Lament of the Mind

gingerhaze:

When it comes to criticism of Frozen, particularly on Tumblr, I’ve seen a lot of people voicing the same few ideas. They’re valid criticisms. It’s a movie about white people, all the characters are white. The two female protagonists are white, thin, and conventionally attractive. There aren’t as many supporting female characters as there could be. 

I’m not seeing many people move past this to other forms of criticism, though. Don’t get me wrong, every person has the right to elect whether or not to put up with stuff they don’t like to get to the stuff they do like - I just find it interesting, you know, the overall reaction. The anti-Frozen-bandwagon that arose. So when the Avengers came out it was five white dudes and a single lady, but people didn’t boycott the Avengers. A lot of people decided that even though there were things we didn’t like and stuff we wanted to change, it was a fun movie that we enjoyed. The overall reaction was positive. Some people didn’t want to see it and had good reasons for that, and people criticized it where it failed, but it was nowhere near the outpouring of hate that I’ve seen for Frozen - a lot of it, from people who never saw it. 

I enjoyed Frozen. I don’t condone its failings, I had my issues with it, but in the end I saw a movie aimed at a mainstream audience where the central relationship is between two sisters, who love each other and try to save each other and have their own distinct personalities. A movie where the romantic interests are secondary and relatively incidental to the love between two women.

A lot of people were rooting for Frozen to fail. It didn’t fail - it’s doing incredibly well in the box office. So despite Frozen’s flaws, there are a ton of little kids watching this movie and seeing two women who’d do anything for each other, whose main motive isn’t romance, women who are going and doing and having powers and complex emotions and yeah, maybe they didn’t go as far as they should have and the creators deserve to be held accountable for that. We shouldn’t ever stop pushing for more.

Do I want to see more movies with varied, diverse female characters? HELLZ YEAH! But if I boycotted every movie that didn’t have all of that, I don’t think I’d see many movies. I would have missed out on Frozen, which, despite its flaws, had something in it that I loved.

So yeah. I’m glad Frozen is doing well.

And I hope Disney does better in the future.

Because you can like things even if they’re not perfect.