More and more as the 2000’s progress, we see this push for male focused fictional universes to be more “inclusive” in terms of female characters. I will lay out why I think this is a bad move and why it will be harmful in the long run.

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I will start by giving the example of the “My Little Pony” TV Series. This is a hugely female focused universe, with the vast majority of rulers and main characters in the setting being female. There are no episodes in S1 where 2 male characters have a conversation, and barely any episodes after that. And there is absolutely zero issue with this. If you want to create a universe where female characters are focused on then great. Furthermore, if someone tried to force a significant amount of the episodes of the later seasons to focus on male characters at the expense of the female characters, then I’d be pretty irritated. It’s great to have a series of universe deal with stories from a female perspective because it’s something that will both be relatable for that gender but also new and fresh for the opposite gender.

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Yet when it comes to stories about male characters we simply don’t get this same logic. It’s considered a “problem” and a “flaw” that needs “correction” for Lord of The Rings books or Star Wars films not to have two female characters talk about something.

My opinion on this is that you need both male AND female centred stories to appeal to others, not that every single story needs to have an even match of both. In fact if you look at older stories and folklore, this seems to be backed up. We get some stories (eg Cinderella, Vassilisa the Beautiful) which are told with almost exclusively female character , and then we get others (“The Golden Bird” “Jack and the Beanstalk”) told from an almost exclusively male perspective.

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This is of course NOT to say that we can’t have stories with both male and female perspectives (“The Clone Wars” TV series and “Gravity Falls” do this beautifully). But once we start forcing stories told from the perspective of one gender to be “diverse”, then I think we’re going to run into a serious problems, where stories will pose their own identities in order to force all these very unique and different experiences into one story. Forcing female characters into male stories robs the female viewers of being able to experience a story from the opposing view, and it robs male viewers of a story aimed at them, and the reverse of this is also true.