And No One Can Be Replaced By A Sexy Lamp - Tumblr Posts

One thing I don't see talked about enough is the amazing cast of women who make up Dead Boy Detectives.

And I don't mean throw-away, there-for-the-sake-of-having-a-girl women. I mean actual, three-dimensional characters, with their own wants, goals, and emotional character arcs that exist independent of the titular ghost boys.

This is a show that runs laps around the Bechdel test in episode one and never looks back.

This is a show that's full of women who are allowed to be messy, complicated, brave, funny, scared, angry, and lash out in their pain. This is a show that's full of women who are allowed to learn from their mistakes, and grow, and change.

This is a show that's full of women who talk to each other, and support each other, and give each other advice about life.

And this is a low bar, but given the state of media today it's a big deal: there is never a single scene in this show that sexualizes a female character. A lot of action movies and supernatural shows frame the women on their cast to show off an ass, or the curve of a breast. Not here. The women are fully covered. They're framed to show their faces and their emotions, because what they're feeling is the important part. It's focused on who these women are as people and not what they can show to entice an audience.

Women in Dead Boy Detectives are heroes and catalysts who are learning to be better people.

They're earnest and clever and processing their own grief and sense of mortality.

They're complicated antagonists who have journeys of their own to walk.

They're cynical, distrustful father figures learning to reluctantly look out for others.

They're cruel and funny and vengeful and have been torn down by a world that did them wrong.

And those are only the main ladies in this cast. There are an absolute pile of supporting women who run the gamut from hilarious to heartbreaking.

I could go on for literal paragraphs about how refreshing it was to see wrongs against women treated as wrongs in the script, or how I have literally never before seen a woman turn down a protagonist romantically and not be villified for it, or how much of a breath of fresh air it was to see a woman's primary emotional arc be an arc about learning to become a better person, but my goodness, there's all that and more.

Nobody is doing it like Dead Boy Detectives, and by god, I love to see it.