Polyamorous Vulpine

Any time anyone seriously says that if Elena and Damon and Stefan became a threesome their problems would be solved and mean it

it makes it really, really obvious that Damon is not a problem to you because his abuse of Elena has no real relevance or importance to you

and you may be willing to pay lip service to acknowledging what he's done to her

but that's where it ends

because oh

my

actual

god

that statement is staggeringly misogynistic

This entry was originally posted at http://bigbrasskey.dreamwidth.org/101419.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

The thing about Mary Sue culture is that it isn't the fact that these women are beautiful or intelligent or skilled or charismatic that fandom so hates; it's that those facts are celebrated, appreciated, taken and/or presented without a denigrating and derisive filter of sexism. You'll notice that if they're put down, abused or painfully self-conscious there's much less of a negative response to simple admirable qualities (unless they're accused of whining or sneered at for having a low self-esteem, but that's merely a part of the fandom practice of belittling and dismissing the suffering of female characters and even castigating said characters) as long as they're, you know, kept in their place. (Sometimes almost - or exactly - verbatim.)

This entry was originally posted at http://bigbrasskey.dreamwidth.org/90348.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Naruto fandom infuriates me in a very special way, besides the copious degrees of misogyny and bizarre homophobia in its slash and general headache-inducing qualities seeped into the fanfiction even if you avoid general fandom like the plague.

Characters are unlikely to intensely deride, for example, Uchiha Sasuke's manner of dress as ludicrous, camp, or clownish. It is not alien for them. They come from a different cultural background and that clothing is obviously drawing heavily on said cultural background. Fandom clearly just doesn't bother to think - especially when other characters have donned very similar fashion from day one and garnered no attention, I suspect because the character in question is a woman and the backlash against male characters who demonstrate mannerisms or dress that's viewed as stereotypically feminine in some way and place always get a shitload of sneering.

On possibly a separate note - I'm not sure and I don't feel inclined to give it much thought - next time characters' dress or behaviour (or lack of demonstrated interest in girls, for example) is referred to as 'gay' - always in some form of derogatory, mocking and/or mindless textual endorsement of stereotypes - I am going to scream. Maybe punch someone through the computer screen through sheer force of willpower.

tl;dr : stop using 'girly' and 'gay' as insults. It instantly devalues your arguments and it - and what you're insulting - reveals more about where your criticism is coming from than you probably wanted it too.

This entry was originally posted at http://bigbrasskey.dreamwidth.org/87891.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I can't help but feel that I've only ever seen characters disliked for "stupidity" or for liking people who don't like them back when the character in question is a woman. When it's a dude, they "deserve better" etc, etc - the onus is on the person who doesn't care for them or doesn't return their feelings, but they're not derided or condemned for their icky girly emotions.

This entry was originally posted at http://bigbrasskey.dreamwidth.org/81508.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

The problem, I feel, with blaming Elena Gilbert with such rigorous determination and venom for her actions of late - besides the element that's character bashing, pure and simple, rooted in rampant misogyny with its lack of consistency, logic or basic empathy exposed by the double standards and determinedly obfuscating focus - is that it likes to ignore context and that it is consistently disinterested in extending her empathy; not empathy in the sense of feeling for her or even being sympathetic to her position, but empathy in the sense of putting yourself, however briefly, in her shoes. This is something that happens a lot to women, fictional or otherwise, an unquestioned mental disconnect that leads to audiences simply finding them less human and less relatable, and therefore finding it more difficult to engage.

Elena Gilbert is not a saint. Indeed, a fair number of her actions could be called exceedingly morally questionable by this point in season three. However - disregarding the fact that many of the situations in which she has been held singly culpable, noted and attended to as such above even the perpetrator, the responsibility is shared between several parties - let's lay the facts out: she is an ordinary teenage girl who doesn't even know what she wants to do with her life and was faced with what boils down to two options of mass slaughter. One of them is going to happen. And one of them involves all of her loved ones dying cruelly, whereas the other involves strangers.

No, it isn't pretty. No, it isn't saintly or angelic (though of course at times when her actions were less morally contestable she was either derided and reviled for excessive goodness or else accused of being monstrous, selfish and egotistical anyway) but these are the options. And when faced with a choice of losing people she loves or losing strangers? People - especially someone who has witnessed a nonstop and catastrophic amount of violence, warfare and torment over the last year with no recovery period or really any addressing the effect that has on the human brain period - will generally make the human, if ugly, choice.

She is a teenage girl who has first hand, lengthy and repeated experience with not only losing the people she loves forever - a pretty phrase and phenomenon that most media consumers are virtually inured to at this point, you might remember these people are real to Elena, and she has no reset button. She has no rewind. She can't write or read fanfiction or skip back to previous episodes. People she deeply loves are dead. - but watching it happen in horrible and helpless ways, and we have repeatedly and canonically been shown that she holds herself responsible for many of these incidents, with reason for some and due to survivor's guilt for others.

However ill-equippred or poorly you feel she may have handled various sequences of events, she is fully aware of her involvement, acknowledges her own responsibilities and is demonstrably overwhelmed and scrambling to deal with world-changing decisions suddenly revolving around her existence. And when she does somehting that causes a severe double take and an 'um, Elena, that is fucked up' you might remember: so is she.

She has a high school education - not even fully that! - and she was more or less faced with trying to strategize a guerilla war or else sit helpless (in the position of having watched people die as a result of this) and let other people decide her life. (Other people who do not exactly have the best competence track record, at that.) One of those people being someone who has repeatedly attacked her and murdered people she loves in the past. Fandom's contrasting criticisms of her for being not active enough and then in the next moment too active, presumptuous in her desire to not be unagencied, trapped or uninvolved in actions that directly concerned her, sometimes came not only from the same person but in the same post. It was a little bit amazing.

And finally, it's mildly notable that every single person attacking Elena for not magically coming up with a way to thwart Klaus and fix her situation, (not the writers, of course, never the writers) when asked what other solution they had presumably thought of considering the lofty judgments being made, had no answer.

But then, fandom never does.

This entry was originally posted at http://bigbrasskey.dreamwidth.org/68572.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Let's break it down, fandom:

Winona Hawkins is a person, and she is entitled to the same instincts, feelings, weaknesses and self-preservation as any other human being on the planet. It may not be convenient to Raylan. It may not be convenient to the viewer not inclined to empathize too heavily with her. It may not be convenient to prolonging their relationship.

But in no way, shape or form could one rationally characterize her behaviour when it comes to their relationship (asking that he, whom she is already halfway to leaving her husband and completely upending her life for, to commit to the relationship, to at least give her an answer about what she can expect, whether he's going to break her heart (...again...) or make her happy, asking that he not leave her living in fear that he's going to die - Raylan, who garners enemies as easily as he breathes, who reminds her every day that he walks into lethal situations by having to shoot to kill, by coming home with bruises and gunshot wounds - not leave her with that emotional torture on top of deflecting almost every time she tries to delve into the less black-and-white matter, his emotional commitment instead of his safety) as unfair, unreasonable, or even unkind. It may hurt, but it's not unkind.

She's not saying 'leave your job or I'll kill you' or 'leave your job or it's the end of the world' she is simply stating - as she has repeatedly explained, and as he understands and has sympathy with - that she is not willing any longer to suffer the fear and heartbreak of waiting every since day he leaves the house to hear if he's died. She's saying that if he intends to put her through that, she's going to step away - not angrily, not violently, not in a hostile way, but gently step away - to protect herself.

And she is completely in the right. Raylan is not necessarily in the wrong, but neither does he or anyone deriding her for her choices have the right to demand that she allow herself to be hurt that way, a heartbreak she makes explicitly clear that she is all too familiar with already. It's not as if it's the only factor in their struggling relationship; Winona's tender, tentative joy and relief when he welcomes her news with open arms illustrates with particularly painful clarity explicitly how little Raylan is emotionally open - as if we hadn't seen enough evidence of it already - even with his wife.

Raylan is an emotional smokescreen who goes on suicide missions every other day. And Winona is only human. I mean, really, put yourself in her shoes. Can you imagine going through that? Without the convenience of knowing he's a TV star, that he's not going to die: every single day when he walks out the door, he could die. Every single day when he walks out the door, his life is potentially put in jeopardy. Living with that, every day, that fear, that question constantly at the corner of your mind.

Hell, maybe if he were more open, and therefore not already causing her some emotional tumult and stress, she would have an easier time with the fear that their time together is all too vulnerable. As it is, though, Winona's stance is completely justified.

And yeah, she made a mistake and she went to him for help when it compromised his position. So? She was human, and scared and panicked and put on the spot; when she later tries to divorce him from the situation, to lessen his potential culpability in the eyes of the law, he insists. It's his choice, and he's a big goddamn boy.

Boyd Crowder made a dumb mistake far outstripping hers in both impact and stupidity and got a dozen men murdered, but I don't see this kind of blowback on him.

This entry was originally posted at http://bigbrasskey.dreamwidth.org/66117.html. Please comment there using OpenID.