Still not done talking about Hit-Girl yet

I'm in a really weird headspace lately. There's a lotta rl stuff going on (has been for the past two months), and I haven't touched TEF since... since I sent ch10 to beta (which was the day before Valentine's... URK), and the lack of actual writing is wearing me down. I can't wait until all this rl garbage is done and I can get back to my daily writing time; I'm getting really, really, really itchy to continue. Not only that, but I just resolved a large plot point that up until last night wasn't very definite in my head, and that reminds me that I need to finish my outline for pt3, and augh. AUGH. My hands are actually shaking; that's how badly I want to write. (Type. W/E.)

I'm sorry for the lack of comments lately; rl is really that intense right now! I will get back to you guys about certain (AWESOME) meme responses shortly, as soon as I stop dodging bullets.

With that mild venting out of the way, I refer you to the title of this post. I got to this blog post (titled In Defense of Hit Girl) via shiegra (who I greatly admire, even if I never tell her so) and basically Kate Harding is worlds more eloquent about HG's awesomeness in ways I can never hope to be, so I wanted to post excerpts from her post like blockquoting is going out of style. (Seriously, expect lots of blockquotage. I know and love and will abuse that BLOCKQUOTE tag like nobody's business.)

(I highly recommend eventually reading In Defense of Hit Girl, but ONLY IF YOU'VE SEEN THE MOVIE, as there are significant spoilers abound. Don't worry, none of the bits I'm quoting here are spoilers.)

Not lj-cutting this mass of blockquotage because I am an inconsiderate bitch and want to get as many people's eyes on this as possible.

*Note: SBUAALOPD stands for "Shit Blows Up And A Lot Of People Die."

That lack of sexualization might be the number one thing I enjoyed about watching the character of Hit Girl, and the sad truth is, I can’t imagine seeing a female assassin on film who’s not sexualized without her being pre-pubescent [...] Once boobs are involved, it’s pretty much game over: You put even a nascent adult female body into this context, and suddenly, the Chicks Kicking Ass Are Hot switch is flipped, and it’s a whole different story [...] It’s not that she’s too young to be so violent, it’s that she’s too young to have the sex appeal that’s supposed to make the violence not only palatable but titillating.

[I]f you accept that this is, in fact, fundamentally a SBUAALOPD movie, and that the 11-year-old girl is the Big Action Hero, then all the horrific violence that happens to and because of her is par for the course [...] if you are the kind of person who enjoys a good SBUAALOPD movie, you have to admit that in terms of what happens — as opposed to who’s at the center of it — this one is not particularly unusual.

And that’s what’s simultaneously disturbing and awesome about Hit Girl being the one at the center of it. Because if you’re too turned off by all this happening to/being caused by an 11-year-old girl to enjoy the movie, you kind of have to ask yourself why you enjoy watching the same basic shit happen to and around Bruce Willis or Matt Damon or Nicolas Cage or whomever [...] Sure, we’re usually watching grown men who can take care of themselves, but Hit Girl is, if not so grown, at least shown to be every bit as capable of fighting off hordes of bad guys. She handles knives, swords and guns as smoothly and confidently (not to mention implausibly) as any adult male action hero, and strategizes just as cleverly.

[...] I do like [SBUAALOPD] movies as a rule, and so do about a gazillion other people, so it’s probably safe to assume that liking them does not actually make you a bad person who struggles to be compassionate and non-violent in real life. It just means you can suspend your better nature for a short time in order to watch a lot of intense, terrifying shit happen to (and because of) a fictional character, provided you know that character has the intellectual, financial and physical resources to wind up safe and triumphant, and that the fictional people who get slaughtered along the way are all A) evil and B) trying to kill the hero first. Hit Girl is clearly shown to be such a character, fighting such characters. So if you can’t stomach this well-established formula with her at the center of it, the obvious question is, are you usually willing to suspend empathy because of the character’s resources and the good/evil thing and the knowledge that it is fiction, or because the hero usually has a dick and a deep voice?

[...] I’m usually not so into SBUAALOPD movies with adult female asskickers-in-chief. They’ve never appealed to me much, probably because they tend to be sold on the fuckability of the heroine more than the relatability of her; the primary market is still young, straight and male, after all, so a female lead is drawn to evoke fantasies either of being dominated by such a badass or being such a badass yourself that you could rock her world, neither of which does much for me.

The sexualization of violence against and executed by women is one of the things I usually hate about even the relatively good SBUAALOPD movies. If there are any women to speak of in the movie, then the focus is inevitably on how hot they are while kicking ass, how hot they are while getting their asses kicked, how hot they are while tied up and waiting to be assaulted by the bad guys/saved by the hero, etc. [...] and I fucking hate that these are nearly always underdeveloped characters who exist only to further the hero’s story and whose most lovable demonstrated quality is, in fact, hotness [...] the mark of a really good SBUAALOPD movie is that there’s somewhat less of that than usual, either because the hot chick evinces a glimmer of personality or because the hero has some purpose other than rescuing her sweet ass. And even making a woman the hero doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be a good SBUAALOPD movie, because I’m still supposed to moved by her hotness, and I’m just not, and I’m actually rather creeped out by the idea that the kind of extreme violence I’ve described above is supposed to come off as sexy when a lady does it (or has it done to her).

[Kick-Ass] is the first time I have ever seen a female character doing it all just like the men do it — with physical and mental toughness, cleverness, courage and a shitload of ordnance as her only resources, and exactly zero use of her sexuality to make an easily duped jackass do her bidding[...] it would frankly be damn near impossible to pull off with anyone much older than 11, because once a female has secondary sex characteristics, Hollywood will never, ever ignore them long enough to tell a completely unrelated story. At least not in a SBUAALOPD movie, and generally not at all.

Is it disturbing to watch a child doing all of this, and having all this done to her? Yes, incredibly. But mostly because it should be disturbing to watch anyone doing all this, and having all this done to them; in reality, violence isn’t exciting or funny or sexy to watch whether it’s happening to a little girl or a grown man or a hot chick. Kick-Ass removes the veil that usually makes it so easy to willingly suspend empathy long enough to enjoy this kind of film, which is woven from a whole bunch of cultural bullshit about Tough Guys and individual heroes and good and evil and hotness that we damn well ought to think critically about more often, even if we are the kind of people who enjoy these movies in between protracted bouts of being compassionate, decent human beings. Especially if we are those kinds of people.

[O]n further reflection, the new thing for me was not a violent, remorseless, brutalized, potty-mouthed child but a female action hero with all the agency and skill of a man, whom the audience is not supposed to want to fuck. That is a pretty awesome thing, even if it is also frankly pretty fucked up that I thought that movie was awesome.