Alita: Battle Angel Brings The Salt

Originally, this was the second half of my previous Post about Alita: Battle Angel's promising box office numbers and the laughable response it's getting from Rotten Tomatoes' idiotic critics, the half where I talk about how Alita is apparently a sexualised character and look at a few articles making that case. The problem is, like everything I write, it got long, really long, so I figured it was a better idea to split the thing in half and post the two separate topics as two separate posts, so here is the half where I accuse a pair of women of projection while laughing at their articles, and since I'm such a goblin, and recently discovered how to crop the backgrounds out of pictures, I decided I'd give my header a bit more character.

Previously, I rambled about Alita: Battle Angel's moderate box office success and laughable critical response, while I, rather angrily, tried to make the point that there's a pompousness and idiocy to RT's critics, one that shines in the chasm between their views and the views of normal people. That's only part of the story though, another part is obviously ideology; critics having hard-ons for films that stroke their egos and confirm their biases. But I'd at least have thought that Alita: Battle Angel, who has, to use their terminology, a woman of colour in the lead role, would get a pass from them precisely because Alita is a woman of colour, never mind that she's actually a likable, fun, badass, vulnerable character as well. However, like Kisonak from Vermont in my last post, I never considered that a CG woman in a film having big tits would be a problem to people, something I feel kind of bad to admit because, in hindsight, it's so obvious, she's an empowered woman, but she's also beautiful, and obviously her being beautiful would be problematic to someone, somewhere. One such person is one Molly Freeman of Screenrant, whose article; "Alita Has A Design Problem (But It's Not The Big Eyes)" has been doing the rounds on a lot of anti-SJW YouTube channels. Since Alita: Battle Angel is my new favourite film, and since there are SJW types going after it, you know that I'll gladly take a stab at one such article, so let's get stabbing.

https://screenrant.com/alita-design-problem-big-eyes-body/

Our author doesn't waste any time with her introduction, getting to the root of the problem in the first sentence of her article. "But the film fails to compellingly explain why her android body conforms to a sexualized "ideal" body type." Our author then gives us a rundown of the film's events, one that includes a few too many details, so, spoilers, you've been warned, I'll be explaining why our author's wrong by talking in detail about the film, but here are the important parts, she finds a URM cyborg body, she gets ripped apart in her fight with Grewishka and Ido puts her back together using the URM cyborg body, something he promised that he wouldn't do. There is a lot going on with his decision to not connect her to that body in the film however, as Alita says, he knows more than he is telling her, and she, and the audience, eventually learns that she is a Berserker, an URM soldier from The Fall, and given that the URM ended the world, and Alita was an URM soldier, hooking her up to the most powerful and dangerous weapon on the planet wouldn't be a good idea. This also ties into his desire to shelter her; there's a lot of meaning in Ido connecting Alita's core to his dead daughter's body, maybe he wants to find peace over his daughter's death, maybe he can't bear to not have a daughter anymore, either way, he rebuilds Alita, gives her his daughter's name and body, and does as much as he can to keep her in the dark about who she really is, and connecting her to the URM body would destroy that for him. Of course, the opposite happens, Alita becomes the woman she is meant to become, and while Ido feared losing his daughter again, by the end of the film, she has embraced him as a father figure. This dynamic between Alita and Ido was one of my favourite things about the film, and Alita's transition isn't just into the Battle Angel, it's also into being the daughter Ido lost.

But like Kisonak, our author doesn't seem to see the meaning in that body, finding the film's explanation of said body's curves "eye-rollingly bad." Firstly, our author states that her sexy design is the product of the original Manga's visuals, which, to me, is a good enough reason on its own. There is nothing wrong with being faithful when adapting a story into a new medium, and as someone who loves Godzilla and has a Netflix account, I've had enough of people changing things for the sake of changing them. If Cameron and Rodriguez are as huge fans of the Manga as they claim to be, then the decision to recreate the visuals of the Manga makes complete sense, and that literally is all the reason you need for her design. Our author even recognises this in her article, talking about the effort that went into her eyes. But here we have the root of the root of the problem, and that's that our author doesn't respect Alita's agency. Now, obviously a fictional character does not, in a direct sense, have agency, a character's agency comes from the power they exert over the story and world that they inhabit, which is all within the mind of the storyteller, but in that regard, Alita has a lot of agency, she's gonna change the world in the sequel, or burn it down, one of the two. But here's where our author slips, she seems to think the explanation of it being how Alita thinks she should look is the film makers trying to cover their sixes because they knew the design would be problematic. It's here though that I have an issue with our author's stance on this design, how it changes from the URM shell to "the sexualised feminine body." This is classic SJW thinking, here, because our author has, fundamentally, confused the words sexy and sexualised, and considers them both to be negative attributes of a character's design. She makes the point that it's odd for a rebel like Alita to conform to how other people think of her, which isn't the case at all, it is literally Alita's mind informing the body on how to look. But this next bit is a gem; "it also doesn't make sense that any woman having the opportunity to transform their body into that of a warrior's would enlarge the breasts and trim the arms, waist and legs." Ha, bullshit.

Are you telling me, author, that if any woman was given the choice of having a masculine body or being sexy, they'd take the masculine body, I don't believe that, not for a single second. I'm no Jordan Peterson, I'm not a behavioural psychologist, but I don't need to be, I just need to walk into my local Boots or Superdrug to see that you're wrong on this. Cosmetics is a billion-dollar industry, one that is indulged in by far, far, far more women than men. Women wear makeup so much that occasionally there'll be a social media challenge where they don't, and that's the challenge, and even with endless social justice pressuring to let it grow, let it grow, plenty of women still shave. Plenty of the women I work with wear makeup to work, which makes no sense at all to me because it's a dusty, sweaty warehouse, but they do it. And lets be really real for a second, you say that if a woman was given the chance to have bigger tits or bigger guns, she wouldn't take the bigger tits, darling, boob jobs exist, and they're frighteningly popular, far more popular than they would be if you were right. And about your example of She-Ra as a warrior woman, ha, bullshit, again, She-Ra is a terrible example of what you're trying to say. She-Ra was once a warrior woman, then Netflix made a show about her and removed all of her feminine characteristics, Alita meanwhile has feminine characteristics, she is also a very feminine character, far more feminine than someone like Captain Marvel. Wonder Woman is another bad example because she too has a very feminine appearance, as well as a costume that accentuates her appearance, she's gorgeous, and it's ok that she is, a woman can be strong and still be a woman, unless you'd rather they all be like Netflix's She-Ra, rather they all look like boys, that is unless you think it's wrong to be feminine because boys are naturally better, you misogynist.

Usually I keep personal attacks to calling the authors I talk about morons and idiots and occasionally bigots if need be, but when a female character is problematic because she's sexy, it's usually worth the time to have a look at the author, because I shall now propose an explanation for this article's existence, Molly Freeman is jealous of Alita. I did some thinking about why a woman would find it a problem that another woman, a fictional one, even, is sexy, but it makes a lot of sense if our author, Molly Freeman, isn't much of a looker herself, and lo and behold, she isn't. That matters, but not as much as how she perceives herself and Alita, and since we can't see inside her head, we don't know how she sees herself, but she has given us her perception of Alita in this article, and she finds Alita's URM body to be thin with a small waist and big breasts, and that this conforms to a sexualised "Ideal" body type. Our author isn't specific on who's sexualising standard Alita is conforming to, and while that may seem insignificant, it, to me, looks like projection. Alita is conforming to what our author deems to be sexy, a standard that she doesn't think she meets herself, Alita is sexier than she is and that gets under her skin. And this is very clear in her little final paragraph, where she asserts that it's a disservice to Alita: Battle Angel's female viewers, how is it? how is a woman in a film being sexy a disservice to women in the real world, because it sets a beauty standard, oh no. The sad thing is that the beauty standard Alita conforms to is a very real and achievable standard, minus the eyes obviously, a slim, lean body with a nice rack and a thin waist isn't an impossible body type, hundreds of thousands of athletes, actresses, singers, models and health enthusiasts have builds like that, but Molly here doesn't, so she projects that insecurity about her own body, saying that it's an unfair and problematic standard that poisons girls' minds, only because it bothers her that she does not meet that standard herself. So at the end, when she projects that insecurity onto the masses by calling the film a disservice to women, that's all it is, an insecure woman projecting her jealousy and insecurity onto whatever she can, and trying to tell us that we should feel bad for liking a nice body, only because deep down, she doesn't like her own.

This Screenrant article is a joke, it reminds me of the good old days of 2012 to 2015, at the height of Feminist Frequency's infamy, when it was a problem that a video game character was too sexy, when it was a problem that Catwoman had a big ass, and when it wasn't a problem that someone who opens dislikes and is openly ignorant of video games was taken seriously as a critic of them.
https://news.sky.com/story/sky-views-hollywoods-sexualised-portrayal-of-young-women-has-to-stop-11628398
The weird thing is that this Screenrant article isn't the only one; there are more people complaining that Alita is sexualised, like one opinion piece from Sky News that, again, complains that Alita's design is "unnecessarily sexual." The same issues as the Screenrant article pop up here too; the "impossibly tiny" waist and big tits, and the author expresses confusion that a film made for a teen audience would make its female lead so sexualised and objectified, as if sex isn't a brilliant way to sell something to teens. But this author takes it a step further by saying that "cultural homage," as in being faithful to the Manga, isn't a good enough excuse, way to belittle Japanese culture you xenophobe. They then say, "We have simply got to stop portraying women and girls like this," like she's anyone to make such a drastic ultimatum, because, and this is amazing, "[she] would love Alita's body and costume to not be in the slightest bit important." This, coming from the one who's thankfully short opinion piece is all about how problematic her design is, very consistent, oh but we need to think of the children, because they might look at Alita and want to be like her, heaven forbid a young girl would have a badass cyborg superhero with a heart of gold as their role model, heaven forbid she aspires to be a hero like Alita.

But she's not done being an idiot, because apparently sexy women in film and TV gives impressionably people the idea that sexy women are objects and not people, wow, that's a sweeper, isn't it. It's an absurd thing to say, because, contrary to what our author seems to think, boys aren't mindless meat heads, teenage boys maybe meatheads, I know, I was one, but they too have brains that they can use to discern an object from a human, and I, frankly, find it deeply sexist that you'd even imply that we men have no ability to recognise the humanity of sexy women, like we're all your misandristic bogeyman of  sexist, mansplaining, cat-calling, sexually harassing, rape-apologist scum. But here's the fun part, well, the other fun part, apparently it's not enough to empower them through the narrative, which really shows how fucking sad you are, author, because it'll never be enough, nothing will ever be enough, you have a girl who is literally unstoppable, who is the deadliest weapon in the world, but who is also principled and morally righteous, but that isn't good enough because she's sexy, and sexy is bad, probably because, like poor Molly, you aren't all that sexy yourself, and feel insecure and jealous of a CG cyborg girl because she's prettier and cooler than you. Cameron and Rodriguez should have known better, eh? and, again, who are you to say anything like that, who are you to make moral judgements about how entertainment should be. Tell me, if you were given the power to stop them from designing Alita the way they did, would you have done it? because if you had, you're exactly the wrong person to have that power, that'd be a very scary power to want, because you don't get to decide what other people make, like and watch based on your delicate sensibilities, no matter how controlling and zealous you are.


Some things just never change
I get the feeling that in a few weeks, Alita: Battle Angel will be getting compared to Captain Marvel a lot, and I'll probably be one of the people making the comparison, because I'm sure it'll be a much more feminist friendly film. But one thing is for certain, Alita: Battle Angel is the film that countless SJW's want Captain Marvel to be; an empowering, meaningful film about a badass woman, but as ever, it isn't enough to be just that, it can't challenge their narrative or insecurities, and unfortunately for Alita, she does, because she's sexy and displays vulnerability. There's another thing that Alita has on her side, and that's that she's a complete darling, she's adorable and innocent, something Captain Marvel, no matter how good the film ends up being, will never be, and it's something that the people currently complaining about her design will never allow themselves to appreciate in the way that they really should, and that sucks for them.