Talk:Final girl

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Minor quibble: Were films such as "Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street" really films with a predominately male audience? MinorEdit June 30, 2005 00:44 (UTC)

you're right. maybe remove the word "predomionantly"... from the second link: Although Clover doesn't claim that these woman are feminist representations of women, she acknowledges their role on a deeper level instead of writing them off as one dimensional damsels in distress, seeing within the Final Girl an evolving woman who learns to not just run and scream but actually fight back and represent female empowerment which the male audience can then identify with. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Niz (talk • contribs)

Contents 1 Androgynous name? 2 Phallic appropriation? 3 and then again 4 More references?

[edit] Androgynous name?

Wikipedia's list of final girls strongly disputes that final girls "often [have] an androgynous name." I only count a handful in the entire lengthy list. I would remove this line unless we can find more proof to the contrary. —Preceding unsigned comment added by MaxVeers (talk • contribs)

Actually, that's one of Clover's rules. But Clover holds that a "final girl" need not be final or a girl, so it's a lot more vague than usually asserted. Шизомби 18:41, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

This assertion in the article strikes me as original research. The list of final girls is by no means an exhaustive list, nor is the claim supported by an academic source. Unless a third-party source can be found for the claim, it should be removed from the article. -- Exitmoose 06:17, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I've removed the bit about the numbers as I counted 15 androgynous names, and as Exitmoose said, it's not an exhaustive list. It says "sometimes" not "usually" so there's no need to try to dispute it. — AnemoneProjectors (zomg!) 22:10, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

The relevance would be in considering whether the Final Girl is allowed to be strong in part by being less feminine and/or sexual, with the androgynous name being part of that defeminization. A Final Girl isn't likely to be a Tiffany or Barbie or Buffy (which is why the Slayer's name was so transgressive of horror tropes). --Orange Mike

Thanks for clarifying that. Although I don't think Buffy as a name is particularly feminine. — AnemoneProjectors (zomg!) 17:34, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

At least in the States, until the rise of the Slayer "Buffy" was one of those girly-girly names, right up there with Barbie, Kimberly, Tiffany and Bambi, associated with cheerleaders and other mall-haunting ultra-feminine types. --Orange Mike 17:41, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

First - I must say, if Clover listed that as a "rule" for it, it should be mentioned, in the form say of "Clover also argues that...", probably followed with, say, "although there are some notable exceptions in horror film and television, such as...".

Second - agreed, Buffy is usually a girl's name (and in this native English speaker's opinion, it is in fact a very fluffy, girly, frou-frou, bubbly girl's name, right up there with "Bambi"). I cite as an actual source(!) for this as HowManyofMe.com, a searchable database site which uses U.S. census data to tabulate how many people have been recorded in the U.S. as having any particular first or last name you care to search for. This site states the following if you search for "Buffy" in the first name portion:

• There are 4,527 people in the U.S. with the first name Buffy.
• Statistically the 2762nd most popular first name.
• More than 99.9 percent of people with the first name Buffy are female.

So yeah. Girl's name. And I would say definitely girly-girl's name at that. Runa27 16:45, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Fun sidenote: I wonder if the name Buffy in the title of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is in fact a double-pun on both the fact that she's blonde, and the fact there is actually a "buff-colored" portion of blood called the Buffy layer? Hmm... wonder if the BtVS main page has a mention of that? Runa27 17:44, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Phallic appropriation?

Could someone please explain this? Usually I just ignore red (or blue) words that need a dictionary to understand, but the assertion that final girls take up weapons to have a penis-like (?) appendage strikes me as being somewhat silly; my figuring was that they did it to avoid being killed.66.133.180.22 20:27, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

It's a Clover referance. In her book, she makes the "Phallic appropriation" comment. She isn't saying the girls want a penis, she's saying that the knife (or whatever) is symbolic and represents a penis. The male killer stabs (penitrates) his female victims with a phallic object. The final girl then takes the object away and penitrates him. 70.249.81.26 00:57, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

It's spelled "penetrate", but yeah. That was actually my assumption, that it was the appropriation of guns or blades that are symbolically phallic, i.e. masculine extensions (probably considered symbolically "phallic" just as much because they're associated with the traditionally masculine realm of violence and aggression as anything else, is my guess). Perhaps the most easily understandable example of this "phallic appropriation" conceit though would be the wooden stake of vampire lore, for instance, as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (I've seen, on a side note, arguments that Buffy is actually a member of the Final Girl archetype, even though she's not literally the last girl in the world or even the last girl left on the team, due to the fact that she is "the one girl in all the world" who can face the demons and vampires, and is a Chosen One given extraordinary abilities and apparently even special instincts for just that purpose, much as the Final Girl is usually smarter and psychologically tougher than the girls around her that get killed, i.e. is "different" and special compared to those who couldn't face the monster and win). It's a sharp, usually fairly thick object (roughly the size of, admittedly, a penis); you stick it in the vampire's heart, and they die. I don't know how to explain it more specifically without doing hours of research into the terminology of literary and psychological and film analyses, but you can't tell me that on a symbolic level, that stake isn't somewhat phallic, a symbol of aggression of the type traditionally reserved for males.

The article is awkwardly worded perhaps, but I got the jist of it, and upon further reflection can see a number of reasons for the "phallic" connection (even though personally, I would not have used the term "phallic" in my description for the phenomenon if I was analyzing it from that perspective, probably sticking to "masculine" if anything along those lines). Perhaps though it should be explained in more depth, especially with links to say any articles we have on phallic symbolism and gender roles (well, OK, gender role is already linked in another context, but you get the idea, yes?). Runa27 17:35, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

After first taking up the knife in Halloween (film) (after the knitting needle incident), Laurie Strode holds the knife above her body, pointing it at her crotch, for a noticeably long time, staring at it. Director John Carpenter himself says this was to show the knife as a phallic symbol. Format (talk) 04:53, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] and then again

In many episodes of The Avengers, the Villain targets a group of people (scientists who worked on project X, directors of corporation Y, witnesses to event Z) – of whom Steed and Cathy/Emma/Tara save exactly one. —Tamfang 04:45, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] More references?

I'm concerned about this article: it appears to be parroting the views of Carol Clover from her book. There is one essay (posted online, editorial level of attention unclear) that refers back to Clover's book, but that's all, the rest is presenting Clover's viewpoint. Is this really appropriate? We should not have an article on this if it's basically the research of one person, but only if the concept has been discussed and analyzed by many people. Mangojuice^talk 22:57, 16 July 2007 (UTC)