#I desire women characters to be written well too... But not in a media similar to Naruto

[feral-radfem]

The het erotica anon here. Yeah thanks for your response. Now it makes sense the way you explain it. I find it refreshing to find similar minded women too. I had limited access to the internet due to my location and Tumblr used to be one of the many websites I didn't have access to until recently. I already have female friends who have stopped reading erotica like me for similar reasons, but because I couldn't connect to other OSA women around the globe, I thought maybe there is something wrong with mine and my friend's heterosexuality that made us not feel much towards works that we were supposed to like. I didn't feel the "submissive" tendencies towards men that these female characters have, and I always thought maybe there's something missing with me, or maybe I'll feel this way too when I grow up. ""Biology"". Whatever. Then it turns out I'm bi.

I agree with you that it's relieving to have access to like-minded women and learn that hey, no need to feel like there's something wrong with you. There are many women out there like you. etc etc. I'll show this response to my partner too, since she had the same thoughts as me.

No you're right. I worded it a bit weird but I don't think romance in general is bad, however the romance books written here are just conservative shitshows with abuse, rape, and murder handled terribly in them.

My mother likes the romance genre but she never buys local books because of how repulsive they are. That's why I spoke so aggressively of romance books, otherwise I haven't read non-native romance books to compare them with ours. And again, these are hetero romance books. I have not found any local romance books related to lesbian or gay love because that's illegal technically.

You're welcome. :)

There is nothing wrong with you or your friend for not feeling a desire to be submissive to men, that is not a desire naturally ingrained in women. Heterosexual, bisexual, or lesbian. We were not born to be below men, though there are plenty bio-essentialists who believe we were, there's no instinctual calling to serve men. I'm sorry either of you were made to feel that way. That is not right.

Oh no. I wasn't disagreeing with you just adding my own caveats. Anyone who read my response would understand that I wasn't equating the two. You know, Romance stories and erotica. I'm a little paranoid about being misunderstood on tumblr, since it happens so often lol. One I'm just not a particular fan of the other I think should be heavily regulated if not banned completely as obscenity and just wanted to make the distinction clear.

Romance books typically mirror the patriarchal ideal of romance for whatever culture they're being published in. Though due to the fact that we all live in patriotic societies I'm sure some of your leading books look very similar to some of ours. So this can definitely come in varying degrees depending on how normalized severe massaging is in any given culture. Male perversion doesn't vary that much in theme though, generally. If I'm being completely honest, most books, both of the romantic and erotic variety, that are homosexual oriented reflect the same patriarchal ideals as the heterosexual books. It's where we would have applied idea of heteronormative before the internet corrupted it and destroyed it like all other political jargon of the modern century.

However, my heart goes out to you for not being able to access any media legally that represents your lived experiences. It's ridiculously early where I am right now, but I hope the coming Day finds you well.

[captnjacksparrow]

But Kishimoto gave gender to his characters and he created pattern concerning the gender. It would be different if we had some female characters that are similar in dream, motivation and power etc. to the male characters. Look at Attack on titan, we also have gender there but we don’t feel it because the author established this pattern about dreams, motivation, power etc. that I mentioned above but in Naruto we don’t have it. Even Konan or Tsunade they are bland compare to male characters. And of course we have some male characters that are not developed but we don’t look at them because we have so many male characters that are greatly developed but with women we look at them that way because they suffer in not being developed enough and they are made as women, even great female characters such as Tsunade and Konan lack development. Why is that this lack of development concern every women in Naruto while majority of male characters have development and take roles that women wanted to achive. I don’t think Kishi is sexist but I think he keeps this stereotype in his head concerning women and that’s why they are written that way. I don’t know if this is true but in one of his interviews someone said to him that he likes Hinata and Kishi answered sth like you like girls with big boobs. This is really inappropriate. I hate Sakura but when she was hated Kishimoto instead of changing her personality, goals chose to make her more beautiful. If it was like you said then Kishimoto wouldn’t look at gender while creating his characters because he could create an amazing character with development and then he would add gender or even change gender if his claims are true that he can’t write female characters but he chose not to do it because he has a pattern concerning women. I know that you won’t agree with me but this is just my opinion.

Thanks for your opinion. @carmenserenity123456

I am not at all saying, "I disagree with you"..... This isn’t like SNS vs SS/NH argument where I can debunk you with all the valid panels....  Because, this discussion is so complicated and the opinion varies from people to people because the topic is in and of itself is vague.

I would have joined you, if all this criticism were for any other Shonen.

My whole point is....

Your Opinion is just not suited for Naruto, the Series.

That's where I am coming from. You can take this as a Rant and see what I am trying to say rather than me opposing your view or anything.... 

When I complete watching Naruto, there’s not one moment I felt any blatant misogyny under my skin which made me go off the rails.... It’s only after visiting these Social Media platforms, I’ve been seeing these Misogyny claims getting prevalent which always confused me. Because the only Negative feeling I felt after completing this series was... “Why this Sakura and Hinata wants to get inside N and S pants so badly???” That’s all... Other than that, everything was fine with me. 

And initially I too thought that the Author was bad at writing women characters... But after I started to pay real attention to other female characters, I realized that the Author was intentionally mocking Sakura and Hinata... And I’ve explained more than once about why he chose to mock them specifically. Yes, I agree that compared to the other male characters, Women characters lack screen presence and development. But I know the reason why.... And that’s what I am going to explain here....

Why every women in Naruto suffers from lack of development while majority of male characters have development?

LACK OF A MAIN FEMALE CHARACTER

Yes, You can say Sakura was the Heroine of the series because she was in Team 7 and featured in most of the Chapter Posters, Promotional Material and so on. She is a Heroine but only in Name.... The Real Heroine of this series is Sasuke which was acknowledged by Kishimoto and I’ve talked about it extensively in this post... [Link].... And the way he gave all the Tropes of Hinata to Sasuke at every given time, the way he gave Kushina’s tropes to Sasuke, the way he blatantly sexualized Sasuke and made him play a femme fatale by hugging Naruto in Orochimaru Lair and liked Naruto’s kiss in Chapter 27... 

How is it that Sasuke was a given the tropes of 2 women... Not to mention one was Naruto’s mom and another was Naruto’s ‘nonexistent’ wife??? And this even gets more funny when the Author made his Hero from his other Manga to say this to Saori, the Heroine????

“I Like you... You.... Resemble my mother... A little...”

Ummm, Excuse me???

People who realize these facts... will not expect anything from Sakura because she is not the REAL HEROINE... She was just another valuable plot device to promote another Bond. That’s all. 

When a Shonen series which ran for 15 years has a Heroine in all just a name but ended up having no relevance to the story..... general Audience will surely criticize this development... Because they don’t know the real purpose of Sakura’s presence in the story... And that’s understandable... 

If only Sakura had some relevance to the story, then 2 things would have definitely happened... 

1. No one would’ve raised this issue of Misogyny claim or anything... Because they will be happy with whatever development Sakura got from the Author...  

2. It would’ve opened a welcoming door for more women to have some relevance... because if Sakura is relevant to the story, then the women associated with her would also ended up having a lot of relevance... And that brings me to my next point

LACK OF FEMALE CHARACTER ECOSYSTEM

This is such an important aspect in any media to have strong presence of Women Characters.... 

For Example....

This is a picture from Kill Bill movie where the story revolves around the Heroine.... And the people in this picture are the Perpetrators behind the Tragedy that had happened to her.... If you notice, out of 4 people in the picture, 3 were Women.... 

If you look at the Right Corner of this picture, you will see a Chinese Woman who is the Main Antagonist of the First Volume of Kill Bill. Since she is also a Main Character.... We get this Extremely Gratifying power display

She is not a Cartoonish Villain, FYI.... She is the Boss of the Criminal Organization.... And this gave rise to....

2 more women Characters were seen standing behind this Boss Lady.... They are her Loyal Assistants who would do anything for her.... And that leads to...

The Protagonist having an extended fight sequence spanning 5 minutes with this girl.... in a 1.5 hrs movie. 

A Strong Female Protagonist gave rise to another Strong Female Antagonist.... And that gave rise to strong female Assistants who follows her....  And this is what I call as Ecosystem... Pushing more women characters into the Main Menu will lead to opening doors for more women who follows them...

However, When you look at this other Movie....

This is from the Movie called Lord of the Rings (LoTR).... And this movie was all about the struggles and hardships faced by this Fellowship of Men whose only job is to destroy the One Ring... Source of all evil... And it’s very clear that this movie will have no big amount of Relevance for Female Characters.... Because they don’t belong to the fellowship. 

Yes, there are couple of Women characters in this movie who played a role of an Angel, Damsel in Distress, A Warrior (for a very short time).... But no one had any true development as equivalent to the male characters... 

I won’t be calling LoTR as the Misogynistic movie.... It’s just that there is no scope for a Strong Women Characters here... Because the Ecosystem is dry....

And this brings me to Naruto....

These are the only Main Characters of Naruto series...... And they are Boys at that... You can argue as much as you want that Sakura and Kakashi were also main Characters.... but this is the Truth. Kishimoto never gave 2 fucks about Team 7 or anything.... He was all about Naruto and Sasuke.  

The Eco System is absolutely dry here... Not one Female character has been pushed as the Main character and hence it feels like the relevance for Women characters are very less...

You may now ask... Other Animes were also like this... that is, it revolves around a Male Character or two... But still it ended up having Women Characters with reasonable development... And Why didn’t Kishimoto do that here... ???? He could’ve easily made certain Male Characters into Female and developed in the same way.... Why didn’t he do that???? And this question brings me to...

PARALLEL STORY TELLING

I’ve asked myself many times.... as to why he didn’t change the Gender of certain Male Characters and give them to female Characters... That would’ve attracted even more women readers into this Manga.... But only after carefully analyzing it I found this thing....

That is, Kishimoto is an Obsessive Freak for Parallels.... 

In the very First Arc, He made a literal parallel of Haku with Sasuke and Zabuza with Naruto in many ways.... One of the important thing established in this Arc is the Nature of the Bond between Haku and Zabuza is very similar to N and S... 

And then the Author made a literal parallel of Team 7 with Team Sannin.... Each Sannin becomes the respective Master for their students.... Similar to Orochimaru, Sasuke also treaded into the Dark path.... Just like Jiraiya, Naruto stayed in the Straight Path.... Just like Sasuke, Orochimaru also left Konoha to achieve his goal... Just like Jiraiya, Naruto couldn’t able to bring back Sasuke after part 1.... 

I simply can’t see either Jiraiya or Orochimaru were to be gender swapped and teach boys and pass their knowledge... Because their bond somewhat parallels N and S to some extent... 

The Fact that Jiraiya couldn’t able to bring back Orochimaru was because Jiraiya gave up pursuing Orochimaru after some time... and Orochimaru has no ‘special’ feelings for Jiraiya to make an exception for him.... Whereas that’s not the case between N and S... 

This is another parallel between Obito & Naruto.... and Kakashi & Sasuke.... 

What if Naruto treaded into the Dark path???? And What if Sasuke stayed in the Light Path???? That’s the parallel Kishimoto wanted to show between these people... 

Kakashi also lost his mom, dad, his friends, his Sensei... Somewhat very similar to Sasuke..... And yet he could stay in the Light Path without succumbing into Darkness.... 

Whereas Obito also had the same dream & similar personality as Naruto.... And somehow he succumbed into Darkness.... Obito is the Main Villain and Naruto is the Hero... 

Again, I simply can’t see either Obito or Kakashi being women when the Author wanted to show this kind of parallel for N and S.... 

This is one of the most Cleverly designed panel in this Manga which always makes me cry....

What is the similarity between Minato and Itachi, by the way?? Well, there are many... But I’ll attach just one....

Regrettably, Both Minato and Itachi were responsible for Naruto and Sasuke’s loneliness.... And it all started from the Kyuubi Incident....

And the last and obvious one...

I really don’t have to go into anymore detail, Do I???? 

Hashi and Madara bond is a plot device to show what went wrong between them so as to not able to break the Curse.... And how would N and S would break the curse??? What’s the difference between these 2 bonds??? And What are the similarities.... 

I’ve never seen any media where these many insane amount of parallels were drawn just to exaggerate the Bond between 2 people.... 

Haku and Zabuza were drawn to mirror the possible feelings between N and S...

Orochimaru and Jiraiya trained their respective students... How did their pupils turned out in the end??? Since N and S never ended up like J and O, What’s the difference between these 2 bonded pairs????

Team Minato parallels Team 7.... But somehow personalities got switched and ended up in different paths.... Why is that??? Why a person similar to Naruto ended up in such a way??? And How could a person similar to Sasuke ended up staying in the right path???

Hashi and Madara loved each other.... But why couldn’t they break the curse??? What’s the difference between HM and SNS??? 

If only Sasuke or Naruto were to be a Girl... Then all the respective people who parallels them would’ve been changed into Female characters.... For Example, if Sasuke were to be a Girl.... Then Haku (who already dressed up as a Girl), Orochimaru (Gender fluid), Kakashi, Itachi would’ve been changed into Female characters and I wouldn’t be writing this explanation post here.... 

Or If N and S were just friends.... Sakura would’ve been given a great relevance to the story... Which means, Her Family background would’ve been explored and her direct parallel people like Rin and Tsunade, Ino would’ve ended up getting good development.... But Since, Sakura was made into a Laughing Stock of Naruto series, any female characters who were associated with her had suffered the Lack of Development.... Thank the Heavens, Tsunade survived this mess... And Rin was made into a pleasant one... 

Man!!! Kishi used all those bonds to exaggerate N and S whereas he used Tsunade and Rin to mock Sakura.... 

Look at Iruka.... The most important person for Naruto... But he barely appears in the Manga... Other than offering Moral support for Naruto, once in a while, he has no other purpose... 

Look at Orochimaru, The Villain who terrorized Part 1 of the Manga.... was killed off in the early half of the Part 2.... And then he was reduced to a Joke...

Jiraiya has no dreams other than ogling Onsen Bath and write smut novels... And he was killed off to make Naruto understand Sasuke’s pain...

Neji was killed off as a Marriage Broker.... 

So, Even though Neji had his own narrative, somehow Kishi used him to serve the love development of Hinata & Naruto.... So, even Male characters’ purpose revolve around N and S... Unfortunately, that’s how the Author designed this story to be... 

The reason why he resort to such a story telling is to show that... Neither Jiraiya and Orochimaru nor Kakashi and Obito loved each other like N and S... Naruto and Sasuke didn’t turn out like their predecessors because they both love each other strongly... After Madara manipulated Obito, his attitude towards his own team member had changed... But even though Obito manipulated Sasuke, he still couldn’t stop himself from concerning about Naruto.... 

This is called Parallel Story telling and fortunately or unfortunately, The respective people who paralleled N and S were given a very good development, narrative wise.... Whereas other characters were mercilessly abandoned if the plot doesn’t require them...

And this is one of the most important reason.... you feel like Female Characters have less development as compared to their Male counterparts... Because just to show N and S were better than everyone... He created 6 more Male Characters who are very similar to N and S and ended up having a very good development in this story.... 

And that leads to my final point...

NATURE OF THE CHARACTERS

If the Author is pushing just 2 boys as his main characters... Then the only way a woman can have a good development in this kind of story is either she should be the Love Interest for one of the Boys... Or she should be related to Blood with one of the Boys....

Since N and S were established as orphans... There will be no scope for any Female Siblings who possibly could have any influence over these boys... You may argue, Itachi could’ve been written as a female character... But I am Sorry... Same gendered siblings have a different dynamics than the Cross-Gendered siblings.... Sasuke being obsessed about his revenge to Kill His Elder Sister might sound good on paper... But people would end up wiping tears for Itachi, if he were a Girl... And the closeness between same gendered siblings is very stronger as compared to the cross-gendered one...

And that leaves us with A Girl being a Romantic Interest to one of those boys... 

If N and S were just friends... then Hinata and Sakura would have some good amount of influence over the Boys they love earnestly and they ended up having a better development... 

But Since N and S love each other.... And also I’ve told this many times in many of my posts that Hinata and Sakura were just an Useless Gay Shields... Can I simply say, there’s no space or need for any women in this kind of Story??? 

I’ll bring The Untamed as the example, A Certified Gay media... And hilariously, this series also had very few Female Characters... Sorry... Few means... It’s exactly 4.... Out of which 3 were killed off to advance the plot... And One had a very less screen time... Probably 10 mins in total out of a 45 hour Series... 

This is out Main Character’s(MC) Sister..... She had a great influence on our MC... 

And she was killed off... to make our MC go mad....

And this lady had a Decent Development who is a Platonic Friend of our MC.... But she was also killed off... to make out MC take a further Dark Path...

This is another Girl... with whom our MC casually flirts... But she didn’t have that big of a role, tbh... 

Compared to these women Characters.... There were plenty of male characters who were given interesting roles, ambitions and dreams in this series... And it was written by a Woman at that... 

But I’ve never seen anyone had criticized this series as Misogynistic... Or criticized for lack of development for women characters... Because what is the use of having a Strong Woman in this Genre?????

This is the same pattern I saw from this Movie called Broke Back Mountain.... Which portrays about the Love between 2 men...

These are the two male lead characters (Dennis and Jack).... On whom the entire movie revolves around.... They meet... Love sparkles and they get extremely intimate...

Even though Dennis knew that he loves Jack... He still went on to marry this Girl... Because of Societal Norms and he lives in a Homophobic Repressed Society....

Now if I wear a thick FEMINIST LENS and view this movie... This Lead guy (Dennis) looks like a total jerkkk.... Who cheats an innocent girl despite loving another person... In other words, He marries this Girl (Alma) to shield his homosexuality.

Whereas if I remove my Gender Lens... And see this movie without getting biased, then I could thoroughly understand the movie in a better way.

It’s all about perspective, you see.... You can totally expect this Girl to develop her own dreams.... Choose her path and punish this Asshole for using her and screwing up her life... That’s another interesting story to explore....

But Since, this story was all about the love between Dennis and Jack.... Alma’s feelings were mostly ignored. Now can we call the writer of this Movie, a misogynist???? Just because he made his leading man to cheat this innocent woman??? Or to reduce a woman into a mere Gay Shield???

And especially after finding her husband being sexually active with his former Boyfriend... This Girl breaks down completely... Not to mention she has 3 little daughters with him...

Since this Girl is innocent... I could actually empathize with her feelings... Fortunately, She got her Divorce in the later part of the Movie... 

Now imagine Sakura’s face in Alma’s place...

Could you even sympathize with this face?????

Don’t you feel, “Sakura, Deserved this empty life!!!! Geez.... How horny must she be to chase Sasuke who clearly rejected her many times”.....????

If Kishi wrote Sakura in a likeable way.... We would definitely empathize with her and wipe her tears for her... But we will eventually join up in unison and hate Sasuke as this moron who abandoned his wife....

In order to not make that happen... But still keep Sasuke’s feelings for Naruto very intact even after their marriage.... The Author derided Sakura in the worst possible way... like, not knowing whether Sasuke wore Glasses, flaunting Uchiha Crest everywhere, Abusive towards Sarada, etc........ He precisely chose a selfish and insensitive character in Sakura’s place in order to preserve the bond of N and S and at the same time use her as a shield...

Unlike Alma from Broke Back Mountain... Sakura is neither innocent nor sensitive.... So, I don’t care what happens to Sakura.

This is what I meant in my previous post.... “Don’t expect strong women Characters in a Gay Media... Because it’s a world for Men where Women have no role to play and it would be a great injustice to those Strong Characters being wasted for Nothing....”

-

-

-

-

I hate Sakura but when she was hated Kishimoto instead of changing her personality, goals chose to make her more beautiful.

Like I said above, her character was nothing but being a Gay Shield and a Third Wheel for N and S... She was written to be hated. Why would he change her goals??? What would that achieve????

Sakura could have been written to have gotten over her crazy obsession with Sasuke. But Boruto disaster was waiting in the alley... She will eventually marry Sasuke... So, realistically she was doomed to have no development... The Author clearly wanted to mock Sakura and Hinata in the war arc... So, that the bond between N and S will never diminish and more visible. 

And Just in case you don’t know, Kishi gave that interview in 2015, that is after finishing the manga.... Plus, Kishi said that he drew her to be pretty on Chapter 66 cover for people to notice. Out of 72 Volumes, what useful & realistic dreams Sakura could have after Volume 66, anyway??? Because Her fate was already sealed on 45th Volume itself, that is during Pain Arc.... If an Author was not willing to give her any development for 95% of the series, what development will he give her for the rest of 5%, anyway???

I don’t know if this is true but in one of his interviews someone said to him that he likes Hinata and Kishi answered sth like you like girls with big boobs. This is really inappropriate.

You may take my answer as a justification or whatever... It’s all about context and when that interview happened....  And that interview you are talking about happened in 2015... Long after the series got over. Kishimoto clearly knew Hinata was a character with no usefulness to the story...

Tell me, if you are an author... And you wrote a successful Manga... with many strong characters... And when you ask a guy, “Who is your favourite character?”... And that person shamelessly tells you, “Hinata” of all people... What would you think??? Provided that she was extremely sexualized by SP in a vulgar way.... I’ll attach that interview excerpt...

“I like the fact that at the beginning she was a weakling, but due to Naruto’s influence she steadily became strong...”

God!!!! I wonder if this person really read the Manga... She never became stronger... She was a joker who was tripping up on the battle field.... Don’t you think Kishimoto don’t know any of this???? Even to my eyes, it’s very clear that this person wanks for Hinata for her big breasts...

If that doesn’t convince you.... Here’s one of the meme from Dudebros...

My Eyes!!!! 

What a vulgar people!!!! Even though I hate her... I can’t even process this meme...

It’s very clear that All of those boys likes Hinata because of her jugs... And Kishimoto was pointing that perverted ass out. I definitely would have been furious if Kishimoto made this remark for any other female characters like Tsunade or Temari... 

One of my guy friend... told he liked Hinata... Much to my disgust, I too asked the same question just like Kishimoto... And My friend became so shy for a moment... Because that’s the truth. If Kishi’s statement still looks inappropriate... It’s fine. To me, he was just mocking the fans of Hinata who like her for nothing other than whatever she has. 

It would be different if we had some female characters that are similar in dream, motivation and power etc. to the male characters. Look at Attack on titan, we also have gender there but we don’t feel it because the author established this pattern about dreams, motivation, power etc. that I mentioned above but in Naruto we don’t have it.

Sasuke didn’t have a dream and healthy motivation until Chapter 699...

Jiraiya didn’t, Kakashi didn’t...

Neji had a dream but was killed off to play a Marriage Broker...

Whereas Tsunade had a dream and a realistic one at that...

This is her dream... And she fulfilled it... And it still lives on... Added to that, she fulfilled Dan’s dream to become Hokage as well... Since she is not a Main Character, we can only get limited amount of her screen time... 

Not to mention, she is the only woman character to have her own Arc.... And went on to have an interesting Battle with people like Orochimaru and Madara.... I think for a side character.... She did a lot more than Sakura will ever do in her whole life... 

And you said, Attack on Titans had women characters who have dreams, motivations and such... I never watched this series and I am writing this purely from my observation from Naruto fan’s discussion in Tumblr... 

“Set in a world where humanity lives inside cities surrounded by enormous walls due to the Titans, gigantic humanoid creatures who devour humans seemingly without reason, the story centers around Eren Yeager, his childhood friends, Mikasa Ackerman and Armin Arlert, whose lives are changed forever after the appearance of a Colossus Titan brings about the destruction of their home town and the death of Eren's mother. Vowing revenge and to reclaim the world from the Titans, Eren, Mikasa and Armin join the Survey Corps, an elite group of soldiers who fight Titans outside the walls.”

This is the description I see everywhere.... From what I can understand, Eren, Mikasa and Armin were pushed as the Main Characters of this series... Unlike with Naruto, this series has a female character in the Main Menu...

First, AoT and Naruto are not same.... Because Naruto is a Gay Media... Whereas AoT might have Gay characters... I don’t know and I am writing this purely on Fandom’s discussion... But it doesn’t have a Bond like SNS... So, Can I say it’s not a Full on Gay media???? 

Second, If Girls had great dreams and ambitions.... then why am I seeing this kind of views very often???

This is something I saw from one of the Naruto fan blog.... Added to that... this

Excuse me???? 

I can jump off from any mountain and boldly say... No other Characters could ever be as bad as Sakura in any other media.... But somehow Mikasa was always compared to Sakura by a large amount of people...

I know fandom dudebros are shit... They are disgusting and I get it... 

But if Mikasa, the Main Character were written to be really strong with multiple layers, then how come such a divisive opinions arise from the Fandom??? People can criticize Mikasa’s decision in certain Plots and Arcs... That’s totally different... They can claim she is Bad or Evil or what not... But why comparing to Sakura??? 

With Naruto series, I can cite Gayness as the reason and also Sakura was never pushed as the Main Character by the Author... But what reason does AoT author has to not make Mikasa equally strong with her Male Counterparts like Eren and Armin???? 

I don’t understand this Shonen thing... AT ALL... 

-

-

-

-

To finish off this post....

This post’s intention is not to change people’s opinion... It’s just my thoughts as to why I feel Kishimoto is not a Misogynistic Monster as the Fandom makes him out to be... Because Naruto Fandom is totally weird and it has a persistent habit of Blaming the Author for everything that they can’t understand... And the sole intention for writing this reply post is to make people see the important Aspects of Story Telling, Author’s motivation and Genre... And then come to a judgement rather than jumping into a quick conclusion without considering any of these... 

This Author is insanely obsessed about the bond between N and S to the point of creating 4 other parallel bonds which failed in certain aspects... He wanted to show that what makes N and S different from any of those other parallel bonds... And if he was this much obsessed about this Bond, then I am pretty sure he would throw any character under the Bus to emphasize SNS... Male and Female alike...

There are so many Misogynistic Tropes in Media like... Gratuitous R*pe, Killing off Main Female Characters to push the narrative of Male Lead, Characters slut shaming another Characters, Romanticizing Abusive relationship like Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey shits... (which were also written by women), Portraying Hinata as this ideal waifu but dissing other Women Characters, Blatant Sexualization where women were just used as a Sex Doll for the Male Character to achieve and there are so many.... Of all the Tropes I’ve mentioned above, Naruto don’t even qualify under one... 

Instead of sexualizing a female character, he ended up sexualizing Sasuke (Sasuke on Sai jutsu...???)... Instead of making a Woman Character as the trophy to achieve for his Male character, he ended up making Sasuke as the trophy which was achieved by Sakura... 

I acknowledge the fact that Women Characters in Naruto may look Lacklustre as compared to other Shonen... But Lacklustre is different from Bad Writing... The Author who wrote Sakura also wrote Saori, Granny Chiyo, Tsunade, Konan, Kushina... Yes, their presence is very less in the story because they are side characters... If he can write these women with a better & strong personality, then I am pretty sure he could’ve did a lot better for Sakura and Hinata too... But he won’t... Not if they come between his favourite boys....

But Will he ever write a woman to have any importance on N and S, in that way??? I don’t think so... He is totally selfish that way... Kishi wants N to be everything for S and S to be everything for N.... Can’t blame his desperation though...

And this is exactly why I am so baffled as to why SNS fans expect strong women characters from Naruto, when you all clearly believe it’s a Gay Media??? Which Gay movie has a best women character, I wonder???

[educatingmerlin]

Looking at the other projects of the Merlin Writers

"But I don't think the writers intended to be AntiBlack"

This is something which has been said a lot whenever people have spoken about the writers problematic work. It is true, a possibility, they did not realise their writing had harmful tropes, and they would never intentionally write problematically.

However, this does not excuse the fact they did! There needs to be accountability.

One way we can establish whether the writers do have racist writing embedded in their work is to take a look at their other pieces of writing.

The writers/creators of BBC Merlin are: Julian Jones, Jake Michie, Johnny Capps and Julian Murphy, Howard Overman, Lucy Watkins, Ben Vanstone.

The last two writers only wrote a few episodes and were not consistent writers.

In this post, I will be taking a look at 2 shows which these writers worked on, (only two due to insufficient information on the other shows they worked on).

All sources used will be linked at the end.

These are:

Misfits - Created and written by Howard Overman

BBC Atlantis - Created and written by Johnny Capps and Julian Murphy and Howard Overman

Misfits:

From a quick search on social media, it is clear people who watch/are fans, recognise and admit the problematic nature of the show.

The characters are widely problematic, ranging from racist, homophobic, transphobic and sexist characters.

There are a handful of punchlines and storylines which revolve around these issues but were done in insensitive ways.

The portrayal of women is also harmful. One character, Alisha, has the superpower of making men attracted to her. Implying it is not men's 'fault' if they desire her.

There was a racist character and from what I gathered, a small storyline regarding that. Unfortunately I couldn't find the context or any details about this, but reading upon the Homophobia, Transphobia and Misogny, I would also assume this was not something done well.

I have briefly outlined some which were shown in Misfits. You can read these in detail in the links below. I was quite shocked with what I found and didn't want to detail too much here, as some of it can be triggering.

But overall, there are a lot of issues with the writing of Misfits.

BBC Atlantis

The information I found out Atlantis was even less than what I found about Misfits.

Atlantis was the show the writers (named above) went to work on straight after Merlin ended. This show was generally what people watched in replace of Merlin as I believe it aired the same day and time too.

There seem to have been a lot of similarities between Atlantis and Merlin.

The main cast of Atlantis only consisted of one woman of colour, Ariadne.

The rest of the characters of color involved were either evil and/or murdered.

Despite being a Princess/later Queen, Ariadne had little screentime or atleast her storyline wasn't as prominent as Season One.

There was also a weird love triangle. Ariadne and Jason were together and in love, but in Season Two, he was enchanted by Medea (white woman), who was also his cousin (canon). This created distance and a rift between Ariadne and Jason and even when they had gotten married, Medea was still an issue.

From looking at fan content, people do ship Medea and Jason and prefer Medea over Ariadne.

Again, overall there generally just isn't a lot of content about Atlantis whether created my fans or otherwise. The links/sources generally also don't give a lot of detail so I've just spoken about and added whatever I could find.

Looking at these brief analyses of Misfits and Atlantis, comparing them to Merlin, it would seem wise to assume this type of writing is not accidental.

Reminder: No one, especially this post, is calling the writers racist/homophobic etc. It can be true that they simply don't know how to write these characters.

But one thing is for sure, their writing has consistent issues within the shows they have created and/or written.

This is something which needs to taken into account when analysing one piece of media. In this case: BBC Merlin.

From this, we have a clearer idea of the creators writing and can see where the issues lie.

Misfit Sources

TW for Homophobia, Transphobia, Sexual Assault Mention, Misogyny

Atlantis Sources

[mejomonster]

I was playing yakuza kiwami 2 today and kiryu voice acted in a bl game as the protagonist like aoba

1 I know the games are hot mess far from perfect but in a way I very much like the game acknowledging BL as another real video game genre with an industry and work put behind it

2 I hear the lead woman in kiwami 2 gets her characterization butchered (aka she's been written fine so far but eventually is written ooc for some dumb or Kiryu plot driving reasons), which I'm not looking forward to because I can tolerate a level of less writing of women but really dislike it when writers can write men but just canr even consistently write their women (see nomura and kairi especially in kingdom hearts 3 unfortunately :c and versus him see Yoko Taro who usually does a very consistent job with writing women and as a result I love his heroines). Characterization matters a lot to me and butchering it because you can't write All your characters as full people really. Is irritating.

Anyway so... as of chapter 11 I feel she's been written fairly consistently (she does the kind of date with kiryu but considering she feels betrayed by her boss keeling secrets and is drunk and blowing off steam it feels fairly in character for most ppl in this series as a set of scenes, and still is kicking ass as usual generally up to the reveal her dad was the mafia leader). I am one part dreading when her characterization gets ruined since there's only 2 chapters left and it's gonna feel real sucky if it's ooc at random at the end, and another part hoping somehow kiwami 2 rewrote her and lessened the ooc bits to some degree (but I'm not getting my hopes up).

The thing too is like. I heard Makoto is an example of poor writing of women, but generally for her game (this was a blind playthrough before I heard anything about writing problems) I felt she was mostly consistent, had a good fleshed out character and motives (parallel to majima but as a civilian which worked excellent for her plot in relation to majima and in contrast to tachibana/kiryus parallels), went up against dojima in the end herself, and the weakest part for me was how they handled the blindness healing but :/ that is unfortunately a super commonly done trope in media so I wasn't surprised. While she had some damsel moments she overall did a Lot more than say kairi in kh gets to usually do (which is like... my lowest point of tolerance for this weak writing If the character is consistent which kairi was in kh and kh2 but not kh3 - i think nomuras issue with writing women lies in as soon as he puts them jn love interest category they become props instead of people with characterization you need to keep consistent and develop as fully realized people). Makoto was more fleshed out then women I was used to in grand theft auto, which was the game I figured was most comparable to yakuza and about the level of writing women characters I expected. So I loved makoto. I didn't notice any brutally weak spots in her writing, though there were some Weaker moments where I'm sure it was convenient to make her a damsel in distress (but being the civilian made those not particularly ooc and her desire to protect majima and keep him out of her business was very similar/parallel to him and worked well).

Then there was Yumi. So like. She had a great setup, flesh out, did stuff in the plot, her actions were logical given what she went through. She was badass for faking her death and protecting her kid and stealing 10 billion and threatening corrupt politician and having the yakuza by the balls. She was amazing. Unfortunately? She was off screen for nearly all of this. Which i think weakened this depiction to a degree. Then the cherry on top that was probably her weakest writing? Having her die Primarily so she can confess she loved kiryu, he loved her, and fuel his emotional pain so he'll have a motive to want to Give Up at the end of the game. Her dying I didn't even find particular issue with itself... she dies because Haruka is a kid who is brave and naive and tries to protect kiryu, so being a smarter adult her mom yumi protects HER and takes the bullet that was going to harm her child and the childhood friend (and man she loves) kiryu. Kiryu even if she didn't love him, was like close family to her (similarly so was Nishiki). So it made sense motive wise for her to talk to these men, have a confrontation with these men at the end, to trust haruka would be taken care of if she died, to get emotional when she argues with nishiki. These are some of the closest people to her. In fact ALL the closest people to her still alive by then in the plot (adopted dad kazama dead, rina like her best friend also dead). So I could accept how the confrontation went as in character, and how she chose to die as in character. I could also see how while she Could have survived, the plot wanted Kiryu adopting haruka (to parallel kazama adopting him) so it was very likely yumi was going to die.

What felt weak about the writing, and poorly handled for yumi, was how her final words boiled down to loving kiryu. She had SO much going on - she was taking down a powerful man and that would still have been her primary motivator, haruka is HER main priority of living people she loves and she took the bullet FOR haruka so her last moments more for haruka or both haruka and kiryu could have maybe been done a bit better and less romance focused. But maybe the worst bit, and there's probably other ways to fix it besides my suggestion? Kiryu confesses he loves her there. And that's the plot drive to get kiryu hopeless (when nishiki dead wasn't Quite the breaking point enough apparently). I would have GREATLY appreciated either earlier explicit mentions of kiryu loving her (because his opening romance scene with him nishiki yumi and rina implies kiryu is simply oblivious and does not indicate a crush or not, certainly not Intense Love for sure - nishikis part in that scene in contrast is deliberate and aware he wants to treat yumi special, rinas part also is deliberate in showing she very much wants nishiki to treat Her special, so their romances later follow logically). But kiryus opening in that scene doesnt strongly imply he feels romantic love for yumi. Just closeness similar to his feelings to nishiki and rina. The writers could have made it clearer kiryu loved yumi, or had him mention it later post prison to say Date, to Rina, to Haruka. But they don't. So when kiryu says he loves her back in the death scene, it feels more like the Entire romance angle was shoved in (hurting both characters consistency) just to try and make the death hit harder. Alternatively, simply not going so hard on mentioning mutual romantic love in the death scene and leaving it ambiguous - either ambiguous how kiryu ever felt (as in opening scene) and/or yumi discussing it with him as more of a general she loved him, rina, nishiki, kazama, and haruka (or some combo). The death alone of a Childhood friend as close as a sister, and nishiki as close as a brother, is enough to explain kiryus emotional hopelessness in the final scenes. So they didn't need to jam romantic confessions into her death scene with no prior solid lead up, making both characters seem weaker for it.

[strangertheory]

I'd love for Will to be able to have the power of reality alteration because him being the most powerful one would be a very nice plot twist. But. Do you really believe they make him more powerful than El? I keep finding crazy comments on social media, suggesting it's the "El show" 😪 *sigh*. And I know some people who say it'd be anti feminist since Will is a boy. Thx

That’s a lot of interesting questions to think about.

I’ll attempt to address each thought that you’ve shared one at a time and provide you with my own opinions and theories about each:

You said: “I'd love for Will to be able to have the power of reality alteration because him being the most powerful one would be a very nice plot twist. But. Do you really believe they would make him more powerful than El?”

I have a lot of conflicted feelings about the way that the fandom often talks about characters’ powers and supernatural abilities in Stranger Things. (I also really dislike the way that the fandom has decided that they can’t appreciate and support both El and Will’s happiness and that their happy endings and successes are somehow mutually exclusive, but I’ll address the topic of their powers first.)

Fans often focus on the abilities and superpowers of characters as something desirable and cool but fans rarely spend time considering what it cost those characters to develop their abilities in the first place. Neither El nor Will suddenly woke up one day and had superpowers that they had conscious control over.

Certain impressive skills that people have in the real world might also be developed under extremely traumatic and undesirable circumstances and not because they wanted them: the powers represented so far in Stranger Things are very much like that variety of skillset.

El’s powers and her ability to control them are canonically shown to have manifested during her imprisonment, abuse, isolation, and manipulation at the Lab. As Kali says “They stole your life, Jane!” Due to El’s isolation from society and from love and affection and from having a family and from everything else in the world beyond the Lab she has a significant amount of early childhood social and psychological development that was stolen from her that she can never truly get back. A healthy, loving, safe environment for development and self-actualization that children deserve to have was not provided to El and she has suffered so much and she has had significant delays in her opportunity to grow and become her own person because of what was done to her. So yes, El has psychic powers that give her a variety of unique abilities that are very useful. But at what cost? If El were given the choice to abandon all of her powers in exchange for a loving family, a community of friends that she’d had the opportunity to know and spend time with since early childhood, a variety of passions and hobbies that she chose for herself over the years as she was growing up and engaging with the world, an extensive understanding of the world outside of the Lab based on her own exploration of the world and not only what people tell her or what she sees on television, and most importantly a sense that she is treated kindly because people truly love her and not because they want to exploit her and her powers for their own purposes: wouldn’t she make that trade?

Do I currently agree with the theory that Will’s subconscious mind created the Upside Down, the Mindflayer, the demogorgon, and even most probably created many other characters and fantastical plotlines that exist in the story? Yes. But I believe it has (so far) been unintentional, entirely subconscious, and is a mental coping mechanism in response to extremely traumatic circumstances that Will has faced throughout his life. Would Will’s subconscious mind creating significant parts of the Stranger Things universe represent a certain level of “power” that is greater than El’s? I don’t personally think they’re comparable. There are things that Will can probably do that El cannot, and vice versa. They will surely each have their own strengths and weaknesses and their own limitations that we may or may not always be shown in the series.

But what does "more powerful” really mean to us, and why does that question even matter? It was not El’s choice to have powers and it was not Will’s choice to have powers. Much of what I believe Will has incidentally created is creating a lot of confusion and suffering for him and for others that he cares about. If the story were about real people I’d be offended at the question of who’s more powerful and feel as though that question and debate is the sort that Dr. Brenner and his colleagues would have: “How useful is this child to me? Which child is more powerful?” I dislike the question because it feels like asking a parent which child is their favorite. I care about them both, and I don’t care about them because they happen to have superpowers: I care about them because they are nuanced characters that are very well-written and that I can empathize with as if they were real people. I respect why it’s a popular thing for fans to debate over which X-Men is the most powerful, for example, but that’s never been what draws me into scifi and fantasy stories. What characters choose to do under unusual circumstances and with unique resources (such as superpowers) is far more important to me than the nature and intensity of the powers themselves. I believe that the Stranger Things fandom does these beautifully written characters a disservice by focusing too heavily on their abilities and not enough on their feelings, choices, relationships, dreams, goals, and experiences that humanize them.

I love Stranger Things because of the humanity of each of the characters and not because some of them can throw cars through walls.

You said: “I keep finding crazy comments on social media, suggesting it's the "El show"”

El is definitely an important character in the story at this point in the show and she has some really fascinating abilities in the Stranger Things universe that often give her iconic moments and provide her an opportunity to be in the spotlight.

I believe that there is a reason that the writers have decided to develop many characters in the story and in my opinion it can seem hard to pin-point a “main” character at times. I think this is absolutely intentional on the part of the writers, and I predict that we will learn how Will’s, Hopper’s, and El’s storylines intersect in season 4. I think we will learn something new about each of the characters.

I do not personally believe that it is the “El show” any more than it could be argued that this is the “Steve show” or the “Hopper show.” But I do appreciate that fans have grown to love El’s character.

I strongly disagree with anyone in the fandom that insists that Will is not important. I can tell that the way that he was quieter in season 3 inspired some fans to dismiss his role in the series entirely, but I think they’re mistaken. Quiet and less assertive doesn’t mean irrelevant in a story like this one. I believe that much of what Will has been through is at the heart of the entire series, and I think that he will play a very critical role in future seasons. If some fans passionately dislike Will then they might need to steel themselves for some severe disappointment.

You said: “And I know some people who say it'd be anti feminist [for Will to be more powerful than El] since Will is a boy." 

I would argue that El embodies many traits that are often presumed to be stereotypically masculine by certain incorrect and outdated schools of thought: assertiveness, the ability to win in combat, determination, resilience, and bravery (among others.) There were eras in which these traits were not always valued and respected in women, and arguably there are still many circumstances under which they still aren’t. El is a complex character who is not written as a gender stereotype and I think that is powerful and important.

We need more characters of many different genders that are written as people. Complex, multi-faceted, and capable of many different things regardless of their gender.

Yes. Will is a boy.

Will is a young boy who has been bullied for having certain traits that are very often stereotypically seen by society as feminine. As being “womanly.”

I believe that feminism needs to be intersectional and seek to address the ways that all people and all genders are harmed by a society that devalues women and devalues traits, work, and skillsets that are associated with femininity.

Feminism should not be reduced and oversimplified to “girl power.” Anyone that reduces feminism to that does not, in my opinion, understand feminism.

“Feminism is the belief in the social, economic, and political equality of the sexes.”

Devaluing admirable traits when someone of one gender expresses them but then deciding to value those exact same traits when they are expressed by a person of a different gender is prejudiced and anti-feminist because it maintains the false idea that certain traits only have value in people if they are a specific gender. 

El is a wonderful, empowering character and I appreciate that she is very well written and admired by many fans. But I worry when certain fans are more willing to appreciate a kick-ass fictional young woman that defies outdated and incorrect gender stereotypes but are not also willing to embrace gentler, more sensitive, less stereotypically masculine young men like Will with similar enthusiasm and affection.

Will is bullied and devalued by his small-town community for having traits and interests that are perceived as feminine and therefore, according to closeminded bigots like his dad, not allowed and are deserving of abuse and bullying. Will is arguably also devalued and dismissed by the Stranger Things fandom because he has traits that are perceived as feminine and undesirable in a young teen guy in the eyes of certain fans, too.

The devaluing and dismissal of gentle, kind, emotional young men is a feminist issue.

A character doesn’t have to be a girl in order to represent feminist ideals within a story. I know that there are probably plenty of feminists that will disagree with me (because there will always be people with their own opinions) but I strongly believe that Will's story is feminist as it has been explored so far (just as El's is.)

Anyone in the fandom that considers themselves a “Feminist” but that spends significant amounts of time criticizing Will Byers by dismissing him as “boring” and criticizing him for being quiet, sensitive, gentle, and emotional should take a good look in the mirror and reflect on what their personal brand of feminism stands for and whether their goal truly is “the equality of the sexes” or if their goal is simply hating men and only valuing and promoting stereotypically masculine traits in our society.

Feminism’s goal is not to make women more powerful than men or to make men less powerful than women, it is about the promotion of the “equality of the sexes.” 

Stereotypes are constructs our society has built and that impact the way we all currently relate to each other. Until society stops treating traits associated with society's currently constructed idea of femininity as something weak or bad then it is important to appreciate these traits in characters of many different genders and to value these traits in men (both in real life and in fictional stories) too. Anyone of any gender can be sensitive and sensitivity should not be seen as a weakness but rather as a strength and as something that's a valuable aspect of our humanity, and the same can be said for many other beautiful traits that society has wrongly decided to put into boxes and assign gender stereotypes to.

This complicated topic is incredibly important to me as a fan of both El and Will. I believe that both El and Will are feminist characters and that the series is very empowering and is challenging society’s gender biases through both of their stories. I hope that my response to your question was successful in communicating how I feel and resonates with you and with perhaps other fans who also care about El and Will and feel their own experiences, feelings, and identities validated by their story arcs.

Will some fans still whine and cry “sexism” and attempt to brand Stranger Things as “anti-feminist” if their hope that El will be the solo main character of the story and not have to share the spotlight with a boy is dashed? Sure. But I think they’re wrong, that their concept of feminism and sexism is incorrect, and that their priorities and their understanding of El’s value as a character is unfortunate. El is more than her superpowers. El doesn’t need to be “the strongest” or “the most powerful” in order to be an inspiring, complex, well-written, relatable, and empowering character.

Thank you for your Ask! I hope you don’t mind how long this response is. You mentioned a few things that I have some very complicated opinions about.

[2ndblogg]

Hey! Just read your hot take on novel!wangxian and I absolutely agree. I'm gonna have to say here that I believe it boils down to the fetishization of homosexual men in a lot of the fandom culture that surrounds mlm shipping, as you said it's a space for a lot of women to experiment with their desires and whatnot, but I think therein lies the breaking points between reading novel!wangxian as a good, healthy relationship vs. reading it as a very flawed and toxic one. As an LGBT person, reading the way the author dealt with their relationship made me extremely uncomfortable, it just really feels like something that is written by someone who is more invested in using her queer characters for satisfying her and her reader's own pleasure than a well-built, strong relationship between two characters. Not to take away from the novel in some other aspects, I believe that novel!wwx is a much better, much more nuanced character than what he is in cql, but when it comes to wangxian, I think the intentions are very different for each of them. To each their own, I guess, but I do find it very troubling that some people in the fandom have a really hard time admitting that novel wangxian is not even remotely healthy.

Absolutely.

And can I just say how glad it makes me to see that not everyone is praising this book for it’s lgbt representation...

But I guess that’s also why I just occasionally feel the need to scream my frustrations into the void or try to make sense of the novel.

And why I try to be understanding and accepting of people’s opinion of the novel and not take it ‘personally’ (in the sense of sitting there thinking “holy shit this is how they view ME, this is what they think of ME” etc).

I was in fandoms back when they were really a place dominated by straight (homophobic) women and realism or lgbt representation wasn’t on anyone’s mind (and the occasional dude butting in to say that’s not how sex works or bottoming is experienced was ignored or told to get out). I experienced this change to fandoms being more of a lgbt space, of people becoming aware that media can shape your views of groups of people, of people becoming aware of their fetishizing of fictional gays vs. their prejudice against real life lgbt people etc.

And tbh MXTX just writes like one of those, she writes wangxian like everyone wrote their gay relationships around 2005 and earlier; clear power imbalance, clear roles and attributes that are divided into ‘manly’ and ‘feminine’, certain physical attributes (like the female self insert character aka the bottom being pretty and slight and weaker and shorter), men/the penetrating partner can’t really be raped so anything the woman/bottom tries isn’t really ‘bad’, the male love interest is forceful and self centered but ONLY because he’s so in love and since he’s emotionally stunted he has to express that through sex, men/tops NEED sex and it’s rude/mean to deny them that, the girl/bottom isn’t THAT horny or in charge of their own sexuality but wants to please their partner and what they really get out of it is the emotional aspect, decisions need to be made for them because the dude/top just knows better, the girl/bottom is childish and flirty and the guy/top suffers through it until he finally snaps and shows the girl/bottom who'sboss etc etc. (honestly homophobia and misogyny is so tightly knit in this kind of fiction, if it wasn’t so frustrating it would be very interesting).

Tbh I disagree with novel!wwx being more nuanced (despite a lot of ppl whose opinions I really respect also feeling this way), because I simply cannot seperate him from the wangxian relationship. All I see are tropes and stereotypes applied to make him ‘work’ in the context of the wangxian relationship instead of an actual personality...

To me, in CQL WWX is clearly the main character and you love his interactions with LWJ and want more of them and value them, wheras in the novel most of the time WWX plays second fiddle even when a scene should technically be about him and LWJ’s presence is incredibly suffocating, because he’s always being controlling or at the very least influencing WWX.

I also don’t feel like WWX has much of a character arc/growth. We’re essentially told he had one but the only thing that really actually changes is him hating himself a bit more and letting LWJ smash..., and I guess: he’s less independent than ever, he’s more isolated that ever...

I’ve called novel!wangxian a relationship between an abuser and his victim, because you can find evidence of that in the text. Not because I think the author wanted to portray an unhealthy gay relationship. Like you said, she was fetishizing and wrote for a similar crowd. But to me that ‘realization’ helped...I still don’t see how people can call it a masterpiece but I can at least understand hyping something you like up...

And like, badly written gay relationship or not; gay/straight,man/women, I see how people can find it hot. Exploring your sexuality through fictional characters isn’t necessarily a strictly straight girl phenomena. I probably have read fic that was exactly like this, I can’t judge anyone for it. But no one prints out the last PWP they read and goes, “this is ideal lgbt representation and nothing will ever be this good, the fact that it includes rape makes it so realistic” like????

(Is that part or an effect of the woke and purety culture? you can’t say ‘i like this book but it has flaws’ or ‘i’ve enjoyed this but it’s not up the feminism or lgbt acceptance that i preach/live’ so you have to pretend it’s flawless?)

And like, I do think novel!wangxian is a nightmare when it comes to lgbt representation and I do believe this is largely due to a cishet woman writing about gay men and fetishizing them (the fact that a lot of peoples arguments why novel!wangxian ‘is better’ boils down to ‘there’s kissing and sex’ is also pretty telling). And I am frightend and worried by some peoples response to it.

But is it really fair to see it as just that? It’s a problem sure, but that same thing happens in straight media (which I am admittedly not well versed in). Stephanie Meyer didn’t set out to write Edward Cullen to be a creep and non of the teenage girls that went crazy over him viewed it as such...Reylo fans (aside from some of them proclaiming Finn to be the real villain and saying it’s racist and misogynistic to not find Kylo Ren hot) found a way to view him threatening her as romantic and sexy, Loki fans that didn’t ship him with Thor usually fell into the camp of “he would be a perfect boyfriend” or “what if this OFC was his slave and he raped her everyday <3″... like ignoring/glorifying/romanticizing behaviours or exploring what kinks you might have through the safety of fictional characters and fictional settings isn’t JUST happening when it comes to ‘the gays’...

And not just specifically in fandom spaces either, a lot of ‘romantic’ movies include inappropriate touching, the boy/guy knowing better than the girl what she wants etc. And I absolutely do believe that that��s something that normalized these things for a lot of young girls and guys (I don’t want to get into this too much, I’ve really seen a change in the past few years, but before that it was pretty common for young boys to believe they need to keep pursuing and pressuring a girl that has said no, girls truly thought boys could die of blue balls, girls thought it was their duty as good girlfriends to let their boyfriends fuck them even when they weren’t in the mood, that they couldn’t talk about what they want in bed or what they don’t find enjoyable because ‘sex is for boys and girls get a relationship in exchange’ etc.).

And in much the same way movies have only relatively recently begun being called out for that, it’s also still pretty recently that they’re being called out for having their one queer coded character be a pedophile and a murder or whatever...Like, society as a whole becoming aware of these issues.

But do authors that publish their work with a specific target audience in mind have a responsibility to think about the effect it might have on them? (And I can already hear loud screams of ‘no way, it’s not your fault if your audience isn’t smart enough to understand that this bad thing is bad’, but I actually do believe in a way they do. That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t write whatever you want, just maybe take a look at HOW you bring your point across. (We do KNOW people are influenced by what propaganda they’re consistantly fed. I mean, you wouldn’t write a pro-drugs childrens book...) )

What if the author isn’t aware of their bias and prejudices? Or their target audience isn’t their actual audience?

And do we, society and media, judge female and male authors differently when it comes to romance and sex in fiction? (The answer is yes btw) But also, where do we draw the line at calling something ‘badly written’ and calling it toxic? Can it be both? As I’ve said before, a lot of people claim that only the physical intimacy scenes of novel!wangxian are bad, because they’re badly written and OOC, some say the book as amazingly written and only the wangxian relationship is bad because the author doesn’t know how to write gay men. In my ‘hot take’ I essentially said that’s not necessarily bad writing so much as it’s simply an (okay, unintentional) toxic relationship. And would this relationship still come across as toxic (or badly written, whichever you want) if we didn’t know the author to be a cishet woman? Or if a gay man had written it? (my personal, eloquent answer for this is: yes, but differently.)

Which was really all just a rambly way to get to my point of: it’s not just fetishizing of gay men, it’s also the homophobia and self-inserting in a safe situation.

You can literally replace WWX in the novel with a female character and it wouldn’t change a thing. The author takes such an effort into building up this power imbalance in every aspect of their life that if WWX were a heroine nothing would change in this (sexist/ancient society) setting.

(And clearly this is something that appeals to people if you look at the amount of female!WWX fics...)

Not even the sex scenes. There are maybe two allusions in all of them combined that WWX might also have a dick but like, you can’t be sure and it sure as hell doesn’t need stimulation.

(and again, that could be written as a kink...but it’s just not.)

CQL is a gay love story. MDZS at it’s core is none of that.

But I also very much agree with your ‘to each their own’, like here I am criticizing and trying to find explanations and whatever, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter why someone might like (or write) a book like this, I vastly prefer CQL!wangxian but people have their own reasons for not doing so.

The ‘problem’ really only lies in, as you said, people not being able to accept that it’s not a healthy relationship. Or claiming it to be perfect lgbt rep.

And because my brain can’t shut up today:

I also can’t stop thinking that the way some people ‘glorify’ the book as due to their age and ‘inexperience’.

When I was a pretty young kid and got into fanfiction, there was nothing but completely OOC!whump to be found in the first two fandoms I was in. And I loved it. It was YEARS later that I thought I might like to read something with the characters being...in character. What I’m trying to say, in different stages and phases of your life you might enjoy different things, for different reasons...and obviously, in that moment, you won’t think about ‘what appeals to me here/should this appeal to me/etc’.

I don’t mean inexperience as ‘sexual inexperience’ here, though of course that could be part of it, but also like, inexperience with this genre (is this the first book like this you read, or did you just read 50 in a row that all had the same unhealthy vibes?), with lgbt people and issues (do you know any lgbt people or is your only image of them either the cute boy you can’t have and don’t want to see with another girl or grown men in full kink gear in front of children during CSD? and also: do you think ‘i like this’ and that’s the end of it or do you notice how many people idolize this objectively unhealthy relationship and won’t allow critique on it...)  

I...just wanted to say thanks really.

I just can’t stop rambling apparently and I know I mostly just repeated what you said or what I already said but in longer... I just really do feel very strongly about novel!wangxian and the perception of them and have actually at times felt very personally...worried/affected, by people’s acceptance and love of them and I just... have to try and make sense of it...

[grandhotelabyss]

With all the Iris Murdoch talk around here recently, I read the novel generally said to be her masterpiece, The Sea, the Sea, and have written about it over at my main site. Above is perhaps my favorite passage from the novel, aside from all the descriptions of the eponymous sea, sea. Some footnotes or B-sides to that essay:

I was brought back to Murdoch after having read her earlier novels The Bell and A Severed Head recently because I'd been reading Bellow—Henderson the Rain King—when podcast hype introduced me to Leo Robson’s comparison of Bellow with Murdoch—their shared desire to revive the realist novel after modernism, their preeminence among mid-to-late 20th-century novelists.

Robson also lauds Murdoch for “her prescience” because in her novels, as in our era, “[g]ender is fluid, sexual desire goes in every direction. (She described herself as ‘a male homosexual in female guise’).” There is genuine fluidity of gender and desire in Murdoch, as in her model, Shakespeare, and it would be odd for a novel called The Sea, the Sea not to be liquescent in its metaphysics and psychology. But do we live in a time of gender or sexual fluidity? Is this the impression anyone really receives from the mounting list of soon-to-be legally enforced labels for every conceivable configuration of identity and desire that academia, social media, the corporations, the NGOs, and the GOs are compiling? Do we not rather live in a period of rigidity, an epoch of disabling self-consciousness, bureaucratically coerced self-definition, and brittle political self-assertion?—when, as Murdoch and Shakespeare well knew, one’s true sexual self shows best or even only in moments of half-uttered un-self-consciousness, freely revealed. Pursuant to these speculations, however, my aforementioned perusal of critic Robson’s back catalogue brought me to this passage in an essay on Dostoevsky:

Though you couldn’t exactly call Henry James macho, an element of repression, an almost masculinist sense of etiquette, was crucial to his aesthetics, and Dostoevsky was found wanting for similar reasons to George Sand, George Eliot, and Mrs Oliphant. Dostoevsky’s novels, with their exclusively male heroes consumed in acts of bearded brooding, may seem an unlikely cause for feminist revisionism. But when Angela Carter was asked to identify her favourite woman writer, she cursed herself for naming Emily Brontë (“who’s pure butch”) because, as she told a friend, “if one is talking about these qualities of sensitivity, vulnerability and perception traditionally ascribed by male critics to female novelists”, Dostoevsky was “the greatest feminine writer who’s ever lived”. (In this context, Lawrence was “infinitely more feminine than Jane Austen”; she later wrote that he made Colette look like Cassius Clay.) At one point, Raskolnikov laments, “I’m so sad, so sad! As if I was a woman... honestly!”, and it seems possible that James was simply embarrassed by the romantic tenor of Dostoevsky’s fiction, which trades in pounding hearts and burning gazes, in characters who fall into hysterics or run shrieking into the night, and in feelings of world-historical extremity (“Rarely, if ever, had anyone carried away so much venomous hatred in his heart as this man nursed against Raskolnikov”).

Despite the silliness of Carter’s categories, many of the standout Dostoevskian writers, such as Sylvia Plath, Patricia Highsmith and Joyce Carol Oates, were not only female but belonged to a national tradition on easier terms with extroversion, maximalism and Gothic psychodrama, the same tradition James had rejected in his study of Hawthorne – and in his life – and that Lawrence celebrated in his Studies in Classic American Literature.

We've been on this beat for a while here at Grand Hotel Abyss. For those keeping track, we have established that Hemingway, Lawrence, and now Dostoevsky were trans women; Colette and Austen (don't forget George Eliot) were trans men, along, I assume, with Dame Iris. Henry James was apparently not trans—he was just too incorrigibly manly in the end, unlike Hemingway. I have it on good authority that this influencer will soon claim the major western novelists not only to have been trans, but to have been, in addition, Korean… In the meantime, read Iris Murdoch!

[myriadnarratives]

Netflix’s Shadow and Bone: My Fangirling Thought-dump

Fair Warning: I’m a darklina, so leave now if you’re not going to be decent (I don’t bash on Mal, though, so you’re safe there)

So I binged Shadow and Bone without reading the books (judgmental people, leave now), and let me tell you, I love the show. True, there were some things I wish were different based on what I’ve been spoiled on about the books, but as a show in and of itself, it’s strong.

So here’s just a dump of my thoughts and fangirling (I use *chef’s kiss* a lot). And obviously, spoilers ahead.

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

WHAT I LOVED

- The storytelling, both narrative and visual, is exquisite. How the dialogue contributes to the storytelling, answering the audience’s questions and doubts clearly even before they’re brought up; how the visual arrangement contributes to informing the audience of what they need to know and how that timeline of knowing helps the audience in piecing together the story, the characterization, and the timeline; the tying in of characters’ storylines so audiences are not confused as to why we’re spending so much time watching the goings-on with a character. *super chef’s kiss*

The show is so organically unified in terms of characterization, visual media, dialogue contribution, and so much more that I just, uh, I cannot even! I LOVE THE ART OF IT!

- How the show dealt with race, identity, prejudice, politics, social acceptance, individual needs, personal wants, the desire for security and safety that mean differently for each character *raises both hands to the heavens in thanks* The show’s concepts hit close to home for me in terms of race, prejudice, mixed biological identity that informs social perceptions, the desire for belonging and safety and acceptance, and I think this show would hold a special place in my heart for its portrayal of these issues.

- How different sexualities and genders are portrayed so casually, as if it’s an everyday normal thing (as it should be).

- The Crows (of course) and how their story intersected with Alina’s, and how the storytelling (I’ll keep going on about the visual storytelling until I run out of breath) shows the intersections and develops the diverging stories to meld into each other

- How they showed how brilliant Kaz’s mind is. The visual storytelling of showing one scene without explanation, leading the audience to create their own assumptions on what Kaz was seeing, then having the scene turn out different once it has been explained later when things have unfolded *chef’s kiss*: the meeting between the Conductor and the First Army General, the hidden changing room, the lynx flush assignments 

- How Inej’s faith is portrayed neither negatively or positively; it’s just a thing that is not contrived but contributes to the plot, not some sort of moral policing inside or outside of the story.

- Mal! I heard he’s a jerk in the books, that’s why I didn’t want to read the books before watching the show. But god, his first scenes with the sparring, and the way Archie moved in that fight. Also how Mal’s overall storyline progressed, how his ties to Alina was shown, how his feelings got revealed to the audience even before it got revealed to Alina so the sincerity is not questioned. That True North thing! *heart eyes*

- How the issue of consent in the sexual sense is highlighted as important. The darkling literally asks “Are you sure?” before he proceeds. (Of course, this is very different from his take on non-sexual consent later in the show - like really, you literally put a control button on your hand to control her powers! Dude...)

- The exploration of Alina’s overall consent and agency. They even literally have her say her lack of it when she was in the final episodes. Even Kaz shoves it in the Darkling’s face that she doesn’t want to be a captive anymore. And throughout the show, the thought processes behind her decisions are clearly communicated, giving her agency a lot more weight as the audience can understand and sympathize with her decisions. And she’s not just a “victim” of the story; she pushes the story along with her actions, from her decision to burn the maps so that she could come with Mal, to her childhood decision to cheat the Grisha test, to something as visually simple (yet strongly narrative-affecting) as choosing the left or right path in Baghra’s escape route.

- The exploration of want. What each character wants, how one want like “security” could mean an entirely different thing for each character (i.e. the Darkling’s want of security for the Grisha, Alina’s want of security for herself, Inej’s want of security in the form of freedom, etc.). The show, being well-written, is a smorgasbord of academic analysis. Again, if I haven’t said it yet, I LOVE THE ART OF IT!

- NINA!!! God, I really like how the actress looks! There’s just something about her face that I really, really like. And then there’s Nina’s lines, the delivery, the attitude *chef’s kiss* One caveat though: I wish she wasn’t made to say “Please” when she was hanging off the ice ledge. Even though she had already warmed up to Matthias (and him to her), I would have wanted the scene to be a clash of his pride and her dignity: just like in the ship earlier, her not submitting even to his kindness (sincere or otherwise), and him having a moral crisis on helping a “witch.”

- Genya’s hand-to-hand fight *absolutely beautiful*

- The overall fight choreographies. It’s not just people punching each other and brawling; the jiu-jitsu locks and judo throws hold a special place in my practitioner’s heart, and the fights look really good, either it be for the women (Hello, Genya and Inej) or the men (Mal and Aleksander’s fight looked so different from usual brawls because of the throws).

- How the different Grishas, even the usually non-combat ones, can weaponize their abilities: Healers can, obviously, break bones; Heartrenders can stop your heart; and even the Sun Summoner can blind you.

- Jesper and Milo the goat. “Grab the goat. Hug the goat. Shut the fuck up.” And how Jesper tearfully parted with Milo LOL

- How Alina just climbed right into the get away carriage’s literal trunk. LOL!

- Kaz and the Darkling meeting. I know it’s not in the books (they’re not even in the same trilogy/duology), so having these two characters with so much gravitas meet and actually verbally spar is *chef’s kiss* 

- Inej’s first kill is to save Kaz *heart eyes*

- The Darkling’s humor! “Yes, David?” and “I’ll have to give that speech again” were hilarious!

Of course, there’s many more, generally because of how they contribute to, again, the visual and narrative storytelling and the characterizations and the plot progression and, ugh, I'll stop now or else I'll just keep going on about how much I love how this show was crafted.

NEUTRAL

- I heard that Alina was supposed to be funny in the books, but apart from the “No pressure” and “My tailbone is killing me” lines, there wasn’t really much of that humor in there--most of the humor came from Jesper’s scenes or Mal’s friends. Honestly, I think the show Alina fits the story, so I don’t really care if her humor is not as evident.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE

- Gosh, Netflix and the showrunners really know how to market the show. They were right when they said the first step is to cast Ben Barnes. Then the focus on the General/Darkling and Alina’s story and relationship, that sort of dark and brooding archetype getting with the green and pure protagonist, is so delicious. But of course, endgame is not meant to be. The Darkling is a manipulative, controlling, toxic person, and should be nowhere near Alina if not on equal ground. I just wish they didn't put that much focus on it in the marketing (i.e. the extra clips distributed to media sources) to make it seem like darklina could happen, especially with the story changes the show was reportedly doing. Oh well, that’s what fanfiction is for. And I guess there’s a chance for redemption in the following season? *puts on clown nose*

MY QUESTIONS AND...WISHES?

So since the show has changed the story quite a bit from the books, I'm so stoked to see where the characters’ stories lead to. I’m sure there would be similarities to the books (Nikolai and Weylan would show up, for sure), but there would be a lot of changes, I'm sure (Alina’s a Saint now, so how would that affect her life on the run and her relationship with Mal? There’s no great reveal for Aleksander’s name, so perhaps he doesn’t die? At least not that way?).

- I wish we’d see more of that internal/thought connection the Darkling and Alina seemed to have. And I wish they’d highlight further the idea of balancing, of being the only two in the world, and of how each needs/complements the other in terms of power. I just really wish they’d explore more darklina, and perhaps have it open to have a darklina ending (I’m not holding my breath for that one at all, but hey, membership to clownverse is free). At the very least, would there be a change in the Darkling’s ending (does he get stuck in the tree)? Does he get a redemption arc? Would he utter the “I do not repent” line? Would Alina and him have the shared connection, I-can-see-you-even-if-you’re-far-away bond? Would Alina somehow forgive him (hopefully only if he has changed and is not controlling and toxic anymore)? Would Alina and him have a showdown as he tries to expand the fold and she tries to close it? He has command of even the volcra now, so what would that mean for Alina’s side? Does she get an army, too? Maybe there’d be creatures of light, too? Perhaps other animal amplifiers?

- Now that Mal and Alina have more or less confessed to each other and ended up together, what would be the next hurdle in their relationship? They can’t just stay static, after all, otherwise the story of their relationship won’t be a good narrative. Season 1 touched on Mal’s fear of the Grisha (with Alina literally asking him out loud), so perhaps as Alina’s powers grow, Mal’s discomfort with her powers would show more (I hope the show doesn’t make Alina do a Slip-into-the-Darkside trope, or at least not too much to the detriment of her agency and core characterization)? Or perhaps going from that conversation with the Darkling and Mal, when Aleksander seemed to have gotten under Mal’s skin when he pointed out that due to their immortality, Aleks and Alina are endgame: maybe Mal would have that rivalry with the Darkling again and, considering Alina’s kind of psychic bond to Aleks (if they add that in), would feel that Alina might choose the Darkling in the end? I just hope the characters aren’t reduced to stereotypes of 1-girl-2-guys-and-girl-can’t-choose love triangle. Even season 1 explicitly had Alina cut off ties with Mal first (because she mistakenly thought he didn’t want anything to do with her anymore since he’s not replying to her letters) before she went to the Darkling romantically.

- What’s next for the Crows? Would Inej eventually go to Sankta Alina? Perhaps the Ice Court heist is next for the Crows. Nikolai has to show up some time, right? How would that tie in with Alina’s storyline?

I have a lot of other questions on what happens to the characters and the overall story, and I'm really glad that the show has diverged from the books to an extent that a lot of things could be possible. I hope Season 2 does happen, and I hope it’s as good as Season 1, especially since COVID is still happening and filming and filming options are limited. If Season 2 does happen, I hope it gets release soon :P

[jarchmarto]

Some Thoughts™️ I’ve been kicking around in my head for a while... (sorry if it’s not coherent)

I’ve been on Tumblr for a while now. I’ve seen the rise and fall of many fandoms. Been a part of those rises and falls, even. And, from what I’ve seen, it’s always the same - some piece of content gets wildly popular for a few years, people (whether they consume that content or not) get annoyed, and then that content becomes - drumroll please - cringy!

And I really hope that doesn’t happen with TMA.

I’m already seeing signs of it starting - small ones, but they’re there nonetheless. The joke about “everyone became a TMA blog overnight.” The fact that TMA is trending every time a new episode comes out. People making jokes about “I’m not in the TMA fandom, but I hope they’re doing alright.”

I’ve seen this before - SuperWhoLock, Homestuck, Undertale, Steven Universe - and I’ll see it again. And sure, there are valid reasons that people don’t like content. If you’re scrolling through your dash and all you see are posts from something you have not consumed or have no desire to, it can be annoying! Sometimes content is problematic and people are too swept up in the hype/too ignorant to recognize that! Sometimes the people who like the content are just so awful/annoying/whatever that the content becomes tarnished because of its fanbase.

But please, if this does happen with TMA, don’t be so quick to “cancel” it or whatever. Remember why you love it so much - the characters, the relationships, the story, the writing. It’s probably inspired you to make art! Or to write fanfic! Or to theorize about what’s gonna happen next! Or maybe you want to create the next most amazing audio drama!

Personally, I love TMA so much because as a writer myself, I am so thrilled to hear such a well-crafted story being presented to us. THIS ENTIRE GODDAMN SHOW WAS PLANNED OUT BEFORE JONNY WROTE IT. That shit takes COMMITMENT! It takes TIME! And it’s SO CREATIVE AND FRESH in a sea of underwhelming content! (Particularly the bad rep the horror genre has, from its treatment of women, POC, and LGBT+ characters to even just those shitty horror movies you watch only to make fun of). I never thought I would like horror, and now it’s one of my favorite genres to write in, all because of TMA.

And I also know that, even though Jonny and Alex have been warning us that this show will not have a happy ending, some people are clinging onto that hope. Trust me, I want to, too. But no matter how it ends up, some people are going to be upset, and that could very well contribute to TMA becoming “cringe.” They might say it’s “Bury Your Gays” if any of the LGBT+ characters end up dying (or something similar to death... again, personally, I think death is too... simple of an ending, for lack of a better word). Depending on what kinds of trauma the characters go through, some people might say that the way the story ends up erases that trauma. I’m sure there are other potential arguments that could come up, but those are the ones I’m thinking of off the top of my head because I know those are common things that people look out for because unfortunately, they are all too common. But, like I said earlier, Jonny has had this all planned out. He’s an EXCELLENT storyteller, and I’m sure he knows enough about the fanbase to know what would be satisfying for us. I know that not everyone will be happy with how it turns out, but look at what we have so far. We have PLENTY of canon LGBT+ characters, so even if some of them end up dying, that’s not Bury Your Gays. We’ve seen how different kinds of trauma have been handled, both for better AND for worse, and the times characters have handled their traumas poorly have been written that way intentionally to show that’s not how trauma should be handled. We have had consistent characterization and development of all of the core characters from the time they’ve been introduced, so no matter what ends up happening, I have faith that it won’t be for shock value - it’ll be the completion of those characters’ arcs and what they’ve been hurtling toward since the very first episode.

TL;DR, as we approach the end of TMA (the end of wildly popular pieces of content usually being when they start to be “assigned cringe by tumblr”), PLEASE remember why you love this show and how it’s helped you emotionally and artistically. It’s genuinely one of the most well-crafted pieces of media out there today, and I would be devestated if people start to hate on it as it draws to a close.

Also, this isn’t a call for people to debate with me. I’ve tried to be as uncontroversial as I could, but I know tumblr. I know if this post is seen by a lot of people, someone’s gonna get pissed over it. I’m not making this post to spark some controversy. If you want to reblog, please do, but if you don’t have anything beneficial to add, I will not interact.

[lamujerarana]

Ace/Aro Representation in Popular Media: A Reference Guide

NOVELS

THE GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO VICE AND VIRTUE AND THE LADY’S GUIDE TO PETTICOATS AND PIRACY BY MACKENZI LEE 

REPRESENTATION: Felicity Montague, a supporting character in the first book and the main character of the second, is openly aroace. There’s a lot of queer rep in these books apart from Felicity -- her brother, the main character of the first book, is bi, and there are also gay and lesbian characters.

PLOT: Felicity is a white, British teen girl who is dead set on becoming a doctor in the 1700s, despite opposition on all sides, both from her family and the misogynist men who control the medical establishment, and she is also busy navigating a world where her value as a person is equated with her ability to marry and have children, despite the fact that she has no desire to do either.

SAWKILL GIRLS BY CLAIRE LEGRAND  

REPRESENTATION: Zoey, one of the three main characters, is ace, black, and a teen girl. The other two protagonists, Marion and Val, are also openly queer. 

PLOT: Teen girls keep mysteriously vanishing without a trace from Sawkill Island and no one seems to be doing anything about it. Zoey, the daughter of the local sheriff, starts her own investigation after her best friend disappears. Not to spoil too much, but the plot involves monsters, a terrible curse, and magic.

EVERY HEART A DOORWAY BY SEANAN MCGUIRE

REPRESENTATION: The main character, Nancy, is an ace white girl. The Wayward Children series as a whole has tons of queer rep, including trans and lesbian characters. The author, Seanan McGuire, is demisexual and biromantic.

PLOT: Nancy fell through a doorway into a magical world, but now she’s back home, and she is having difficulty adjusting. Her parents send her to a boarding school for children who have had similar experiences, but then someone begins murdering Nancy’s classmates in grisly ways.

PROTECTOR OF THE SMALL SERIES BY TAMORA PIERCE

REPRESENTATION: The main character, Keladry of Mindelan, is an aro white girl.

PLOT: The series follows the struggles and adventures of Keladry, one of the first women to be allowed to train to be a knight, beginning when she is ten years old.

THE CIRCLE OF MAGIC SERIES BY TAMORA PIERCE

REPRESENTATION: Sandry, one of the main characters, is an ace white girl. There’s other queer rep in this series -- Daja is a black lesbian.

PLOT: Follows the adventures of four young mages, as they learn how to use and control their powers.

THE SHADOWHUNTER CHRONICLES BY CASSANDRA CLARE

REPRESENTATION: One of the supporting characters, Raphael Santiago, is an aroace Mexican vampire. The most explicit discussion of Raphael’s aroaceness happens in the short story “Son of the Dawn” in the upcoming Ghosts of the Shadow Market anthology (he specifically mentions being completely uninterested in romance) and in the novel The Red Scrolls of Magic, where he describes his sexual orientation as “not interested.”

PLOT: When fifteen-year-old Clary Fray heads out to the Pandemonium Club in New York City, she hardly expects to witness a murder — much less a murder committed by three teenagers covered with strange tattoos and brandishing bizarre weapons. Clary knows she should call the police, but it’s hard to explain a murder when the body disappears into thin air and the murderers are invisible to everyone but Clary. Equally startled by her ability to see them, the murderers explain themselves as Shadowhunters: a secret tribe of warriors dedicated to ridding the earth of demons. Within twenty-four hours, Clary’s mother disappears and Clary herself is almost killed by a grotesque demon.But why would demons be interested in ordinary mundanes like Clary and her mother? And how did Clary suddenly get the Sight? The Shadowhunters would like to know….

TASH HEARTS TOLSTOY BY KATHRYN ORMSBEE

REPRESENTATION: The main character, Tash, is an alloromantic ace woman.

PLOT: An ace coming-of-age story. Tash’s web series, based on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, becomes unexpectedly popular, and she must navigate her newfound fame and the difficulties of her crush on a fellow YouTuber. 

LET’S TALK ABOUT LOVE BY CLAIRE KANN

REPRESENTATION: Alice, the main character, is bi, ace, black, and a woman. 

PLOT: Alice’s girlfriend dumps her (because she finds out Alice is ace) right before summer break, and she decides that she’s through with dating...until she meets a boy named Takumi.

COMIC BOOKS

RAVEN: THE PIRATE PRINCESS BY JEREMY WHITLEY

REPRESENTATION: Jayla Cooke, a secondary character, is a black, autistic, aroace woman. Nearly every character in this series is openly queer.

PLOT: Raven Xingtao, pirate princess, cobbles together a pirate crew composed entirely of women in order to gain revenge against her brothers, who stole her inheritance away from her.

JUGHEAD BY CHIP ZDARSKY

REPRESENTATION: This is the series that establishes that Jughead Jones is aroace.

PLOT: Riverdale High provides a quality education and quality hot lunches, but when one of those is tampered with, Jughead Jones swears vengeance! 

THE MOVEMENT BY GAIL SIMONE

REPRESENTATION: Roshanna Chatterji, one of the main characters, is a canonically ace Indian-American woman (I suspect she’s aro as well, but that’s not explicitly confirmed).

PLOT: The young heroes of The Movement rise up to take back the dirty streets of Coral City. But when one of their own is captured by the police, it’s Coral City’s finest against the citizens they have neglected to protect.

TELEVISION

SHADOWHUNTERS

REPRESENTATION: One of the supporting characters, Raphael Santiago, is an ace Mexican vampire.

PLOT: Based on Cassandra Clare's bestselling young adult fantasy book series, "The Mortal Instruments," Shadowhunters follows a group of human-angel hybrids who fight to protect their world by hunting down demons. With warlocks, vampires, werewolves, and ominous threats at every turn, the Shadowhunters must lean on each other and their abilities to keep the darkness at bay.

SIRENS

REPRESENTATION: Voodoo, one of the secondary characters, is a white asexual woman. 

PLOT: The series follows the work lives of three Chicago EMT paramedics with the Eminent Ambulance Company and the unusual—often crude or humorous—situations and people in need of their assistance.

BOJACK HORSEMAN

REPRESENTATION: Todd Chavez, one of the supporting characters, is an asexual Latino man.

PLOT: BoJack Horseman, the washed-up star of the 1990s sitcom Horsin' Around, plans his big return to celebrity relevance with a tell-all autobiography to be written by his ghostwriter Diane Nguyen. BoJack also has to contend with the demands of his agent and on-again-off-again girlfriend Princess Carolyn, the misguided antics of his freeloading roommate Todd Chavez, and his friend and rival Mr. Peanutbutter.

If anyone knows of any others, please share! 

[abigailnussbaum]

Legends of Tomorrow, Season 5

I was going to write weekly reviews of this season, and then with one thing and another ended up dropping it in the spring (hey, remember when there was so much weekly TV that you couldn’t keep up with all your shows? Wonder how long it’ll be before that happens again). I caught up with the entire season this weekend, and honestly, that feels like a better standpoint from which to write about it - I think if I’d stuck with weekly reviews, I would have ended up saying the same thing week after week.

A couple of years ago, Emily VanDerWerff suggested that there is a standard lifecycle for high-concept, large ensemble, off-the-wall genre shows: 

Season 1: still figuring this whole thing out 

Season 2: now we’re cooking with oil 

Season 3: we can do anything! 

Season 4: whoops, no, we’ve gotten a bit over our skis here 

Season 5: ??? 

Legends, I think, encapsulates this progression to a T. The show’s second and third seasons were some of the best and most exciting genre storytelling on television, but last year was a bit of a mess. That’s not entirely the writers’ fault - Nick Zano’s limited availability due to family obligations forced them to beef up the Time Bureau’s role in the season, and their desire to keep Maisie Richardson-Sellers on board even after Amaya’s story had wrapped up led them to create a character, Charlie, who had no real reason for being on the Waverider. But a lot of it was self-inflicted. The cast was too unwieldy, the Time Bureau story seemed designed to expose the thin spots in the show’s self-presentation as irreverent but fundamentally compassionate (it certainly didn’t help that the decision to rewrite Nate Sr. into a good guy was made almost at the last minute, requiring the entirely unconvincing argument that forcing magical creatures to perform in a circus act is somehow morally superior to forcing them to be secret agents), and some of the character choices felt entirely parachuted in (Zari/Nate, anyone?).

Season five, therefore, had a lot of clean up work to do, while also demonstrating that the Legends formula had more life in it than just those two transcendent early seasons. And while this is undeniably a more successful, more enjoyable season than the one preceding it (which also does a great deal to address some of the show’s structural issues, chiefly the overlarge cast), I also can’t help but notice that instead of finding new places for the show to go, what the fifth season delivers instead is a hodgepodge of story elements from seasons two and three. So we’ve got a mystical object that can rewrite reality (The Loom of Fate vs. season two′s The Spear of Destiny); a token hunt across time and space in which the Legends face off against the estranged relatives of one of their members (the totems in season three vs. the search for the pieces of the loom, Amaya’s evil granddaughter vs. Charlie’s evil sisters); a late season loss that forces our characters into a nightmarish alternate reality in which they don’t even remember who they are (the Legion of Evil rewriting the Legends’ lives to make them ordinary and unsatisfying vs. being stuck in TV shows in a world run by the Fates); which comes about because of a betrayal by a member of the team (Charlie in season five, Mick in season two) whose eventual return to the fold enables to Legends to win in the end. There’s even an abandoned, abused girl who has turned evil, and has to be won back to the side of good through the offer of true companionship and understanding (Nora Darhk vs. Astra Logue).

This isn’t exactly a bad thing - a lot of these storytelling beats cut to the very core of what Legends is and what makes it work, so it’s not necessarily wrong for the show to repeat them. And even if the basic structure is the same, Legends just keeps getting more adventurous in how it delivers that structure. I’ve already written about how well done the season’s mockumentary episode was, and the same can be said for the 80s slasher movie riff, the Mr. Rogers parody, and of course, “The One Where We’re Trapped on TV”. Like the multiple universe episode in season four, these are things the show couldn’t have done when it was just a few seasons old, and they’re proof that whatever other issues it has, Legends is constantly pushing the envelope in terms of the kind of tropes and genres it can graft onto a superhero template. That said, there’s a very real possibility that this is all the show will ever be - a standard story template, enlivened by increasingly gonzo riffs on existing tropes.

Some more thoughts on where the season worked and where it didn’t below.

THE GOOD:

I really hated the decision to make Nora a fairy godmother in season four, not least because it felt like yet another way of infantilizing her (it certainly didn’t help that it was a choice she was forced into, and that she spent the remainder of the season catering to the every whim of Gary, a character I still have very mixed feelings towards). But season five really reclaims that choice. Having Nora embrace the fairy godmother life as a way of both helping children and working through her own issues makes a lot of sense, and the character feels happier and more confident than we’ve ever seen her (certainly a step up from how gloomy she was last season). I even like the wardrobe change - once the fairy godmother dress was ditched except for specific occasions, having Nora dress all in teal is a nice touch, and certainly an improvement over her rather boring season four wardrobe. I still think Legends missed a lot in how it handled Nora last season (I will never stop being annoyed that she and Sara didn’t develop a deeper friendship, given how similar their life trajectories have been), but this was a good way of righting the ship, even in a very limited timeframe.

I already mentioned this in the episode review, but watching the rest of the season really cemented my admiration for how quickly the show embeds Behrad into the crew, and makes it feel as if he’s always been there. That’s all the more impressive given that Behrad doesn’t really get an arc in season five. Most of that storytelling energy goes to establish Zari 2.0, and Behrad is, of course, absent for much of the latter half of the season. And yet he feels almost instantly like a fully-rounded character who is integral to the show, so much so that you’re heartbroken by his death (and convinced that it will be rolled back, even though Zari could easily take over his superpower). That’s really excellent work by both the writers and Shayan Sobhian.

I was a bit nervous when Zari 2.0 was introduced, because replacing a heroic, cool-girl-coded, nobly self-sacrificing character with a version of herself who is extremely femme-coded and obsessed with things like fashion and social media is the sort of move that is ripe for easy misogynistic point-scoring in the guise of feminism - of course the Zari who is good with machines and eats donuts is superior to the one who has a perfume line and spends hours in the bathroom every morning! But the show very quickly established that Zari, though certainly not without her flaws, is awesome in any guise, and it did so without trying to change her into “our” Zari, eventually even establishing that they are two completely different people, each with a right to exist (though not simultaneously, unfortunately). I get why the show didn’t keep both Zaris around - it would be asking a lot of Tala Ashe to play two characters, much of the time against herself, not to mention a production nightmare - but I appreciate that it didn’t decide that Zari 2.0 was the lesser version. (Also a nice touch: Behrad, though obviously fond of Zari 1.0, doesn’t think of her as “his” sister, even though to us she’s the “real” version of the character.)

Similarly, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when Ava moved to the Waverider full time - obviously, it would be an improvement on her playing a tinpot fascist at the Time Bureau while the show pretended that this wouldn’t really bother Sara, but at the same time Sara and Ava are both so similar in their functions and abilities that I worried they’d step on each other’s shoes. Instead, the show leaned into their differences and made the season about Ava finding her place as captain of the Waverider, a role she fills in very different ways than Sara while still doing a good job at it. It also allowed her to expand her point of view a little - bonding with Zari 2.0, or reaching out to Astra, both things that would have been outside of her comfort zone in the past. Obviously, this is setup for Ava taking over as captain in season six now that Sara has been abducted (though I hope not for very long - Legends isn’t Legends without Sara), but good on the show for taking the time to bring Ava to a point where she’s ready for this, and in a different way from Sara.

And speaking of looking ahead, the show takes the wise step of thinning out its cast. Personally, I would have kept Ray, Nora, and Mona and written off Constantine and Nate (and possibly also Gary), but either way, it’s good that the writers realized their cast was getting unwieldy. I was concerned, for example, that the show figuring out what to do with Charlie and giving her an elaborate backstory was a sign that she would stay on, but instead she leaves once that story is resolved. And I think that in an earlier season, Astra would have been positioned to stay on the Waverider after the end of the season, but instead she’s clearly a one-off character, who goes off to live her own life once the show has brought her story to a satisfying conclusion. (This also, however, means that Legends has written off two black women in a single season, not to mention Mona, and in fact has only one WOC main character remaining; I hope that’s something season six addresses.)

THE BAD:

I realize that I am very much in the minority on this, but I’m sorry: John Constantine does not belong on Legends of Tomorrow, and certainly not as a main character. Season five feels, in fact, like a perfect demonstration of this simple truth. The early parts of the season feel like two different shows, the Legends show and the Constantine show, that happen to have some points of intersection and shared characters. And even once those storylines converge, it’s notable how John’s quest for the Loom of Fate very quickly becomes Astra’s quest for it, and then Charlie’s, and how they both feel more grounded in that story and more affected by it than he was. What it comes down to, once again, is that John Constantine is a character who can’t change, and putting him on a show that is all about change and growth can’t help but feel unsatisfying for both the character and the show. Season five tries to suggest that change is possible for him - he finally comes clean with Astra and make a real apology to her; he admits that his pursuit of magic has cost him relationships and a chance at happiness; he reaches out to his friends when he thinks his life is about to end; he even quits smoking. But the character just doesn’t have that much give in it. To be John Constantine, he has to be the cynical, arrogant, self-destructive fuck-up we’ve always known. On a show like Legends of Tomorrow, that can work in small doses, but not as the main character that Constantine has been positioned as.

Though I’m glad that the show figured out something to do with Charlie before writing her off, the similarities between her story and Mick’s can’t help but shed a light on how poorly thought out this character has been, and how much her season five story is parachuted in. When Mick betrays the team at the end of season two, it’s barely a season after they’d put him off the ship for being perennially untrustworthy, leading to him becoming their nemesis. They only take him back out of pity for the decades of torture he suffered, and sympathy for the loss of his only friend, Captain Cold. His betrayal is a direct outcome of those cracks in the relationship - he does it because he wants to live in a world where he hasn’t been hurt or hurt others, and where his friend is still alive. When he changes his mind at the end of the season, it’s a culmination of two seasons of character growth, the realization that holding on to the pain in his life is worth it if it means he gets to keep the friendships he formed on the Waverider, and to continue to grow as a person - as expressed by his choice to put Snart back in his timeline, where he will become a better person (and eventually inspire Mick to do the same) but will also die. Charlie’s very similar storyline just doesn’t have this kind of depth. Neither her heel turn nor her face turn feel particularly earned, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that it took the writers so long to figure out who this character even was.

For a season of Legends, this was an awfully heteronormative stretch of episodes. Sure, Sara and Ava are still center stage, and that’s fantastic. But every other romantic relationship in the season, and there are quite a few of them, is a straight one. You might blame this on the fact that season five is a housecleaning season, wrapping up dangling storylines like Ray/Nora or Nate/Zari. But even the new characters like Behrad or Lita express only opposite-sex attraction (I guess Astra never demonstrates a preference). I mean, if you give John Constantine two different love interests in a single season and they’re both women, surely something has gone terribly wrong?

And speaking of John Constantine’s love interests, is putting him together with Zari meant to make the old her’s romance with Nate look organic and true to the characters in comparison? Because I can’t think of another reason for it. Do not want.

THE UGLY:

Words cannot express how much I hate the Damien Darhk episode. Not all of it, obviously - the Mr. Rogers riff, as I said, is pretty good (and pays off handsomely later in the season), and pretty much all the Ray/Nora stuff, especially the moment where she realizes she’s not going to lie to her father about the man she loves and the life she’s chosen, are golden. But it is simply mind-boggling that after two seasons in which Nora was firmly established as the survivor of a lifetime of abuse, Legends takes an entire hour to not only rehabilitate Damien, but pretend that he was always a loving father who just made some mistakes. For crying out loud, the man fed his daughter to a demon in order to gain power for himself. It was always an interesting wrinkle in his character that he clearly saw himself as a loving, protective parent, and was even capable of some level of self-sacrifice on Nora’s behalf, but I had assumed that the show realized this was at least partly a self-serving lie. To discover that we’re actually meant to think that one act of sacrifice cancels out a lifetime of abuse is nauseating. I wanted Nora to stand up to her father, but as a victim calling out her abuser, not a loving daughter trying to renegotiate a relationship with an overprotective parent. It certainly doesn’t help that the episode features inexplicably popular wedding story tropes, such as the groom asking the bride’s father for permission to marry her, or the father trying to keep the couple from physical intimacy before the wedding, which are gross in any context but especially so here. I suppose in the end it’s all worth it to be rid of Damien once and for all, but I was squirming with discomfort and rage throughout the entire episode.

[sleepingfancies]

We Need to Talk About SJM

I was recently anonymously asked what exactly my issue with Sarah Jane Maas is, and ended up writing what was essentially a thesis paper about it. Unfortunately, Tumblr pulled a Shitty Website move and deleted everything I wrote under the ‘read more’ tab, so I’m compiling my reasons here on a masterpost, for your reading leisure.

EDIT: Read more tab continues to not work for me, so I apologize to all of you who have to suffer through this. I’ll tag is as a long post accordingly.

Let’s get started

                                                        ***********

Reason 1: She preaches messages that no young girl needs to (or should) hear.

Granted, I know the a lot of the YA genre are adults who are no strangers to smut and aren’t phased by toxic behavior in characters. But on the same token, a lot of the YA genre is fueled by young girls age 12-20. Now I’m not going to sit here and pretend like girls in that age range aren’t reading/writing smutty fanfiction or dating. I know they do, I did, most of my friends did. But at that age, young girls are still trying to figure out who they are and who they want to be, including in terms of relationships. That’s where my problem with Maas comes in.

Maas writes, almost exclusively, toxic relationships - at best. Straight up abusive at worst. At one point in ACOTAR, I had to put the book down because I was so disgusted by what happened. Rhysand assaulted Feyre. I’m not kidding. He kissed and groped her against her will, telepathically asked whether she was wet about it, and wondered aloud what she looked like naked. The entire goal of doing this was to piss Feyre’s then-boyfriend off, and for Rhysand to assert his dominance as a Fae lord or whatever the fuck (y’know, like rapists do). Feyre was left shaking, nauseated, and scared for her life. But the worst part? It was written like this was something sexy and desirable. Literal penetration was all that stopped this from being a horrifying rape scene, and I couldn’t believe Maas wrote about it like some hot erotica. It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t cute. It was disgusting, violating, and I was furious when I read it (especially given Feyre actually ends up with Rhysand eventually. What the fuck).

In Throne of Glass - and subsequent sequels - there are couples (namely Rowan and Aelin) who quite literally spit on each other, punch each other, and bite each other. No, not “love nip” bite, I mean “I’m trying to tear your skin off” bite. But we’re meant to believe they’re endgame, meant to be, and a totally healthy relationship. Let’s not even get into emotional abuse and manipulation, because holy fuck does every single character in these books act like a goddamn villain if we were to go over that in detail. All you need to know is that “if you don’t do xyz then I’ll leave and never come back” “what made you think I cared about you? You’re nothing to me. Just kidding, I love you” and similar sentiments are rampant in these series.

While we’re here, what is up with this “mates” nonsense? Every character pairing we see by the end of the ToG series has a “mate,” and swears off everyone they’ve had before, claiming them to be “false mates.” This whole “mates” business sounds a lot like somebody desperately trying to reassure their insanely jealous partner that they don’t still have feelings for their ex. That’s not healthy! That’s not okay! Your exes helped you narrow down your search. They helped you understand yourself more and what you want (or don’t want). And y’know what? It’s okay to have happy memories with an ex. It’s okay to not hate your ex. Telling young girls that all that matters is their future husband (which erases LGBT+ girls, as well as straight women who don’t want to get married) is harmful as hell, and contributes to the idea that a girl is only “complete” when she finds her “soulmate.”

Girls 12-20 really do not need to be given the message that it’s normal - nay, romantic - for their partners to hit them, humiliate them, or assault them. You may be saying, “Clara, come on, girls know fiction isn’t reality and no girl is actually going to stand for that kind of thing in real life.” But I can’t tell you how horribly my own view of relationships was corrupted for several years after all the books I read as a tween where the protagonist had to defend her flirty boyfriend from the advances of other girls. I didn’t trust boys not to cheat on me. I didn’t trust my girl friends not to try and steal a boyfriend. I thought girls who dressed up and wore makeup and dated a lot were sluts. It took me years of conscious effort to unlearn those ideas. Fiction can and does influence the reader. So again I say: teaching girls that it’s “hot and sexy” when men literally abuse you is not a message a 12-20 year old should be hearing. Ever.

                                                     ***************

Reason 2: What exactly does Maas want her readers to be?

Y’know, Maas thinks Caelena/Aelin is a role model for young girls. But here’s a brief list of things Celery/Alien has done throughout the Throne of Glass series:

1. Tried to smash a flower pot over a girl’s head for showing interest in courting Prince Dorian. Despite said girl literally being present at the castle for that purpose and Caelena was not.

2. Very nearly murdered Dorian for absolutely fuckall reason, and then she got mad at Chaol for trying to stop her (keep in mind: Chaol and Dorian are supposed to be best friends. So like... yeah, he’s gonna come to Dorian’s defense).

3. Straight up said, “if I get bored being queen I’ll just go and conquer more lands for my kingdom.” Imperialist there much, Aelin?

This is Maas’ role model material? Half the shit she does from Heir of Fire onward could be described as “war crime” and the other half could be described as “selfish.” Maas seems to think that a shit ton of half-baked “witty” lines and a few “badass” fight scenes completely makes up for having an amoral character as the protagonist you want to flaunt around as an icon for young girls.

It would be one thing if Maas said, “I don’t want anyone to be like Celery/Alien. She’s not a good person and I want my readers to be able to identify how and why she isn’t a good person. The moral is what not to be like.” But she does the opposite and claims time and time again that Celery/Alien is some kind of feminist warrior, when in fact Celery/Alien is the very epitome of white feminism and false feminism. She’ll be all kinds of gung-ho for herself, but as soon as another woman mentions her own unique problems or lifestyles, Celery/Alien thinks she’s a “whiny bitch,” “dumb slut,” or something similar. Celery/Alien ends up looking down her nose at basically every other female character. The lack of female friendships in Maas’ books is frankly astounding.

No girl needs to be Celery/Alien. Celery/Alien is not a role model, she is not a feminist, she is not a figurehead of a well developed female character or even a compelling antihero. She’s sexist, she’s misogynistic, she has serious anger issues, she’s manipulative, she’s abusive. This is not who young girls should be looking up to.

                                                       ************

Reason 3: Maas has no place in the YA genre.

I’m not really sure I need to elaborate much on this. Let me give you a scenario:

Imagine you’re at a book signing for your fans. They’re mostly girls 15-20, so you kind of just sign their copies without thinking much about it. But then a smaller girl comes up to the table, you ask her age, and she says “I’m ten.” A 10 year old girl is standing in front of you, clutching her copy of your book where you wrote and published the scene, “he buried in to the hilt and roared. Over and over he spilled inside of her, the lightning outside flashing soft and lovely long after he stilled.”

Look me in the eye and tell me that shit is appropriate in the YA genre. At all. Ever.

You wanna write romance? Go for it. It can be cute! It can be healthy! It can be intriguing! But this? This? This is just... erotica. If you’re publishing stuff like this in the YA genre, in a book that isn’t even on the ‘tween/teen romance’ shelves, then you better be ready to take full responsibility for teaching 10 year olds what a blowjob is, what an orgasm is, what BDSM is, what a fucking foot fetish is.

I know JK Rowling isn’t the most popular right now, but even she did better than this. The first 3 Harry Potter books you can generally find on the children’s/middle grade shelves. They were cute, fun little adventures about wizards and magic and fantastic creatures. Books 4-7? Those are on the YA shelves. People are dying, magic is dangerous, fascist organizations are on the rise -- it isn’t fun for Harry anymore. It isn’t about the wonders of magic. It’s about life or death, war, and fear. So yeah, of course those book aren’t going to be on the children’s/middle grade shelves! They’re dark! They’re scary! That kind of material shouldn’t be advertised as appropriate for younger kids!

Maas never extended that courtesy. Maas took her books full of badly written erotica and plopped them down right where all the rest of the completely tame YA books went, because she wanted the sales. She didn’t care if she was exposing kids who were too young to explicit sex scenes. She never posted a disclaimer, she never posted any kind of warning on social media when the books came out. Nope. She just silently took advantage of the market knowing she’d get more sales in YA. But it has no place in YA. It’s not YA. And I don’t think I’m ever gonna be okay with that.

                                                          ***********

Reason 4: Diversity? Never heard of it!

Maas’ books are so incredibly white and straight that it’s painful. Rowan and Aelin? White and straight. Feyre? Rhysand? Chaol? Dorian? Manon? Hey, you guessed it! They’re all white and straight (despite Chaol, Dorian, and Manon being heavily LGBT+ coded for like, the entire series till the last book)!

“He looked at his friend, perhaps for the last time, and said what he had always known, from the moment they met, ‘I love you.’” (Queen of Shadows)

Hello? Sarah Jane? I’m all for male friendships, but there’s male friendships and then there’s actual romance. Chaol and Dorian are about as gay-coded as they could fucking get. And this isn’t even the only time this happens! Check this out:

“Dorian surged from his chair and dropped to his knees beside the bed. He grabbed Chaol’s hand, squeezing it as he pressed his brow against his. ‘You were dead,’ the prince said, his voice breaking. ‘I thought you were dead.’” (Queen of Shadows)

But wait, there’s more!

“‘I’m not leaving you. Not again.’

Dorian’s mouth tightened. ‘You didn’t leave, Chaol.’ He shook his head once, sending tears slipping down his cheeks. ‘You never left me.’” (Queen of Shadows)

I mean come on, Sarah!

Also, Manon. My girl Manon hated men, pretty explicitly, for the entire series. In case you don’t believe me:

“There were few sounds Manon enjoyed more than the groans of dying men.” (Heir of Fire)

Oh, and other characters even imply Manon has never had a heterosexual relationship in her fucking life. See:

“‘That golden-haired witch, Asterin...’ Aelin said. ‘She screamed Manon’s name the way I screamed yours. How can I take away somebody who means the world to someone else? Even if she is my enemy.’” (Queen of Shadows)

Tell me that’s not gay as fuck. I dare you.

Manon had a whole lot of love to give women! She was always affectionate towards other women. Particularly Elide. This is a woman who was about as lesbian as you could get. Had no interest in men, every interest in women, rejected typically expected roles for women (getting married and having kids, etc.) but guess what happened? Guess what fucking happened?

This warrior who was friends with and rode on a big fuckoff wyvern completely and totally submits to Dorian as her lover. I don’t mean that metaphorically. They literally do some BDSM shit where he’s her “master” and she “kneels to him” or whatever the fucking fuck. This entire thing pissed me off more than Chaol and Dorian being all “no homo bro,” because Maas used every possible symbol and subtext for Manon being gay, and then said “just kidding!” Her relationship with Dorian came out of nowhere. All of a sudden she was just as thirsty for mediocre dick as Aelin.

At this point I honestly have to wonder if Maas is really this ignorant or if she’s - dare I say it? - taunting her readers who have complained about the lack of LGBT+ representation. Maas has, historically, not reacted well to people criticizing her work. I would not put it beyond her at all to intentionally queer-code characters only to turn around and rip the rug out from under her readers by pairing them up in heterosexual relationships. And not only is that shitty writing, but it’s... really malicious and rude.

Of course then there’s the issues with racial representation. Again, Maas doesn’t even try. She includes 13 characters of color only to immediately kill off all of them in a suicide pact. So there’s that. Not sure I need to say more than that.

Maas knows what diversity is, but as per her famous quote, “I just don’t want to force diversity into my books.” So. Y’know. Writing a black or gay character (or!! God forbid, both black and gay!!) is asking a little too much of her, apparently. She doesn’t want to force anything as unbelievable as someone who isn’t white or straight, don’tcha know? In these books about fae people and dragons and gods fighting mortals and explicit erotica, an LGBT+ character or a character of color is high fantasy, not YA. *Sarcasm*

                                                        ************

Reason 5: The woman can’t write.

This is pretty straightforward. She cannot write. My proof? She plagiarizes the living fuck out of everything she can to avoid actually writing her own original work.

1. “You’re gonna rattle the stars.” - from Disney’s Treasure Planet

2. “The Queen Who Was Promised” - from GRRM’s ASOIAF, where Dany Targaryen is often toted as the exact same thing. Oh, and The Prince Who Was Promised prophecy in ASOIAF also mentions Azor Ahai being “the Heir of Fire” so, uh.... yeah.

3. Aelin basically being Aragorn. Lost royalty spends years as an outcast, denies their claim, teams up with elves (fae in Aelin’s case) to defeat a greater evil, becomes known as the people’s champion, falls in love with an elf (fae) and makes them their consort, crowned by the people, ends their coronation scene with a “you bow to no one” (I’m not kidding).

4. Nehemia dying for Aelin and it later being revealed that Nehemia was “grooming” Aelin to face great evil, and potentially give her life to stop it. How much you wanna bet Maas tried to give Aelin a name as close to “Harry Potter” as she could get?

5. Manon lighting a series of beacons across a mountain range to call for aid during war. I mean seriously? This is one of the most iconic scenes in Peter Jackson’s rendition of Lord of the Rings. It’s moving, it’s powerful, it’s awe-inspiring. And Maas knew it. So she just... took it. I don’t have a lot of respect for writers who can’t write their own moving scenes.

6. Kingsflame blossoms, which only bloom when the rightful monarch is on the throne. So... the White Tree of Gondor. Got it.

7. The Hand of the King being a royal court position. Like... jesus. GRRM, come get ya world-building, SJ stole it again.

8. A paralyzed Chaol has a specialized saddle made for him, because he wants more than anything to ride a horse again. GRRM! Please! She’s taking Bran Stark’s story now!

And besides all of these horribly plagiarized points, there’s nothing even slightly compelling about these books. There’s literally zero substance, and the last few books in both the ACOTAR and ToG series have been nothing but a smut-fest. Plot who? We don’t know her.

Trauma, both physical and mental, is erased at the drop of a dime (Aelin lost physical scars, Chaol’s paralysis was basically cured, series of events that should’ve left characters absolutely fucked just... didn’t phase them). The battles are rushed and sloppily written, and Maas has a particularly nasty habit of focusing on exactly the wrong people in the middle of what should be an action packed scene. Instead of showing alliances forging and plots being made behind people’s backs, instead of showing us people gearing up for battle by saying tearful goodbyes to their infants and spouses, Maas shows us Rowan and Aelin banging on a beach, or a tree, or a ship, or wherever the fuck they happen to be at that moment.

None of these characters lose jack shit. There is no sense of urgency or stakes, because we knew since Heir of Fire that Aelin and her precious uwu fae “mate” would be just fine. Why? Because nobody shipped Rowaelin as hard as Sarah Jane Maas did. Consistently the only people who suffer in these books are background characters (who, coincidentally, are almost always the characters of color and LGBT+ characters). By the end of Kingdom of Ash, literally everyone is fine. And paired off to be married, too! Because a happy ending isn’t a true happy ending if it doesn’t end with Babies Ever After and everyone in a heterosexual relationship, of course, right?

                                                        ***********

Reason 6: World-building doesn’t even go here! Sorry, she just wanted to be a part of something.

Maas’ world-building is... how do you say... shitty. New lore pops up in every book, having never been mentioned before, and is for some reason of utmost importance (but only for this book. It’ll be forgotten again as soon as it isn’t relevant). Religions who? Culture where? History what? None of these things exist in Maas’ world. None.

Now before anyone jumps down my throat with “but The World of Throne of Glass is coming out this year!!!1!1!!” let me gently establish something. Speaking as a fantasy author: if you do not have your most basic world-building - that being religion, culture, language, and history - already established, then you have no business making a “world of” book to cover all the bases your ass never bothered with in the original series.

I said what I said.

Tolkien and GRRM are masters of world-building because they spent decades working to forge their worlds before they ever put a pen to paper and wrote their stories. Not to toot my own horn, but my own fantasy series has been developing for almost 7 years now. What am I doing with it? I’m outlining governments in different societies, why people came to worship what they do, and I’m making a fucking world map on my bedroom floor (that now has cat paw prints on it, so it’s not exactly final product material anyway).

I give not a single hoot for Maas’ “The World of Throne of Glass.” She could be saying anything she wanted to and it would all just have to be canon, because she’s establishing what this world is after already finishing her series. Yes, it does piss me off, because it’s pretty obvious she didn’t have a clue what her world was, or who was who, or why things were the way they were. She made shit up as she went along, nothing more. There was no grand scheme. There was no planning, and it shows.

                                                       ***********

TL;DR: I have a lot of issues with Sarah J Maas’ writing, including her world-building and handling of diversity. But most of all I despise the potential impact she has on the YA genre and on the young girls reading her work. They deserve better than this. They deserve better than Sarah Jane Maas.

[captnjacksparrow]

Is it true that Kishi’s wife is similar to Sakura. And I am thinking what if Kishi is gay but he hides it and he doesn’t love his wife so he wrote Sakura based on her

But it seems that he dismissed that theory later in another interview. Also if Sakura was Kishi's wife then why couldn't he make N/aruS@ku as endgame??? I mean Kishi knew that he was going to pair up Hinata with Naruto right from Pain Arc... If that's the case, why make Sakura to confess fakely and then dismiss their bond entirely for the rest of the Manga???

So, this Sakura was based on his Wife is just a theory. He never explicitly mentioned it... He infact, made Minato to say Sakura resembles a bit like Sakura in order to spite NH.

As for Kishi being Gay.... ***Giggling***

In Chinese novels, there is this genre called Harem which is usually written by Male Writers. They are veeeery popular among dudebros over there.

Those type of Genres usually goes like this... Like How a Poor UwU innocent boy who was abandoned, rejected and ostracized by the bullies has risen up to seize the position of power and in the process how he wins over inordinate number of Gals’ hearts because of... Yooo!!!! Toxic Masculinity.... 

And If you want a close to Western Equivalent of such Genre... Take James Bond movies. He is cool, rich, has gadgets and gets to bang a sexy femme fatale WITHOUT FAIL in every one of his movies. 

To give you a picture,

ALT

Pic from Scum Villain Self Saving System - Anime.

This is how your typical Harem novel Protagonist looks like. Sitting on a Throne, looking down on someone, surrounded by bimbos who wear skimpy costumes. He got Fuck load of Spiritual Power and lots of Gals.... It’s everything a guy ever wants in his (wet) dreams and these type of genre fuels Male Power and Sexual Fantasy. The Protagonists are usually termed as “Stallion”. And if you want to know more about this, Check this hilarious Reddit thread here. [[’Papapa’ means euphemism for Sex in Chinese]]

So, it’s A Typical Media for dudes to self-insert. 

This kind of thing exists in our Naruto Manga too.

Jiraiya was seen surrounded by Girls.

Here, Filippo, the guy from Mario Manga was drawn very similar Stallion pose. 

My boy Charasuke too....

And that’s why Naruto created Harem No Jutsu in order to knock out Men.

Because Men are horny for these stuffs and Naruto used their desire against them to knock them out.

But What Kishimoto really did in Naruto???

He ended up drawing Naked Sasuke, Naked Sai and these bunch of Naked men... 

+

Add the fact that, Naruto is Kishi’s Self-Insert character and Naruto practiced Naked men more than Rasengan

+

Sexualization of Sasuke and sometimes Sai.... 

+

Made Sexualized Sasuke to seductively hug Naruto (as Kishimoto).

+

Made Sasuke look alike Sai to describe about Naruto’s Man Part several times.

+

Sakura and Hinata not being sexualized which is contrast to every other Mangakas who drew women characters in a Horny way.

Sigh.....

I mean, Instead of Giving “Stallion” contents for Dudebros by sensualizing girls & oozing out Masculinity just like how 99% of media does to women characters... He ended up Giving Yaoi contents for Girls as well as for Guys who are into men by making Sasuke to parade with his open chest for 100 Chapters & this Reverse Harem no Jutsu.. And he was regularly indulging them for 600+ Chapters... 

LOL... I don’t know if Kish is a Gay and I am not going to indulge myself in it... But his taste and way of writing all points to him being one.

[gav-san]

The Hollow Kingdom

Review and Defense of a classic fantasy favorite.

Warning: Below is a large explanation that spoils some upcoming projects and talks about things you may be uncomfortable with, but are important to talk about. Also, spoilers of the book. 

Please consider reading the book!

There’s a stage that man girls go through, likely after watching the 1986 Labyrinth. I like to call it the ‘Goblin King Craze’. After all, few things match the childhood spectacle of David Bowie dancing in very tight pants with his cohort of bumbling goblins, coupled with the magic of Jim Henson. 

I can imagine many of you who have watched this movie, had like me, also longed for the imagination and craze in your own life, or at least something similar in fiction.  

Cue being a teenager, and discovering The Hollow Kingdom (published 2003), but mere chance in your hometown library. 

Here is the Goodreads summary: “In nineteenth-century England, a powerful sorcerer and King of the Goblins chooses Kate, the elder of two orphan girls recently arrived at their ancestral home, Hallow Hill, to become his bride and queen...”

It’s no surprise that I ended up loving this book. 

This book is generally under a YA fiction/fantasy tag. It has won various awards, including the 2004 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature. It’s well-written, relatable to a young woman, and full of intelligent moments and clever thinking. The characters are fully-fledged, as are the societies they live in. 

It’s not a perfect book. Sometimes the pacing and choice of focus can be inconsistent, and sometimes the timing and structure are not as strong as they could be. Its lack of care for developing romance can cause problems with the reviewers, had they been expecting a romance.

Now let’s chat a bit. As a teenager, it was an eye open experience to discover a book that didn’t pander another tale of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ once again. Meaning, an easy tale that force-fed me obvious morals, and condescended to my 'age-level’. And, I thought, it was better to talk about difficult things then pretend they didn’t exist.

And so time passed, the internet grew, and the Me Too movement rolled along, said hi, and sorta gave a half-hearted wave as it did so. Now, much older, I have finally had time to work on some projects that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I do fanfic’s as a writing exercise, but my true love is illustrating stories on the webtoon platform. I have a series called ‘Vixen’ out that has been a trial run of sorts to sharpen my skills and get me back on track.

One of the long-running projects that I’ve desperately wanted to illustrate for a long time is ‘The Hollow Kingdom’. I am only in the beginning steps and have yet to contact the author or any of the other relevant sources. This research stage is mostly an exploration to see if this is even possible, and how it would be done. 

As I’ve delved into the internet to see how my old favorite has aged... I was a bit startled.

Despite its initial accolades around 2018, when a lot of Hollywood was being stripped and scattered, and there were many accusations worldwide of prominent figures accused of sexual abuse, perhaps it was predictable that a complicated book that does not deal with a traditional happy ending started becoming maligned in general. And as social media, as a rule, tends to ignore content in favor of a thoughtful readthrough, I felt the need to go reread and reassess my POV.

So I did.

And I still enjoyed the book. As did the roughly 10,000 others who rated it 4 stars and above.

But to be fair, here are some reviews from other who didn’t:

----

1. The end is some sort of apologia for rape, abduction, and Stockholm Syndrome.

2. I expect that when I’m told said female protagonist is intelligent for her to actually be intelligent, like you know, by giving her any ounce of sense, resourcefulness, or deductive skills. 

3. (The Goblin King)...seriously tries to justify his actions by saying he doesn’t have a choice...

4. I also did not like the pointless slaughtering of animals…which really if you think about it made no sense…why would the monkey and wolf not be threats and be all for following kate but not the bear or the snakes…

5. It didn't help that I was well aware of how the main character got tricked. I mean, if her guardian believed her and was concerned for her sister why would still keep Kate locked up in her room and offer freedom from the room in exchange for info on goblins?

6. A young woman is coerced into marrying the Goblin King, Lord of the Hollow Kingdom.

7. What I'm trying to get across is that this is another example of a story where a young woman gets virtually everything taken away from her - her passions, her freedom, everything - but (through Stockholm Syndrome or sheer stupidity, I'm not sure) she forgives it all in the name of love and becomes a supremely contented Stepford Wife. 

8. So a girl is kidnapped by the Goblin King, and is trapped in the goblin kingdom. The end. Well, she ends up liking it, doesn't struggle, doesn't really care about what is happening to her. 

-------

Sorry, that was a lot. I understand that there are many who are just not going to jibe with a book. But I think it’s fair that on the complaints that accuse the book, it can be rebutted.

1(a). Perhaps many of the problems with the book that people expected it to be the perfect mash between Labyrinth and Beauty and the Beast. First of all, Beauty and the Beast is a classic tale, which many accuse of Stockholm Syndrome. It isn’t, by the way, but that’s not why I’m here. Or here.

Neither is the Hollow Kingdom. It seems that many of the reviewers are sure that Kate is forced into marrying the Goblin King. She wasn’t. She actually ends up going to the Goblin King and agreeing to marry him in exchange for the release of her sister. 

But Gav-san, the Goblin King )Marak) misled Kate into thinking they had her.

No, they didn’t. It even points out that had she asked, they would have told her. It’s stated very early on that Goblin do not lie under any circumstance (though are prone to being crafty beasts). 

Kate never is isolated with her captour, or ignore his awful parts and has does not fall in line with his ideas, holding strongly to her own. In fact, it’s her very ideals that lead to her success in the end, and that leads to Marak’s change of ideology. Kate’s own honor often compelled her to make choices that seem frustrating to the (modern) reader (who perhaps forgets this is 1815 England). To demand modern ideologies from the protagonist is awfully stupid and presumptuous.

1(b). This book, in no way shape or form, is an apology for rape and abduction. It’s a large point in this book that is unavoidable. The Goblins and Elves kidnap humans (and the occasional elf) to marry. The King must always marry outside of his race. This inevitably leads to unhappy women and broken families.

It is not seen as a happy, good event, but often a stressful, angry one that leaves tragedy and scars that echo across the generations. It is also a revealing look at humanity and our own atrocities. Much like the goblins and elves, sometimes these things are painted as noble when they weren’t, and thus it makes the societies feel real, having these pitfalls. 

And, as a King whose entire, beloved kingdom is at stake, do you chose to make one person miserable, or condemn the entire lot to a slow death?

It may make us uncomfortable to see the reality of this situation played out in such close-to-the-chest terms. 

Because Kate ends up happy and the victor, even in a situation that was not perfect, should she be condemned? I don’t think she or any women forced into that situation should be denied a healthy joy they find.

Remember, at the end of the book, it’s because of Kate that the Kingdom continues.

2. Kate is intelligent. (How could you miss her relentlessly scheming, most that succeed?!?!) And due to her heritage, she has top-notch instincts (untrained though) she continually outsmarts and outmaneuvers the Goblin King and the meddling human family. I think, had her Uncle not kidnapped Emily, she would have escaped. But her own concern for her sister was more important, and so she made that choice. That’s why she agrees to settle in, and that’s what open’s the door to her falling in love with Marak. She isn’t his prisoner, but his equal, who he learns to respect. Many human relationships could learn that last part better.

3. The Goblin King doesn’t justify himself in any degree. He knows he’s not going to be a desirable, handsome husband to any woman, especially in 1815 (or any time before and long after). If the only way a magical kingdom could continue is the misery of one person outside your race who is treated well, all things considered, then why would a brusque goblin who is not naturally inclined (thanks to his heritage) to get his feelings hurt easily worry? Many of the King’s Wifes never fell in love with their husbands, especially the sensitive elves. 

In the animal kingdom, it’s not as important. Stop projecting modern standards on a fantasy culture. JRR Tolkien's goblins murder, are crass and cruel, but we don’t expect them to be human and learn to be polite. Dunkle’s Goblins are far more genteel and human-like, but they are not humans. 

4. At the end of the book, there is a sorcerer who is a bad man and uses human and animal parts in his spells. If you are sensitive to that, perhaps it’s something to consider, but the book doesn’t go into great detail of these things. And frankly, ‘traditional’ medicine in many parts of the world does the same. 

And why would Kate release animals that would hurt her?

5. Kate’s Guardian was never concern for her. He thought about murdering her and was concocting plans to do so. As it says in the book, society would not be kind to Kate or Emily. This is no surprise. A wealthy young woman in 1815 England? A prime target. 

Kate manages to trick the doctor who the guardian brought (to put her in the insane asylum) and save her sister, though she needed to Goblins help. She was in a bad position! 

6. Why are people so determined to take away Kate’s dignity and choice? Her uncle lied to her, and he was punished for it later, by the Goblin King. She went to the Goblin King and bartered her own freedom. Women make their own choices and feminism is respecting those choices as a man’s would. Her acceptance of the Gobline Kingdom is not proof of her weakness, but a show of her strength. You will face difficult problems you cannot change, and the only decision at that point is how you react.

Just because Sarah didn’t chose the Goblin King doesn’t make her strong. It was what she learned doing it. The point of reading the book is the journey.

7. Or you can see this as a book that takes on the idea of conflicting cultures that are forced upon a woman, and she makes decisions that ensure the important things to her are seen through. A real woman who, much like real women, is put into a difficult situation that is fraught with dangers and missteps, and does a decent job at navigating them without giving up her integrity or beliefs.

Don’t be taken in by easy illusions that meant to be as shallow as they appear. Feel free to message me and we can chat about it more. 

In the end, this is just my opinion. But I don’t think I’m wrong, and I stand by it, which is why I’m writing it, and why I hope to illustrate this magnificent work one day.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

[nyxelestia]

I’ve talked a ton about what fandom spaces look like when Black woman steps into a racebent role, but not about what happens to Black men who play racebent roles in the same franchises.

If you think that things are any easier for Black men in fandom well…

You’ve thought wrong.

This installment of What Fandom Racism Looks Like will look at how the racism behind how the Smallville fandom treated Pete Ross – played by Sam Jones III – and how, over a decade later, the Supergirl fandom pulls from the same playbook in order to excuse heaping a ton of racism on James Olsen and the black actor that plays him, Mehcad Brooks.

It is a fact of fandom that Black characters of any gender are treated poorly in comparison to non-Black characters. When you take gender into consideration, misogynoir leaps out and the anti-black and anti-woman violence leaps out, but that doesn’t mean that Black men have ever been beloved in fandom.

Some Black men/male characters are liked a little bit more than Black women in similar shows or properties, but can you actually name one that is treated on the same level as a white male character or performer?

Can you name one that’s actually beloved?

We’re now in my fifth year of running Stitch’s Media Mix and one constant that I’ve talked about is the way that the Star Wars fandom maligns, dismisses, and makes weird shit up about Finn and his actor John Boyega.

Folks across various fandom spaces don’t limit their ire just to Finn’s existence and creating fanworks (fiction, art, and meta fandom analysis) that turn him into a villain or kill him off so that Kylo Ren could succeed as the “real” hero of the franchise.

No.

I’m talking about folks deciding Boyega has to be homophobic because he’s Nigerian-British and because his father is prominent in their church and things like the time folks flooded his mentions calling him a misogynist and sexist and even @-ing Lucasfilm/Disney over a video of him dancing during carnival.

What Finn and John Boyega go have been going through since in 2015 is what Mehcad Brooks and James Olsen go through in 2019.

It’s an updated version of what Sam Jones III and Pete Ross went through a decade ago.

Looking back now, it’s obvious that the Smallville fandom was predictable in the same ways that many other superhero fandoms are now.

The most popular ship for the fandom was between two white male characters – Lex Luthor and Clark Kent – frenemies for life.

It’s a fandom that often treated white female characters and characters of color as obstacles in the way of the main slash relationship – instead of like Lex Luthor’s everything. It’s a ship with a fanbase that pretty much cut out or ignored the relationships either white male character had with white women or people of color in order to portray their relationship as the most important one across the series.

With that much predictability, it’s not that difficult to look back at fanworks from when the Smallville fandom was at its highest and draw connections between what fandom did over a decade ago and what it continues to do now.

Pete Ross wasn’t the first sidekick or friend in a superhero drama to be racebent.

In Smallville alone, biracial Chinese-American Kristen Kreuk was cast to play a racebent version of Clark Kent’s teenaged sweetheart Lana Lang. (And Dean Cain’s Clark Kent on The Adventures of Clark Kent and Lois Lane in the early Nineties was visibly not white.)

However, the fandom’s response to this newly Black Pete Ross was… different.

When folks in fandom deigned to write him, they wrote him as a shucking and jiving stereotype, an approximation of what they think Black men were like In 2002.

Back then, longtime fan writer teland aired one hell of a grievance about the way that folks in the Smallville fandom insisted on writing Pete Ross when the series first aired, writing that:

If I *never* see another story where Pete fucking ROSS goes around speaking stereotypical JIVE again it will be too soon. What the fuck is *wrong* with you people? Do you *watch* the show? Has Pete *ever* been anything but a normal smartass teenaged boy with a crush on Chloe and a lust for every other woman his eyes have lit upon? Has he *ever* expressed an interest in the poetry of Amiri Baraka? Does he cruise the streets of Smallville in his low-rider and do drive-bys with his do-rag arranged in Criply perfection?

 No?

 Then why the *fuck* do you write him that way, numbnuts?

This fannish insistence on writing Pete Ross as hella hood despite the fact that there are next to no other Black people in Smallville – much less a “hood” of any kind – was one of the ways that the Smallville fandom made it very clear that they didn’t actually see Pete Ross as a character. He was a bad blank slate, one that they could overlay not with the nuanced characterization that white blank slates got –

But with stereotypes about Blackness.

There is no “hood” in Smallville, Kansas.

Outside of a few racebent characters, the small country town is pretty darn white. There are several episodes of Smallville where Pete is the only character of color with dialogue. He’s frequently the ONLY black character on-screen and his dialogue and motivations aren’t exactly hard to parse –

So why was fandom’s “go to” for Pete Ross a hella hood version that dropped slang and exhibited a frankly offensive stereotype of Black existence that didn’t even apply to him?

Simply put?

The Smallville fandom, like many fandoms when faced with having to interact with or write a Black character for the first time in ages, gravitated towards what they knew from their limited interactions with Blackness and Black people. Their biases shone through because it was, for them, the only way they knew how to conceptualize Black people.

(You can see this replicated in more modern fandom with how the MCU fandom tries to turn Sam Wilson into a hard hood stereotype in fanworks or that one horrible headcanon where Miles shoplifted to get art supplies – despite his solidly middle-class existence and strong views of right and wrong.)

If you know nothing about Black people outside of what like… Fox News and your elderly grandparents in the Midwest tell you about Black people and have no interest in seeing us AS PEOPLE or doing the work to unbuild those biases, your fanworks that reference or even center Black characters will hold those beliefs.

Pete Ross was on Smallville for three seasons. In those three seasons, the fandom pretty much decided that he was set up to sit in one of two roles. Either he’d be a supportive sidekick to Clark and company, or he’d be a villain. And either way, when they wrote him, they often gravitated to writing him as a hood stereotype.

Again, there are next to no other Black people in Smallville on the seasons Pete Ross is one of Clark’s closest friends.

Smallville is a picture of white Americana right down to how the show and town takes a Highlander-esque approach to diversity where only a few characters of color are even allowed to inhabit the same space at any given time.

Unlike many of the other Black male characters that set fandoms afire with their ire, Pete Ross wasn’t a threat to established ships or character arcs. He was gone before he really had a chance to shine, written off and moved out of town as other characters took his spot at Clark’s right hand.

What happens when a Black male character is in the way of one ship or poses a threat to another?

Well, for the answer to that, we need to fast forward over a decade to the Supergirl fandom and how it treats Mehcad Brooks and his character on the show, James Olsen.  From the start, racebending Clark Kent’s most famous sidekick didn’t go well. His casting was met with frustration from all corners of fandom from folks that hated that he was a) Black and b) potentially in a relationship with Kara.

Then season two on The CW happened and the fandom kind of… started mutating in the worst way.

Certain parts of the Supergirl fandom will have you believing that James Olsen is the worst character on the show and that Mehcad is the most problematic person to ever work on a CW show.

They cite Mehcad’s (admittedly offensive) Instagram username, his championing Lena/James as a ship on instagram using a hashtag commonly associated with LGBTQ people, and a comment about how his girlfriend at the time told him that he’s “a lesbian trapped in a football player’s body” made to a trans reporter.

None of those things are great, let’s be very real here.

I don’t actually like or support a lot of how Mehcad Brooks carries himself. I don’t need to like him in order to be very aware of how he’s treated by the fandom from even before he was deemed Problematic.

One of the things I’ve been hyperaware of in fandom is how celebrities and fans of color are shunned for problematic thoughts and behavior in a more… permanent way. There are non-Black CW stars who are problematic – some of them are even on Supergirl – and who’ve presented themselves in ways that aren’t great.

But for the most part, they don’t have people calling for them to be fired or for their character to be killed off.

They don’t have folks pretending to care about marginalized people to cloak their anti-Blackness.

Which is one of my biggest issues with the way that Black male characters are treated in fandom spaces: the way that folks use social justice rhetoric and a vague “desire for representation” to excuse unsubtle racism towards these male characters and their performers.

I know we covered that folks performing wokeness is in the minority of Things That Happen In Fandom, but let’s be clear: this is one occasion where it’s frequent and obvious.

One of the ways that Black characters and performers are subject to racism from fandom is in the way that non-Black fans will reframe them as “too problematic to support” (which therefore allows them to be dehumanized by the fandom that dislikes them). If folks in fandom can claim that they really don’t like a Black character because they need to protect marginalized (white) fans from their existence, then they can’t be called racist.

Because they’re doing it for (white) queer people.

Or (white) women.

But it’s terribly transparent.

After all:

Someone celebrating (with champagne and all) that James Olsen has been shot and that Lex Luthor called him a dog does not actually give a shit about representation for people of color.

Someone fretfully worrying that John Boyega, thanks to his father’s role in their church, is a homophobe that doesn’t actually want Finn/Poe to be canon, doesn’t actually care about queer people.

Someone positing that a Black male character is actually harmful for a non-Black character – and that’s why the fandom has to distrust and dislike them – doesn’t actually care about Black people.

And if you’re out here championing a non-canon (fem)slash ship because #RepresentationMatters at the same time that you’re out here actively wishing evil on a Black performer and hoping that their character gets killed off… you can’t possibly care that much about representation for anyone but white queer people.

It continues to boggle my mind how non-Black fans seem incapable of understanding that we can see their tweets and tumblr posts. They seem incapable of understanding that we know the script as well as they do because we’ve seen them use it across the years of fandom and that we see it put into play, we’re not going to fall for it.

Hell, we’re going to call that crap out.

Pete Ross wasn’t the first Black male character to be mistreated by a white fandom. We’ve got years of evidence of Black male characters being rewritten and misrepresented and torn down in order to lift up non-Black ones. Name me a Black male character in a franchise or fandom and I’ll probably be able to tell you at least two ways that fandom mistreats them.

As we can see with James Olsen, the disgusting way folks in fandom treat and talk about Black male characters and performers. is just going to continue until non-Black fans step up and throw away the script they’re adhering to so hard.

[echodrops]

Why Do Certain Ships Become So Popular? (And Why Should Writers Rethink When They Do?) - Part 2

<- Start back at part 1 or you’re going to be very confused!

This time my victim of choice example is Klance (and Allurance and Lotura too).

In a previous post, I established the premise that shippers focus their efforts and attention on ships between characters who exhibit the most compelling dynamism, the greatest amount of emotional energy--good feelings or bad--that directly relates to one or more of the characters’ growth arcs... or the two characters whose emotional interactions most significantly affect a story’s main plot.

This idea (that shippers are looking for strong, dynamic emotional interactions that are directly tied to plot) feeds directly into my second premise: part of the popularity of slash ships comes from the fact that, very often, the strongest and most plot-relevant emotional events don’t occur between male characters and female characters, but between male protagonists and other male characters--due to a combination of 1) a much smaller number of female characters, 2) a majority of writers for anime/manga and American shows being male; 3) under-developed or poorly written female characters, and 4) the tendency to situate males in the hero, sidekick, and villain positions, increasing the chance that their actions will have greater importance in the story’s main plot.

In short, writers can unintentionally cause fans to prefer non-canon slash ships by writing more dynamic, better developed, and more plot-relevant interactions between their male leads than between the main character and his designated female love interest.  

Now hang on. Before you get all up in arms, yes, I’m perfectly aware there are plenty of other reasons slash ships are popular, including:

A huge desire among LGBT+ fans for positive representation

The fact that m/m interactions appeal to straight women/others the same way w/w interactions are sexy to straight men/others

The tendency of shows, particularly from Japan, to deliberately queer-bait

The fact that many women vicariously ship male characters together because it allows them to imagine a relationship of “genuine equals,” particularly in areas where women feel they are still not treated equally to men

The tendency for “pair the spares” to result in m/m ships simply due to a lower number of available female characters

And so on

This isn’t written to negate any of those reasons or to imply that they aren’t major factors in the popularity of slash ships, not at all, but it has always, always struck me as reductive when I hear things like “Slash ships are only popular because girls think two dudes together is hot” (the fetish argument) or “Girls will ship any two good-looking male characters together regardless of canon. They just hate het ships” (the fetish argument with a side dish of misogyny).

In particular, this last one--an argument I’ve heard from a lot of male fandom members (but of course not all)--has always gotten under my skin, because it implies that girls who ship aren’t capable of critically analyzing the media we consume and identifying characters who have meaningful interactions and interesting potential. That we, unlike those viewers who adhere to the canon (typically heterosexual) relationships, are somehow reading these stories wrong, blind to “real” romance (namely the one between the male hero and his best girl/waifu), and/or misusing male characters with zero regard for their personalities--worse, this argument also implies that female fans deliberately hate or under-appreciate oh-so-perfectly written female characters whose romantic subplots are totally natural and not at all an unfortunate side effect of their position as the token chick on the team...

At its best, the statement: “Girls will ship any two good-looking male characters” is demeaning in its dismissal of a majority of slash shippers and their ability to read characters. At its worse, it’s this exact dismissal that continues to allow so many (primarily male) authors to write under-developed, unimportant, token female love interests: “It’s the girls [or the slash shippers] who are weird; there’s nothing wrong with the way we’re doing things.”

But guess what happens when well-written female characters whose actions are central to a story’s main plot are introduced and highlighted? Guess what happens when the emotional energy between a female lead and her male counterpart is the most compelling and dynamic in the series?

The (often canon) het ship suddenly--somehow--magically becomes well-liked by fans!

Zutara and Kataang vastly out-strip any slash Avatar pairings in popularity. Noragami’s Yatori commands a staggering following in the fandom. Is there anyone in their right mind who thinks Alucard/Integra wasn’t the best pairing to end Hellsing with? No one debates whether or not Ahiru and Fakir from Princess Tutu are true love. In Doctor Who, Rose and the Doctor reign so far supreme in the fandom that none of the other ships even need to exist though I actually prefer River. Terra and Aqua from Kingdom Hearts beat out every other Terra or Aqua ship by a mile (and this is in a series notorious for hating and under-shipping its female characters). Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-Kun has no problem juggling three very well-accepted het ships--even while having a scene in which two male characters sit down and draw a gay manga together. Ain’t nobody suggesting Mr. Bates and Anna from Downton Abbey should be with anyone else, right? And this is just in the handful of shows I personally have time to watch. Anyone who reads or watches a series with well-written female characters can play this exact same game!

The obvious conclusion? Female fans are perfectly willing to ship heterosexual pairings--if they’re well-written.

It’s the same story all over again: when the real emotional energy, the dynamic core, the most plot-relevant interactions occur between a male and female character, they too can become the fan-preferred couple. (Shocking!)

Yes, yes, I hear you saying “B-But wait, sometimes the m/m ship is more popular even though the het love interest is well-written!” or “Sometimes girls ship guy characters who have never even met!” or “So what you’re saying is female fans wouldn’t ship slash if there were better het options available?”

1) Don’t get me wrong--there are certainly always exceptions. I’m pointing out a trend, not a rule. Sometimes a fandom has a separate, specific reason for elevating a non-canon slash ship above a well-written canon het ship. (Someone who is actually in the Fullmetal Alchemist fandom might be able to explain why Ed/Roy is more popular than Roy/Riza, probably?) And in situations where a slash ship and a het ship in a series both have equally strong emotional energy, my bet is that the slash ship will always come out on top because it gets the added benefit of people liking LGBT+ rep and straight girls (and anyone else) who just think m/m is hot.

2) Crack ships definitely do exist. But usually when a crack ship actually manages to become popular, it’s because fans have recognized the potential for a strong emotional energy between two characters. If the two characters could reasonably have strong tension because of similarities, differences, or other elements of their characters, then crack ships are still following the trend of aligning with emotional energy, even if that energy is only anticipated at the moment.

3) I definitely don’t mean to suggest that slash ships are shoddy seconds to fans who would “naturally” prefer het ships if good het ships were available. What I’m suggesting is only that it’s no surprise slash ships are so extremely and consistently popular across so many fandoms, because in terms of plot relevance, depth of writing, and meaningful interactions with each other, male characters so rarely have any real competition. A desire for LGBT+ representation and people living out power or equality fantasies through slash are certainly motivating factors and good and worthy reasons to write slash. But one unfortunate contributor to the popularity of slash ships is that male characters continue to occupy a place of privilege in modern narratives. Our heroes remain overwhelmingly male. Our sidekick/lancer/buddy characters remain overwhelmingly male. Our villain characters remain overwhelmingly male. That is to say: male characters continue to dominate all the most “plot relevant” roles in our narratives, and so long as male leads continue to be placed in roles where their most compelling emotional interactions and greatest sources of character growth are other male characters, slash ships will continue to dominate fandoms’ online presences.

(Hilarious: the dude bros who complain about the number of slash ships in their favorite series are often the very same ones supporting and becoming the writers whose shallow portrayals of female characters further bolster the popularity of said slash ships in the first place...)

Okay, I’ve made you wait long enough.

What does all of this have to do with Voltron?

Well, you’ve probably figured that part out already, actually.

If we consider the “emotional energy” and tension among Voltron’s main characters, there’s absolutely no question who is at the core, where the most plot relevant and meaningful emotional interactions have occurred, where the “heart” of the story is, in essence...

Hint: It’s Keith.

(Just a heads up: I’m going to use Klance as the example because it’s the most popular Voltron pairing according to the numbers, but any Sheith fan worth their salt could obviously very, very easily apply these ideas one-for-one to that ship, because clearly Shiro’s interactions with Keith are some of the most emotionally tense and compelling in the entire Voltron series--they are a consistent core of feeling energy for the show which naturally leads many people to support this ship. A large part of the reason that this post is tagged Sheith is because I am absolutely inviting Sheith shippers to use the theory and lens in this essay to analyze Sheith--using this idea to analyze Sheith will reveal a lot of intense emotional energy to discuss and validate that ship. I’m very tempted to put this paragraph in all caps or something so the Sheith shippers will actually read it and stop badgering me...)

Keith (and his relation with other characters) is the core of Voltron’s main plot, both in that he is positioned as the leader/the hero/the protagonist, and because, obviously, almost all of the series’ emotional high points (with the exception of “Crystal Venom” and Pidge’s search for Matt) somehow feature him. 

Keith isn’t just central in the main plot though; he’s also central in the individual arcs of two other characters: Lance and Shiro. He’s a motivating and driving factor in both of these characters’ stories and change throughout the series, affecting their actions, attitudes, and self-worth, and so it should come as absolutely no surprise that Sheith and Klance are the series’ most popular ships.

But since Klance is the most popular pairing, the person I really want to talk about is Lance.

You can say a lot of things about Lance and the raging debates that occurred over whether or not Lance is a straight loverboy trope or not, but I don’t think any viewer of Voltron would deny that, if we consider the main cast members (Team Voltron plus Lotor), the core of Lance’s emotional energy and tension is Keith. His interactions with Keith--not even in a romantic sense, simply in a storytelling sense--are more important and dynamic than his on-screen interactions with any other main character.

From his laser focus on Keith at Garrison that caused him to invent a rivalry (this word is basically just a synonym for “emotional energy” at this point):

To comedic banter:

To the infamous bonding moment:

To a fledgling “right hand man” partnership:

To Lance’s insecurities:

The story of Voltron itself continuously reiterates that Lance’s interactions with Keith are more dynamic, more intense (even if we’re talking about “Rawr, I hate you, we’re rivals!” emotions instead of lovey-dovey stuff), and more plot relevant than Lance’s interactions with other characters in the series. Lance’s emotional arc is irrevocably centered on Keith until very, very late in the series.

More importantly: Lance’s motivation and personal plot line as a whole are centered on Keith. At it’s most basic, Lance’s character arc seems like it was supposed to center on Lance’s sense of self-worth--despite acting confident, Lance was actually insecure about his ability to help save the universe. Theoretically, his narrative should have focused on him becoming confident about his place on the team and his value as both a friend and fellow paladin to the other main characters. His arc should have been (and I guess theoretically still is? It’s just not... ever given much attention?) about him overcoming his insecurity by learning to recognize his own unique talents and discovering the things that only he can do to help Team Voltron succeed. (Hell, the entire Allurance thing could have been framed as “She’s completely out of my league” ---> “Whoa, originally I was putting Allura on a pedestal but actually she’s as much a member of this team as me--we’re in this together, side-by-side.”)

Whether or not the semi-incoherent narrative of Voltron actually delivered on this promise is iffy, but the set up in season 1-3ish is all there and all Keith:

At Garrison, Lance viewed Keith as a road block in his quest to becoming a fighter class student. Keith’s achievements and talent became a measuring stick for Lance’s own capabilities. He imagined a rivalry to make himself feel better/less insecure. His drive not to lose out to Keith is what dragged Hunk and Pidge along to Shiro’s rescue and ultimately led to the discovery of the Blue Lion. Lance comparing himself unfavorably to Keith as a paladin and pilot contributed to (mostly) one-sided animosity throughout the early seasons that gave way to a scene of Lance attempting to step down from the team because he didn’t see himself worthy of the position in comparison to Keith:

The logical conclusion that I think most fans would draw from these many scenes is that, as part of Lance’s overall character growth across the whole series, he needed to have a moment in which he recognized that he isn’t--and has never been--inferior to Keith.

Ultimately, the first five seasons continually reiterate the idea that, in terms of interactions, energy, and dynamic character growth, the most important main character in Lance’s story (other than Lance) is Keith.

Keith’s interactions with Lance are directly and immediately tied to Lance’s individual character arc/growth, and Keith is definitely the focus of Lance’s most meaningful emotional tension throughout seasons 1-5 at least.

Which means it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Klance is the most popular Lance ship, particularly when you set it side-by-side with the (increasingly canon) Allurance.

I just want to make this abundantly clear before I begin: I have absolutely nothing against Allurance shippers and, until it was done so poorly in season 5-6 (and potentially 7, I still haven’t even finished that one), I actually was okay with the possibility of Allurance being endgame because I thought there was potential for it to be done well. After what we’ve been given, I actually feel the Allurance shippers have been horribly shortchanged by the show’s real writing, and that I can’t personally support the ship the way it’s being written, but that’s not the fault of the characters themselves or anything inherently “wrong” with the ship. So please don’t take the rest of what I say here as ship hate--this is just observations from a literary analysis standpoint.

What has prevented Lance and Allura from gaining significant traction with the fans despite the fact that it’s edging close to canon territory if it isn’t canon already?

Well, one problem might be that Lance’s emotional energy has no bearing on Allura’s individual character development--and Allura’s emotional peaks have no bearing on Lance’s personal arc either (at least as far as it was established in early seasons and then left essentially unresolved).

Allura’s arc has, throughout the course of the show, centered on her ability to defeat her family’s foes, her grief for her lost people and planet, and her desire to follow in her father’s footsteps as a leader and in the Altean traditions as well. None of this has much of anything to do with Lance. Her growth as a character occurs--with the exception of the single shining scene on Naxela--completely independently of Lance. She lets her father’s memory go on her own in “Crystal Venom.” She faces Zarkon head-to-head by herself after rescuing Shiro. It’s Shiro who stops her from over-working herself to aid the coalition, not Lance. It’s Keith’s whose Galra blood forces her to re-examine and overcome some of her universal hatred for the Galra. It’s Lotor who helps her reach Oriande, and her own ingenuity that allows her to tame the White Lion and learn the secrets of Altean alchemy.

With the exception of the scene on Naxela where it was specifically Lance’s speech that motivated Allura to save the day, virtually all of her most charged emotions occurred elsewhere and with other characters, and there’s nothing in her personal goals--to be a strong leader, to revive her culture, to save the universe--that is intrinsically tied with Lance. He can encourage and aid her in those pursuits, but so can Shiro, Keith, Pidge, Hunk, and Coran. The role of fellow paladin and supporting ally isn’t unique to Lance. His interactions with her don’t fill a niche that drives her personal plot lines outside of the romance subplot.

And the same thing is true in reverse.

We get this nice scene of Allura encouraging Lance and helping him work on his insecurity... And then it is promptly never mentioned again. (Where did the sword go, guys? Where???) Lance gives up Blue to Allura and she’s almost immediately gifted at piloting the Blue Lion, while Lance is shown struggling with Red (once more in Keith’s shadow) and still hadn’t, as of the end of season 6, seemed to have mastered it to the same extent as Keith. It’s Keith, Laika (an alien dog--not Allura guys, an alien dog) and the SPACE MICE that Lance expresses his insecurities to, and it’s Coran who is there for Lance’s touching scene expressing his longing to return to Earth. Lance’s personal arc about growing into the paladin role and becoming a selfless person who puts the team before his own desire for glory once again occurs independently of Allura, with little to no interaction, and even fewer emotional high points between them, in the entire first half of the show.

For both of these characters, their “real emotional energy”--their tension both positive and negative--occurs with other characters. The “believability” and energy of this ship is diminished by the fact that it simply isn’t the most well-written of character pairs in the series. The romance subplot isn’t organically tied to either of their personal plot lines, and the depth of their one-on-one interactions pales in comparison to their, particularly Lance’s, interactions with other characters.

But huh... would you look at that... When a potential romantic interest came along whose interactions with Allura were both directly tied to her personal arc, her central character motivations, and her emotional high points...

Isn’t it amazing how well it was received by the fandom--despite the fact that no one was really sure whether Lotor was evil or not? Now of course, I’m not going to ignore the fact that Lotura was probably helped along by leaving Keith, Lance, and Shiro free to ship elsewhere, but I don’t think the actual chemistry in the series’ writing itself should be ignored.

There was significantly, significantly more tension and nuance to Allura and Lotor’s interactions that any of Allura’s interactions with any of the other main cast, and their interactions operated not just in a romantic capacity, but also as a vehicle for Allura’s personal character growth:

The push and pull of these two characters and their scenes together sparked change in both of them, which augmented and increased the quality of their romantic arc while also furthering both of their own individual goals as characters.

The story painted them as equals with mutual interests, a shared interest in Altean culture, both victims (at least initially) of their parents’ war, both distrusting but ultimately lonely people who were longing for connection to, in Allura’s case, what had been lost, and in Lotor’s case, what he theoretically had never been able to have (except the writers did him dirty so jk).

I just don’t think there are many people who would argue that Allurance--or Allura’s interactions with any other male character--have been written with near as much depth, engagement, and integration with her motivations as Lotor and Allura’s were. Their plot literally got more screen time one-on-one in a single seven episode season than Allura and Lance did in the 43+ other episodes...

And for the the short time that it lasted, this pairing was embraced by many fans. I might be biased because I immediately went out and followed every Lotura blog I could find, but to me it seems like it was well-liked and generally well-regarded among shippers until the colony reveal (and by many still after). I was very excited by the writing of this ship and definitely wanted something meaningful to come out of it. Part of the fandom’s immense outrage at Lotor’s reveal was, I think, linked to the fact that this ship had been so convincingly written into the series before it.

This, to me, is a perfect example of a situation in which the emotional exchange between two characters exceeds the strength and depth of their interactions with others, leading to immediate adoption and approval as a ship by the fandom. Where the real energy is, there are the shippers.

PHEW! Let me take a deep breath and come up for air. There’s a lot going on here, but boiling it down to the basic point I’m trying to make, and which I’ll address in a lot more depth in the third and final part of this: the way that a story is written profoundly affects what ships will or will not become popular with fans. Shipping isn’t an unpredictable beast that grows completely independently of its source material. The ways writers craft interactions between their characters--and the places where they invest the most and infuse the most life--are powerful tools that impact how fans view and come to love seeing characters both separately and in romantic relationships.

To that end, while there are numerous reasons slash ships are popular and continue to grow in popularity, one reason that should be considered seriously by all creative writers--fanfiction authors or aspiring original novelists--is the notion that shipping often aligns with the core of a story’s or character’s emotional energy, the pairs with the highest tension, the electric pulse of the story’s most meaningful moments. Non-canon ships of any sexuality swell to mega-popularity when fans perceive more depth and significance in the interactions of characters outside the canon pair, when the emotional work of the story is happening somewhere outside the intentional romantic plot line. Sometimes this is fine. But more often, this is a bad sign for creators--a sign that you’ve fumbled in the writing of your main romantic leads.

As writers, questions we rarely ask ourselves but often should are: “Where is the core of the tension in my story? Whose interactions are deepest and most central to the development of my main character?”

In other words: Where is the real emotional energy in my story?

In part 3 I’m going to provide one more excellent case-in-point, and then close out with a discussion of some take-aways for writers from all this that might help strengthen your romantic subplots, whatever your genre or whoever your characters.

Go on to Part 3 ->