From the comments, where a question is asked – and promptly answered:
Nope. https://t.co/FVOon2TJ4A
— The Critical Drinker (@TheCriticalDri2) July 20, 2023
Regarding which, John D replies,
Ah, but then those of a progressive inclination couldn’t piggy-back their Current Year politics onto someone else’s work, established over many decades. Plus, there’s lots of self-congratulatory subverting to be done. All that signalling about how antiquated and tiresome it is to have a white, male hero being daring and heroic. Because hey, nobody wants that.
The Screen Rant article, by Shaurya Thapa, is, it has to be said, not entirely persuasive. There’s some obligatory wittering about things from the past being “problematic” – among which, the fact that a film series about an iconic male character has always featured said male character:
Which does seem a bit like complaining that every season of the detective series Bosch features, among other things, a white, male detective named Harry Bosch.
But this is, we’re told, “the perfect time for a female Bond.”
A woman named James.
We’re also told, “A gendered spin on the character can open up more potential for exploring Bond’s individuality.” And this exploration of the character’s individuality will apparently be achieved by erasing a rather fundamental aspect of the character – his maleness – and replacing him with an entirely different person of a different sex.
Readers are invited to ponder whether similar transitions might enrich the character of, say, Miss Marple, who, via similar logic, could be depicted as male, and as always having been male. Thereby exploring her individuality. Answers on a postcard, please.
The recent, sex-swapped iteration of Doctor Who is invoked as a “positive example” on this front, as if Jodie Whittaker’s brief, unloved manifestation had been a rip-roaring success – despite the terrible writing and wildly unpopular retconning, both loudly derided by fans, and despite the subsequent, rapid death-spiral of viewing figures. Because boring and alienating much of your audience, and shrinking it dramatically, is a political triumph. A breath of “new life.”
Onwards and upwards!
Mr Thapa, by the way, has written over a thousand articles for Screen Rant. He claims many areas of expertise, and many “domains of knowledge,” including fact-checking. He also boasts of his “academic background,” details of which are, sadly, not divulged.
“Domains of knowledge” are generally pulled out of the domain of one’s ass. Albeit sometimes with the assistance of a thesis advisor.
It is a bit much.
Are the domains of knowledge at the intersection of anything?
Is today’s word ‘ouch’?
As I said in the original thread, there’s an element of franchise exhaustion, of all the stories already told, and the effects of hiring ungifted writers who imagine themselves to be activists of some kind. I rather thought Peter Capaldi made a good Doctor, or a potentially good one, but the writing for his tenure was apparently, for the most part, pretty awful.
Clearly, the gimmicky casting of Ms Whittaker didn’t fix that downward trend.
It’s one of those rhetorical cliches (tropes, <wink>) that simultaneously (1) announces one’s membership in the “intellectual” elite, (2) intimidates those who did not learn the jargon, and (3) serves as a warning to those who did learn the jargon and realized it was created to seduce and deceive.
Jelly Babies anyone?
*uwraps longish scarf, looks at forecast for 100F day. Puts scarf back in box*
If there were any female spies it has been a well kept secret. On the other hand as demonstrated by the Bond episodes, women in espionage tend to be honeypots and definitely undercover. If one wanted to make a good spy movie with a female lead it probably would be a porn movie
“the effects of hiring ungifted writers who imagine themselves to be activists of some kind”.
Which for those of us old enough to remember, if not exactly care, was precisely what brought about the merciful end of the original series Neither the blameless Colin Baker or the admittedly annoying Sylvester McCoy stood a chance considering the utter dross they were given to work with.
Here’s an idea. Just make better films.
….a good spy movie with a female lead?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_Vanishes
Perfectly possible and Miss Foy was anything but a honeypot. It just required a decent script, good acting and great directing – all that old-fashioned stuff.
Well, yes. Quite. As I said a while ago, when I finally got around to watching the latest Bond film, at home, I was actually surprised by how bad and misjudged it was.
No, Time To Die, as someone quipped.
However, it wasn’t underwhelming because Bond is still male, or indeed white. It was just badly written. You sort of expect a modern Bond film to, whatever else, at least be entertaining in a brisk and efficient manner. But the pacing was awful, the characters utterly unengaging – Léa Seydoux was by no means a triumph of casting – and the whole thing felt flat.
“I know, let’s make a Bond film, but make it really dull and mopey and maudlin, with lots of crying and sensitivity.”
Only because Hollywood has forgotten* how to tell anything by implication. The actual psychological process of seduction and compromise can be conveyed without onscreen sex.
* And by “forgotten” I mean “enthusiastically jettisoned”.
See also this:
It’s worth noting that replies to Telegraph tweet, above, are overwhelmingly, almost unanimously, negative. Emphatically so. And women, the demographic in whose name such changes are being entertained, don’t seem to want a sensitive and emasculated Bond either.
That’s not why people go to see a James Bond film.
I find that Doctor Who chart fascinating. This American couldn’t get into the old series — I had enough trouble parsing Monty Python — but I started with the first episode of the rebooted series and was instantly hooked. Watched all the episodes of the first three doctors, and bought the box sets. My wife and I watched the episodes that ranged from watchable to fantastic.
Then Capaldi and Clara came in, and we stopped when the moon gave birth to a dragon. Haven’t watched another episode, and from the reviews, haven’t seen a need to.
But it’s interesting that the viewership went down with the first doc, at the same rate of decline as Jodie W.’s. And it may be that the series was heading for exhaustion after the first hundred episodes, but it also seems to me that Doctor Who is an anthology series, and it’s the people the doc meets (and his companion, which changes) that can keep it fresh. It’s such a shame that it’s being turned into propaganda that would have found a home on the Big Brother streaming service.
Well, the current century does resemble a dumpster fire.
BTW, how much more of a ‘gendered spin’ can you get than James Bond?
Female spies: they made a tv movie about american and british female spies in WWII in Germany/France. They were great spies but not the stuff of a bond movie.
Sensitive bond: a key trait of bond is that he is NOT sensitive and weepy. He is kind of a jerk. Part of the plot repeatedly is that he ignores orders, goes off on his own cowboy style, and then gets in trouble. That is not what sensitive men do. His extreme confidence and arrogance make the plot go around. Woke want to end masculinity.
Haven’t watched another episode, and from the reviews, haven’t seen a need to.
Haven’t watched an episode since she went full BBC and called me in idiot for carrying a pocketknife, in the New Doctor Intro. Do I understand that she’s gone?
[Searches under old newspapers for programming instructions for the PVR].
David’s previous blog server.
And the cycle is now complete.
Oh no, Instalanch!
[ klaxon ]
Yeah, well, here’s a thought that’s not going to go over well: The majority of the things that the educated-yet-still-idiot ideological assholes object to vis-a-vis the male/female role thing?
They’re not actually based on sex. They’re based on raw necessity. You really can’t be a nurturing supportive maternal father figure; that’s just not what the role calls for. The role of father requires you be the distant authoritarian type, because that’s the yin to the ever-supportive and permissive “mom” role. Both parents trying to do the same things? Disaster awaits.
It’s like that everywhere; you’ll find that successful female NCOs in the military are very often the same sort of authoritarian assholes the male ones are, because that’s what the f*cking role requires. You can have uniquely feminine takes on it all, but in the end, the same sort of requirements in the role-space wind up convergently evolving to the same resultant ends.
So, if you’re going to have a super-spy? The differences between a male one and a female one aren’t going to be at all interesting. The requirements of that role-space (and, I’m not talking acting here, either…) are going to mean that they do many of the same things, the same way. The impersonal way that male Bond handles his sexual conquests, using sex as a tool? Yeah; the female version will do the same thing, but because we’re wired to see that far differently, it’s going to come over entirely differently.
You can posit a sex change in the roles, but in the end? The inherent requirements are going to overwhelm the sex of the person in the role. You want to be a successful soldier, a traditional male role? Well, sweetie, guess what? You’re gonna wind up behaving just the same as the “traditional male”, ‘cos that’s what works.
Likewise, you put a male into a traditional female role? Like, nurturing and caring for small children? He’s very likely to take on a lot of the same features as the trad females have, because, again… That’s what works.
Ninety-nine and nine-tenths of what the arseholes out there object to is actually objective reality; they don’t want successful military behavior, they want a feminized military because, thinking that will result in something somehow being different and better. The reality is that instead of making a better military, they’re either going to wreck it and ensure defeat, or they’re going to successfully stick a bunch of women into the male role-space and force them to adapt what they thought were traditionally “male” patterns of behavior. They’re not actually “male”; they’re just what works best in that role.
[ Hands out breath mints, combs, moisturiser. ]
“Mixed results” = total failure, lost $70,000,000.
“Positive example” = total failure, nearly killed franchise.
I rather thought Peter Capaldi made a good Doctor, or a potentially good one, but the writing for his tenure was apparently, for the most part, pretty awful.
Same here. I was never able to get the old Doctor shows in the US except for re-broadcasts on PBS and I loved them. Was gifted the 9th Doctor series and was hooked. I thought Capaldi was going to be more good stuff. But by then the stories were all woke preaching, the Gay Companion, and it just got boring. I don’t mind a gay character if they are interesting in some way. But if all they got is the fact that they are Gay, I’m outta there. Same for a straight character, actually. Not much interested in romance and sex in adventure stories, although seduction as part of a spy intrigue would be an integral part of the story flow. I guess the last Doctor had a Diverse posse of companions, just a woke mess of box-ticking and preaching. No wonder viewership dropped off.
James Bond – the character and the mythos – are based on the Ian Fleming BOOKS, so you’d need to start with good BOOKS with female characters. I’m unaware of any series of action/adventure stories or books with female heroes who might serve as the basis of the movies.
Of course, these days when actual gender doesn’t matter, why not continue to make Bond movies as they always have and just SAY that the hero is really a woman, but living life as a trans-man?
Greg N,
Kindly Google “Virginia Hall” for a real-life female agent whose exploits could probably make a good film. They already made a good book…
So, am I the only one to watch “Atomic Blonde”?
Basic shoot ’em up spy w/gratuitous scenery…
Interesting that wossname, the Bloke from Paisley*, saw the biggest increase in viewership. I tapped out about halfway through his tenure.
Although it’s also notable that this reflects the trend up to that point. I wonder how many in the second half were new viewers and how many returnees. I’d already given it about three second chances with the Northern Bloke*.
*I suspect it probably says something that I can remember William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, John Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and even Paul McGann off the top of my head, but struggle to recall the names of any of the post-reboot lot.
Re the Doctor Who reboots one shouldn’t overlook the show runners decision for 3 of the 5 principle female companions (Rose, Donna and Clara) to have black boyfriends or husbands while a 4th, the lovely Martha, had the unrequited hots for David Tennant.
None of the men had any significant or lasting input, they were just there. It was all rather clumsy even before Jodie Whittaker.
I was really pleased when Dr Who returned, and I think that Christopher Eccleston is my favourite of the new set of Doctors, second only to Tom Baker. (Jon Pertwee is the first one I remember watching, which ages me terribly, I know.) And some of the newer episodes have been genuinely excellent – The Empty Child (“are you my mummy?”) was genuinely unnerving; as was Blink in season three (the weeping angels).
But increasingly, I felt that I was watching it simply out of (misplaced?) loyalty – like when you buy every album that one of your favourite artist releases, even though they’re getting less and less inspiring as the years go by. Whittaker was the last straw. Laughable acting, sidekicks, plots, scripts, and worst of all utter contempt for the mythology of the program. So the new Doctor is black? and has a trans companion? FFS: the contempt just increases doesn’t it?
so you’d need to start with good BOOKS with female characters. I’m unaware of any series of action/adventure stories or books with female heroes who might serve as the basis of the movies.
At the risk of repeating myself — Renee Ballard.
In principle I had no problem with the Whittaker doctor: regeneration is such a blatant method of keeping a show going anyway, and is fundamentally a fantasy concept. And Time Lords are an entirely alien species anyway.
in practical terms I had parted ways with the show long ago anyway: as you say, it is a franchise that has long had its possibilities exhausted.
But the retconning about the character that came after the Whittaker regeneration is, by all accounts, ridiculous.
Perfectly possible and Miss Foy was anything but a honeypot. It just required a decent script, good acting and great directing – all that old-fashioned stuff.
Her authority, derived from experience, was not to be messed with and being of a certain age, rather than a vamp, gave her added appeal as a crafty operator. At the end, examination of her sparse apartment with few adornments, told of a lonely woman embroiled in matters of great pitch and moment.
A more sensitive hero? A soldier must continue on while being bombed for 30 hrs straight (like at Bastone sp? in WWII). He must keep going while filthy and with no sleep. He cannot weep or take time for introspection. As Kirk says, it is what the role requires.
A husband can be a good dad but typically dads teach their kids to be more adventurous, play rougher with them, tell them “you’re ok” when they get hurt, and teach them skills. Kids do better with this dichotomy of parents. A softer gentler dad does not teach the same things. My grandkids know that I fix things and my daughters call me for help (cars, banks, plumbing).
Mata Hari has entered the chat. But yeah, honeypot/porn. Mostly. Not too familiar with Virginia Hall. A quick wiki read hits a few sounds-familiars though. While she seemed to be mostly a coordinator, that and her more physical activities were more of the mental than James Bond-y action stuff. I do think her story would make a fantastic movie but not of the more comic-book leaning hero of Ian Fleming’s experience and imagination. It’s an indictment (heh… I love using tgat term on the leftists) of feminism and the Hollywood left in general that such a story hasn’t had much, much more traction.
Heh. I got chastised, well not directly/individually but in a blanket team email, by our security officer when working for “a major US defense contractor that you definitely heard of that develops delivery systems for nuclear weapons” for providing a butter knife for cutting the mock apple pie I brought for our diversity/heritage pot luck lunch.
Also, meant to say earlier, what Kirk said.
Having read the books many many years ago, I recall one in which healthy living dictates came down from on high — agents were required cut out the booze, cigarettes, rich foods, etc. Bond did for awhile and IIRC found he did have more energy, but by the end of the book he was right back to his previous lifestyle.
Modesty Blaise. She smart, skilled, athletic, gorgeous and even has a slavishly devoted male sidekick (though he’s extremely competent in his own right and she values his assistance, so the femmies would hate him on principle).
There were some really good female spies in WWII that could serve as models for decent Bond-esque alternatives.
Good Vanity Fair article on some of them:
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/11/allied-world-war-2-female-spy-movies
There were others, whose names are regrettably not coming to mind.
RE: Sex differences relating to leadership positions. One thing I don’t think I quite made clear was that while you inevitably wind up doing a lot of the same things the same way, there are differences in execution. You have to be a hardass, male or female. But, you cannot possibly be a hardass in the exact same way as someone of the opposite sex, and if you try, it will blow up in your face. One of the worst officers I ever worked for was a woman who tried “playing male”, aping what she saw as “strong leadership” behaviors. It did not work; had any of her subordinates been given the chance, most of us would have fragged her ass in a heartbeat.
Likewise, one of the best officers I ever worked for was a woman who never once lost her contact with her femininity. She had extremely high standards, and got them met with a simple raised eyebrow. You liked working for her; she was an utterly selfless leader who I observed going to bat for her people and anyone else she felt responsible for. She had teams coalesce around her, seemingly by magic and sheer force of personality. During an exercise that featured a lot of self-serving abuse of the junior enlisted by entitled upper-ranking officers seeking to make points off our backs, she managed to pull everyone from a very wide-ranging selection of different elements and sections into a working team that was quite ready to do actual physical violence on her behalf, when they observed someone senior to her giving her a hard time over something she’d changed in order to take better care of the collective lot of us.
I’m pretty sure that had one of his aides not gotten that ranking idiot out of that hanger that violence would have been done to his person and his remora-like straphangers, and the bodies might not have been found. Ever.
I ain’t exaggerating one damn bit, either; some of the crew who’d been pulled into her orbit were fairly bad actors we’d inherited from 2nd Ranger Battalion due to medical unfitness, and they were a tad, shall we say, unfettered? I had a hell of a time reining those guys in; likely the only thing that prevented a late-night meeting with fate and circumstance was the lecture said female Major delivered unto the crowd that she could take care of herself, thankyouverymuch, and that their efforts on her behalf were neither appreciated or necessary…
To this day, if I got a call from her, I’d cheerfully drop what I was doing and go do what she thought needed doing. One of only two officers I can say that about. The other female? Wouldn’t cross the street to piss on her burning body.
There are different paths to follow, but the end point is the same. That’s the thing that these idiots don’t seem to grasp, which is that situation dictates behavior far more than sex or perceived sex roles. If you’ve got to be the partner going out every single day to earn your crusts for the family, male or female, you’re going to look and behave a lot like everyone else that does that same thing. The partner staying home with the kiddies? They’re going to wind up the same way, behaving and doing the same things as the other nurturing-role parents.
Most of the problems with this stuff boil down to immature and childish people railing at clouds. Fate and circumstance have rather more to do with sex roles than they’re ever going to admit, and they somehow think that because a nurturing woman is a country’s leader, that she’ll do things differently. The track record for that fantasy playing out in real life is sordid, indeed: Elizabeth I? Catherine the Great? Any other European female royal that wound up in charge of things? How about Ranavalona I, the queen of Madagascar? That chick wound up meeting or beating Pol Pot’s record, in terms of sheer damage to her nation’s population levels, unless I’m reading the wrong numbers.
It ain’t the sex, folks: It’s the roles. You do the necessary, never mind the consequences or how it looks. If you need to change the diapers and cuddle, well… You change the diapers and cuddle. You need to kill in defense of the kiddies? Guess what? You’re gonna kill like it’s going out of style.
Or, you and yours will die. That simple.
LOL. We live in dumb times.
Again, it does seem a bit like complaining that every season of the detective series Bosch features a white, male detective named Harry Bosch.
obligatory wittering about things from the past being “problematic”
Problematic, Unacceptable and Inappropriate. This gives us the full picture of whatever it is that irks them at any given moment.
Part of the reason the Screen Rant article is unconvincing is that, like so many of his peers, the author doesn’t appear entirely honest about his motives.
Replacing male characters with female copies rarely benefits the female character, or female audiences – see the recent box-office failures of Lucasfilm, Marvel, etc. (Riri Williams, aka Ironheart, a charmless superheroine whose comic was promptly cancelled due to lack of interest, is no Tony Stark. And Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the supposed replacement for Harrison Ford in the Indiana Jones film series, has, shall we say, failed to attract an audience. And done so decisively.)
And it seems unlikely that similar complaints would be aired regarding Luther or Lupin or Bulletproof, or some other series featuring a black protagonist.
Looks like Typepad has managed to go for a whole month without any massive, week-long outages.
So there’s that.
Could that have been due to the same motivations that lead some local code inspectors to always try to find something, not matter how trivial, to write up?
But an authentic diversity celebration would include knives, guns, drugs, brawling, and a killing.
David, that reminds me: I have been doing google searches on the old Typepad site because searching the new site yields far fewer hits.
Is there any way to instruct google’s bots to index the contents of your new site?
According to the dashboard here, the blog’s SEO score is “excellent,” fully optimised, and if I search for the blog anonymously, it’s the very first Google entry. So, I’m not sure what else can be done. Maybe it takes time for older posts to filter through? No idea.
Related: “feminist” upset because no women appear in “Oppenheimer” for 20 minutes and there are not enough POCs, Vogue is upset that Oppenheimer’s wife and mistresses are not central to the plot; and the University of Pittsburgh goes completely off the rails.
OTOH, filmmakers can just make a movie that is generally historically accurate.
Next up, reboot of “Judgement at Nuermberg” doesn’t have enough women of POCs on either side of the bench.
I just hope that all this recurring talk of a female James Bond resurrects Cate Archer and No One Lives Forever from licensing hell.
That these weird, neurotic people have ever been taken seriously, about pretty much anything, by anyone, is quite remarkable.
I saw the trailer for Oppenheimer at the cinema last week, before watching the new Mission: Impossible film. It looked visually impressive in IMAX format. But then I remembered that I haven’t actually enjoyed any Christopher Nolan film I’ve ever seen. I’ve appreciated some interesting bits, and some clever bits, but the word enjoyed doesn’t seem quite right, for me.
At the 20 minute mark, a woman appears in Oppenheimer. Who is this femmo that gives away spoilers? Up to this point audiences would have been on the edge of their seats, awaiting the climatic moment.
…audiences would have been on the edge of their seats, awaiting the climatic moment.
Pun intended, I assume, although among the offended are the Indians.
A scathing attack on all of Hinduism, right. The best part of these days of modern times in which we live in is that no one ever overreacts to anything.
But this is the left’s thing. They don’t need to be convincing, to present rational ideas that stand up to the Socratic method. They just need to pump out volumes of mid-wit level material and present it in places where the average blathering know-nothing will see it, believing that they themselves are now “smarter” for reading it, and will repeat it sufficiently and to sufficient people such that when the lower-mid-wits and even upper-mid-wits encounter it the nod their heads sagely and say that everyone knows that.
Well, the Screen Rant article – and others like it – seem driven more by a fashionable and pretentious disdain of All Things White And Male than by any obvious benefit to cinema, or indeed to womankind. (Including, of course, all those women, noted upthread, who dislike the idea of a weepy and emasculated Bond, let alone the prospect of him being replaced by a novelty female copy.)
Likely. He was an otherwise quiet, mild mannered black guy of whom I really could not see in what way our specific department needed. It smelled like a make-work job. I suppose he could have had lots of background/behind the scenes work to do but the only direct contact I had with him in five or so years was the day I discovered that one of our “security” doors, one with the manual lock with only numbers 1-5 in the combination, opened no matter what combo you entered. While he did immediately address it, he certainly didn’t seem much concerned.
Movies: there were complaints that Dunkirk did not contain the proper quota of POC. Because of course, in 1940 Britain was 98% white and gratuitous black folks in the film would be historical nonsense. But actual history does not concern the Left–all must now be propaganda.
As to female heroes…men are reckless. Many of those reckless men die without notice. A few die (or even survive) doing something important and we call them heroes. The Spartans against the Persians for example. Under extreme circumstances such as the battle for Stalingrad, among the slaughtered there were some Russian female snipers, pilots, and tank drivers who were heroes–but it was a fight for survival.
Sort of like some sf stories I’ve read: A few interesting ideas, but wooden plots and cardboard characters that I couldn’t care about.
Well, there’s your problem. You expected entertainment.
Or something.
When you hand your country over to non-whites, then of course your popular culture and mythology is part of the package. What’s ours is yours, let there be no domain of life in which whites can say that something belongs to them and not to non-whites.
I’m sure evidence can be found against Fleming and Bond that they’re guilty of the crime of not thinking much of foreigners. Perhaps “not thinking much” in the sense of holding their abilities in low esteem. Certainly “not thinking much” in the sense that the stories are about the adventures and amours of Bond, and not about shoring up non-white ethnic self-esteem.
Now that we all have to set our moral compass by the ethnic resentments of non-whites, it’s not surprising to hear that they ethnically resent their people being depicted as spear carriers or local color or comic relief, and that they’re not going to let Bond fade away quietly as a raffish old man pinching the bottoms of his nurses – he has to be humiliated and defeated.
I think that one of the things that has to be acknowledged with all of this is that the move to recast traditional protagonists as being “differently raced” is that the actual intent isn’t equity, but subversive transgression.
If it was equity, then they’d be insisting on their own new stories with new characters. What they’re going for, instead, is the replacement of one race/ethnicity with another.
You will note that there ain’t nobody out there demanding that traditional characters of minority populations be replaced by their majority counterparts. Indeed, you try casting a white woman in a role that the idjit class thinks ought to go to, say, a woman of Japanese background, and you’re going to get excoriated.
Which is flatly, nuts. In the example I’m thinking of, the character design for Major Kusanagi was never that of an ethnically Japanese woman. Her appearance was clearly that of a Westerner of indeterminate origin, and ohbythebloodyway, she’s not even strictly human: Her body is an artificially built shell, apparently constructed so as to resemble that of a Westerner…
So, casting Scarlett Johannsen in her role as Major Kusanagi was not only justified, it was entirely within canon.
Which did not stop the usual suspects from ranting about “whitewashing”, as insane as that actually was.
But it’s interesting that the viewership went down with the first doc
As a Canadian, I had ready access to Doctor Who from the 3rd through 5th Doctors, and if I’m honest I always found the character foppish and fey. I liked Chris Ecceleston in the role for the exact same reason he was fired: he played it like a normal bloke who was taking the piss out of all the various pompous ideas and alien characters. I’m surprised to see the audience disliked him as much as the producers did, though.
The impersonal way that male Bond handles his sexual conquests, using sex as a tool? Yeah; the female version will do the same thing, but because we’re wired to see that far differently, it’s going to come over entirely differently.
Season 1 of The Americans, but don’t watch any of the later seasons.
I’m unaware of any series of action/adventure stories or books with female heroes who might serve as the basis of the movies.
There’s tons, but Hollywood no longer knows how to write sympathetic female characters. The French film La Femme Nikita, the Canadian-filmed TV adaptation (not the reboot), the aforementioned The Americans, even the first season of Covert Affairs.
The Stephanie Plum novels would make a great film franchise but Katherine Heigl killed it by being Linda Fiorentino-levels of horrible to everyone she worked with.
The problem, as it always is, is that audience demographics are key. Women don’t want to watch action movies, and the few that do don’t want to see women doing action hero antics. Some men do, but a strong, masculine action movie protagonist will appeal to many more men and women. ‘Twas always thus, and movie producers who forget that will produce bombs.
So, casting Scarlett Johannsen in her role as Major Kusanagi was not only justified, it was entirely within canon.
The Japanese, being in general racially chauvinistic, do not give a sh*t about this kind of baizuo BS.
Stop trying to find sense, logic or consistency in these arguments. They’re not intended to make sense. They’re intended to not make sense. The only goal of these arguments is destroy social cohesion and set various factions of Western society against each other.
This.