Mako mori exitvoid dreamwidth12/19/2023 (The name comes from a Green Lantern comic wherein our hero finds his girlfriend’s body literally stuffed into his refrigerator.) In Uprising, Mako’s death lights the fire in layabout Jake to finally take his Jaeger Initiative responsibilities seriously. The phrase “ women in refrigerators” was coined in 1999 when a group of feminist comic book fans led by Gail Simone noticed that female characters were often murdered to heighten the male protagonist’s dramatic stakes. This kind of treatment of female characters is all too familiar, to the extent that there’s an established term for it that’s almost as old as the Bechdel test. The rogue jaeger takes out a government helicopter carrying Mako onboard, and our heroine is lost in the burning wreckage.Įven Mako Mori’s own arc fails the Mako Mori test in spectacular fashion. Sure enough, an unmanned jaeger attacks Sydney, and things quickly go south. The movie, like its predecessor, is a delightfully dumb tangle of plotlines, but the gist is this: Delinquent Jake has been brought back onto the Jaeger (read: giant robot) Initiative, which, though running on fumes, is still active in the event that the once- canceled apocalypse gets a surprise order for renewal. Mako, meanwhile, is now a top military official and serves as a welcome foil to the boyish Jake. The sequel follows Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), son of the first film’s exquisitely named Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba). Unfortunately, after seeing Pacific Rim: Uprising, I can report that even Mako Mori’s own arc fails the Mako Mori test in spectacular fashion. Moreover, its own conception was a testament to the love many fans had for her character, who subverted tropes about submissive Asian women as much as audience expectations about female characters.Īll of which meant that there was always going to be a lot of interest in what the movie’s sequel did with Mako. Though the Bechdel test was never conceived as the final word on whether a film was feminist, the Mako Mori test nonetheless provided a useful complement.
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