A Bias Against Female Leads

New intellectual properties that feature female protagonists (like Horizon Zero Dawn, for instance) sometimes receive criticism because of the gender of their primary characters: stories with female lead characters are sometimes criticized for having female protagonists (or female villains).  I have never heard about a video game or movie being criticized for having a male protagonist or villain, but the inverse is not uncommon.  Some people even try to make it sound as if male lead characters are becoming scarce, when this is far from the truth.

Of course, franchises like Tomb Raider and Metroid avoid this criticism--they have always featured female leads.  It is mostly recent or upcoming games or movies that are denounced on the grounds that there is no need for more stories prominently featuring women.  As if there is a need or justification for women to be excluded from prominence in entertainment!  When one analyzes the content of these objections, a specific trend--a thorough inconsistency--becomes very apparent.  The objectors almost inevitably succumb to the same hypocrisy.

Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn, a new
IP (intellectual property).

The great irony is that none of these people have ever complained to me about the decades of relentless male-centric films, nor do they complain when contemporary movies have more male leads than female leads.  Instead, they begin acting like the benevolent, egalitarian push for more stories with women at the forefront is itself sexist, when it is only an attempt to bring women alongside men in entertainment, not an attempt to invert the current landscapes of gaming and cinema.  Neither I nor any other legitimate egalitarian wants to see men sidelined in entertainment--that would be antithetical to reality in the same way that sidelining women is.

I certainly do not mean to imply that there is not an increasing number of games and movies that deviate from the traditional character setup where women are mostly secondary or background characters, often serving as love interests for male leads.  There are games and films that do put women in primary statuses.  The problem is that certain people object to female characters in ways that they do not object to male characters.  Beyond showing offense at female characters taking the spotlight, these objections might criticize characters for being "too simple" or "too complex" in their depiction of women, when male characters are practically never called too simple or too complex in a genderized way.  These sexist objections reveal the idiocy of those who make them, with some even mistaking the presence of female primary characters as something that belittles men (ultimately, a person has to be quite unintelligent to interpret an increase in female lead characters as an attack on men).

The world is full of both men and women.  For entertainment to reflect this vital aspect of reality, as well as to welcome people of both genders, it must not exclude either men or women from prominent roles.  Anyone who thinks that intentionally trying to put women in more lead roles is a misandrist move has a pathetic grasp of actual sexism.