Which (probably male) Superhero/Sci-Fi/Fantasy Character Are You?

So having taken the obligatory myspace-favourite, the ‘which superhero are you’ test, it was only a matter of time I think before the ‘which sci-fi character are you’ test came along. Being more up my street than superheros (the two times I took the test, the first time I came out as the Incredible Hulk ((-no comments please!-)) and the second time as Batman, which was a mild improvement I think, although anything has to be an improvement on being associated with something built like a juggernaut, luminescent-green, and about as articulate as a bulldozer!) I took the test newer test; quickly realising that the so-called sci-fi test should be called ‘which sci-fi/fantasy character are you’ since there are many Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter characters thrown in.

Your results:
You are Hulk

Hulk 90% The Flash 75% Green Lantern 70% Robin 65% Catwoman 65% Supergirl 61% Batman 60% Spider-Man 55% Wonder Woman 46% Superman 35% Iron Man 25%

You are a wanderer with amazing strength.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero are you?" quiz...


The first time I took the test I came out as Yoda (what is it with my apparent affiliation with linguistically challenged, unambiguously ugly creatures, who look like they emerged from the same chemical-waste plant??), and the second time as Galadriel! (From one extreme to the other – although she and Yoda do have the same ears… ((my ears are not pointy, I should add…))… Which was surprising, initially, since I counted, out of a possible 48 character results, only 4 of these – 4!!! – were female characters!

This was an issue I had with the superheroes test too, although the fewer possible outcomes and the inclusion of strong female characters such as Wonder Woman and Cat Woman made the imbalance less obvious. Also, there is a whole other separate issue about the overall lack of female comic superheroes, already a cause of concern for a number of feminist Marvel fans...





But I feel personally that this concern need not apply to sci-fi and fantasy characters since, on reflection, there is no shortage of popular females in this genre. For such a test to suggest that a similar absence in this genre has happened for the same reasons is erroneous.

The other argument, of course, is the assertion that this kind of test is taken mainly by men, and that men don't like to be compared with female sci-fi, fantasy, or superhero characters (whilst, apparently, the women who do take these tests apparently have no problem with this at all!!). I’m not sure of the accuracy of this assumption either, since all of the myspaces where I viewed superhero results were women’s! And, out of the those results – I remember seeing Superman twice and Spiderman once, out of the ones I remember – I saw no-one’s results come out as either Wonder Woman or Cat Woman.

Actually, in itself, I really don’t have a problem with being compared to a male superhero or fantasy/sci-fi character, and don’t see anatomy to be necessarily a problem in identifying with anyone. So why should men?? Why should equally popular female characters be missing from a list just because they may not, debatably, share the same anatomy as many of the characters taking the test? Do men genuinely object to being sometimes identifiable as female? Is it that, as many of these throw-away tests reveal – as well as not so throw-away tests – women have just become so acclimatised to having to identify with male characters that they simply no longer notice, and take it almost entirely for granted?

I wrote a blog post two months ago about how female children are so often required to identify with male child characters in children’s films, because there are so few films made that follow young female protagonists. These identifications with male sci-fi/fantasy characters are a result of the same socialisation process.

And anyway, as I stated above, this absence of female sci-fi/fantasy figures is an unforgivable oversight (that’s it wasn’t a deliberate oversight!) considering the abundance of possibilities. If Star Fleet Captains Jean-Luc Picard and James T. Kirk are there, where is Captain Kathryn Janeway? If Wesley Crusher, Worf and Data are all there from Star Trek: Next Generation, then where is Deanna Troi, Beverly Crusher and Natasha Yar, who all occupied as much screen time and as many story-lines as their listed male counterparts?





In fact, all three of these female characters appeared more times than Beverly’s son Wesley ever did!



If Harry Potter, Severus Snape and Lord Voldemort are all listed in the test, then where are Hermione and Professor McGonagall?




An interesting twist on this particular ‘which sci-fi character are you’ test however, is found if you go to its Character Statistics page, which displays the results submitted: it shows that the most frequent character identified with was, in fact, Galadriel – one of the four females!



So perhaps, at least among sci-fi/fantasy fans, there is quite a lot of the feminine (or the elf!) in all of us, regardless of our anatomy, after all…

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Earth-centricity

Armando posted an article link in the comments last week that I enjoyed very much and thought was worth a blog post of its own:

According to CNN, the Viking space probes which landed on Mars in 1976-77 may have accidentally ‘baked’ (!) the ‘life’ they were looking for. Their experiments involved pouring water on soil that…

“…would have essentially drowned hydrogen peroxide-based life… And a different experiment heated the soil to see if something would happen, which would have baked Martian microbes”.

Scientists were using Earth’s environment and Earth life-forms as their point of reference for establishing whether life existed on Mars. It would seem then that in an act of ‘universal humanism’ of galactic proportion, Man imposed itself and its habitat as the only (or at least, the superior) position upon which everything else in the known universe must be measured and compared in order to recognise or establish its own status position of ‘life’ and habitat in relation to Earth. No wonder they didn’t find anything! And how typical that they may well have killed what they were looking for, in the act of looking for it!

The human superiority complex about the supremacy of the human shape and form can be seen constantly in popular culture. It never seems to surprise anyone that when aliens are portrayed on film and television they often seem to appear remarkably, well, human! Think Star Trek.



TV and film might even be to blame for the perpetuation of the human looking alien since it was perhaps the need to be able to have human actors portray the aliens that kept these aliens in human forms. But even with the move to CGI and digital filming the furthest directors seem to go from human forms is to base aliens instead on more-or-less recognisable animal forms. Think Men in Black.




Is this done because, in order to relate as an audience, we must be presented with recognisable forms – does human emotion and empathy depend entirely upon responding to a recognisable physical form? Or is it that we simply believe the human form and the environment we inhabit is so supreme that there can't possibly be any other way to exist as a life-form? I would have initially thought that, rationally, our attitudes would have more to do with the former. But the so-called ‘scientific’ approaches of the humans in our world in the 70s, supposedly at the very top of their field, were apparently demonstrating the latter!

This is my favourite part of the article:

“Schulze-Makuch's research coincides with work being completed by a National Research Council panel nicknamed the "weird life" committee. The group worries that scientists may be too Earth-centric when looking for extraterrestrial life”.

I think calling the research council the ‘weird life’ committee is great, although I’m a little torn between whether I think the word ‘weird’ in this context only exacerbates our human ambivalence towards the possibility of alternative life-forms, or whether it in fact reappropriates the word for a funky, contemporary take on the word ‘other’… And the second sentence nails what’s going on, and continues to go on, at least in popular culture, in our approaches and responses to the media and scientific treatment of alien life: we are defiantly ‘Earth-centric’!

All I can say is thank goodness this is now being recognised and addressed. It’s about time! Maybe now we can proceed towards more post-human approaches to other issues… such as gender!

Yes, lets put a gender twist on aliens, seeing as we’re on the topic! Why not?? It occurred to me, whilst looking for illustrative images (‘cos that’s the funnest part of blogging, at least for me!!), that alien images are largely based on the male physical form. And, yes, there’s the whole why-would-aliens-have-a-sex-they-might-be-androgynous argument, and after my whole why are we so human/earth-centric spiel, believe me I’m right there with them in that argument. However, why does an androgynous body only become so on the removal of ‘female’ attributes such as hips and breasts? If we are going to insist that aliens must, obviously, assume human-type forms, why do these human-type forms, especially in pop culture portrayals, always appear more masculine than feminine?

Off the top of my head, the only specifically, deliberately, female portrayed alien life-forms in pop culture I could think of were the tiny, fragile, impish, high-pitched-voice blue sprite of an alien, Umi, from the cartoon series Ulysses 31 (my god, I’m getting old…!!)

(there was a similar female character in Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, but she was barely alien at all… allowing her to be more alien might have made her less vulnerable… and therefore less recognisable…)

...and Umi’s opposite; the grotesque, terrifying, oozing, grunting, man-impregnating, murdering, spawning, Mother-of-all-Aliens, The Alien! What a surprise!: the meek, mild, vulnerable, innocent, exploitable, girl-child, versus the evil, destructive, chaotic, manipulative, leaking, Mother, dichotomy strikes again!! This really is a case for Mulder and Skully!