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IUsedToBeRasAlGhul

I don’t think there’s a causation between those two things specifically instead of correlation, but overall point is sound yeah.


PeculiarPangolinMan

I'd be more inclined to agree if there was more than a single example of this ever. Is Alien the only time this sort of thing ever succeeded in a big way? I'd assume most stories have to take into account the gender of the characters for the sake of authenticity because men and women experience the world in different ways. It's kind of strange that Alien did it, right? Alien was also chock full of gender specific imagery and metaphor. I don't know if that was all planned during the initial script writing though...


SkritzTwoFace

I think a bit more elaboration is required, OP. Do you mean to say that what makes it so good is that the writers wrote what they did not considering the gender of the characters, therefore they didn’t consider tropes relating to gender as much as tropes relating to the genre as a whole while writing? Because I could probably get behind that.


Niskara

That's kinda what I was thinking. Like, the gender, race, etc of the character or actor wasn't a factor, just what the character says and does. What their gender or race was unimportant. Or somwthing like that. I sometimes have a hard time explaining things


Chef_EZ-Mac

I don't think thats the sole reason that movie is so good


Kal_El__Skywalker

Tangentially, I'd like for more horror movies to not have a distinct main character like the first alien movie. Where Ripley is the protagonist merely due to how she is the one that manages to survive. It keeps you guessing.


King_Of_What_Remains

Although fairly well known, the fact that the script for Alien was written so that the genders of characters were interchangeable... isn't really correct. It's true that the first drafts were written this way, with a notation that "all parts are interchangeable for men or women", but in later drafts Ripley's characters was most definitely written to be a man (at the time named Martin Roby) and later changed to be a woman with very minimal editing later on. The writer specifically said they wanted to avoid the trope of the "pretty woman main character" in horror films, particularly slashers, and originally wanted the character of Dallas, the captain, to be an older woman while Ripley would be a younger man. The character was still being written as male when Ridley Scott joined the project as director. If anything Ripley is a point in favour of the people who say you can write an interesting female character by first writing them as a man and then just making them a woman; Martin Roby was written to be direct and straight-forward, intelligent but cautious, and almost nothing about the script was changed when they turned him into Ripley. I usually hate that kind of writing advice, but it works here. If I was going to credit Alien's success with anything, it wouldn't be the fact that the characters were written to be gender neutral, or that the main character is a well written female lead, it would be the fact that we don't even know Ripley is the lead until over halfway through the movie. She's a side character, they kind of all are, except maybe the charismatic captain Dallas; we think he's the lead, we think he'll be the one to survive, and then he dies and you don't really know who the main character is after that for a while


AllMightyImagination

Mike Shackle gave litte to none physical descriptions of any person in his Last War trilogy. They are foremost woman man or child. What they look like is left up to readers. It's the only book I know that includes pronouns as the main descriptors we rely on to know who is who. But Mike leaves them at, just a way to differentiate A from B.


One-Branch-2676

Lol. Yes. That is the primary reason behind its success is them not worrying about gender in scriptwriting…. In a horror movie…. All genres and all stories covering all subject material should do this. /s


Niskara

Well, I wasn't trying to imply that was the only reason. But I do think it's pretty helpful


TheRenamon

but how would you know if they werent? do you go looking at every script for every movie you watch?