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Some of my core memories are of pretending to be imaginary characters from my youth. I remember shamelessly leaping around our farmyard, arms flayed spinning webs as a spunky Spider-tott. I later wrote genre-bending teen fanfiction with a hint of daydreaming…wait, isn’t all fanfiction just daydreaming with the names changed to save from incrimination? Anyways, when you spend much of your youth and adolescence in fantasy mode, it’s hard not to look at your identity and think of it as partly made up, created.
In some respects fiction makes people, and I’m not talking about the impossible creatures cast out from the page or the stage. Completely made up characters, even the not-physically-possible ones, can infiltrate our minds, they slip through the side window and enter existence as belief, expectation, example, and other elusive winds. I’m going to hone in on children’s television, which it may or may not surprise you does more than just entertain boys and girls. The hidden curriculum of children-targeted, well, anything, whispers how to participate in gendered life, alongside other instructions on toeing the larger web of human relations. As kids we gobble up these messages and internalize them, becoming what we eat.
I try to unpack the mess of representation in the media I consume these days, but as a young sprite I pretty well took at face value some of the worst stereotypes of men and women that cartoons had to offer. I find it fascinating to rewatch a childhood favourite film with my preschool son, only to realize the embarrassing genderizations that I bought into at his age. Don’t get me started on the maelstrom of detrimental gender portrayals that is The Little Mermaid—all I’m saying is no prospective partner is worth giving up your voice, period.
But every once in a while, I come across something that I’ve got to give a double-take. In a fit of millennial nostalgia I popped on the ‘90s hit kids show Reboot, the first ever ½-hour CGI television series. I won’t get into too much detail about Reboot’s plot, you can look it up, but essentially it’s an oblique and creatively re-portrayed version of Tron: the bits and processes within a computer are depicted as literal beings struggling to survive in a volatile digital world. The twist is in the perspective; we live the plot through their eyes, not the foreign invading ‘User’ (who is actually seriously villainous and destructive in the show—I’m surprised it didn’t instill in me a moral distaste for playing video games).
After casually breezing through a few episodes, my self-indulgence morphed into a reflection on my own beginnings in gender perceptions. My rewatch of Reboot has joined up with a longer-term project of looking back on fictional media I consumed at a younger age in order to discover its influences on my understanding of men’s and women’s roles.
For a kids show, Reboot offered some complicated characters who did not always perform your run-of-the-mill gender expectations. To be fair, there was quite a bit of subversive gender portrayals in ‘90s kids TV, like the strong-willed Powerpuff Girls, the outrageously ignorant Johnny Bravo, and the grotesque, sexually suggestive dyad of Ren & Stimpy. But Reboot, despite its many tongue-in-cheek humour and extensive parodies in every episode, often maintained a more serious tone. The broadcast realism of CGI made it seem like more was at stake. I want to briefly highlight a few exhibits within Reboot that opened up my thinking about gender. Of course, at the time, I didn’t understand this. The influence was subtle, even surreptitious at times.
Balanced gender representation:
Over time, the show’s cast grew to have more female main characters than male characters. In an age where the popular Paw Patrol has one female out of six leads (seven if you include Ryder), I find the implications of this simple quantification are huge. What’s more is that each female character has distinct personalities and strengths. Dot, the consistent main female lead, is a hard-working business (and later, military) leader, Mouse is an effective mercenary and hacking wizard, and AndrAIa is a bike-loving, sword-wielding warrior. Balancing the numbers isn’t the goal exactly, but introducing rich, diverse characters instead of chucking in tokens really offers viewers a chance to empathize with more than one person, and gender.
Dot’s record of achievements:
Dot is amazing, simply put, and deserves recognition for being one of the most driven female cartoon characters of the decade. Orphaned as an aloof teenager, she raises her little brother on her own while running a diner. Early on, she organizes a resistance plot to prevent a local virus from taking power over the city. She eventually takes over the function of COMMAND.COM, running the principal office that keeps the city alive and directing its ‘war room’ when there are major military events.
The boys are complex too:
Okay, Enzo starts off in a comfortable trope as a rambunctious young sprite set on proving he’s a big boy and finding a father figure in the show’s hero, Bob. But his character has a sudden transformation after (spoiler alert) he and Bob are separately banished from their home city. He then grapples with the fury and despair of losing his family, feeling he no longer has a ‘function’. As for Bob, he’s a curious hero indeed. Although he’s part of an elite military force known as the Guardians charged with protecting civilian life from viruses and Users, his whimsy performance and (in my opinion) overdependence on his utility bracelet continually calls his competence into question. Which makes him a fascinating guy to watch.
Part of the work of unlearning gender trappings is to be witness to and celebrate good, compelling, complex people, of all genders. That extends to good characters as well; call them insubstantial all you want, but Saturday morning cartoonies reach millions of children, entering their imaginations, their language and self-presentation, and their conversations with their friends. By comparison, I’ll be lucky if this post is read 10 times.
I unlearned gender expectations in smalltown Saskatchewan, in part, by watching media that subverted them (not to take away anything from the non-CGI men and women who moulded my development). Reboot is an example to which I owe credit; it depicted men and women in a range of powerful, creative, level-headed, and compassionate roles. By contrast, in Paw Patrol, major Goodway—a woman of colour—is shown deferring to a pubescent boy to save her from every possible variation of city crisis. In shows like Reboot the seeds were planted for a more diverse stock of gendered behaviours, which together produced within me a more comfortable gender identity and more respectful personal relations across genders.
It’s important that we reflect on the stories we were told as kids, and what effects they may have had, may be still having, on who we are.
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Photo Credit: Flickr/Kelvin64
Very great article! I find that one of the last phrases: “In shows like Reboot the seeds were planted for a more diverse stock of gendered behaviours, which together produced within me a more comfortable gender identity and more respectful personal relations across genders.” could simply end with — “no matter the gender.” Gender has become a bigger issue than necessary. People just need to be people.