(Hated)changing somenthing to be more "progressive" ends up being a bad thing

[u/Morr4Seiya]

Now to be clear,i am not one of these "anti-woke" losers that complain some people exist,and i am also not the type to complain about changing somenthing in a new version or adaptation,however there are cases where it did ended up being a bad idea.

-In the anime of Cowboy Bebop there is the character Gren,despite being short lived the character is very memorable specially thanks to his tragic story.Basically his story was that he was a soldier from the titan war who was a great friend with Vicious(the main bad guy)after the war he was emprisioned thanks to Vicious who testified against him and he was forced to take a experimental drug that caused him hormonal problems,giving him a feminine appearence and even breasts.

In the Netflix live action,for some reasons they decided Gren was going to be non-binary,which wouldn't be a problem(some people believe he was gay in the anime)if it wasn't for the fact that they also removed all the nuances and complexities that made the character memorable and interesting,instead of a tragic war veteran that was betrayed and had his body changed against his will,Gren is just kinda there.

-The original Rugrats cartoon had the couple Betty and Howard,Betty was a big and masculine woman while Howard was a smaller and nervous man,it was a genuine interesting relationship that stood out from the other couples who were the standard straight couple.

In the new series however they replaced Howard with a woman named Trish,two things,first off why?What was the problem with having a woman being the stronger in a straight relationship?Second why does Hollywood seem to think that every tomboy or masculine woman is a lesbian?

Overall not the worst thing but it is jarring that they had a gender reverse roled that was progressive and decided that wasn't enough.

-Oh man,this one pisses me off the most so i am gonna have to break it down

So back in the late 80s and 90s there was this anime called Saint Seiya also knows as Knights of the zodiac,it tells the story of knights who fight for the Goddess Athena to protect earth,being divided in the golden,silver and bronze knights,the anime was a huge hit in latin america and Europe and while it floped in the US it still has a loyal fanbase.

Being a fan myself i can't recommend it enough,now granted the story does have a fair share of flaws,and that's because the author was honestly just making stuff up as he went along(also a lot of side characters are poorly used or even forgotten about)still it is a great story you should check out

But then a couple of years back Netflix got the rights and decided to a 3D reboot,in this reboot they decided to make the story more "american" to try to bring more american viewers,now i could go on and on a big rant about how that was a bad idea and the execution was so terrible that it made me want to strangle someone but this post is about one specific change.

So Saint Seiya has five main characters,those are Pegasus Seiya,Dragon Shiryu,Cygnus Hyoga,Phoenix Ikki and finally Andromeda Shun.

While the other four characters were the standard masculine and brute male characters who were always ready to throw punches,Shun was smaller,more sensitive and even feminine looking,a pacifist who didn't liked fighting,but don't mistake that for weakness because Shun was loyal to his friends and was extremely powerful.

Then Netflix decided to change Shun into a girl named Shaun.

So wait,you have a male character who goes against every male stereotype and you turn him into just another generic female character?

When asked about it,the showrunner Eugene Son said he made that change because there was no girl in the group and having a all boys group wouldn't be acceptable nowadays

First off that's not true because Athena was also part of the main cast,yeah she wasn't the fighting type but she still helped quite a lot in the story even saving the knights on several occasions,second if you wanted to add a girl to the main group why not use Marin or Shaina?Hell,if you were going to change the story anyway why not turn Seiya sister into a knight?

Thankfully this monstrosity was cancelled(so much for trying to bring more fans)

[u/Longjumping-Ear-6248]

In a interesting irony, during times when Mulan takes place, Mongolian women had more rights in Mongolian Society than Chinese women had in theirs.

[u/TandrDregn → u/Longjumping-Ear-6248]

This seems to be a thing in a lot of very warrior-like cultures. Another example are the Spartans who treated their women better than most of the other polis did. I think it’s tied to the fact that they couldn’t MAKE new warriors without them, so they naturally tend to respect them more, as opposed to, say, the Athenians who were apparently pretty damn shitty towards their women.

[u/thetrustworthybandit → u/TandrDregn]

It's less about the making new warriors (after all, having heirs is important in pretty much every society) and more that when men are out fighting wars it's the women that have to keep society going, and for that they need to be able to be more independent/competent/educated

[u/MagnusIsABird → u/thetrustworthybandit]

Also, harsher climates mean more people have to work outside just to survive. A mongolian camp wouldnt survive if the women didnt work alongside the men.

In more settled agrarian societies you have a surplus of resources (usually) and you can pushh women into household chores. So they tend to be more patriarchial

[u/ManiacalShen → u/MagnusIsABird]

Don't undersell the amount of farming women would do. You'd have to be pretty well-off to be able to be confined to household chores, which themselves could be pretty backbreaking compared to today (eg laundry). In feudal societies, lords weren't exactly excusing female peons from field work.

But if you are landed gentry or a homesteader and have that big, settled property, you can make the farm the wife's problem and sequester her there with the kids while the husband does any business that's elsewhere. So she ideally needs to be skilled enough to manage the land but not bold enough to disobey his orders about it.

[u/Akhevan → u/MagnusIsABird]

Actually the Mongolian grazing-based economy required about 20-30% of the population to be engaged in herding, when most agricultural societies of the time had about 75-85% of population engaged in agriculture. You should read on the subject instead of making silly assumptions on the level of "harsh climate makes harsh women".

Also it's not as if the women in said agricultural societies didn't work all their spare time (on top of doing "household chores" and farming work), weaving alone was a black hole for labor until the advent of the mechanized loom.

[u/Notte_di_nerezza → u/thetrustworthybandit]

See also: the Norse.

[u/thetrustworthybandit → u/Notte_di_nerezza]

See also: the world during and post WWII.

[u/nagrom7 → u/thetrustworthybandit]

Yeah, the same even happened in our societies whenever we'd engage in total war. Both world wars were massive advancements in the rights of women because they basically had to run everything back home while all the men were off fighting, and as such jobs and roles that they were previously forbidden from even applying for, were straight up begging for them because they had no workforce otherwise. And then even after the war was over, most of those young men that were fighting came back with no relevant experience in those fields, while all the people who did have experience were the women who'd spent the last several years doing those jobs.

[u/my-name-is-puddles → u/thetrustworthybandit]

more that when men are out fighting wars it's the women that have to keep society going

This was true for other Greek city states too, though. It's not like Spartan men were going to war significantly more than other Greeks. Contrary to popular belief, Spartans were NOT professional soldiers. They were specifically profession-less. During times of peace they didn't do military drilling or anything like that; when war broke out they mustered, drilled, and marched off to war much like every other Greek city.

Also keep in mind, "Spartans" made up a small minority of the people in and around Sparta. Spartan citizenship was a very exclusive club. Most of the actual population were perioikoi (free, non-citizens) and helots (state-owned slaves/serfs). At Sparta's absolute peak there were only about 9000 male citizens. They were greatly outnumbered by the perioikoi and helots. Women in those groups did not have the same privileges as Spartan women. And it'd also be very wrong to imply Spartan society was anything close to being egalitarian between genders (not saying you were implying that). If you were born a woman in that time period in Greece you might wanna be born Spartan, but that's mostly because if you're Spartan you're already basically in the "1%". You would not want to be born a woman born in basically the same place just not a Spartan citizen.

[u/blacksoxing → u/thetrustworthybandit]

Without typing a novel us Americans have a history lesson of our own regarding WWII and how women were treated while propping up the economy and their persistence to not return back to the house...

[u/TheAmplifier8 → u/TandrDregn]

It typically has a lot more to do with the fact that you cannot keep a nation running if all your men are off fighting and all your women are incompetent. So women naturally take on more skilled roles to fill the gaps.

Look at labor during WW2 in the US for a more modern example of this.

In some cases it is also a scarcity thing. So for example Scandinavia, where you needed everyone to chip in to get the two through tough winter weather.

Sparta is a bit of an odd situation since they had a fairly unique culture with a high dependency on helots. This likely exacerbated the need, as there was a risk of revolt while the army was away.

[u/Spider40k → u/TandrDregn]

>I think it's tied to the fact that they couldn't MAKE new warriors without them

Well on the other side of the coin, they couldn't HAVE an entire martial society if it wasn't for their overwhelming slave population; but they very much didn't respect the Helots at all

[u/TandrDregn → u/Spider40k]

There’s a reason I said the Spartans were better to their WOMEN than the rest of Greece. They were still absolute dickheads that surpassed the rest in most other forms of phallo-cranium syndrome.

[u/ny00t → u/TandrDregn]

I'm definitely simplifying things a lot here because reality is obviously way more nuanced, but one thing i notice is that a culture/society that grew up in hardship tend to be more "equal" because everyone needs to play a part in order to thrive. Men, women, the elderly, children, etc. Everyone plays a role and has a niche and respects each other for it because if one fails, all collapse. Likewise, culture/society that's living relatively easy life (especially one with cities in ancient times) tend to go for the dominance route towards anyone that shows even the slightest of disadvantage

[u/kaian-a-coel → u/TandrDregn]

the Spartans who treated their women better than most of the other polis did

It should be noted that "the spartans" everyone thinks about were the litteral 1%er of sparta. Like yeah, athenians did keep their women pretty much locked at home, but maybe wealthy slave owner wives aren't a very good metric for women respecting in a society that was made up of 70% slaves.

[u/AreYouThereSagan → u/TandrDregn]

The Spartans wanted their women to be strong and intelligent to increase the odds of their children being strong and intelligent.

[u/FuzzyFrogFish → u/TandrDregn]

Another example are the Spartans who treated their women better than most of the other polis did.

That's pushing it as an example, really pushing it. Spartan women were very much still property, and we're treated like sexual commodities

As for making new warriors. Spartans were the leisure class, they were not trained warriors any more than any other polis, and if you didn't have money you got booted out of that leisure class pretty fast. Sparta was an oligarchy

The understanding of Sparta has changed wholesale in about a decade, and most of the rubbish peddled by Cartledge and those before him has been debunked by his own PhD student.

[u/ScyllaOfTheDepths → u/TandrDregn]

Look up what the Mongols did to the women and children of the people they slaughtered. They were absolutely not paragons of gender equality, they simply treated their own women slightly better than the average of the time. They viewed the women of their opponents as the spoils of conquest and horrifically brutalized them.

[u/TandrDregn → u/ScyllaOfTheDepths]

Yeah, probably should have specified I meant their own.

[u/CelioHogane → u/TandrDregn]

Of course the fucking Athenians were shit towards women, that makes so much sense...

[u/TumbleweedPure3941 → u/Longjumping-Ear-6248]

Mulan was a Northern Wei soldier fighting the Rouran. There were no mongols.

Also mongol women had better rights than Han women literally all the time. Han Chinese culture was far more misogynistic than any of their neighbours from as far back as records began. Han culture was so misogynistic, it even managed to influence the deeply matrilineal cultures of Korea and Japan; turning Korea, what was once one of the least misogynistic cultures in the world, into one of the most by the late Joseon dynasty.

I mean they invented foot binding for crying out loud.

[u/AnalysisOk7430 → u/Longjumping-Ear-6248]

Yeah, the right to die of starvation along with her children, when their husband got killed by another man, or prostitute themselves. Gee, how progressive.

[u/Secuter → u/Longjumping-Ear-6248]

This is a general theme with settled vs nomadic societies. The more settled they became the less gender equal it became.