"I appreciate that people are writing characters that are interesting and unusual, rather than some bland female character as the girlfriend in a movie, but when the point of the character in this movie is to, like, help the guy have his arc, that's sort of the problem, and that's why it's good that they're talking about it, because it certainly is a troubling trope."

There's just one problem: The Internet is super dumb.

How We Ruined It

The biggest misunderstanding surrounding Rabin's criticism is that it describes any kooky female character. That's why Diane Keaton in Annie Hall and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby and Maria Rainer in The Sound of Music have been called "Manic Pixie Dream Girls." You may as well say that Sally Albright from When Harry Met Sally is one, too. And Marge Gunderson from Fargo, because she's got a funny accent. Or you could acknowledge that giving a female character some distinguishing traits is actually just what writing is.

Gramercy Pictures

Imagine the person who thinks like this. They read blog posts, pick out buzzwords, excitedly repeat them all day, and then confuse that with actual thought. They don't actually care about context or nuance so much as they do gathering trend-credit for using this shiny new term. "Belle from Beauty And The Beast?" they ask sweetly. "Ever notice how she has fun that one time and let helps Beast grow as a person? Why, she's nothing but a stupid Panic Mixie Dream Person!"

Incidentally, this is exactly why Rabin apologized for inventing the term. His idea had been murdered by stupid people.

How We Ruined It

If the definition of a "meme" is a deceptively simple concept that gets repeated endlessly and instinctively regardless of context or thought, then "It's satire" is probably the most popular meme ever. Now, there are a lot of hot-button examples I could use in this entry. I could talk about comedians being murdered over offensive jokes. Or I could talk about the phenomenon of hipster racism, in which dudes who look a lot like me think that they can get away with saying racist and homophobic stuff just because they're doing it "ironically." But instead I'm going to talk about something far more important: Starship Troopers.

Tristar Pictures

You already knew that Starship Troopers was a satire, because any time somebody mentions this movie, they follow it up with an explanation of how nobody understands that it's a satire with a glint in their eye that, if you zoom in, is actually the concept of irony dying in a house fire. This is a movie in which the heroes dress in actual Nazi SS uniforms and high school teachers explain "the failure of democracy." The movie uses satire the way an eight-year-old uses curses when her mother is at the grocery store. Everybody gets that this movie is a satire. Everybody.

The insufferable arrogance at the center of every "It's satire!" claim is that people who disagree with you just don't get it. I "get" Starship Troopers and I like it a lot, but a lot of other people "get" the movie and happen to hate it. That's fine. "Satire" is not a defense of shittiness. It has nothing to do with quality at all.

The reality is that Starship Troopers is a fun, dumb movie with some clever bits thrown in to make you feel less guilty about what you're enjoying, like Flintstones Vitamins in a bowl of Lucky Charms (don't try that, it's no good). That's fine. But if you want to talk about actual brilliant satire, then just put in Robocop.

Orion Pictures

The magic is that it's so simple. "Two girls talk" isn't this crazy-high bar for feminine empowerment, and it seems like it should be pretty easy to achieve. So the simple fact that so few movies meet that comically low standard is crazy. If you actually limited yourself to only seeing those kinds of movies, then you wouldn't be able to go see anything. That is, in fact, the joke. Now I've explained it and it's dead, so sorry about that. But before just now, it was a pretty good one.

How We Ruined It (Before I Did Just Now By Explaining It To You. Again, Sorry)

In some corners of the Internet, the Bechdel-Wallace Test has supplanted the MPAA as the end-all, be-all judgment of cinematic progress. Cosmopolitan says that it's the best metric for determining if a movie is feminist. Some Gawker writers have speculated over whether it's ever okay for a movie to fail it.

The problem is that once you use the joke as litmus test instead of just a general observation about movies, it stops working. Scary Movie features a woman getting plastered to the ceiling in semen but still technically passes, while Boys Don't Cry, which was directed by Kimberly Peirce and stars Hilary Swank as a trans man, fails. The use of the word "test" in the name (which, I'll note, doesn't appear in the original comic) is misleading, because it implies that we're getting some kind of meaningful results from this joke. But figuring out what a movie means is always a crazy complicated discussion; here are 9,000 words about whether Gone Girl is feminist, and here are 9,000 more on fucking Twilight.

Little, Brown and Company

Part of the reason this particular topic has gotten so popular and trendy over the past decade or so is because it's really goddamn complicated. That's why people want a simple test. It seems like an easy shortcut. Which is why even when people admit that the Bechdel-Wallace Test isn't the end-all, be-all of feminism in film, their next step is to try and create another test. The Mako Mori Test (inspired by Pacific Rim -- one of main touchstones of modern feminism) tries to distill "Is this woman a well-written character?" down to a simple three-pronged checklist. Because why use 9,000 words to explore an interesting idea when you can distill the subject down to a simple, binary yes or no?

Great jokes jog your brain and let you re-explore your world with perspective. Bechdel's strip does exactly that. So stop using it as an excuse not to.