? It's merely going to be little more than an excuse to have Robbie's Quinn (and her friends) prance around on screen for roughly 90 minutes and I'm sure it'll make a good deal of money doing that. *shrugs*

Expecting? no.
Having some tiny bit of hope that it would be better than this? sure.

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Uh... yeah. The next time I see a guy wear a cup and a leotard together you'll be the first to know.

Well, wrestlers (the olympic version that is, not the WWF pretend to be real variant) tend to wear what amounts to a male cut leotard.
Swimmers too, though nowadays they trend towards a full body wet / catsuit.
And athletic, especially the 100m dash where every tiny bit of clothing drag can be the difference between winning and infamy, also wear a form fitting one-piece that basically is a leotard for men.

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And once again (for about the 8th or 9th time in the last year or two) I continue to be ironically amused at how many [b]other people that aren't me[/b] keep bringing up
the "topic" of that infamous thread that supposedly no one else but me was supposed to care about. Thanks for continuing to prove my point about that.

Well, you are assuming I was talking about the jiggling. and the dangling :)
But since to be fair you weren't the one who brought up the point initially, I should have kept quiet about it in a reply to you.