Why We Can't Fix the Makeover 

Please put it on here too. I just got into it and cannot afford Patreon. I am not a feminist, but interested anyway.

Paywalling anything more than a time delay carries its own self-inflicted detriment.

I'm a feminist but I don't think child abuse is ok

This was about Ms trunchbull by the way

As a woman with straight hair who always wanted curly hair: Yep, it was a crime to straighten Mia's hair.

My best friend growing up had hair just like Mia and glasses and I felt so so bad for her about that portrayal. Curly hair in general was considered abhorrent back then as well. I'm so glad we've evolved on that point at least

This always got me too. My hair was just as frizzy and difficult to deal with, and my mom would constantly tell me the only way to make it nice was to straighten it. So glad there’s more curly hair information out there these days!

Hey I just felt the need to say that I see you in basically every comment section ever whenever I watch a video and there is a strange comfort to that agshfi

anne hathaway can't fisically look bad you're right tho

I'm trying to think of female protagonists with naturally curly hair (who keep it that way by the end,) and I really can't think of many. Merida from Brave, Ms Frizzle from Magic School bus, Nadia in russian Doll, Mirabel in Encanto, Ripley in Alien.... And of those, the only ones who have the characters self expression as part of the story are Russian Doll and Brave. Sucks since full curly hair looks awesome. Mine just half asses it and goes curly near the ends, like I gave up halfway through curling it.

@@tortoiseoflegends4466 The only I can think of was Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, but as is stated in the video, she was going the other direction towards the "plainer" end of the spectrum, and started out with the straight, blonde wig

“You look like that cause you hate other women!” “Ohhh… sweetie…”

100%, Miss Congeniality is the closest to rejecting the makeover at the end, but it's almost an after thought.

I appreciate that this does mention the makeover in Do Revenge; I'd be curious about the ways that other queer movies do and don't follow this approach. (Actually I guess Do Revenge has an onscreen and an offscreen makeover of the same character, if I remember right? There's the makeover scene but also the whole premise is that Maya Hawke has had such a makeover that Camila Mendez doesn't recognize her.)

I saw this movie! It was really good!

As someone that was obsessed with the Barbie movie when it first came out, but now don't really care for it. I was fully blinded by the nostalgia and the callbacks to my childhood. Watching it now, it's very VERY middle ground. It says more about existentialism than it does about feminism. I wonder how many people who either really hated or really liked it feel now that the Barbie craze is over.

When I was little I was an abused kid who always dreamed that the perfect angel would come along and save me from my home life, whether that be a boyfriend like the prince from Cinderella or a mother figure like Miss Honey. I think that's Miss Honey's main appeal. Your own mom might deeply regret ever having kids but Miss Honey's so perfect and motherly she's even willing to adopt you, unlike most people

@@kjarakravik4837 This was her appeal to me too. As a kid you want the perfect mother figure and she genuinely is that but not because of her physical appearance but her patience, kindness, and understanding. Moms who are butch or bimbo can also be those things just not in movies written by men lol.

also the 'why are all these women married' line is actually so funny and cracks me up every time I hear it

As a fellow glasses wearer, I share your frustration that merely wearing glasses is sufficient for female characters to be deemed worthless. But beyond that, we shouldn't need to be "beautiful" to be accepted regardless of what that word means. I hate the "you're beautiful on the inside" of 2000s "feminism" - No I'm not "beautiful", I'm smart, talented, and hardworking, and should be respected because of that.

Same, and I'm still mad she ends up with Chacotay, when Harry was the only one who respected her as she was when she first joined the crew. Harry Kim == best man in Star Trek.

This was the point the author was trying to make in the books - there's literally one part where the main character is looking at magazines from The Before Times and marveling at how "ugly" she perceives the hottest celebrities of those days to be, and how there's only a few "natural pretties." Her internal monologue at this point is her wrestling with the preconceived notion she was raised with that there is one way to be pretty and that way is through the dystopian surgeries that make everyone look more or less the same. If those people were considered beautiful, then could she also be beautiful as she is? The issue with bringing this book series to the screen is that the visual medium doesn't really allow for this point to come across, for the same reason Verity brings up about the ending of My Fair Lady being changed - what audience wants to see a "won't-they" ending to a will-they-won't-they dynamic? What audience wants to see "average" people on the screen? Certainly not any audience that studio execs are interested in courting.

i think with uglies the pretties are supposed to have a rlly extreme form of beauty and look sort of inhumanly ‘beautiful’ so that even if ur attractive by our standards it doesn’t matter bc no one looks insane as them

@@ememem2952 it would be so much better animated. you just can't do enough with makeup. i laughed so hard when they showed the last shot of (lol already forgot her name) and it's the most assymetrical face i've ever seen. why did they do that?! they could've just show her from angle or something. (there is nothing wrong with assymetrical we all are you are beautifulllll) "it's the same person but with makeup, bleached hair and contacts" just doesn't do it

SAME!

Waaaa this was great

Mrs Trunchbull??

@@dylanc5835 Legit I'm so confused because she was so evil

@@caitlingill I'm talking abt appearance idk who she is

​@@caitlingill maybe because evil is so HOT! Not even necessarily "evil", but - dare I say? Transgressive But seriously, folks . . . As a bisexual man I've noticed how the female villain is allowed to be rude, aggressive, slovenly; basically, she's granted archetypically masculine traits (while remaining a woman). And conversely, a male villain's "evil-ness" is often presented as his embracing of traits commonly associated with femininity; slow languid body language, crisp attire, an appreciation of decorum, breathy voice - often with an inexplicable Dixieland accent (yet still presenting as a man). They're the villain, so we're not supposed to find them aspirational. But their obvious - performative, even - adaptation of tropes coded for the opposite gender gives them (ideally) a compelling, seductive aspect. Heroes can be bland and still be heroic, but a villain is allowed (required?) to indulge in unapologetic flamboyance. Otherwise, how would you know they're the villain? And how else could they convince so many henchmen to die for them? I admit, I'm attracted to women that are womanly and mean, and also men that are manly and sensitive. And I think attraction to that dichotomy is not uncommon. Wow, I thought this would just be a couple of sentences. A paragraph, max. Just couldn't stop once I got started

I agree! I feel that these stories only bother to tack on a “ur beautiful in and out” at the very end to dodge criticism, rather then meaningfully engage with the implications of the makeover narrative that drives the plot 😫 Its entirely possible to write a good story that indulges in that fantasy of someone giving you a glow up and fixing your life without the sexism, but few of these stories seem to really want to try

@@Nicole-pc2hc it doesn't even need to engage with the sexism too much, it would be a start if they even tried to grapple that just because the makeover fixes things, who you are is not one of these things to be fixed. om the other hand, that seems to be interlocked with the sexism for the most part, since the "you as a person need to be fixed" trope is all about how to be a women (or, as rarely happens, a man, not to even mention enbys) the correct way. also the way basically all of them don't even consider to question that the characters are cis and straight, and probably for that matter white too. it feels like they're taking all kind of different crystals, and then cut all of them into what basically ampunts to the same shape without using the natural shape of the gem, except that instead of thereby insulting the gems uniqueness, they insult everyone remotely similar to that character for not putting into the one box they have fof that demographic

for realllllll

yeah and unfortunately i dont think its something that could easily be conveyed with live action to begin with since they'd otherwise probably need to alter and edit the post-surge actors to a degree that would be uncomfortable and also probably unfeasible with a direct to netflix budget lmao >.< even though Tally says the pretties still look like themselves they still look majorly same-y. at one point while playing with morphos tally slightly lightens shay's skin to be "closer to the baseline" and we know the surge also makes their noses thinner and shaves down jaws etc. the pretties already look a bit uncanny valley because of all the filters added in but to be 100% accurate they'd have to entirely strip almost all their individuality and effectively white wash people. and it might not be the best idea, i could see people taking it entirely the wrong way, and tbh I just don't think i really want to see real peoples features stripped away like that anyways

Yes!

i think that's more of an indictment of the adaptation just being terrible. the point of the ugly characters being normal humans and not actually ugly isn't conveyed at all in the movie. the movie gives up on all of the messaging of the book and just decides to make a brainless dystopian movie instead. the book had a lot more to say about basically everything and the movie has nothing to say apart from "tiktok yassification filter bad"

@@ishathakor oh christ that’s exactly what i was afraid would happen

Yes, the point of the book is that the uglies look normal, but some of the actors in the movie were literal models. The actors in the movie have the means for expensive skin care, expensive hair care, plastic surgeries ect. I mean they are supposed to be normal teenagers, but none of them have acnee or blemishes, they all have flawless skin, how does that represent the "natural" teen? The actors in the movie are more like the "pretties" of our world then "natural" teens.

yeah the thing is in their universe even hot actors are considered just "almost pretty" at best. saying "well the actors are so hot!!" is missing the point because the surge makes the standard of prettiness absolutely near damn impossible to achieve naturally. "Shay wasn’t exactly a freak, but she was hardly a natural-born pretty. There’d only been about ten of those in all of history, after all." Being considered a natural-born pretty is something so exceedingly rare that when Tally sees a magazine full of celebrities she calls them all freaks lol. When she sees a model she says she's the closest to being a natural pretty but still fixates on her flaws and settles with "almost-pretty". I think the magazine scene would have helped a lot but I feel like even without it it's still clear to me that their standards are just straight up impossible? i think a lot of viewers are just fixated on the fact that they think the actors are too hot to play "uglies" or "average people" but tbh i think more than anything, the pretties and specials are the ones that aren't getting the message across as clearly but i dont know if a live action netflix movie would have been able to get it across as well to begin with. I think animation would have done a better job since you can make a drawing look impossibly perfect more easily (but depending on the style we could end up with an issue of the uglies not looking varied or "average" enough lol) but upping the uncanny valley and making them look like eerily doll-like or something so that the standard of "prettyness" is more clearly unreachable to the audience is what I would have done instead. like imo david wasn't "too hot" to be an ugly, but post surge peris doesn't look mindboggling enough.