3 Bizarre Beliefs Hollywood Has About Boobs

3 The Breast is Where the Soul Is

Much like internet weirdos believe that "pee is stored in the balls," filmmaking weirdos seem to be under the impression that "souls are stored in the boobs," at least when it comes to non-human characters. Basically, if you have an alien anthropomorphic tree, bipedal lizard people, or killer toasters etc., then the ones with mammalian breasts will be more likely to help the hero or just be more emotional and noble and good than the rest of their species.

In the episode "The Lizard King" of the Spider-man Animated Series, The Lizard accidentally creates a bunch of humanoid lizard mutants in the sewers. Spider-man eventually defeats them with help from the ONLY female lizard of the main group, Gila. You can tell she was a girl because of her scaly sweater stuffers, even though lizards would have no use for breasts since they don't nurse their young.

The exact same thing happens with Vastra from Doctor Who. She is part of a race of aggressive reptilian warriors who, in the old version of the show, were pretty androgynous. But in the new series, they were revamped, with emphasis on vamp. They put boobs on a lizard again, is what we're saying, but they might as well have put a T-shirt that reads "I'm going to become good later" on Vastra because she totally does. Still, in the world of Doctor Who, we have Jabe, an anthropomorphic tree with breasts who, of course, ends up nobly sacrificing her life to save the day. Sappy, but wood you have it any other way?

Even robots aren't immune to this. The mechanical Queen Machina from Power Rangers Zeo, for example, has robo boobs (roobs?), and although she is evil, she does exhibit the most emotions out of her entire family. She laments every monster that the Rangers destroy because to her, all of them are like her children, and she genuinely cares about them. She's fiercely dedicated to her son and her husband, to the point where she would rather be thrown in a dungeon than betray him, all because she was built with metal mammaries.

Another interesting example is Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager. Taken by the Borg and turned into a mindless cyborg drone, you could barely tell she was a woman when we first met her.

But once she becomes free of the Borg collective and turns good, she gets her iconic skintight suit so that her breasts can remind us that she is now on the side of the good guys. The show quite literally used breasts to symbolically chart the story of a character regaining her humanity. Her mammary humanity. Her ... humammarity.

2 Breasts Are the Female Muscles

Because Hollywood is such a progressive place--stop laughing, we're still setting up the joke--it now gives us plenty of physically strong characters who can kick some serious ass. The thing is, though, it doesn't really want to give them a lot of muscles because those are difficult to masturbate to (if you're a coward.) So when asked how they plan to signal that a female character can break both necks and hearts, Hollywood thought about it for all of three seconds and wrote down "( o Y o )" as their answer. It's uncertain if they actually understood the question, but since they've committed themselves, they decided to roll with it and pair every physically powerful character with a powerful pair.

So on Stargate Universe, Lt. Vanessa James is one of the biggest ass-kickers on her squad of space soldiers, frequently taking down opponents much bigger than herself. Well, bigger everywhere except in the chest department. See, James actually has a pretty small frame. She's TOTALLY in shape, but nothing about her build screams "physical strength." But that's why the show makes sure we get a lot of shots of her in just her T-shirt, which always seems one size too small. It's almost as if the show is trying to tell us, "No, no, she totally has muscles. They all just... migrated... into the breasts...? It's a thing, shut up."

You also have characters like Galatea from Justice League Unlimited, a stronger clone of Supergirl but happens to have a much larger bust than her. On its own, this would mean nothing but let's keep looking at examples. There's the case of Rose Quartz from Steven Universe, who's arguably the strongest character on the show and also sports the largest sports bra. She also is physically the largest, so it might be a coincidence, but what about Ty Lee from Avatar: The Last Airbender? Super strength, tiny body, breasts for future back problems. (Is that why she never showed up on Legend Of Korra?) It all seems to fit some kind of pattern.

A particularly weird example of this comes from My Super Ex-Girlfriend (part of the EGCU: Ex-Girlfriend Cinematic Universe), where Uma Thurman plays a superheroine who has an average-sized chest in her civilian persona but looks like she's wearing a necklace made from soccer balls as her super ego G-Girl and it's never addressed in any way. Because in Hollywood, big breasts are just a "normal," universal shorthand for super strength.

Hell, on The Boys, The Seven have three female superheroes: Starlight, Stormfront, and Queen Maeve, whom we've just listed in terms of their superstrength (from lowest to highest) and how much their costumes accentuate their breasts, unrelated to the actresses' physiology. Maeve is physically the most powerful, and therefore her costume makes her look the most incapable of sleeping comfortably on her stomach. Interestingly, Maeve is an obvious parody of Wonder Woman, and it's very possible that this entire weird trend started with her.

See, the original Wonder Woman from the comics was actually a bit flat but also slightly ripped. This made sense because she was an Amazon, who were supposed to reject traditional femininity so much that, according to legends, they'd cut off one of their breasts in order to shoot arrows better. So in the beginning, Diana wasn't too stacked ... until Lynda Carter started playing her. For some reason, something about her imprinted itself (or themselves) on the psyche of a lot of fans of superhero stories, so later on, when they thought about physically powerful women, their thought process went like this: Wonder Woman → Lynda → Lyn-damn. It seems to have stuck.

1 Turning Breasts into Weapons Is a Sign of Pure Evil

Shakira's hips may not lie, but in Hollywood, it's breasts that better be truthful unless they want something horrible to happen to them. We've mentioned before that filmmakers have this bizarre hatred of fake breasts and will straight up mutilate characters for having them. Still, if there's anything they hate more than faux funbags, it's maleficent mammaries. Whenever a character has breast-based weapons (bazookas turned into literal bazookas), it's almost always a sign that they're remorseless killing machines devoid of human emotions.

That's why the killer Fembots in Austin Powers had machine guns in their breasts, with the muzzles coming out of their nipples. Sure, it fit the movie's comedic tone perfectly, but it also helped make them more terrifying on some levels. Because robotic women? Not that scary -- actually, more of a pretty common fetish. Robotic women that can kill you? Hot...! Is what some people may say. We heard. At church. That we go to every day. (Go, Jesus!) But robotic women with breasts that can hurt you? It's not right. It's an abomination! That's how it usually goes in movies and TV shows.

In the seminal movie RoboGeisha (seminal in the sense that a lot of weirdos definitely masturbated to it), female geisha assassins undergo augmentation that, of course, includes giving them D(eath) breasts. The movie isn't exactly a philosophical piece, but it does have these themes of the killer-chested assassins questioning if there is any goodness and humanity left in them or has it all been scooped out together with their breast tissue to make room for the bullet-belts. Weirdly, the exact same themes are found in another Japanese movie, 009-1: The End of the Beginning, about a female cyborg spy with machine guns in her breasts. We say "weirdly" because the movie is loosely based on a character who also had to worry about accidental breast-related discharges (not involving a guy), but she never got too existential. And yet, the live-action movie's writer took one look at her bullet boobs and said, "Bet she must question her humanity a lot."

Most movies and TV shows aren't that subtle, though. They just use breast-related weaponry as part of your standard-issue female villain arsenal. So you have Violet Kimura with her drill-bra from The Machine Girl, the laser-nippled Machine Beast Tamer Keris from one of the Japanese Power Ranger shows, or the flamethrower-bra killer from From Beijing with Love. You also have Sofia Vergara's Desdemona from Machete Kills, who has miniguns built into her bra and likes to do things like torture people for shits and giggles. Because, of course, she does. "Why would anyone weaponize something as full of goodness as the female breast," ask a surprising number of screenwriters, probably with one hand underneath their desks.

And you might be thinking that, well, putting a weapon on ANY part of your body is kind of a villain move. Which, okay, we can maybe see it ... but also, remember Rose McGowan's character Cherry Darling in Planet Terror? She loses a leg and replaces it with a minigun, and she never turns into a villain. In fact, she ends up creating a safe and peaceful society in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. But apparently, if she had mounted that minigun on her chest, she'd be using it to shoot people in the legs and cackle as she watched them try to run away from zombie hordes. Because if the breast is armed, you will be harmed.

Follow Cezary on Twitter.

Top Image: Amazon Studios, New Line Cinemas