Action cartoon with female lead . . . can it work?

One common gripe I have with many western cartoon portrayals of females is that they always have to have the female get in the last word. It's not annoying in and of itself, but it gets to be a cliche. Let me stage a familiar scene for you:

It's an action cartoon. A male and female lead are sparring with each other in practice. The male gets the upper hand and takes down the female. He'll say something along the lines of "Getting rusty!" or even something humourously pigheaded like "Can't beat a manly man!" etc,. Immediately after this, the male gets his comeuppance--the female whips out some awesome kung fu/judo takedown and she gets in the last wisecrack. This scene has been used countless times in Justice League, Batman The Animated Series, Spider-Man, and pretty much every superhero cartoon ever made.

Or the comedy cartoon variation of this: the male and female are in a "humourous" argument. The male gets in a little dig at the female or says something idiotic. The female then comes in with a wisecrack that sufficiently humbles the male.

I have two major problems with this cliche. The first is that the female is almost always right and therefore never TRULY humourous. The male often gets the idiotic line and gets the comeuppance which brings the REAL laughs, but the female lead is NEVER allowed to look bad, not even momentarily for a joke.

The other problem is that it boils these scenes down to gender wars. Now, I have no problem with gender TENSION. Men and women are different, so there should always be some sort of tension there in their interactions, even the most relaxed ones. Since these scenes essentially boil down to the woman always being right it's basically just a pointless way for the writers to throw a "you GO GIRL" cookie to the female lead. It's lazy and unnecessary and when several variations of these scenes add up in the course of one episode (I only described two common ones, there are thousands of others) it becomes exactly the feminist politics that people complain about in cartoons with female leads.

I'll say, the only show in recent memory that seemed to consistently allow the female lead to be the comedy relief (and therefore be subject to "losing" as one might call it) is King of the Hill. Of course, some people might say it's just because of KOTH's republican politics, but I am not going to go there. ;)
 
To be honest, I think the main difficulty your idea will face is the fact that adult-oriented western action cartoons just aren't usually allowed to happen, period. DC and Marvel superheroes? Okay, they get a pass. Sometimes. Stuff like Gargoyles and Avatar:TLA? Flukes that might pop up once a decade or so.

You need to get past that before you can even start to worry about getting past anything else.
 
This is why i recently think that most of comics and live-action features can be study for appealing good girls/womens than animation. Whatever the country you live (even Japan), they often give girls a bad role. When i draw and write my main characters for my comic, i try to be the much neutral possible without yell to sexism. I try to keeping them equal.
 
This is not an adult-oriented cartoon, the protagonists would be teenagers and it would aim for the same target audience as Generator Rex and Young Justice though it would be more open towards female viewers.

However, as I made progress on the bible, I realized that this is too ambitious (which many of you had said), so I'm turning towards something else that has a simpler concept and storyline, a male lead (with a female co-star), a majority-male cast, and trying to provide a more marketable balance between toyetic material and character/story. Same target audience as GR and YJ, with appeal for female viewers though it's not as strong as the one I originally envisioned.

It kills me to compromise myself but whatever. It'll be more likely to sell in the unlikely event that I even get a chance. Still, I don't believe in making toyetic elements obvious (instead implementing them subtly so the viewer goes "Hey, that's cool!" instead of realizing I'm throwing a toy or action figure at them) so maybe I'm just deluding myself.

Oh, who am I kidding? I AM deluding myself.
 
I don't know. I think if you wanted to sell an idea today it would be better if you started on a project you could do alone first--a webcartoon or a webcomic. Then, if you build up an audience, you can point to the hits you get and say there's an audience for it and go from there. Very rarely is a TV show or movie made today without it having a built-in audience behind it first--whether it be comics, a webcartoon, a book, etc,. It's only when you build up trust in the industry that you're allowed to be taken seriously for a pitch about an original concept.
 
A show that engages viewers should be toyetic as result. That said, if you're looking for a kid-aimed property, you should have a passing familiarity with the toy aisle. Mattel is not going to make a toy, even for the collector market, they don't think will sell.
 
To be honest, Sym-Bionic Titan is pretty much the only cartoon I've ever seen to not do this. Lance is a highly-trained alien soldier, and the show has absolutely no problem reminding you of this. Better still, his sparring match with a girl lacked the typical pigheadedness and sexism and seemed more like a master teaching a student...not that his sparring partner took it that way. :p
 
You may be right, and honestly as a girl I don't mind that. It's okay for a female in a western action cartoon to be vulnerable
sometimes. A bigheaded girl is just as annoying as a bigheaded guy. I'm tired of the trend of action girls having to be tough and cocky and big mouthed just to prove she can be a fighter. There can be a girl who is just as shy or closed off like Lance with some insane fighting power as well.
 
There's plenty of shy girls out there in animation, but they're almost all in anime. :sweat: I've noticed that shy girls are almost completely gone in American animation . . . Spectacular Spider-Man's take on Gwen Stacy was kinda the last high-profile one, though she was evolving out of the "shy stage" very naturally by the end of the 2nd season.

I've come up with an idea to release my animation project, though, ironically, it doesn't involve animation. Think like a sound mix by itself.
 
The chances of it becoming an internet phenomenon are as high as a network picking up the show now. The fickleness of the Internet, and what does and does not become popular on it, is unpredictable and actively trying to be popular has the negative effect. Even if it became "internet popular" that would not guarantee a network pick-up or that the show would be a hit. Snakes On A Plane did extremely poorly despite its internet popularity.

However making a pilot and putting it online is a way to prove viability in the product. It is not going to automatically convince them as Internet fans are not going to be their target audience. There are other, and better, ways to prove viability in the concept that wouldn't mean years of work on something that doesn't pay and might not even have the desired effect. Comics and novels show that the story and concept are workable and that it can appeal to the target audience. Plus making them won't take nearly as long as it would a fully animated five part pilot.
 
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