Gender representation in media

 Gender representation throughout fictional media products such as music, TV, films, video games and magazines is often done with heavy use of stereotyping. Wether that be following or opposing gender stereotypes they are still guidelines in representation of characters.

An example from video games where stereotypes are both heavily challenged and heavily opposed is the mortal kombat series. There are many female characters who are shown as overly sexualised servants to the male characters in the series, seen as assets more than people. These female characters are shown in overly sexualised skimpy outfits for no reason other than the sexualisation of them. This is most likely due to the main demographic of the series being young straight men, the producers likely would have done made these decisions to make those characters more appealing .Narratively they are also put into the negative stereotypical roles. Their main purpose is to assist their male superior and a majority of the time they have their own notable goals they are motivated by petty issues with their female peers playing into the negative stigma of women being overly emotional. However despite these characters representing negative stereotypes to the point of it could be interpreted as satire they do also break some stigmas as they are very strong characters and are seen protecting a male despite stereotypically it is the man protecting the woman. An example of a character implemented that completely ignores female stereotypes is the 4 armed character sheeva. She is shown as an incredibly tall muscular character who is completely savage, the opposite of traditional feminine. It could however be argued this can't be seen as a positive stereotype breaking representation as she is an alien.

Moving towards the film industry, the avengers franchise has many positive representations that challenge traditional gender roles and stereotypes however sometimes it could be seen as overpowering and only done for the sake of challenging these traditional representations. Some good examples of this are the two fight scenes around the climax of endgame and infinity war. Both major scenes have some of the lead women heroes coming together to play a major role in the outcome of the narrative, thematically this is a positive breaking of the standard representation of women in media as they are independently taking a major role and showing their strength. However the effectiveness of these scenes varies in my opinion, in infinity war the female heroines come together by coincidence in a way that fits into the narrative and briefly become the focus of the narrative whilst they come together to achieve the goal, the thematic tone takes a backseat to the importance of the narrative whilst still being obvious and portraying a positive representation. The scene in endgame however seems forced, it doesn't fit into the narrative and has forced dialogue. This creates the impression it was only implemented to force positive representation which draws attention to all the negative representation of women in the mcu to some viewers and seems very shallow.