My Thoughts About How Female Characters Were Handled in Legends of Chima

Legends of Chima very much does the thing where there's one girl in a group of guys. This can be seen not only with the Eight Heros of Chima (Eris being the only girl), but also with the tribes. As far as named characters who appear in the show go, there's usually only one named female character per tribe (there are exceptions to this; the Crocodile Tribe has two and the Raven, Bear, Beaver, Scorpion, Bat, Phoenix, Sabertooth Tiger, Ice Bear, Tiger, and Vulture tribes have none).

There's another thing that I've noticed that I would describe as "Here's the one girl and she's the normal one." This happens with G'loona, Rhinona, and possibly Eris (although to a lesser extent). It's most obvious with Rhinona, as the Rhino Tribe is primarily jocks and himbos and Rhinona (the one rhino who is canonically female) is the only one who consistently has a brain cell. G'loona is another example of this. The Gorilla Tribe has a distinctive dialect and, out of the gorillas who have dialogue, G'loona speaks it the least. An argument could be made that the reason for that is that she doesn't have much screentime. However, I don't think that's the case as Grumlo (the leader of the Gorilla Tribe) has a similar amount of screentime and dialogue as G'loona and he very much does speak with the Gorilla Tribe's dialect.

Eris is almost another example of this. I say 'almost' because she's less 'the normal one' and more the most responsible and (generally) the most level-headed one (at least out of the three characters who appear in every episode). On the topic of Eris, while I can't find the words to really expand upon this at the moment, I feel like Eris is an example of a female character who has traditionally feminine character traits without being reduced to just 'the girl'.

Jumping off from that topic, Legends of Chima did something that, while it is the bare minimum, you don't always see it done (mostly in media targeted towards boys and men). Despite their limited number, all the female characters are full-on characters. They're never reduced to just 'the girl' or just a love interest. Even Windra, who has one line of dialogue in the whole show, is her own character separate from Worriz having a crush on her.

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to claim that Legends of Chima was revolutionary at all in any sense of the word (it wasn't). I'm just talking about some things I noticed about some old kids' show that maybe twenty-five people on the whole world wide web care about.




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