r/ShenComix • u/flower_puns • 12d ago
Val would NOT stop hating men: An analysis on gender roles and why TBFV does not work
Hello, fans of Shen's comics and whatnot. I know analyses like this are not often very well liked, but I'll seriously ask you to bear with me while I explain why The Boy From Venus does not work down to its very basic concept: "Man-hating femcel grows to change her prejudices by befriending and falling for a GNC man".
Now, all of this is well and good. The idea of the comic can be understood from pretty much the first part. Val hates men, manhood and the general idea of a man, Audrey is a man that breaks from that idea, and so her preconceptions of cis men are broken and her more self destructive behaviours heal. However, there is one important distinction to add:
Aubrey's "breaking of gender norms" is just conforming to a woman's gender norms.
Now, now, put down your torches. I am NOT claiming Audrey is a trans woman right now (that's a different argument for a different post), so listen to what I have to say: Aubrey's life pretty much perfectly conforms to the idea of what a woman should be, and therein lies the problem. He's an extreme exception, the kinds that do not change perceptions of a larger demographic because he's *that* different from the average cis man.
Let's do a thought exercise here. In the very first panels of the comic, do you think ANY of the misogynistic men that Val daily suffers through on comms do any of the following:
- Dress according to feminine fashion
- Have stereotypical "girl" hobbies like shopping
- Constantly pass both physically and through voice as women (Val never assumed Audrey was a man despite hearing his voice a lot)
- Have a female name they keep for themselves as the main way to refer to them
- Have all the typical characteristics of a "manic pixie dream girl"
If you said, "they do not", you're right. In fact, I'd argue there's little, if any cis men you know right now, in real life, that fit the first four bullet points. Not Discord, not specialised twitter femboys, not anime characters. Real life, do you know any man that so dramatically adheres to female gender norms?
I'm not saying this to claim that there are absolutely 150% zero cis men out there that are like Audrey. I'm saying this to emphasise that Audrey is beyond a statistical anomaly and is directly the rare opposite of what being a cis man usually entails.
Now, let's move on as to why Val WILL NOT stop hating men so long as her interest is centered on Audrey. You might raise your hand and say "But, OP, Audrey is the opposite of a cis man, like you said! Shouldn't learning that cis men can act like him fix her hatred of men?"
Nope. It shouldn't. Val's hatred of men seems to come from three things: A general hatred for misogyny, hatred and prejudice towards stereotypical cis men behaviours (she hated the "manly" og clerk despite seemingly being a nice guy from his image, so her distaste extends to general cis men attitudes and looks), and bad experiences from her past. While the first and third aspects are entirely understandable, the second is an unfair prejudice towards men. Even if she hates the bad aspects of male culture, which is valid and agreeable, there are aspects that are simply harmless and should not evoke such intense hatred from her. Ideally, for Val to unlearn that hatred, she'd need to be exposed to a regular cis man, that is different from her expectations of a cis man not in his general manly behaviours but by being openly against misogyny and sympathetic of her past without any ulterior motives. That way, she'd separate the average man from the awful extremes that are harmful.
Audrey is not an average man. Functionally, while he's a cis man, he lives his life as a woman. Audrey's first, and seemingly only friendly interaction with a man is him entirely following the gender norms of a woman. This, does not, work as a way for her to unlearn her hatred of men.
Let's make another example. Let's say, group of people A have ABC traits, while group of people B have XYZ traits. A person in group A scoffs at B, thinking that ABC traits are inherently superior while all XYZ traits are bad. Then, a perfect angel from B arrives. They're different from normal group B people, not because their XYZ traits are actively appealing, but because they exhibit ABC traits. The first person likes this outlier, and so smugly thinks "See? The only good person of group B has ABC traits. ABC traits are superior to XYZ, so group B is worse than group A".
Val should still despise men, and will continue to despise them so long as she hangs out with Audrey. Audrey is the exact opposite of what she thinks a man is, a misogynystic manly asshole, and so she shouldn't associate him with the larger demographic at all. He's "one of the good ones", a man that doesn't act or look or think like what a man "is", but rather how a woman "is". He's not from Mars, he's from Venus, and so all of Mars will continue to be hated, because if a Martian acts and looks like a Venusian, to a hater of Martians it will be just another Venusian.
This was my analysis on why the comic doesn't work. Feel free to counter any of this, I'm actually interested!
70
u/JamesonRide 12d ago
You're viewing this through an extremely specific lens and I think that means you're missing the forest for the trees.
It's quite clear that, at least early in, Val is...maybe not doing the best? With the way her room is and the general bitterness she shows, especially towards men.
And I agree that, purely by the specific lens that you're viewing this through (gender roles, presentation) that Audrey would not just...suddenly make her change her views on men. The cute GNC boy that you like doesn't suddenly make men as a concept okay again.
But that's not entirely the point of all this, is it? I think a big part of this comic is just...Val getting a friend. Someone who is helping drag her out of her angry, closed off space and bringing her back into the world.
A lot of people who end up like that do (partly) just need some human contact...someone to care about them and someone for them to care about again. The fact that this person also identifies as male, yeah, it's maybe unlikely to stop Val's dislike for guys entirely, but I can still see it helping.
Also, just, like...let the comic play out? None of us know where this is going and applying this kinda stern psychological philosophy onto the characters before all the events have played out seems premature.
34
u/LowlySlayer 12d ago
OP bringing the literary analysis but forgetting the literacy first lol. They have evidence supported arguments but those arguments rely on a baseline understanding of the characters inner worlds that is... certainly not the only way of looking at it. And they fail to provide compelling evidence for that.
It's like if you had a reasonable argument that aliens exist based on factual evidence underpinned in the assumption that they sky is green.
44
u/JustAnotherALGOnaut 12d ago
Please, can we stop with the discourse and just read the silly hetgem gnc comic?
8
u/Medical_Succotash894 12d ago
There's nothing wrong with thinking critically and discussing potential deeper meanings or understandings of media. There's also nothing wrong with enjoying it for what it is at surface level. I think openly queer stories tend to get more dissection due to a lack of quantity of them. I understand your frustration with the many different readings and issues people have, but shutting them down seems like the wrong angle to me.
12
u/HH_Creations 12d ago
I dont think completely shutting them down is the answer
But it IS exhausting
Maybe certain days of the week or a mega thread for all the "problems with Audrey's character" posts
Tbh this post IS interesting to debate, but the essay flood of Audrey's character is XYZ...I think many people are exhausted
-8
u/flower_puns 12d ago
well it's kind of impossible to stop gender norms discourse when the comic is about breaking gender norms now innit mate?
19
8
u/ThisIsHowBoredIAm 12d ago
Incels aren't incels for reasons. They're incels because their mental health is in the toilet and there exists a predatory community of similarly disaffected folk and their masters to offer the drug of malcontent and self-loathing to medicate with.
Incels tend to be very big picture, applying generalities (often false ones) and population level trends to their interpersonal relationships, much like you're trying to do to them. But actual relationships with actual people don't exist in generalities. Audrey is just far enough off the bell curve to slip past Val's general bullshit and engage with her in the way that people engage with people irl, personally.
If you track a thousand Val's and a thousand Audrey's, you could probably make some substantive predictions about what trends you might see across the board. You could not, however, look at any one of those pairs and reasonably deduce what will happen to them.
We tend to tell stories about the edge cases, for a multitude of reasons. I'll highlight one, very relevant reason. Across our lives, across our many relationships and circumstances, most of what we experience will fall in the center of the statistical distributions for the available variance of those situations. But life is long and our experiences multitude. The chance that we fall in the center of every single distribution for every single relationship, circumstance, or happening in our life is very, very low. Statistically, you will find the edge of that bell curve somewhen in your life, multiple times in fact. Good or bad, our lives are marked by those inevitable outliers, our stories are told by them.
5
u/SammyWammy492 12d ago
I definitely have a lot of problems with this comic in general, specifically about Audrey. However, I still slightly disagree with this critique.
If Val's character was primarily about hating men, I'd agree. Audrey, on his own, would do nothing to stop Val from hating men - since in so many ways, Audrey doesn't really act like a man.
However, the way that Val is framed, it seems like her earlier man-hating is framed more like a symptom, rather than a cause. Her biggest problem seems to be that she is a shut in, and she channels her anger and misery at a group of people that are pissing her off.
I could see Audrey as a stepping stone - Val's bigger problem is that she needs to touch grass. Seems like she's beginning to do so. It would be unrealistic for her to just drop ALL of her man-hate without that ever being addressed, but getting her to touch grass can likely lessen that hate enough to let her have better interactions with men, helping her to become even healthier as time goes on.
Now, will Shen be able to write an arc like that well enough to be satisfying? Eehhhhhh... we'll see.
7
u/NerdDetective 12d ago
While Val's story arc will probably involve her changing her views about men, I don't think it's just that Audrey is feminine.
The only reason she approaches him in the beginning is that she thought he was a girl. And his appearance is probably disarming. There's also a bit of "extrovert adopts introvert" going on.
But also I don't think Val was always like this. In her flashback to 2 years ago with Fatima, she looks like a happier, better adjusted person, which suggests that her current views are rooted in:
- Resentment. The explicit reason her place at the arcade (a place she clearly loved being in) was threatened was to satisfy the egos of guys who didn't like that she was the best gamer there.
- Negative exposure. After she became a shut-in (by her own admission she mostly only goes out at night for walks), it's very likely that her only interactions with men are from toxic game lobbies. I imagine she also fell into online spaces where her resentment was reinforced by other misandrists.
This comic's core theme, I think, is summed up when she recognizes that Audrey is "not defined by hurt". That is the core differentiator between them: how they've reacted to being hurt by others. I think that moment is just as much a moment of introspection (that she has let hurt define her in negative ways) as it is about admiring him. So I think this is a story about healing.
Though I do agree that a part of her arc needs to be exposure to other men. Her image of a man is selected for negativity and she's at least two years into that spiral. The only other men she has interacted with in the comic so far were the gamer dweebs, one of whom was reinforcing her views about men. But that was within a few days of meeting Audrey, so she's had time to begin changing.
My hope is that Audrey has male friends she hasn't met, and that interacting with them will be part of her healing process. Through showing her one positive example of a man, he can help her to challenge her views. Seeing another man who is more traditionally masculine can show that growth. I hope that by the end, she too will not be defined by hurt. <3
1
u/Renegadeknight3 11d ago
I would not be surprised if there’s a mini arc about Val hating men and Audrey being hurt by this
3
2
2
1
u/rookie-mistake 10d ago
what does gnc mean in your post
1
u/gelatinoussandwich 9d ago
“gnc” in this context stands for “gender non-conforming”, meaning gender expression or identity that doesn’t conform to traditional/societal norms 👍
1
1
-3
1
37
u/HH_Creations 12d ago
I think theres one BIG problem that this analysis ignores
Most people who fall into these hurtful ideologies are just....unhappy
Val met someone who surprised her and who she is attracted to
She probably would've never given a chance to a man that looked like "a moid"
But she gave Audrey a chance and is growing to like HERSELF more
When you are confident in yourself, you arent as scared of things being unpredictable
She is more mentally prepared to deal with conflict and explore
She is making a friend that challenges her views and by exposer? Is exploring the world around her and is naturally interacting with more people
Racism, sexism, homophobia, etc all those things only work IF your way of thinking is never challenged and you dont make it a point to explore the world around you
Its easy to say "they arent human" or "theres only exceptions" when you only have a small sample size
In other words.....I would just enjoy the comic and see where the story is going
So far we know she is exploring outside her house, is happier, more confident, and has a friend
Those are all good signs she is socializing and growing as a person
This anaylsis, like sooooo many others being posted are exhausting for people to read because they arent realistic lol
Most adults in the LGBTQ+ community know that people can come into our community and STILL learn a lot as they met knew people
Life is messy; people change as they gain more information
Being hateful is exhausting and miserable
People who are happy with themselves tend to accept others because they arent scared and....well why freak out if you arent scared? Thats just silly