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The Dead Mother Cliche: A Counter Arguement by casual-dhole
A few days ago, the Cartoon Brew made a post about one of the cliches of animation, the dead mother cliche to be exact, which brought me over to the original article by the Atlantic. To summarise, they made the observation that a large amount of children’s movies started off, or somewhere in the middle, killed off the mother of the protagonist (or a significant character who is also a mother). I do agree with this. There has been quite a lot of movies over the last few decades or even longer with the same plot point and I’m sure it has not gone unnoticed by many others too. But both of them in the end closed with the acknowledgement that it was an intentional decision with the intent of portraying mothers as less or no importance while glorifying fathers, and it is this statement which I have to strongly disagree with. It is true that writers could handle this better, but I’m here to argue that the mothers are just as important if not more than the fathers. And that is why they chose to kill them off.
It's about a 5 minute read. But I'm a bit concerned the font here may be too small so you can read it over at my blog ?
(It took me like 3 days to write it, obviously I'm not cut out to be a writer x3)
http://blog.necktiedog.com/2014/07/12/the-dead-mother-cliche-a-counter-arguement/
The Dead Mother Cliche: A Counter Arguement
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Oh gosh I forgot about lion king x3
But you do have a point, it could be that those movies were selected just to strengthen the authors argument, whereas in reality which parent dies or if both do is heavily influenced by the story and the moral the writers want to impart.-
all they are doing is selectively choosing the movies in which the mother dies or is absent just to make it appear that these movies are sexist while ignoring all the movies that don't follow the dead mother trope.
its creating an issue that doesn't exist because these days people just want to be offended just so they can have something to bitch about.
I see it all the time on tumblr (and my god do I fucking hate tumblr and its community, bunch of pretentious social justice white knights trying to make problems out of nothing and hating the "white cis male" with the kind of bigotry that they claim to be against. tumblr is full of the worst fucking people on the internet, I hate that place so much)
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Yeah, it's the new fad thing to decry anything that could in any remote possibility be construed to portray women in a negative view.
Hell, in my own works, I've done the same trope. Why? Because the mother is vastly more important. She not only represents a bond between certain protagonists (you know, having given birth to them), but even serves as a foil to the first father figure, who flees the would-be family shortly after the mother becomes pregnant. In fact, she's the only character out of all three parental figures who remains for a significant portion of the back-story, and only dies from exposure and exhaustion after having carried her only surviving child to safety.
But, you know ... I intentionally killed her off, which makes me a terrible person.
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Ahaha x3 I don't think it makes you any worse. Regardless of gender, if a character's role has a strong weight and their absence would cause a great catalyst for a good story, it does feel tempting to take that shortcut and kill them off.
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Yeaaah, feminism is important but the media criticism side of it is half-worthless. Sometimes it's pointing out that women's outfits in games are consistently ridiculous or that "rendering women is hard and expensive" is bullshit, which are totally valid gripes. But often it's stuff like this, just taking an arbitrary pattern from cherry-picked examples and assuming the worst.
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That's a very good point too. Maybe it just feels that way because the author of the original argument selected movies that would strengthen their side. I would like to see if there was any study made of the number of movies with the mother or father or both dead, and if there is any one side that's weighted more. I do hope they're evenly distributed though, or at least the gap between them is not so wide.
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StriderWolf
Lion King - father was killed.
Aladdin - orphan with no known parents (he has a father in one of the sequels but lets just focus on the first film)
Tarzan - both parents killed in the beginning, adoptive mother was more important to the story than the "father"
Lilo & Stitch - parents both dead, the mother figure was the protagonists older sister.
Frozen - both parents died
Treasure Planet - father abandoned the protagonist as a kid, mother lived through the whole movie.
and thats just the disney movies, I could also go on with dreamworks movies.
the point is that even tho its more common for the heroes of these movies to have no mothers, it doesnt exactly glorify the father as a result. its just the direction these movies tend to go in, not the intention.
In the Lion King the father was central to the plot as it was his death that set the plot in motion.
whereas in Tarzan the mother was important to the plot as without her Tarzan wouldnt have become who he is, and she never dies in the movie.
so this whole sexist argument that the mothers are killed off to glorify the fathers is total bullshit.