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I'm not a particular fan of realism either, but I'm not sure what the relative popularity of Dickens and Collins, or Dostoevsky's declining popularity would tell us?

Most of the people here are writers of one kind or another, and we understand that characters have a structural role to play in narrative. But it's reductive to say that all characters are merely symbols, and it also allows writers to abdicate all responsibility. "You can't be upset about [crude stereotype] because that character was merely a product of my imagination!"

I mean that even if there are many characters, they are all one vehicle - they don't exist in the first place; they are symbols to allow you to travel in your own world of thought.
Which is also why I mentioned that having fleshed-out characters is more realistic a goal in movies/tv shows ^_^ (because then you start with actual people anyway; those playing the roles)

I really don't see it that way - quite the opposite. Films last a couple of hours, whereas Brothers Karamazov is 800 pages long. The best film ever made can't (and shouldn't have to) compete in terms of depth of character. Of course Dickens uses caricature, but realist writers use exaggeration and grotesquery without reducing characters to floating symbols or levers that need to be pulled.

It's very easy for films to give the impression of realism, because they can use real people and naturalistic photography. I think this amplifies the problems the Bechdel test draws attention to - when a female character seems real, but actually acts in a superficial and highly idealised way.

Usually in literature you get a majority of characters being there for purposes of juxtaposition to the main character(s). For example, someone may be hideous, to allow for the protagonist to be identified as more decent. It's in essence the same trick that (supposedly) was used to lure a girl, by paying someone to attack her and then defeating him (I mean I never used it, but maybe some people are into capitalist planning ).
Furthermore, a book where every character is their own thing, simply does not work. It's why art isn't a mimesis of life, but something inherently more poetic, and also why the more realistically-inclined authors rarely get to become famous or stand the test of time. Dickens>Collins etc.

I think what you're saying is most often true of movies, games and folktales - where characters frequently do flatly perform structural roles. But 19th Century realism is dominated by writers who absolutely did devote page after page to creating characters who are, as you put it, 'their own thing'. Dickens is particularly renowned for his colourful and varied portrayals of supporting characters.

I love Wilkie Collins, but his 'sensational' novels weren't a great deal more realist (or realistic), so I don't think I understand the point you're making.

but Lady McBeth isn't there as a fleshed out character; McBeth himself isn't fleshed out either. LMcB serves very specific purposes in the plot, namely to push McBeth to take the place of the king. Later on she becomes mad, but it's not like any specific personality was there to wash out along with the damned spot.

I agree that Shakespeare isn't doing psychological realism - but it hadn't been invented. Moving the story forward and being a rounded character aren't mutually exclusive. Lady MacBeth has her own goals and concerns.

If I can contrast that with a very badly written character: Madison Paige keeps trying to help the protagonist of Heavy Rain even though he seems disturbed and violent and she has every reason to suspect he's a serial killer. She stays in his motel room and bandages his wounds and takes huge risks for him. Why? They just met and he's awful. But the story has only been thought through from the protagonist's perspective.

(I think, later on, it explains explain that she has some journalistic interest. But the game is happy to rely upon the players' assumption that she has simply fallen in love with Sketchy Joe.)

As a moderator, I will remind people that as soon as we enter into aggressive/personal insults (regardless of position), or posts that are intended to simply provoke, action will be taken. There is a way to disagree with someone that doesn't involve belittling that person, or their beliefs, regardless of how passionate (or right) you feel in your disagreement.

It certainly wasn't my intention to provoke or belittle anyone. In the spirit of debate, I'll address TheFrighter's original question:

I think the Bechdel Test, like any critical tool, can be very useful as long as it isn't applied with a pedantic rigidity. What I find interesting about it is that it's a neat little way of testing how rounded the female characters in a story are. Do they have their own interests and concerns, or are they there to serve a male character's narrative arc? As Crimson Wizard said, I think similar tests are instructive in different contexts. Even in science fiction, how frequently do we see two aliens talking about something that doesn't involve humans? Or in Hollywood, two non-Americans speaking about something that doesn't involve Americans. It draws attention to the way even self-consciously progressive shows like Star Trek implicitly place certain people at the centre of the universe.

No it's not, Ali. However, if you read through the replies to TheFrighters first post, they have very little bearing on the subject matter.
Going by a later post, from him, it seems he was surprised at the reaction. When it gets into the realms of who should do the housework etc.
it has nothing to do with the main topic. As I said in an earlier post it would be nice if we could all just get on with one another 

Are you being serious? Because I don't see how you could honestly disagree that sexism is relevant to the topic of sexism in the media?

I also think it would be nice if we could get along and have an interesting conversation about the Bechdel test. From my point of view, what's made that difficult is people who seem to be uncomfortable with media criticism in general, or otherwise determined to minimise sexism.

Congratulations, I think remastering it is a great idea. Having done an AGS -> Unity switch, I know it's a serious job. Are you using any plugins, like AdventureCreator or PowerQuest?

I liked Kathy Rain, but I thought Whispers of a Machine was really outstanding. So it's nice to see you returning to Kathy Rain with all the experience you've gained.

But it's not off-topic to discuss sexism in a thread about sexism in the media, is it?

It really amazes me that, with Covid19 still on the rampage, certain people still spend every waking hour
analysing the written word, or other media, to pick up on anything that might cause offence. (i.e sexism,
racism and any other 'ism' you can think of)

You could use this argument to deflect criticism of just about anything, surely? There's always something worse somewhere, or something that has been worse or could be worse.

I don't want to get off topic, but the idea that Covid 19 exists in a separate universe from racism is particularly strange. Black people, and other ethnic minority groups have been disproportionately affected by Covid 19 in the UK and elsewhere. We had a Conservative MP claim (apparently without evidence) that the Muslim and other ethnic minority communities were largely to blame for spreading the virus. It's not frivolous to be concerned about what you call 'isms,' it can be a matter of life and death.

I know from seeing it in action that trying to force change too rapidly on people who aren't ready for it will only result in a backlash.

Can you think of an historical example of advocates for progressive change not incurring a backlash, and yet succeeding? I'm struggling to think of one. But I think it's a topsy-turvy line of thinking that can turn the people saying, "I want to be treated fairly," into oppressors and the people saying "Hell, no!" into victims.

I must say, I'm particularly repulsed by the contempt you seem to have for the weak, the stupid, the obese, the lazy... your world seems to be full of inferior specimens.

From this we seem to somehow found the false conclusion that I approve of all aspects of that history or somehow oppose change? 

You do consistently adopt a stance against efforts to deliberately change society. In fact, you seem nostalgic for a time when people weren't as 'lazy' and 'stupid'. The only progressive change you seem prepared to consider is a 'natural', glacial form of social change, constrained by (supposed) biological realities that happen to justify existing inequalities.

They [critics] are still trying to dictate culture.

But this is an untenably silly take that would cast having an opinion on just about anything as dictatorial. You're not "forcing people to conform to your standards" unless you... you know... force people to conform to your standards.

So they aren't required to pass the test but they must have a good reason for failing it?

Required by whom? Blondbraid's not the censor-in-chief. The people talking about the Bechdel test are critics, not cultural dictators. I think Hollywood should stop making so many superhero films. That's not me threatening to ban them.

If it smells like it makes sense, tastes like it makes sense, and looks like it makes sense: it probably makes sense. From the point of view of biology and evolution, preserving the females makes a lot of sense, and is a pattern we see all over the animal kingdom to this day. Why would you think humans are exempt from such basic rules?

I think this is a case of the naturalistic fallacy - the assertion that because some aspect of social order is natural (or, in this case, believed to be natural) it is both inescapable and good. Or if not good per se, preferable to any risky change to the social order. I've heard Jordan Peterson fans insist that disagreeing with Doctor P. about women is tantamount to denying that gravity exists.

Appeals to common sense and gut-feelings are always anti-intellectual. And, like Blondbraid says, this kind of argument has legitimised some of the most appalling injustices in history.

Not in general, but men being raped is sometimes played for laughs. You have your soap-dropping jokes, and then there are things like Hangover 2.

I can't comment on Hangover 2, but that sounds very different to the average prison-rape / drop-the-soap joke. Those tend to be homophobic, and the fact that we laugh at them tells you how readily we dehumanise criminals. Criminals, like women are regularly treated as less-than-whole by fiction (and, coincidentally people in reality).

I'm not sure if this refers to what I was saying earlier, but I wasn't exactly thinking of Agatha Christie when I mentioned men also being treated badly. If there was a way to somehow quantify characters' suffering (humiliation being a subcategory of that) as a result of violence in movies, would your guess be that women would rank higher per capita?

It's not that women suffer more than men in films - it's that women's suffering is commonly a plot device in service of a male character's personal journey. When the man is being tortured, the audience is in the chair with him. When the woman is being tortured, the audience is with the protagonist, trying to find her. I can't think of more than a handful of stories where a woman's husband is murdered/kidnapped/abused and she seeks revenge.

I also think the studies are very interesting, but I don't think it's necessary to demonstrate a cause-effect relationship between troubling media portrayals and negative real-world behaviour. From a writer/creator point of view, it should be enough to recognise that the narrative conventions we grew up with tend to commodify and exploit the suffering of women, while centring men's experience.

I don't think you can compare rape with murder/violence. No one is traumatised by an Agatha Christie, or disturbed by a Jackie Chan film. Murder can be a subject for light-hearted, lurid fun in a way that sexual crimes can't (at least, responsibly). 

The argument that rape happens in real life, and fiction should reflect that could be more persuasive, except that the refrigerator trope isn't about realistic depictions of sexual violence. It's about using the abuse of a female character as a plot device to (e.g.) establish the villainy of the bad guy and provide the male protagonist with an impetus to action. Princess Leia's slave costume couldn't be a clearer example. I'm sure there are people of all sexes and genders who love the outfit, but it's obvious the scene is inviting the viewer to be aroused by Leia's peril at least as much as to empathise with her.

It's not that these tropes make any particular film bad. It's that they demonstrate a pattern in the stories we tell. Also, avoiding these tropes doesn't necessarily place subjects off-limits. The Netflix series Unbelievable is a compelling true story about rape, and the way womens' trauma can be compounded by the police.

Of course, I'm an atheist - so please watch God Is Not Dead and come to the conclusion that it's terrible on your own.

While the great Hercules Herakles votes for the gop, snowflake Zena apparently supports the green party of New Zealand 

The virgin Hercules versus the chad Xena?

Well, apparently he directed and did the writing for at least one of them according to imdb, and there's not been much money in any of those films. I'm fairly certain he picked evangelical films because he likes evangelical films.

For what it's worth, God is Not Dead is a hilariously bad film - an extremely crass oppression fantasy in which Christians are silenced by moustache-twirling atheists. It's unpersuasive in terms of proselytizing, because it fundamentally misunderstands what atheists think. It centres around an atheist/Christian debate, in which the participants do nothing but quote famous scientists at each other. There's no concern for things like evidence or reasoning; Hawking and Einstein are just invoked as if they're were the saints of atheism. It's a style of Christian argumentation and the writers don't seem to be aware that other people do debates differently.

Kevin "disappointed" Sorbo gives the best performance in it. Which should be all the information you need.

I'm also extremely confused, and feel like I'm about to be conclusively proven wrong. (Nonetheless, I'm enjoying the conversation more now than a couple of days ago.) I would love it if someone could put me right here. The 37/63 figure suggests to me that people with a college education are both more likely to vote and more likely to vote Democrat. But I don't think it tells us what proportion of the country has a college-education.

I'd welcome corrections on my sums here:

In the Pew figures, College grads represent 37% of the electorate. 36% of College grads voted Trump, so that's around 13% of the electorate (36% of 37%).

Trump's total vote represented 45% of the electorate, and around 13% of those voters were graduates - around 29%. So there's a roughly 70-30 split among Trump voters, which is not far from the national average / Republican average.

So, I'm comparing how likely college-educated and non-college educated people were to vote for Trump. I'm not comparing how popular Trump was in comparison with Clinton in those groups.

If I'm interpreting the numbers correctly, there was about 36% chance you'd vote for Trump if you were college educated and about 50% chance if you weren't (the difference being even bigger if you were white). What am I getting wrong here?

I'm hardly a statistician, so apologies if I'm wrong or repeating myself here. But those figures suggest that college-educated people disproportionately voted for Clinton. And college-educated people are probably more likely to vote in general.

But the ratio of college-educated to non-college educated Trump voters in 2016 roughly matched the general population. So if 7/10 Americans don't have a college degree and 7/10 Trump voters don't have a degree that doesn't seem to show him being disproportionately popular among less educated people. A randomly selected college-educated American (though more likely to vote for Clinton) would be about as likely to vote for Trump as a randomly selected non-college educated American.

Perhaps the relevant passage from the WaPo will clear this up:

although more than 70 percent of Trump supporters didn’t have college degrees, when we looked at the NBC polling data, we noticed something the pundits left out: during the primaries, about 70 percent of all Republicans didn’t have college degrees, close to the national average (71 percent according to the 2013 Census). Far from being a magnet for the less educated, Trump seemed to have about as many people without college degrees in his camp as we would expect any successful Republican candidate to have.