30 Days of Meta Challenge: Day 13 How do you feel about the representation of women in your fandom?

Let’s go through this bit by bit.

Laura Roslin - HBIC who doesn’t take crap from anyone and has a terminal illness that she doesn’t allow to get in the way of her duties. Manages to keep the vestiges of humanity alive with their civil rights largely intact for 4-5 years. Must ultimately relinquish all power and find the love of a man before she is considered “whole.” Dies.

Kara Thrace - Hot-headed ace pilot who bucks authority. Shoots first and asks questions later. Best shot in the Fleet. Most innovative strategist in the Fleet. Best survivalist and improviser in the Fleet. Becomes embroiled in a five-way romance that consumes her plotline at the expense of BAMF-ness. Goes crazy and commits suicide. Resurrects crazier. Disappears without explanation.

Caprica Six - Cylon idol who fell in love with her mark. Leads the Cylon movement to make peace with humans. Spends the rest of the show trying to get with her honey. Is impregnated as a prisoner. Magically miscarries. Is compensated by getting her original lover in the end. Lives.

Boomer - Cylon sleeper agent who is loyal to her human friends. Continually tries to fight her Cylon programming. Is shot. Leads the Cylon movement to make peace with humans. Eventually gives up on humans and sides with Cavill. Repeatedly shows highly developed agency and sense of self. Murdered without regret.

Athena - Cylon agent created to be impregnated by Karl Agathon. Turns her back on her own people to follow her baby-daddy. Doggedly loyal to Agathon above all else. Goes catatonic whenever her baby is taken away. Lives out her days on Earth as the dutiful mother with her husband and daughter.

Dee - Communications officer with a deep-seated sense of right and wrong who is not afraid to tell you her opinion. Suddenly becomes flighty and incapable of knowing her own emotions. Is eventually never even seen on screen except in regards to her marriage to Lee Adama. Goes crazy. Commits suicide.

Cally - Competent mechanic with a strong backbone and a sharp tongue. Intensely loyal to Chief whom she has a major crush on. Eventually marries her crush and has a child. Is murdered. Is later shown to have been a philandering deceiver when she is no longer able to defend herself.

Ellen Tigh - Devious, hyper-feminine, alcoholic who seemingly sleeps with everything male just to make her husband jealous. Pushes him into very poor decisions in her own hunt for power. Is later shown to be the leader of the Final Five and madly in love with her husband across aeons. Lives.

Tory - Minor character who fulfilled her duties well, but suffered with fans from the fact that she was replacing a very popular character. Eventually discovered she was a Cylon, embraced the dark side, and was brutally murdered while everyone applauded.

Kat - Loud-mouth ace pilot who butts heads with Starbuck on a regular basis. Is shown to be a compassionate leader and a good combat strategist. Her shady past as a drug-runner and dealer’s moll is discovered and she commits suicide in atonement.

Three - Cylon HBIC until she becomes a crazy sibyl. Leads her peoples into ill-conceived war because of her insanity and is shown to crack under pressure. “Boxed.” (Oh, the terminology.) Passively commits suicide by staying on nuked planet.

Helena Cain - Hyper-masculine admiral who is cruel, brutal, amoral, and otherwise portrayed as unfit for command. Is deemed a threat to the fleet and marked for assassination. Eventually killed by her abused lesbian lover.

Kendra Shaw - Loyal, rebellious, gutsy, and brilliant soldier. Follows orders even when those orders are horrific and her fellow (male) soldiers cannot. Commits suicide in the heat of battle to pay for her sins and save her comrades.

So yeah. This show started out pretty damn amazing in regards to female characters. But as it went on, it was like they got lazy and resorted to tired tropes. Now, I know bad things happen to everyone on this show. But how many of the guys went crazy? Even crazy Gaius was purportedly not crazy at all in the end. How many of the major male characters die? Billy and Sam—and Sam is a case all to himself. Sam is the only virile masculine Cylon threat and he is reduced to an inert vegetable in a tub of goo. I’m not talking about character flaws here. Every single character on this show—male and female—is beautifully flawed and it makes them all the more real. I’m talking about poor narrative decisions that took all of these wonderful women and punished them for their power, agency, and independence.

Hannah avert yer eyes, BSG talk

the-violet-femme replied to your post: 30 Days of Meta Challenge: Day 13 How do you feel…

I’m going to be completely frank. I don’t think that all of your explanations are entirely fair.

Agreed with the fairness. But there’s also truth to the whole subject matter.There should be an exemption clause of “Jane Espenson comes on, prepare to have a character you like/love DIE”

I never did consider Billy major. But Gaeta snapped, doing what he thought was right. He definitely paid for his sins and had good closing moment with Baltar (those two I love those two together). Tom Zarek falls under that lazy writing, starting out so layered and then….reduced to thuggery.