Because they are assholes.

Because they are so privileged they REALLY believe that they should see themselves in all stories.

Because they were taught from a young age that empathy is not manly.

Because, at the end of the day they were failed by their parents and society as a whole.

Forced diversity characters are generally just cringe.

Characters who are normal people who just happen to be female, of a minority ethnicity, non-heterosexual and so on are generally as good as all other characters because that’s just about people living live in an imaginary situation, so just like in the real world not everybody there is a white heterosexual male and people who aren’t white heterosexual males are, just like the white heterosexual males ones, not some stereotyped cartoon cutout of a person.

(That said, in Action movies, especially XX century, often all characters are stereotyped cartoon cutouts of a person)

This also dovetails with how Modern Acting techniques work: good actors will naturally play more believable characters in more believable situations because the actor also has their own version of “suspension of disbelief” going on.

If you want a neutral metaphor, it’s like the difference between seeing a scene in a Film or TV Series which is pretty obviously product placement for a cola brand were one or more of the characters are using said product in a way that makes sure its brand is seen and mentioned vs a perfectly normal scene were somebody just happens to be drinking something that looks like a cola - the entire vibe is totally different between having something which is not a natural story element shoved there to fulfill objectives other than telling a good story and just telling a good story that naturally reflects the real world in its many facets hence all that’s there just feels natural.

You may want to look up the study “Speaker sex and perceived apportionment of talk” for a potential explanation of why this could be happening.

Basically, psychologists did a study where they asked participants to rate excerpts from a play. They started by attempting to control for male and female “role” bias from the script itself; They had students read the scripts with “A” and “B” listed as the speakers, and try to determine the sex of the characters in the play. So this gave them a baseline on the socially perceived gender of the script.

Next, they had actors perform the script, and took some recorded excerpts to play for participants. The excerpts had a male and female actor, and the participants needed to rate how long the believed the excerpt was, and how much they believed each actor spoke, from 0%-100% of the conversation. So for instance, if they believed the female actor spoke 40% of the time, they would list 40 for her and 60 for the male actor.

Virtually every single participant (both male and female) over-estimated the female actor’s participation to some degree. Female participants were closer to reality, but male participants were pretty far off. Some of the male participants began saying the woman was an equal contributor when she was only speaking ~30% of the time. Interestingly, these numbers were closer to reality (not totally accurate, but closer) when they flipped the actors’ roles and had the female actor performing the “male” part (determined by the earlier script reads) of the script. So societal role expectation does play some part in the determination… But it’s not the entire reason.

It could be a large part of why so many terminally online men pipe up about “feminism is ruining my hobbies” whenever more than a token woman is added to media. Because many men genuinely feel like women are an equal contributor when they’re only a small fraction. Does it excuse the behavior? Absolutely not. But it could at least begin to explain it.

Insecurity.

Being a woman is “marked” while being a man is just the default, so anything that strays from the “default” sticks out and it seems reasonable that it requires justification. This goes in reverse in some cases, like the need to refer to someone as a “male nurse” - why do we feel we need to say this? Because the default nurse is assumed to be female.

Why do men complain?

Because -isms exist in a binary world (sexism, racism, etc…)

Any increase in visibility for whatever minority they happen to hate, is a decrease in visibility for them (in their feeble transactional little minds) and it drives them bonkers.

A lot of it comes down to genre, target audience, and writer’s personal experience. Even MC and DC are characters written decades ago. Batman is basically from the 1930s/40s.

Compare that to last decade’s best selling YA novels. Hunger Games was constructed to be very balanced from the start including a female main lead, same for Percy Jackson.

My hot take is that most of these instances are actually fine as is because Hollywood in general sucks total ass at writing new characters into existing franchises, especially for the exact purpose of introducing diversity without any depth.

There’s literally a 3+ hour series on youtube of how bad the new star wars trilogy is, and a solid third of that rant is about how poorly written the female lead is.

The issue here is that having an equal or majority female (or any other metric) set of characters wouldn’t automatically make your story or writing better. You have to develop each character just like the rest, otherwise you end up with inserts that have no purpose other than to equal out a fraction.

Whether that is due to the writers being able to create male characters easier, or just a perceived audience target, you’d much rather have a well written character than a soulless one.

And that is likely not even correlated with male vs female writers. So much so that some critics even believe female writers are better at writing male characters than male writers, which is funny to think about. Ex: Harry Potter is still a 2:1 ratio.

Again though, there are plenty of good examples (mostly books) with very successful stories with equal or majority female characters.

If it makes you feel any better, this argument is old as hell lol. You can find ye olde forum posts discussing the exact same things mentioned in this entire thread from as far back as early 2000s, with plenty of in text examples from books and screenplay.

The general concencus though, is that if the characters are good, the plot is good, and the writing is good, no one really cares about the number because you’re absorbed into the story. Your attachment to the story is a direct reflection of your own personal identity. If you notice the lack of X whatever while reading/watching and it breaks your immersion, then it’s probably a viable critique of the writing. If it’s something you notice after outside the story, then it might not matter as much as you think.

I mean, look at the news; there’s a LARGE number of anti-DEI people out there who would say exactly what you’re complaining about.

That said, Hollywood is trying Wanda and Agatha were both very diverse. She Hulk was pretty diverse, and Wednesday was pretty mixed. Even captain marvel and ms marvel tried to fill out the stands better.

Of course, it’s hard to tell what’s going to happen now. Will government force the hands of the show runners to reverse the trends?

I think it really depends on why the story has a female lead.

I think Alien is a good example, Ripley could have been male and it really wouldn’t have changed the plot that much. If I’m not mistaken Ripley actually was male at one point in the movies writing.

Doesn’t matter that the shift happened, it happened, Sigourney Weaver fucking smashed it out of the park and the rest is history.

If the story is good and happens to have a female lead, I don’t think people are actually against it. The Menu is the first movie to come to mind, I don’t think anyone said anything about the lead in that being female (although being a lead in an ensemble cast with damn near equivalent amounts of screen time is kind of meaningless). I think what people are against is blatant pandering because it usually indicates that the product is poor.

Edit: this is my limited, anecdotally rooted opinion. There are probably a decent amount of people who will just not watch a female lead. I’ve known women who won’t watch something or play a video game without a female lead or the ability to create a female character, so I assume the same has to be true for men.

Sexism

I don’t know. I live a good female lead. Ripley, Furiosa, Marge Gunderson. There’s so many, that’s just the first three that come to mind. Half the time when I’m playing Fallout, it’s female characters.

There are definitely bad female leads in things, too. Just like there are bad male leads. Like, Borderlands 3, basically unplayable. I never finished it. And I really want to be clear, the characters aren’t bad because they are women, they are bad due to poor writing. That game had such potential, but it felt like the script was written entirely by highschoolers.

Most of those superhero teams were originally created by comic book companies staffed almost entirely by men. The heroes created are therefore how they visualize heroes being, which mostly takes inspiration from their own experiences, and therefore creates mostly men.

I think it’s cool, but I also really like strong women so…

I’ve never heard anyone complain about it unless it was a remake or different from the original story.