Why are men the ones to screw everything up in fiction?

[ProfessorDetective]

I mean, look at the Harry Potter model, where girls drugging and then date-raping boys is seen as "harmless and innocent."

Didn't the narrative ITSELF decry that perspective when we learned that female-on-male assault via magic was how we got freaking VOLDEMORT?!

[Madner Kami]

And then we get Romilda Vane spiking chocolates with love potion in order to get Harry Potter's affection, which are accidentally eaten by Ron and it is played for laughs. We have a scene where Hermione overhears a conversation of multiple other school girls where they consider and plan to use the love potion on Harry Potter. The Weasleys have a literal fountain of that stuff in their shop and it is mentioned that it is frequently smuggled successfully into Hogwarts. And there are hints that Hermione herself has some experience with the love potion.

Mixed messages much?

[Yukaphile]

The narration never makes that explicit. Dumbledore just blames the lack of being raised by a mother. Really, the quality of the series suffered after Goblet of Fire.

Hell, look at what happens with Marietta. I could understand wanting retribution for snitching on them, though Hermione is criminally stupid to not warn them just to bend over backwards to justify JKR paying back a "traitor," but that gets thrown out the window when it's shown in Half-Blood Prince there's no hope of full recovery, and Harry smirks as if this is a good thing. I mean, come on, her mother was pressuring her very strongly given the Ministry's tyranny, and it's implied she was the only one of her various giggly girlfriends to stick by her once Cedric died and it left her an emotional mess. And she's scarred for life over a stupid thing she did as a teenager. Others are forgiven for worse sins. Marietta is not.

[Madner Kami]

The narration never makes that explicit. Dumbledore just blames the lack of being raised by a mother. Really, the quality of the series suffered after Goblet of Fire.

Ravleen: How much does the fact that voldemort was conceived under a love potion have to do with his nonability to understand love is it more symbolic

J.K. Rowling: It was a symbolic way of showing that he came from a loveless union – but of course, everything would have changed if Merope had survived and raised him herself and loved him.

J.K. Rowling: The enchantment under which Tom Riddle fathered Voldemort is important because it shows coercion, and there can’t be many more prejudicial ways to enter the world than as the result of such a union.

Source: http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/2007/7/30/j-k-rowling-web-chat-transcript/

I mean, it's Rowling herself saying it. But then again, it's Rowling saying it herself.

[Yukaphile]

Exactly. She claims Dumbledore is gay only after the fact. That's not empowerment. That's facepalm. She seems eccentric, to be kind. And Animorphs is far better anyway.

[Yukaphile]

I mean, it also ignores that Merope is a rapist... how does nobody see this except people with common sense who are hard-line on this stuff like I am? JRK is seriously messed up.

[Deledrius]

Great thread, begging the question right in the title. >_<

frankly surprised that people were happy Peggy was the one who was stupid and self-absorbed, because "usually it's the men who mess everything up in fiction." This was very sexist, imo

You're missing the context. Shows like King of the Hill and King of Queens were both reactions to the early-90s sitcoms, where the husband was a bumbling fool who couldn't do anything right and the wife was the put-upon worker who had to set everything right and fix every mistake. These themselves were a reaction to earlier sitcoms like The Life of Riley, Leave it to Beaver, and Father Knows Best, where a very 1950s ideal of the nuclear home was sacrosanct. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and popular media like sitcoms especially follow a pattern of deconstruction->reconstruction->deconstruction. Maybe you're just slightly too young to remember what KotH was referencing, but those people you're quoting probably weren't being "sexist", they were talking about the shows they had grown up with and the sexist themes carried therein.

[Nealithi]

First I think Deledrius hit quite a bit of it on the head there. Now let's look at an example of that work.

Home Improvement. Tim is always wrong. He does in the course of the show make a few legitimate mistakes. And he seems to get no respect from his wife or children. But the mistakes of others are glossed over. Jill herself has mistakes made that get glossed over so that it is still Tim who is wrong and has to change to accommodate her. Take an argument they had once. Jill left little clues and reminders. Like have his tux cleaned and so forth. And was angry when Tim did not know of a dinner date and did not want to go because he did not know about it in advance. When talking to Wilson she lists all her reminders and all but shouts "I did everything but tell him we were going!" . . . "Oh my god I never actually told him." Later when she went to apologize. Tim is apologizing for not noticing her hints so she just blows off where she herself was wrong.
Yes this interaction repeated and went up my father's. . . Ahm he didn't like it very much. .

Point is Men = Wrong. Even if they are right they are wrong. But it also plays into something hard to write. Multiple intelligent characters. Usually to have someone be smart they have to make the other people dumber.
Wesley around Data, as an example. So to play up women being intelligent and or not subservient. They have to walk on men in general to show they are 'better'.
There is similar work in the new Star Wars movies. Though arguably a little better handled. The point is to make one person or group look good you have to sideline the others.

[Deledrius]

Home Improvement. Tim is always wrong. He does in the course of the show make a few legitimate mistakes. And he seems to get no respect from his wife or children. But the mistakes of others are glossed over.

Home Improvement is a great example. I got a bit off-track and forgot to provide a few, but it's not hard to find the ones of this era that had this as their go-to conflict. Thanks for helping clarify my point.

[GreyICE]

As usual, the Simpsons did it first. Homer was an absolute sendup of the "Leave it to Beaver" father. And it was hilarious.

The Simpsons did it first is a refrain for a reason.