Jenny from Forest Gump is the best example of a movie villain being completely ignored because of gender.
If you swap the gender roles Forest would be seen as a rapist taking advantage of a mentally ill woman.
But because Jenny is a girl it’s brushed off because “sHe HaD a RoUgH lIfE”
Seriously look at any movie (or even any irl case) and you’ll see over and over that if a woman does something bad because of trauma or mental illness they get treated like helpless children that didn’t know what they were doing, while men in the exact same situation are demonized
A partial counterexample might be soldiers with ptsd. First Blood was a sympathetic portrait of a vet wth mental illness, so was_Jacob’s Ladder_. Hercules and Ajax from the Trojan war are both tragic heroes despite their violence towards family members.
For a more recent example, watch Jarrett Moore’s video about military propaganda, he interviews GWoT vets about their ptsd and it’s very sympathetic.
Jenny from Forest Gump is the best example of a movie villain being completely ignored because of gender.
If you swap the gender roles Forest would be seen as a rapist taking advantage of a mentally ill woman.
But because Jenny is a girl it’s brushed off because “sHe HaD a RoUgH lIfE”
Seriously look at any movie (or even any irl case) and you’ll see over and over that if a woman does something bad because of trauma or mental illness they get treated like helpless children that didn’t know what they were doing, while men in the exact same situation are demonized
A partial counterexample might be soldiers with ptsd. First Blood was a sympathetic portrait of a vet wth mental illness, so was_Jacob’s Ladder_. Hercules and Ajax from the Trojan war are both tragic heroes despite their violence towards family members.
For a more recent example, watch Jarrett Moore’s video about military propaganda, he interviews GWoT vets about their ptsd and it’s very sympathetic.