happydalek: (spock)
HighlanderTorchwoodNew AmsterdamThe Man from Earth.  What do all of these recent pop cultural offerings have in common?  All feature people--specifically men--who are, for various reasons, immortal.  Where are all the immortal women in pop culture, eh?  It seems they only get the live-forever feature if they're already supernatural, like goddesses or superheroes (Wonder Woman).  Why don't normal, everyday women ever get blessed/cursed this way?  Notice too that all the above examples feature white, European men.  Perhaps this is a dumb thing to complain about, since the overwhelming majority of pop culture in Western society features white European men in leading roles, and the immortality bit is but a subgenre with an already narrow genre.  But still.  As a female and a fan of that subgenre, it bugs me that the guys are the ones hogging all the fun.  After all, what a woman do with immortality?  Make sandwiches for an endless series of husbands?  *shakes feminist stick*  

In my limited amount of research for this post, I can actually think of two immortal characters who were NOT  white men, and both were protagonists in Wild Seed, the first (according to in-universe chronology) book in Octavia Butler's Patternist series.

...Okay, well, I can think of another.  The Kirsten Dunst character in Interview with a Vampire.  However, as a rule, I'm not counting vampires in this post because they have an entirely different set of complications beyond the simple live-forever motif.  Vampires have their own category, whereas this one is "ordinary person discovers he is/becomes unable to die."  

So, what do you say, ladies?  Can you find me more chick immortals out there who aren't gods, vamps or superheroes? 

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happydalek

August 2012

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