Crawl Across the Ocean

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

I Need a Hiro...

...And she's gotta be strong
And she's gotta be fast
And she's gotta be fresh from the fight


So I've been watching the first season of Heroes, and it's pretty good. My biggest complaint/suggestion is that I think they should have reversed the gender of all their current heroes.

It they had done that, then for female Heroes/main characters we would currently have:

- A hard-nosed (female) politician who does whatever it takes to get elected (aided by her supportive, but crippled husband).

- The (female) hospice nurse who absorbs the powers of others nearby has to save the day by facing off with the evil villain (aided by her supportive, but otherwise useless boyfriend, and her supportive mother)

- The unattractive (female) office worker / geek from Japan who can bend space and time, who comes to America with her (female) office worker friend, but is unable to save a cute waiter that she falls in love with from being killed.

- The mysterious (female) government worker who can negate other's powers and (almost) never speaks

- The near-unstoppable (female) villain, a former watch-maker who can steal other's powers.

- The (female) drug addict who can paint the future (aided by her supportive former boyfriend who is now with the nurse)

- The (female) small-time criminal with a good heart, who just wants what's best for her daughter - a mechanical genius with powers of her own.

- The (female) Indian child who can helps others see the past in their dreams.

- The (female) who has turned into some sort of human nuclear device and is on the run after accidentally killing her husband

- The somewhat overweight (female) cop who can read minds, including that of her cheating husband, and the sarcastic FBI guy she works with.

- The (female) scientist who is looking to follow up her mother's scientific research on genetic mutations (aided by her supportive father, inspired by the memory of her brother who died as a child)

And on the male side, we would have:

- The hot blond (male) stripper who has a split personality due to being abused by his mother as a child, whose dark side protects him and his child by doing things like sleeping with the female politician for money.

- The hot blond (male) cheerleader who is pretty much indestructible, but nonetheless, after sneaking out of the house to get away from his overprotective mother, finds himself needing to be rescued by the (female) nurse.

Yeah, I think that would work a lot better. The show is good, but the dated sexism of the casting and writing gives it a bit of a tired, clichéd feel.

2 Comments:

  • I've just read that post aloud to my husband. We're both fans of the show. We both agree with you. We're both ashamed that we'd not really noticed or been bothered by the gender stereotyping. And we're normally quite attuned to these things. Our bad.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 4:38 PM  

  • To give credit where it's due it was my (ex)girlfriend, who first complained of the show being sexist (back when we were first introduced to stripper-mom - she wondered why there's never any stripper guys in their underwear on these shows). At first it didn't seem too bad to me, but now that we're back to two female heroes, and we've had the big cheerleader rescue and with the steady stream of new male heroes being introduced, it started getting out of hand (IMO).

    By Blogger Declan, at 7:04 PM  

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