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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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Replying to @vgr
counterpoint - the first hacker character was a nerd girl
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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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Replying to @vgr
Acid burn (Hackers 1995) ~> NCIS hacker ~> Eureka
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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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There was Claudia in Warehouse 13, the show was steampunk. she dressed pretty normal but the computers were actual magic so there's that
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Perhaps also a Trinity (Matrix) influence on the goth/industrial side? Also, Sandra Bullock/Brooke Langton were still kinda girl-next-door in the film and TV versions of The Net, so the trend wasn't quite there mid 90s yet.
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