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You talk as if film makers have some reactionary agenda. No one is saying that current gender roles have to be reflected in fiction, but they undoubtedly have an influence on it. When people write gangsters, or secret agents, or soldiers, or whatever, do you think the fact that they are more likely to make them male is due to some desire for the status quo, or because their perceptions of such people are shaped by reality?
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When it's fiction, all bets are off. If you make a decision to do the same old thing with gender roles or even representation minorities, it's all on you. It's fiction! So you have the choice to stick old assumptions and prejudices in it or not.
Furthermore, the justification of "reality" or "history" is predicated on the author actually knowing anything about the real world or history, and I mean
real history, not the incomplete school curriculum or the "common knowledge" we pick up from each other and the media.
Women have always fought.
Non-whites have always lived and worked in Europe. There is a wealth of participation and contribution to history and the modern world by every disadvantaged group that we don't know about, not because it's unknown to history but because no one has seen fit to educate us. There are so many stories left completely untold, brilliant narratives from real life and history that have yet to hit the pages of modern works, and ways to depict these groups of people in both realistic and historically accurate ways that we are no seeing because our assumptions about their historical roles are all absurdly wrong.
Which makes the constant rehashing and spoonfeeding of the same old stories and tropes even more insulting, just as a consumer of them.