[ POLL ] The Bechdel Test.

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I keep noticing what I call the "Rogue One Effect." It's when the main character is a woman, but all the rest of the main cast are men. So you can have a kickass female protagonist who pretty much never talks to other women aside from the odd bit-part or extra. Which is Jin Urso from "Rogue One" in an nutshell.

I noticed this while re-reading "The Final Empire" by Brandon Sanderson. Vin is the protagonist, but the rest of her band of revolutionaries are all men. I don't think it passes the Bechdel test. Vin talks politics with two named female characters (one of them a minor villain) but IIRC the names of male characters are mentioned both times. Sanderson added two more women to the group for the sequel, which suggests he noticed the imbalance and thought it needed adjusting.

If the theme of a production is to present a collective expression of specific gender or minority experiences while minimizing evolution of plot, character development, and overall entertainment value, then the production may as well abdicate all pretense of fiction and simply be presented as a recreation of past events -- an historical documentary.

Does "the Greatest Story Ever Told" pass the test?

Actually, maybe it does.

There are at least three women characters. They do speak to each other. Most of them are named. Trouble is that three of them have the SAME name ("Mary"). But they dont talk about men...as such... much.

I think Margo Robbie is a good example of a woman trying to make good, watchable, engaging films with female characters. She has her own production company now.

I Tonya is very tied up in her relationship with her husband, so yes it invloves men, but she's not his side kick. Shes a fully developed character.

I like the way Robbie explains the way she produces movies.

I'd argue that better diversity/inclusion/representation does not have to be something tacked on at the expense of good storytelling. Quite the opposite, in fact. Yeah, you do get the odd exercise in blatant box-ticking. But in my (considerable*) experience, that's the exception, not the rule.

I'm a big reader of SF and fantasy, two genres that have shown a massive uptick in quality in recent years, with fewer authors churning out replica novels that put the Generic Male Protagonist through the Generic Male Protagonist Plot Beats. With more awareness of the history of gender, sexuality, race etc, current SF/Fantasy writers are coming up with far more interesting and original settings, plots and concepts. Put simply, expanding the variety of characters you can write properly is a boost to both realism and imagination. Going back a bit further, for my money the most original of Ursula le Guin's Earthsea books were the two that featured Tenar as the protagonist- as a child priestess in "The Tombs of Atuan", and as a middle-aged, widowed farmer in "Tehanu." Those two novels tackled subject matter which must previously have seemed utterly off-limits to the genre.

*One of my current dilemmas is finding room in my home for a twelfth bookcase....

I take it we're not counting Rey Palpa-Skywalker in that

I was thinking along the lines that they dont talk about him as husband material.

But yes...they do talk about him because he is the protagonist of the story they are in, and action surrounds him.

Maybe yes. I always consider the Bechdel Test when evaluating a movie from a feminist perspective, but it is far from the only metric for that and that alone does not inform my decision to see a movie or not.
If I refused to see any movie that did not pass the Bechdel Test, I wouldn't have many movies to watch, sadly.

In the early days of the Doctor Who program, the Doctor's female companions seemed to be present to provide the Doctor with someone to rescue, to provide him with a reason to explain the various plot devices employed by the writers and directors, and that is about all there was to the characters.

Hence, the early Doctor Who programs would not have passed the Bechdel test.