Author: Fu Qiongyin
Editor: Zhang Youfa
Source: Poison Eye
The heroines in the realistic theme of domestic dramas are becoming the "first perspective" of storytelling.
In several recent hit dramas, the "Xiao Min Family" in "Little Min Family" consists of a divorced mother and her two equally divorced daughters, and a series of stories are cut from their perspectives. "Female Psychologist" is from the perspective of the heroine Horton, taking the audience to pay attention to the national mental health.
In the era when TV stations are still watching the mainstream, men are often the main subjects of stories in domestic dramas with realistic themes, and women mostly appear as the ancillary relationship of the protagonist, or a member of the family, or an emotional passerby. We rarely read women's subtle feelings and experiences in such stories, but now domestic dramas are slowly showing the story perspective of women as independent individuals.
This, of course, has to do with changes in consumers. Since the mainstream channels of watching dramas have gradually transitioned from TV stations to the Internet, post-90s female users are the main force in both social discussions and episode traffic, and their requirements for female characters have also changed.
The rich and diverse female image has exploded this year, which is also the result of the Internet platform's insight into the needs of users. Content production has a cycle, and this year's popularity of realistic female topics is the feedback of users in previous years, and the platform may also find the "password" from the feedback of the audience.
Youku has recently broadcast several realistic female dramas, including "Xiao Minjia", "Female Psychologist", and "Star Sea". With the help of these episodes, the proportion of Female Users of Youku has also increased. According to the data, from November to December, the average proportion of Female Youku users increased by 6.3% year-on-year.
These themes not only meet the general trend of women's consciousness awakening after the 90s, but also have the potential to break the circle. Xie Ying, general manager of Youku Drama Center, once said that excellent realistic works can most arouse a wide range of social psychological resonance, with the energy to break through all circles of society.
A gentle but long-established content change has taken place in the field of drama.
The roundabout of the "first view": from strabismus to head-up
Looking at the ratings ranking before 2010, the top domestic reality dramas usually make the male protagonist the "first perspective" of the entire drama.
In 2006, "Soldier Assault", which caught fire on the Internet and fed back the ratings of tv stations and eventually won multiple awards, is a typical "man's play". Baidu Encyclopedia introduces this story like this: there is no female character in the play, it is completely the emotional world of men - the spirited military career, life and death and common growth years.
In urban dramas, the core of the protagonist group is often male. The absolute protagonist of "Struggle" is Tong Dawei with the collar of the Polo shirt, the ghost ideas in his mind are continuous, a bunch of friends "struggle" after graduation, and there is a base of their own "heartbreak utopia"; the protagonist group in "Beijing Love Story" is also three men, and the more accurate summary is "the love story of three men in Beijing".
The heroine wants to have a C position in the realistic poster, only in family dramas and love dramas.
Family dramas have a more extended writing for women, but most of them take marriage relations, parent-child relationships, and mother-in-law relationships as entry points. The 2007 satellite TV ratings champion "Golden Wedding" is about a couple's 50-year marriage; in 2010, a "Belle Epoque of Daughter-in-Law" became popular, opening the trend of mother-in-law dramas occupying the screen.
Love dramas are either idol dramas or love dramas with idol drama elements, and in 2013, the ratings led the first half of the year to run "The True Love of a Million Brides Without Regret", integrating family ethics. "See You Again" is a new version of "A Curtain dream", but it still maintains the emotional relationship of the four-corner love.
In these scenes, there are more "crazy women in the attic". For example, in "A Curtain of Dreams", Lu Ping, who lost her legs and hated her sister.
In 1979, two American female scholars, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Guba, published a monograph "Mad Woman in the Attic", arguing that Jane Eyre, the governess of Rochester's living room, and Bertha, the crazy ex-wife who is closed in the attic room, in "Jane Eyre" seem to be the binary opposition between angels and mad women, but in fact, Jane Eyre and Bertha "one of them represents a personality that can be accepted by society or tradition, and the other is a free, unfettered, often destructive self-externalization." And "behind every docile and kind woman, there is more or less a shadow of madness."
This almost sums up most of the high-rated female episodes of the time. The heroine is usually set up as docile and kind, in contrast to a hysterical "bad woman" who tries to sabotage her life.
After 2010, although there were some dramas with "independent women" as gimmicks, they still wrapped the core of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law and parent-child. Sun Li starred in the first drama after "The Biography of Zhen Huan", the protagonist is a working woman, but the name is also called "Hot Mom Zheng biography".
With the tide of online IP adaptation and the rise of female consciousness, the "big female protagonist drama" has emerged, but the heroine in the series is quite "overcorrected" meaning. In these big female protagonist dramas, the growth of the female protagonist is the "first perspective", they slowly grow into important people who are on a par with men, of course, this process is indispensable to the affectionate escort of the male protagonist. But this also inevitably falls into the "squint" of "fantasy".
Many workplace women's dramas are also the same "squinting" perspective. For example, "Translator", "Negotiator", "Perfect Relationship", these domestic dramas with a rating of less than 6, the workplace part is handled more suspended and perfunctory, and the heroine's riding of the wind and waves in the workplace is not convincing in the workplace, even if the heroine sits in the position of an executive, the essence is still a love story.
In these episodes, the dilemmas and challenges of women's reality are ignored.
To this year's domestic women's drama, slowly "looking up".
In Youku's solo "Xiao Min Family", women after divorce, there is no good girlfriend and good girlfriend's husband to help them make a comeback, and there will be no more complicated triangle relationships. Xiao Min's struggle in Beijing, the first episode of the opening has been quietly revealed: after work, sitting in her boyfriend's car to celebrate the first anniversary of love, but tired of sleeping, from dawn to dark.
"True love" has no immunity here, and she has to face the chickens and dogs in life: the worries of the mother, the confusion with the son. However, the episode as a whole is daily when presented, and there are not too many "heavy emotions" of big ups and downs.
This year's other 8-point word-of-mouth drama "I am very good in other places" is also writing about ordinary office workers from a level-headed perspective. The opening chapter is the suffocating office workers crowding the subway, and the accommodation problems when they drift north: black agents cheat money, and encounter unreliable roommates also appear one by one. Ren Suxi, who has achieved management in the play, cannot avoid being urged to marry and encountering workplace discrimination.
Women can finally regain their "right to explain." In Youku's other reality-themed drama "The First Half of Wit", each episode will have a narration from the character Fan Xiaoyu, which notes the plot and gives each character a richer interpretation. Many netizens on Weibo recorded these narrations and said that they had never watched a drama so seriously to take notes.
The growth of women is finally depicted in detail, in a way that is not bloody and distorted.
Female roles, from single to pluralistic
With the shift of the perspective of domestic reality dramas, female characters have slowly changed from single to diverse.
This diversity is first reflected in the presentation of occupations. In Youku's just finished "Female Psychologist", it is also a rare domestic drama that takes the psychological counselor as the protagonist and spreads out the psychological counseling case so widely. A number of mental health problems such as "claustrophobia, panic disorder, binge eating disorder", as well as social issues such as "female sexism, dependence psychology, and gender marriage relationship", have been touched upon in the play. In "Ideal City", Sun Li's growth is the key clue to string together the whole story, and it is also the first workplace drama in China with the cost engineer as the background.
"Pluralism" is reflected in both the career setting and the group portrait setting.
Women's group portrait dramas can be seen as "feminine" cool dramas, which mainly serve female audiences, providing a part of the "reasonable" fantasy on the basis of showing women's real lives. Compared with the classic "big heroine" paradigm, the group portrait drama can show more samples, and can also contain various topics that women pay attention to at the moment, such as friendship, love, and workplace relations.
This has also made female group portrait dramas a hot theme in the past two years. According to the statistics of the Beijing News, from 2020 to August 2021, there are as many as 15 well-known female group portrait dramas.
In this process, female college students also have their own "Struggle". "Witty First Half", which was broadcast on Youku in the first half of the year, is the story of four female college students. The series uses a lot of pen and ink to implement "university life": getting up in the morning to grab the bathroom, wifi is always so slow, the housekeeper aunt confiscates illegal electrical appliances, strict military training, etc., and a series of difficulties to face after choosing to start a business after graduation are also presented.
The audience was also able to see their real, lustful side in the rich female group portraits, not like the domestic urban dramas of the past, and avoided talking about it.
In the opening few episodes of "Xiao Min's House", after the son and mother came to the door, Xiao Min did not know where to hide the condom, and Xiao Min would also take pictures to ridicule her boyfriend Chen Zhuo.
How should film and television works correctly portray female characters? This mature screenwriter has long agreed: write women as adults. She has flaws, desires, struggles, and progress, and is a multifaceted, complex person, not just the side of her taking on social roles.
Only in this way can women truly achieve "side by side" with men in the realistic theme, and can establish more character relationships and storylines. It is reported that in Youku's 2022 film list, "Dressage" tells a series of workplace stories triggered by the fashion magazine "Dress" unexpectedly facing the vacancy of the editor-in-chief at the time of transformation, and there is no emotional drama between the five male and female protagonists, focusing on the "open struggle and secret struggle" in the workplace.
If it were not for the "strabismus" to the "heads-up", such a variety of female stories would not have appeared in the realistic theme.
Big Tsing Yi plays a mother, what?
"Difficulty in employment" is a topic that these middle-aged actresses often mention on various occasions, whether it is "Big Qingyi" or "Big Flower Dan", there is confusion at the fork in the road.
Liang Jing admitted that the transformation producer is a "curve to save the country", hoping to find a good role for herself; Haiqing also introduced herself on behalf of the middle-aged actress on First: "We are a group of actresses who are very keen on acting, not as difficult to cooperate as in the legend, must be cheaper than Hu Ge, and it is also easy to use..." "Playing a mother" is also a threshold for them to experience. Big S once said in the variety show that it is difficult to take over the drama in these years, "Some people have already asked me to play Wang Mainland's mother." ”
However, the rejection of "mother" is, on the one hand, the "narrowing" performance of middle-aged women in the past realistic themes, so that the role of "mother" has no performance space. In most reality dramas, the mother is not a cute image, but is responsible for giving the young protagonist a plot boost, and the "tool man" attribute is stronger.
On the other hand, it is also the reality of the theme that does not show the richness of middle-aged women, and it seems that after the age of 30, there is only the attribute of the mother. This situation has also improved with the continuous emergence of "30+" women as the protagonists of domestic dramas over the years, which has opened up a new situation for this group of actors to a certain extent, and is also a choice to cater to the current trend of women's thoughts. The 36-year-old Tong Yao has now starred in two female group portrait dramas, and the 35-year-old Jiang Shuying has also joined the "Ode to Joy" crew after "Thirty Only".
But now, why not "play a mother"? She is no longer a repetitive, functional character.
In "Xiao Min Family", Zhou Xun, who used to be the endorsement of "Xian Qi", can also be a mother with adult children, she can still talk about sweet love, and she can also have the ability to control her own life in a big city.
The above is also caused by the change of realistic themes. The image of middle-aged women in domestic dramas is becoming more and more abundant, and 85 flowers do not always have to be in the big female lead drama or ancient puppet drama, and there is more space for them to open up in realistic dramas. Zhao Liying played a rural woman who led the villagers to bravely fight against the interest groups in "Happiness to Ten Thousand Families" and won everyone's respect and support.
Women's dramas are a topic that all platforms are trying to break through. In the past two years, major platforms have focused on women's topics and launched various types of women's topic dramas, including suspense, urban, and ancient costumes.
Youku also clarified the upgrade direction of "youthfulness" and "femininity" as early as the brand upgrade in 2019, such as the launch of the girls' season brand, and the term "cool girl" was proposed to express women's confident attitude. As early as 2018, Youku's "Women's Picture Book" series and "East Palace" have become the hot dramas of that year. In March 2020, the "Pet Theater" was launched, producing popular female content such as "Rock Sugar Stewed Sydney", and continuing to add weight to the young and feminine content scheduling tape.
From youku's recent three consecutive reality dramas, it can also be seen that the narrative perspective of women's stories is continuing to expand, and from the perspective of broadcast feedback, it also meets the needs of female users of multiple ages.
Based on the story of women's workplaces in the 90s, the heroine from the Greater Bay Area migrant girl to later become the boss of the foreign trade group, captured the hearts of a large number of middle-aged and elderly female audiences. From broadcast to the end, "Female Psychologist" has received more than 100 hot searches on multiple platforms, triggering audience discussions on a number of social issues and poking at the hot spots of young people's concerns about mental health issues. "Xiao Min Jia" cuts from Xiao Min, a modern woman with multiple identities, and explores the real dilemma of middle-aged women.
Judging from the achievements of these three dramas, Youku's strategy of rejuvenation and feminization has also achieved initial success. Judging from Youku's to-be-aired list, the women's stories of reality dramas will continue.
In addition to "Happiness to Ten Thousand Families", in the "Falling Flowers Season" produced by the noonday sun and starring Lei Jiayin and Yuan Quan, Yuan Quan plays an independent woman who is divorced in middle age and decisively decides to start from scratch. Liu Jiacheng's "Love Full of Nine Turns" takes Fa Xiao, who grew up together in the hutong, as the protagonist, and puts it in the background of the forty years of reform and opening up, and Ye Fei, played by Reiza, will also experience a series of ups and downs.
When the multi-faceted and complex nature of women is faced squarely by more creators, it is not the time when the series has entered a new world.
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