Despite this, it still' has gotten quite a bit of praise from feminists for the handling of one of the main characters, Mako Mori. Pacific Rim does not pass the Bechdel Test. Likewise, by now I'm sure that damn near everyone knows what The Bechdel Test is. Not for the purpose of becoming a feminist writer, but to have my writing more closely align with the human condition.Okay, by now I'm sure there are several of you on these boards that have at least heard of Pacific Rim, if not seen it. If you strive to get an easy-to-calculate, objective metric, then it may only be a rough gauge of the truth you’re after. If you articulate what you truly want to measure, then any metric you come up with will be unwieldy and possibly subjective. I mention this not to denigrate the tests, but to point out the difficulty of accurate metrics in the social sciences. A writer bent on passing the tests could do so without necessarily representing female characters in a good light. A poorly written story could score higher than a well-written one. There is also some dispute about the tests themselves. As a male writer, it is more difficult for me to craft a believable and relatable female character.Very little of the fiction I grew up and loved reading would pass these tests, and.I write a lot of alternate history fiction involving technology, and historically women have not figured as prominently as men in dealing with technology,.In partial defense of my low scores on these tests: For the record, I have nothing against women. Not great scores, I’ll grant you, given that women are 50% of the population. I’m counting “Vessel” and “Last Vessel of Atlantis” as a single story because I did not revise it much for its second publication. Note: I’m counting the two versions of “Alexander’s Odyssey” as different stories, because I substantially revised it for its second publication. With some trepidation, I’ll show you how my published stories faired in these tests. And we shouldn’t forget the Mako Mori Test-whether a female character has a narrative arc that is not about supporting a man’s story. Then there’s the Smurfette Principle Test-whether there is only one female in an otherwise all-male group or ensemble of characters. Other, related measures include the percentage of female speaking roles, the percentage of named characters who are women, the percentage of female characters overall, whether the protagonist is a woman, whether 2 out of the top 3 speaking roles are for women, and whether the character with the most dialogue is a woman. Bechdel credits her friend Liz Wallace for the idea, too. The test got its name from Alison Bechdel, who writes the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. A story passes the Bechdel-Wallace Test if (1) there are at least two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, (3) about something besides a man. What is the Bechdel-Wallace Test? It purports to measure the degree to which a work of fiction features female characters in their own right, and not just as characters who are there to react to males. Do my stories past the Bechdel-Wallace Test? How about other similar tests? How important are these tests?
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