Oh boy. Look, you can say what you want, but women really do constantly draw the short straw when it comes to their representation in video games, fantasy movies, and all that good stuff where there’s really no reason for them not to be there. Well, there’s no reason for them not to be included in any media, for that matter, but here we are.
The Lord of the Rings is a stellar series, but it’s definitely not without its problems. In case its lack of female characters wasn’t immediately apparent to you, one YouTuber has attempted to compile every single time that two women were seen speaking on-screen into one video, and uh, it really can’t have taken them too long.
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Courtesy of eightfootmanchild (excellent username, by the way), we can finally watch the peak of cinema, condensed into… one line of dialogue. Two words, to be exact. “Where’s mama?” More like “where’s literally any other woman in this series”. Take a look below.
As some viewers pointed out in the YouTube comments, this has been slightly exaggerated for the sake of the joke, but not by much - Éowyn has some (still very brief) interactions with a couple of other female characters, but that's about it. Honestly, the fact that we can count the amount of occasions from the entire trilogy on one hand, not to mention how hard you actually have to think about it to come up with any in the first place, should really tell you all you need to know.
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Does this mean that the series is actually bad, then? No, of course not, no one’s trying to say that. But, is it indicative of just how much men were prioritised as the main audience of the films, and also the original books? Yeah, potentially. Even if a piece of media isn’t blatantly misogynistic, it’s really not a great look that basically the entire story is told through male characters.
Obviously, it’s been a hot minute since the third and final LOTR movie released - the most recent one came out in 2003, so it’s been almost 20 years. So, you know, it’s not exactly indicative of modern-day cinema as such, but still. Not very cool.
Topics: The Lord Of The Rings, TV And Film