Screenwriting Our Way to Better Representation

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This past summer, some friends and I went to see How to Train Your Dragon 2. I hadn’t seen the first movie, but I had been assured it was good, so I was game. Some 102 minutes later, I walked out of the theater and announced, “All screenwriters should be fired.”

Six months later, I couldn’t tell you much about the plot of the movie or the names of the main characters. Throughout the entire film, I was distracted by a side character, Ruffnut Thorston (voiced by Kristen Wiig), a teenage girl whose crush on the film’s initial antagonist is consistently played for laughs. You see, Ruffnut is… rough. She’s not particularly pretty or feminine, and the absurdity of her crush is emphasized over. And over. And over.

In a recent interview with TIME, Fresh Off the Boat star Constance Wu said, “Stereotypes are only dangerous when they are used as the butt of the joke…What makes a stereotype harmful is when it’s a one-dimensional person.” Her comments apply perfectly to my discomfort with Ruffnut’s character. Of course women perform different degrees of femininity. Of course, at times, our love is not requited. But Ruffnut is a stereotype—a stereotype that shouldn’t be normalized for the five- and ten-year-olds (of all genders) who innocently and uncritically went to see a movie about some dragons.

Unfortunately, my “all screenwriters should be fired” mantra has not been swept away by magnificent representation in the months since. Over Winter Break, I watched the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and I was utterly dismayed by how often female characters were referred to as “girls.” I understand that people will say this a “tiny,” “nitpicky” problem, but it completely jolted me out of the storyline. I understand that part of the appeal of the show is how personal and professional lives become one and that the lead agent regularly takes on a mentoring, fatherly role in his young recruits’ lives—but a thirty-something former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, a girl? No. Writers can do better than that. It would be so easy to do better than that.

Because I know that we do not live in a world wherein all screenwriters can actually be fired and my tumblr crushes can take their places, here’s what I’d like to see instead: more female writers. Now, it’s true that one of the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. writers is a woman, and it’s possible that even if How To Train Your Dragon 2 had been written by a male-female partnership (as opposed to a single man), deeply discomforting gender stereotypes may still have been present. Women are not all inherently feminist, and there’s plenty of internalized misogyny to go around, even for women who do think of themselves as feminist.

Still, having female writers in the room matters, because women can bring their personal experiences as just that—personal experiences that reflect their multifaceted identities, rather than simple stereotypes. Furthermore, having more female writers has the potential to lead to more female-driven films (if we believe that women are more likely than men to value women’s stories). And if there are more and better female roles available for actresses, perhaps actresses can actually demand equal pay for their work… and perhaps their red-carpet questions will focus less on their dresses and kids and more on their characters.

Here’s a tiny snapshot of how it stands today: No female screenwriters were nominated for a 2015 Golden Globe. BBC phenomenon Doctor Who was without a single female writer for five seasons (in November, they added Catherine Tregenna to the writing team for season nine). I picked Doctor Who as my example because last May, students ran the Bechdel test on seasons 1-7 of the rebooted Doctor Who, resulting in a nice infographic that television shows with less devoted fan bases are spared.

And here’s what I want for the future: I want to be able to watch a children’s movie and not desire to stop every under-ten (let’s be real: every everyone) on the way out of the theater so I can explain to them how sexist the film was. I want women to make up fifty percent of screenwriters, not fifteen. I want a woman to write the episode where Skye and Simmons end up together—not just the fan fiction.

I want more films about women—multi-dimensional, complicated women. The more female characters there are, the less pressure there will be on each to represent “womanhood,” and characters can be written as complete individuals, not stereotypes. But as we all know, the people who write the stories are the people whose stories are told. Let’s get writing.