On the DVD/BRD, there is a short where Riley goes on her first date. I think that the puberty button gets pushed and a much more complex console is installed. The first date short is absolutely worth the watch.
She isn’t, but perhaps the emotions are. They aren’t human. after all - perhaps the male emotions become female during puberty.
Now if she were bi who knows what they’d become.
The emotions don’t look like the boss emotion - they all look like their person. Dad’s emotions all have a big moustache, Mom’s all have glasses and lipstick. It’s just a shorthand to keep which emotions we’re looking at straight. It continues in the credits where we see lots of people’s (and animals’) emotions.
Here it is. No puberty button - in fact, maybe 10-15 seconds is inside Riley’s head - most of it is inside the Dad’s head, showing his reaction to this boy sitting in his kitchen waiting for his daughter.
Storytelling constraints. It’s a concept people don’t seem to understand these days.
And explain to me why anger is a male emotion other than the fact that Louis Black was perfect for the part.
I think the idea is that the parents, having grown up and (hopefully) matured, have all their emotions working together, in synch with each other. Mom and Dad both have all the same emotions Riley does, but the emotions are all sitting together and working together as a team, making more or less unanimous decisions together.
In a kid, the emotions are more scattered, more random. That’s why little kids are subject to major tantrums (Anger is in complete control), major bawling fits (Sadness is in complete control), silly sprees (a little too much Joy), and panic attacks (Fear takes over).
I’m pretty sure that all my emotions can be played by Lewis Black…
An even simpler explanation is that it just looked more appealing when they did the concept art, and they looked at it and said “I bet Lewis Black could do this voice, let’s call his agent.”
Who would you cast as Anger in the feminine role? Besides, anger, to me, feels like a masculine emotion. That seething rage coupled with restrained violence is something I haven’t seen in women as a rule. I’m not saying it’s non-existent, just that I have very rarely seen it.
Jane Lynch
My mother-in-law. She’d be perfect.
Thank you.
The argument I’ve seen is that a kids emotions are more wild. As you get older and develop more of a sense of identity, your emotions start to act more like you.
People talked about it so much, I assumed it was in the movie. Heck, I could have sworn I saw it here and saw it just accepted.
Thank you Thudlow. I was coming back to make that point and you made it for me.
Note to self: don’t visit Deeg at family events.
It seems far more likely to be a matter of her gender identity (likely fluid), than her sexuality.
Fine, but then they sort of invited all this speculation when they showed the emotions of the dude in “Riley’s First Date?”, who’s about as old as she is, and HIS all conformed to one gender presentation/look.
When something is different from all the others, people notice. That, too, is a storytelling constraint.
I’m not sure this topic merits much thought, particularly since we have the word of the creator that there was no deeper meaning behind the gender of Riley’s emotions, but we could take the mix of masculine and feminine emotion characters in Riley’s head to indicate that her personality reflects a mix of (traditionally) masculine and feminine traits.
That does seem to be the way Riley is depicted. Her main interest is hockey, she dresses in a pretty casual style and IIRC is always shown wearing pants instead of skirts, but her best friend is a girl, there’s no indication that she thinks of herself as a boy or wishes others to see her that way, and she has longish hair and sometimes wears pink. In other words, she’s a somewhat tomboyish girl, and the gender ratio inside her mind (majority feminine, but significantly masculine) could be taken as a reflection of that.
Age plays a role too, none of the emotions know what the poo-berty button does. Watch Rileys First Date on YouTube for a more advanced Riley.
As an additional practical consideration, making all of Riley’s emotions feminine might have been considered a potential turn off for the young male demographic. Giving her a mix might have, in part, been to make her more identifiable to a wider section of the audience.
It’s also worth pointing out that the parents are more archetype than actual characters. They have a few personality quirks, but aren’t really developed much beyond “the father figure” and “the mother figure”. Which is fine and appropriate for a story told from the perspective of a child. Keeping their emotions relatively simple is fitting to their role in the story.
I’m inclined to just say Riley has a mix of traditionally feminine and traditionally masculine traits and leave it at that.