Keeping It Pushing: Lessons From ‘The Regular Show’ On Female Representation

Why do we feel so bittersweet when we see our friends succeed?  I recently opened my phone to find that a classmate of mine, from when I went to school in Brooklyn, has been modeling for some really important brands. This brought me joy. She is a respectful and creative person who deserves her flowers, but I also remember feeling a sinking feeling in my stomach. Through my thoughts of congratulatory stupor, a voice was heard in the back of my mind: “Why aren’t you doing something like that?” “Why aren’t you working like she is?” “Why aren’t you successful yet?” These kinds of thoughts tend to get in my way to a degree that I am almost embarrassed to admit. It’s almost a feeling of shame that is tacked onto seeing our friends succeed. Shame to feel almost self-pity in the light of someone’s up-and-coming career. And while I feel this is a common emotion in a capitalist and ever-evolving society, I also feel it is intensified when you exist as a woman or are female-presenting. This is undoubtedly increased if you are also a woman of color. There has always been a heavy pressure put on us to perform to a higher degree, to prove that we are capable, or even to prove ourselves as people. 

The Regular Show was one of my absolute favorite cartoons growing up. For those who have never watched, the premise of this show is that Mordecai —a personified blue jay — and Rigby, a humanesque raccoon, work as groundskeepers at a local park, but tend to slack off. The primary plot device of the show is that these characters, whose dispositions are very realistic to many people we come into contact with, start the episode off in a very normal or ‘regular’ fashion, but by the end of the episode, something incredibly outrageous happens. However bizarre this show may seem, it still has an incredibly big influence and inspiration on the work I hope to do in the future, especially in world-building, writing characters, and comedy. JG Quintel, the creator of the show, is one of the many people who inspire me creatively. However, recently I found that when the show introduces a female character, the writing and development I love so much seem to fall flat. 

Margaret, another personified bird, is only used as a love interest to Mordecai. She’s not realized as a fully developed character, and her personality is often limited to how she affects Mordecai as a love interest. However disappointing, this happens quite frequently in the media as a whole. But what made this realization so shocking was that they do it with almost all the female characters shown on screen. Every female-presenting character is written to be a love interest of one of the main male characters. Even though some of the female characters are written more deeply than others, they never reach the potential that Mordecai and Rigby both obtain because the primary purpose of the female characters in this show is for them to be desired.

 Rewatching a show so dear to me, I find it doesn’t know how to write a realistic female character. These characters lack complexity and thus fall below the male characters of the show. Depictions of women as flat or underdeveloped characters affect women and feminine-presenting people in real life. Women and those who are female-presenting are complex people who fail, succeed, and sometimes lie in between. When the media depicts us as one-dimensional, we have to fight, sometimes even ourselves, to have our complexities realized. Personally, when I feel I am vulnerable in my life, I immediately jump to how a certain character or person whom I look up to would handle the situation. I also feel a pit in my stomach when I am too vulnerable, to a degree in which these characters in my head would not exhibit, I start to feel like an outcast in my own skin. I don’t think that is an original experience. This added pressure for women and female-presenting individuals to always act cool, or filtered, or even predictable, makes it so easy for us to not have our own back. 

 Women and female-presenting individuals know collectively that they are more than objects of male attention, but that label is tacked onto them from the moment they are born. And even shows that are dear to us can subconsciously drive this narrative towards our identity as a whole. I still love the Regular Show, and I understand that JG Quintel was writing from a standpoint in which he knew. His later work, Close Enough, writes female characters in a much more complex and positive way, and he remains an inspiration to me. To ignore women as complex characters aids in the internalization of almost wanting to be a one-dimensional being. For women to cut themselves down because they would feel abnormal otherwise, because it is easier. When I see a fellow friend succeed, that small and nagging voice in the back of my head isn’t a personal problem; it’s been installed since the day I began to breathe. These complex thoughts that many of us yield about the perception of ourselves as well as others tend to pit girls against each other. 

Media is so easily internalized, a sentiment often forgotten.  For this very reason, it is important to realistically depict characters that belong to a plethora of identities. This isn’t an issue that just affects women; it is one that affects every single identity that doesn’t align with the status quo.

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