A while ago I saw video on tumblr that talked about the
smurfette principle. I tried to find it on my tumblr but had no luck but I did
google it and found this article. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSmurfettePrinciple
You can read that article or I can just explain to you what
this principle is. The smurfette principle is the “tendency for works of
fiction to have exactly one female amongst an ensemble of male characters in
spite of the fact that roughly half of the human race is female. Unless the
show is purposefully aimed at a female viewing audience the main characters
will aim to be disproportionally male.” And why is called the smurfette?
Because of the only female smurf in all
of smurfville. There are SO many examples of this that I have trouble looking
at any movie and cartoon ever the same.
Take for example Winnie the Pooh. My favorite character is
Eeyore, Tigger is my brothers favorite
and then we have owl, rabbit, Pooh,
little Roo and all these different male characters. The only female
character in that cartoon is Kanga and she’s not even in that many episodes. Or
in the muppets the only female character we have is miss Piggy (which I
personally don’t even like). I told my mom this and she gave me The
Transformers as an example. We also saw Star Wars in the movie theaters today
which Princess Leia is the only female character in the whole entire kingdom.
Also inception, one of my favorite movies, only has one female character (Ellen
Page) in the dream team.
I guess movie makers do this to give viewers the illusion of
being diverse. I personally had never noticed this because of the only female
characters that were in each movie or cartoon.
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