When did the default hacker character in tv shows shift from awkward unattractive nerd guy to faux-awkward atttactive nerd girl?
They don’t even bother putting nerd glasses on the characters anymore.
Examples: Felicity in Arrow, Cable in Bull, Riley in MacGyver.
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Reminds me of that curious phenomenon of straight male gamers preferring hot female avatars in games. I read somewhere that it was about looking at a sexual object during game play rather than closeted gender identities.
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Presumably the main audience for many such shows is male and they prefer the stock hacker character to be eye candy, since the tech plot points are garbage anyway and they don’t identify with them even if they themselves identify as hackers.
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The Jurassic Park hacker character was a child, so doesn’t count. Plus hacker characters in the 80s were default male I think, like Matthew Broderick in War Games or Ferris’s Bueller.
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Felicia Day probably had something to do with it, though I first saw her in Eureka (2011 -), after she’d already acquired a gamer celeb reputation.
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The wardrobe choices are invariably some sort of vaguely schoolgirl cutesy fetish-object-ish. No actual women engineers/hackers I’ve met dress like this so the aesthetic must have come from elsewhere. Influence of anime?
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Hmm. 2005 seems right for other reasons as well. Something about laptops replacing desktops as default devices, making the hacker character more mobile 🤔
Deskbound characters have less room to outgrow stock roles.
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Replying to @vgr
Might have become dominant around 2005?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_
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Nah, Matthew Broderick in War Games, various characters in 80s movies like Ferris Bueller...
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I mean, isn’t it obviously an attempt to counter the stereotype that women can’t code?
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Why would commercial entertainment producers do that kind of public service messaging? Plus the specific portrayals suggest that’s not the main reason the character developed. It was just a nice bonus.
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