Got the idea for the post from here... : https://www.reddit.com/r/Gamingcirclejerk/comments/1ge3tuh/which_female_character_have_you_noticed_gets/
Jenny from Forrest Gump.
A traumatized woman who believes several times she is hopeless, often settling for abusive relationships because that's the only type she knew and view it as love she's worthy of, self aware enough of her issues to push Forrest away in order to protect and not taint only truly good thing she knows and loves, and then finally embracing a future after she push through inner demons and made herself presentable (for the sake of her child)... is reduced to being a slut.
Every time I watched or conversed with someone about the movie, it seemed only the men ever hated her. Even though I tell them she's empathetic and views herself too damaged for someone innocent, and loving him is seen as taking advantage of him, they still think because she's slept around she's a terrible person.
I viewed Jenny as a very sad tragic character. I cannot fathom people who view her as anything but. I love your summarization of her character, you absolutely do it justice!
Thank you! She's such a well written character.
I forgot where I read it, but I believe that Forrest himself was a representation of all of America's good virtues- simple (in desires), honest, loving, loyal, moral, and strong. But Jenny represents America's sad reality- lost, sad, lonely, substance seeking, and yearning for to fill the emptiness.
But they love each other, and they complete each other. Neither one superior or inferior, but equals needing each other as they shaped the other.
I'm curious of the age range of the men you've encountered who view Jenny's character negatively. I don't recall many people expressing such sentiments back when the film was at the height of its popularity. It seems to have become a thing only recently, mostly among people who were too young (or not yet born) to have seen the movie back then. It feels like a very social media driven "hot take" to me.
We could vilify Forrest for being a creepy weirdo who couldn't take no for an answer and became a borderline stalker. We don't because we understand context and nuance.
I say that younger men are way more vocal about framing her as a villian, but older men still think shes a "druggie b****" that brings down Forrest.
What I noticed it's because they all empathize Forrest's situation and personhood, and place themselves into his shoes. But not her. Never her. She's supposed to be "the prize" in the story like women are in every other story so how dare she be flawed. They hate her on behalf on Forrest, not because they hate her for herself.
I only met two or so women that thought Forrest was a creep for that exact reason.
I have a cousin who explained how he thought that Jenny was the ultimate villan. It made me feel so uneasy and disgusted. I don't think I could ever talk to him again. Thankfully, everyone else disagreed with him and made him look like an idiot.
I started labeling all those that call Jenny a terrible human as incels. You know she would be highly beloved as a well written "male loneliness epidemic victim" if she were a man in those circles.
Jenny doesn't always make the best decisions, but it's because of her long history of trauma. People often dismiss that last part. But it's not normal for children to pray to God to save them from their father. What must that have been like to grow up in? Of course she's not well adjusted!
Jane Eyre. Why do so many people cast as dull or uptight? She’s complex and passionate but the world she lives in requires constant tone policing and self-repression- I don’t get how this isn’t obvious.
Susan gets sort of hate dumped by CS Lewis in the Narnia chronicles.
Exactly, these books are supposed to showcase women as having rich inner worlds, but the movies are always made from a male/societal perspective of these women, which defeats the purpose.
Lewis's hatred of Susan was so bizarre, genuinely think she was a stand in for some women who did him "wrong" in his life.
Yes I also think old CS thought he made Lucy (who rules of course) better by burying Susan- can’t have too many women interacting and excelling can we?
Diane from Bojack Horseman and Pam from the office. The amount of people who have weird theories that Pam cheated on Jim is too damn high.
The number of people who watch BoJack Horseman and think he's the good guy is astoundingly high. I have no beef with Diane, she's a great character.
Yes. Diane definitely makes selfish, mean, and self destructive choices. But who doesn't on that show? And she's WAY better than Bojack, who does so many awful things I can't even list them. If a viewer hates Diane more than Bojack, something is deeply wrong with them.
Dolores Umbridge. I mean she is a genuinely evil character, and a well written evil character. But there are lots of evil characters in that series who don’t get the same hate.
She is an ugly, middle aged lady into girly things. That is why she is hated so much. Handsome Bellatrix is adored. Sketchy Fudge is tolerated. Voldemort is notbhated nearly as much as her, and Snape was beloved whether people thought he was good or evil, though he was also cruel to students.
It isn’t that she doesn’t deserve hate, it is that she doesn’t deserve MORE hate
Snape is explicitly written as a sympathetic character though - I personally don't like him one bit, but JKR clearly wanted me to ! And Voldemort and Bellatrix are two very different forms of evil compared with Umbridge - very few of us have suffered at the hands of sociopathic killers and evil overlords IRL.
We've all met an Umbridge though, because genuinely awful people associating themselves with cute and wholesome things and pretending to be so nice as they carelessly dehumanize everyone that doesn't fit into their very narrow standards are dime a dozen. Fudge is a bit of an edge case, in that he's also a very realistic portrayal of a cowardly politician, but here again we hate politicians from afar. Umbridge was my old neighbour down the street who harrassed my sister for years. I've met plenty of people who told me about "their Umbridge" in those exact terms.
I do think the character wouldn't have had the same impact if she had been male, but I'd bet my house Himbridge would still be the most hated character in the books, and for good reason.
Oh yeah, spot on analysis. We all have multiple Umbridges in our lives, and see how they directly hurt us and others. Few people ever directly encounter a Voldemort (genocidal maniac) .
That’s what I thought too! She’s so much more personally relatable to so many people, I remember reading the books as a teenager, and just despising her more than any other character LOL because she’s so realistic
I’ve always thought she was the best written villain in the series and JK introduced her when she realised a lot of the death eaters and voldey himself are a little one-note. I find bellatrix so unbelievably cringe personally she really is generic.
I agree, she gets hate disproportionate to her character. She deserves some hate, but the guy who murdered a bunch of people deserves more. I'm reading the books to my kids now and Voldemort is simply an evil bastard through and through.
Voldemort has no redeeming qualities... no misplaced idealism, no family he is trying to advance at everyone else's expense, nothing understandable.
He was VERY good looking before messing with the Dark Arts both in the movies and in the books too ( his mother Merupe Gaunt fell in love with his father Tom Riddle Sr because of how good looking he was in fact and it is said he resembled his father when he was young ) but even that is gone...
Christian Coulson was very handsome playing young Tom Marvolo Riddle in The Chamber of Secrets movie...: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/0f/d6/48/0fd648c9229318bdceeaa02cada83abb.jpg
I always thought the line about him being incapable of love because of the love potion was a way to tell us he was a sociopath. Which he was, guy was also stupid, splitting your soul 7 times dude?? Come on lol. By the logic of the universe he really screwed himself in every way possible, what little sanity his already deranged mind had, left the building with that shit.
I never liked Snape. He abused children for years, and just because Alan Rickman was awesome doesn't change what he was. Also for all his supposed love of Lily, he treated her son like shit.
Umbridge got hate also because she was just the face of the corrupt government of the wizarding world. A lot of it was just because of the way the actress presented her in the movies imo.
I have a feeling that if Harry had been a girl, Snape’s treatment of her would have been very different 🤢
I also didn’t like the Snape rehab arc -the tragic love story just seemed mopier and creepier than when he was just a loser who hated his job and took it out on the kids.
Also it got a bit weird that everyone seems to either marry their school boyfriend or their life is ruined cos they get rejected at school but then I guess Hogwarts is the centre of the HP universe
I never cares that Umbrage was uggo. I cared that she's the personification of, essentially, rank and file evil.
Evil is repugnant. Incompetence is repugnant. Beung both as well as being pretty much the powermad, cruel, impedimentarilly useless HOA president is what takes her over the edge.
Bellatrix is evil but competent and makes no bones about it.
Fudge is an idiot and a coward and everyone knows, including him, but not evil.
Voldemort is almost cartoonishly evil, if insidious, and has character motivations that at least make him an interesting case study in madness.
Snape is a dick with questionable intentions, but he at least tried to correct them, to a small degree. He's going to hell and he knows it but he's cleared his worst guilt from his mind.
Umbridge is the sniveling, petty, everyday evil that crawls out of its hideyhole to gleefully shove everyone that doesn't toe the line under the bus. She's the same flavor of shitty personality traits that lead to things in the backbiting left that we all abhor. She loves nothing and brings nothing but misery to anyone, and makes everyday life hell.
We don't hate her because she's a woman. We hate her because she's Phyllis Schlaffly and Aunt Lydia and every "just following orders" pretender rolled into a completely unpleasant personage.
She is not ugly at all! In the end most actressses are beautiful!
Because no one has said it: Desdemona from Fallout 4. Only hated because she's a woman in a position of power over the male player.
Bellatrix Lestrange is hated more than Voldemort, who you are supposed to hate the most.
Yennefer from Witcher 3. She's a strong woman and doesn't coddle Gerralt so she's hated.
Heather from Blair Witch. Mike threw the map in the creek and doomed them but Heather gets all the blame because she has a vagina.
Also, Rita from Dexter. I loved Rita but male fans hated her for gasp questioning Dexter and not blindly ignoring his sketchy behavior.
Diane from Bojack Horseman. They will try to say they aren't sexist because they love Princess Carolyn but PC is not a feminist and Diane is. One guess why Diane is hated.
Skyler on Breaking Bad
She's the poster woman for this topic. Never understood the hate.
She was standing in the way of Walter becoming even more of a really bad dude. We were seeing everything from Walter's perspective. So, Skyler was blocking Walter's goals and that made Skyler bad.
Objectively though? His goals were to be a really bad dude!
Because she didn't follow a man's lead, despite how destructive and criminal it was.
I rage quit Breaking Bad after Wlater White turned down that job that would've solved literally all of his problems. I get his tragic flaw was his pride, but I have no interest in rooting on a petulant man child.
It's not that simple. I really liked Marie, but Skyler always irked me. And it's definitely not because Walter is the good guy here. It's like we know Walter is the bad guy, we know Hank is the good guy, but we don't for sure what Skyler is. At one time she's laundering his money, but other time calling him a criminal, while helping his boss manage his criminal behaviour by using Walt's money ?
Some of the hate is justified, but not to the level she actually does end up receiving though.
Props to Anna Gunn for such a great acting though.
The only time she bothered me was when she thought Walter was smoking pot and confronted Jessie about it. Like just talk to your husband, damn. But other than that she was pretty believable as a character in an impossible situation not of her own making trying to make the best of it and provide for her family. We like our characters flawed, don’t we? Skylar got an extreme amount of hate for cheating on Walt but most people don’t even register that Walt raped her in the kitchen when she tried to leave him.
Yeah I thought she was well written for all these reasons. On top of being in an insane and dangerous situation with her husband, she’s pretty smart and capable. Though he also is so that doesn’t get her far.
She’s able to go right into laundering money because she’s a smart character. She sees past his “I was doing it all for you” bullshit (that Walters fanboys bought so hard the writers had to have him admit out loud in the finale that that was a lie he told himself and he just enjoyed being a murdering drug kingpin, it made him feel like a real man lol)
Hank humiliated a prostitute and is racist and crude to boot. No one is the by good guy on that show. That's what made it so great.
Her husband was struggling with both cancer and surviving on one salary, they already had a special needs kid, she didn't have a job to help out pay for things, and she got pregnant and kept it. That's personally why she bugged me.
In the United States, having a special needs kid almost necessitates having one parent stay at home, which is almost always the mother, and even when she can fit in a job, it’s almost always part time and means the mother never, EVER gets a break. I speak from personal AND front row seat experience.
Even kids that aren’t special needs have regular needs that even the best intentioned fathers are rarely available to handle, for a thousand and one debatable reasons.
And that’s older kids who can go to school. Daycare for a toddler alone sucks upwards of $1K a month in cheap areas and $3K+ in urban areas. If you have two kids under 5 (not applicable in this show, I get it), that can be an entire month’s salary for a woman working full time.
She sold stuff on eBay to make money in the beginning and worked later on. Having a stay at home parent available for childcare, doctors appointments, extracurriculars is a blessing. Not having to worry about missing work, who’s gonna pick up the kids, who’s taking little Timmy to soccer practice. Let’s not pretend like stay at home moms have got the easy life plus assuming that she’s the one providing the “special needs” for the special needs child.
That was likely a mutual decision (in my head canon), not just hers. They're portrayed as fairly conservative from what I remember.
She literally got her life ruined by her shit husband and they think SHE'S the villain. Self awareness in hades, truly cooked as a society.
1st character I thought of.
I also think Rachel from Glee gets undeserved hate.
Ross was the grossest friend of the group, and he should of left Rachel alone. She really grew up as a person, and in her career. She started that journey later in life then others because of her privilege( she never had to care about things like jobs, money, work ethic etc) but she worked on becoming more mature and having work ethic. The character development was there, Ross was a weirdo.
She actually was referring to Rachel Berry from Glee ahah.
Lmao! D'oh moment lol! You know what, that show was such a trip and it was because the producer was power tripping. The cultural hold it had for the time though.
Rachel is selfishness and disregard for others turned up to 100 so the hate I think is justified.
I never watched the whole show but wasn’t that pretty much every character? Maybe I don’t remember