#sacrificed at the altar of manpain

[gh-0-stcup]

Idk exactly what went down with Darla in this show (though I do have a vague idea), but I can say they clearly did her wrong.

[janiedean]

Why is Kylo even considered abusive tho

...... hahaha. uhm. this is gonna be fun.

(ps: anyone who hates kylo or reylo pls skip this post okay? k.)

people have decided that any relationship (not even romantic, any) that’s like, even moderately problematic or not healthy or in between a villain and a hero is inherently abusive, because of course EVERYTHING is abusive now, and villains that aren’t, er, how we shall say, Approved By Tumblr Standards, are inherently horrible abusive people;

kylo is, sadly, technically a mix of All the things tumblr finds automatically problematic in someone, ie that he’s: a) white, b) a cis man, c) comes from a **privileged background** (let’s just say that for the sake of simplicity), d) has obvious anger issues, e) a villain, f) heterosexual as far as we know (or better: we don’t know he’s not, but you know that for people on tumblr when they hate someone and their sexuality isn’t specified straight becomes the default because obviously if u r evil then you have to be straight. ofc kylo could be bi for all we know, but never mind that, right?), g) not conventionally attractive (or, in tumblr lingo, UGLY, because of course everyone’s canon of beauty is the same!!), which means that given point one above, he’s of course abusive, not even a shred of doubt given. (of course if one or more of these fail to happen, tumblr does the contrary and excuses whatever the bad person does but I’ll shut up before I say things I’ll regret.)

which means that of course any rship he could have with rey is abusive when it’s fucking dumb because in order for a relationship to be abusive you actually have to know that person and be in a relationship of any kind with them - your parents can be abusive (but they’re your parents and you grew up with them), a friendship can be abusive (but then you have had to know this person and be friends with them), a romantic relationship can be (but you have to actually be in love with them or at least be together), and kylo and rey have no such relationship because they met, he captured her, they had their mind-force argument where he tried to get inside her head and she got into his (compare that with what happened with poe I mean XDDD) and then they fought and the next time they met each other it was through the force bond and then you can say they developed a relationship.... where she was the one pretty much taking the first step most of the time and where she saw that there was some good in him? I mean, there’s no bloody way any of that falls under abusive relationship. is it problematic? obviously it has problematic elements because any relationship you have with a dude or woman you fought with/tried to kill/is on your opposite side of the fence can’t not have problematic elements. is it 100% fluff unicorns and rainbows? no. but like, from that to say he’s abusive in general is ridiculous, at most he could be to hux but I mean kylo and hux are generally terrible to each other in turn and that relationship is your usual rival/hateship that’s been around since the beginning of times. at most it’s mutually toxic if you ask me, and anyway no one who ships either reylo or kylux goes around saying it’s The Purest Ship, or at least no one who’s not the usual bad apple that you find in any shipper group.

this also is a perfect mirror of how people on tumblr can’t distinguish what’s coded as abusive and what’s not, because if there is one relationship in the new trilogy that’s explicitly coded as abusive it’s.... snoke and kylo, and kylo is not the abusive part, he’s the abused part of it. I mean, tlj made it overtly clear and the point is that whether you like it or not this guy has been groomed/tormented/lied to by snoke (who is, uh, THE BONAFIDE BAD GUY I mean guys it’s star wars being the palpatine stand-in in the dark side part should say everything really) same as palpatine did to anakin and guess what kylo wants to be anakin/thinks that he’s honoring his grandfather’s footsteps it’s kind of heavily implied, and while obviously there’s no overt sexual subtext because it’s still a disney movie made for kids too I’m fairly sure it’s kind of very subtly implied and other people wrote about it more in-depth than me, but tldr: kylo’s issues (he’s unstable, he’s angry, he doesn’t really know what he wants, he’s volatile and blah blah blah) are all direct consequences of a) being heavily force sensitive, b) feeling like his family failed him (and luke AGREES because wow what did he do before they fought in tlj? apologize to him for failing him, and if you don’t think that han let him kill him also because he thought he failed him idk what movie you watched), c) being groomed and lied to by the evil bad guy of the situation for most of his life, which makes... him... an abuse victim.

of course, tumblr has a really unhealthy approach to how you get to be an abuse victim, which is a whole other wasp nest, but basically on this bloody website anyone who doesn’t meet the Good Victim Standard (ie: they fight against their abuser immediately, they do Good Things, they Show Clear Morals and it’s obvious that They Are Good Guys) is automatically Not A Good Victim and is therefore denied any basic empathy/decency, and anyone who tries to be nice to them or to help them out is there to help the villain’s storyline HOW BAD, OR, if the Bad Victim dares being a man, of course it’s all OH MY GOD CHARACTER X IS GETTING SACRIFICED ON THE ALTAR OF Y’S STORYLINE AND THEIR MANPAIN, because of course if you’re a man you can’t, like, suffer, without it being manpain and not, like, legitimate feelings. which means that poor kylo cannot win because even when the story is coded otherwise and rey helping him out/wanting to reach the good part of him/seeing him as ben solo/etc people don’t see it as, like, rey being a good person and regular character development (nvm that the entire point of the light side in SW is, like, forgiveness, but okay then), but as her character being sold off for the male’s development or whatever else they think it is. which is obviously not true, but the fact that you take a character who has being a decent person in their basic traits and think that in order to Be A Good Person they should want to murder their adversary who is most obviously coded as someone who needs help and has issues but not as the ultimate bad guy rather than, like, did what rey did in tlj ie trying to help them out, says more about whichever anti thinks such things (ie: nothing good) than about the sw writers or whatever. I mean, I unfollowed people for reblogging fanart where rey killed kylo and finn/poe were doing the cheerleading and not just because I don’t want that kinda toxicity but also because it’s absolutely OOC that finn, poe or rey would cheerlead each other over murdering anyone that’s not snoke or the likes -

ah, but wait, who killed snoke?

I mean, given that kylo killed the guy who abused him for years because he threatened to murder the one person who had taken the effort to be nice to him and see his side of the story I think that it’s fairly obvious that he’s not abusing anyone himself and that next movie he’s going back to the light side no question also because they’re not gonna kill the last character with direct skywalker lineage around.

but of course most people around here can’t see past their own preconceptions and don’t understand that if you want to care for mentally ill people/abuse victims you also have to give a fuck about the kylo rens and not just about the finns. let’s just put it out there, I care about finn more than I care about kylo and I’m light side trash so of course I’m into the character and I love that finn understood at once he couldn’t kill people and defected and I love the journey he had, but you can’t just support the people that immediately see the way out and do things the way Good People Are Supposed To Behave. because if you support the finns but ditch the kylo rens then you really will end up with horrible people, because if someone who has the potential to not be a terrible person is left to their own thing without anyone trying to help them out of course they’ll convince themselves they’re not worth it and the more time passes the worst they get. and you can’t go around parading that you care about victims/mentally ill people/abuse victims/whatever if you only think the good ones are worth it. it’s such a calvinist way of thinking that makes my skin crawl tbh but then again tumblr is puritan calvinism hell so what do we even expect.

tldr: because tumblr is calvinist af without knowing it and because people have decided to give up on text comprehension for the joy of being asses to anyone who actually enjoys fictional villains, characters who aren’t necessarily the heroes and the likes.

and before anyone decides to murder me for the above and thinks that I’m a ride or die kylo fan or whatever, I’ll close this saying that: in tfa I really couldn’t care less about kylo (really, I was 100% indifferent), my favorite new trilogy character is actually poe which I find way more interesting/relatable/whatever than i could find kylo, my main ship investment in the new trilogy is finn/poe and before tlj I couldn’t care less for reylo (after... well it’s obvious I’m shipping it, but I started when it turned out to have infinite h/c potential/redemption arc potential because that’s what appeals to me in ships, I don’t care for mutual rivalships/hateships or villain/hero ships just for that, I only am into it if there’s the whole potential h/c angle so I wasn’t into it from the get-go). but I’ve liked enough characters who had stuff in common with kylo to at least recognize the pattern and I’d be fairly not coherent if I stanned theon and hated kylo on principle. ah, and I don’t find kylo particularly attractive either (honest I’d take oscar or john over adam any moment if I had to pick based on attractiveness level to me), but I also don’t feel the need to shame poor adam driver over it, especially when I think it’s a very good thing that people find attractive a type that’s not very hollywood-common and that’s actually considered not pretty/beautiful by canonical standards, so I mean, who cares. but it’s a question of intellectual honestly. *shrug*

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[sorrowsflower]

(2/2) And for me, Adlock is definitley canon, but still after few months this Molly/Sherlock scene rubs me off. I know he was played by his sister, he was forced to say these words to Molly, and still i'm disappointed that he said these words to Molly (she deserve better, tho). So, my question is what's your piont on this scene? Sorry for a mistakes, english not my natural language. P.S. Is it true Lara and Ben were dating briefly (?) while filming AsiB and after? thanx

Alright, so first off, apologies. I’ve been deliberately putting off answering this particular ask because I wanted to think it out.

I know this is not a popular opinion, especially among the people who liked TFP, and those who ship Sherlolly, but I’ve never particularly liked that scene because to me, it screamed inauthentic and forced. And even worse, it did a disservice to not one, but both female characters involved in this scene, Molly and Eurus. 

And this is not the Adlocker in me speaking, but the story-teller and the viewer.

When I create a story, especially one as complicated as TFP turned out to be, I always try and take a step back and think, “is this necessary? is this the best route for my character to take? is this even believable?” Even in a plotline as outrageous as Sherlock (which I’m not saying is a bad thing, I love that it’s over the top), the story has to be, even in some small measure, grounded in reality and authenticity. It has to be believable, relatable enough for me to care about these characters and what happens to them.

A lot of people say that the scene was about Sherlock’s character development, his growth, he’s becoming more human, and I think, objectively, that this was the problem. The writers put the spotlight so much on Sherlock, that it devalued both women involved in the scene. A typical example of female characters being sacrificed on the altar of manpain, but let’s not even get started on that.

Why do I say this?

Because first of all, it places Molly (as the writers so often and persistently have) in the role of the tragic, ever-smitten girl with the unrequited love, the one who refuses to say “I love you” because she’s still so crazy about him and she just can’t get over him, and she can’t tell him that because her heart’s breaking and saying it will prove his power over her. 

It completely undoes whatever “progress” or “development” her character has supposedly undergone (which, to me, isn’t even saying much, since the guy she got engaged to so that she could supposedly “move on” is a farcical replacement for Sherlock; but again, I digress). I’m not saying she can’t still love Sherlock after all these years, romantically or otherwise, but why can’t she say, “I love you” to him in a way that says “Yes, I love you. And it may still be romantic. But I also love you as a person and as a friend, and I’m not afraid to tell you that because I know, in your own way, you love me back.” Why does she have to force him to say it first, as if she needs some scraps of affection thrown her way?

Now, understand, I’m not saying this to diss on Sherlolly or Molly fans. Because I do love Molly sometimes (she’s a socially-awkward nerd like me, what more do I need to say?), and there are scenes where I think she has grown in some ways, but sometimes, I just wanna shake her (and the writers) and go “Girl, what the fuck???? Are you kidding me?”

This is not about defending Adlock for me. It’s about Sherlock’s love for the people in his life. Do I think Sherlock cares for Molly? Yes, absolutely. Do I think he loves her? Yes. Do I think there’s a romantic love there? No, I don’t. I believe Sherlock loves Molly in the way he loves John, Mary, Rosie, Mycroft, Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade and all the people in his life. Wholeheartedly, though not often expressed. So I’m not disappointed that he said he loves her, because he does. 

The only reason it turned into this angsty, I-hurt-my-friend-emotional-context thing is because the writers persist on treating Molly like a smitten girl who needs some crumbs of affection thrown her way, instead of the mature, self-respecting woman she could be.

Also, I’m gonna put Eurus in this too, because I feel like this scene was also a disservice to her character in a way, because of that whole “haha, there wasn’t really any bomb, you just hurt your friend for nothing." 

This really topped the whole fiasco off for me, by that point, I’m like -_- "you’re kidding, right?” Because it renders Eurus essentially toothless. For all her bluster and nonchalance regarding human life, she’s actually just bluffing, she’s not actually gonna kill Molly (or any of the main characters; she wouldn’t even let Sherlock kill Sherlock). For all the build-up that she’s this cold, apathetic, psychopathic mastermind Game player, she’s actually all bark and no bite. Great.

I think that scene, like many others in TFP, tries too hard to needlessly inject drama into an episode that felt the need to top all the other episodes. I can’t blame them for that desire, because they’d introduced some very heavy and very intense plotlines, as well as remarkable villains the first two seasons (essentially I’m not counting the disappointing Magnussen or the even more disappointing Culverton Smith), and there’s a lot of pressure to top all that. 

So they came up with this elaborate Saw-esque mind game that was actually mostly just a bluff on Eurus’s part. No little girl in danger, and John, the perennial damsel-in-distress, needing Sherlock to “save him” again (*insert eye-roll here*). Which is why I feel like the whole episode itself was inauthentic and forced. I feel like it was trying too hard.

Also I’m disappointed in the essentially passive role Sherlock played in this whole episode. Where’s the brilliant genius who can always turn any situation, no matter how dire, to his own advantage purely by his own intellect? Who outwits everyone? Instead, he just accepts Eurus’s terms and is merely a player in this Game.

That being said, all of this is just my opinion, and I am in no way trying to tear down any particular ships or characters.

P.S. I have no idea if Lara and Ben were dating, sorry. I know there were some papers who tried to say they were. I don’t really try to go into that too much, because these are real people, with real lives, both of whom have children and seem to be happily married. I love them both and I’m happy for them, but there’s a reason I don’t do RPF. As much as I love them, I have nothing to do with their lives, so I stay away from that out of respect for two people I admire very much.

[theysentushope-blog]

The Women of The Fast and The Furious

Or, alternatively, Sarah has a lot of righteous feminist anger when it comes to her beloved film series.

I’ve been a fan of the series from the beginning. I’ve seen every one of them on opening weekend. I think they’re great fun, entertaining, over the top, and perfect escapism. I’ve even been supportive of the franchise continuing post-Paul Walker. However, the treatment of the female characters is something that infuriates me to end, and nowhere is it clearer than in F8. I could have included a number of other female characters (Gisele Yashar, Riley Hicks, Monica Fuentes, I’m looking at y’all my girls) but I decided to limit myself to the three female characters relevant to the story in F8. Spoilers, ahoy.

MIA TORETTO

If anyone has received a bad hand in the series, it’s Jordana Brewster. It’s arguable that Mia Toretto is the original female lead of this series. While she was unsupportive of her brother’s less-than-legal life choices in The Fast and The Furious, she was not only willing to look the other way, but she also helped to save not only Dom’s life but the entire team’s. When she returned in Fast and Furious, she was relegated to a supporting role and that of the little sister/love interest/damsel in distress. It has been shown time and time again that Mia is just as skilled a driver as the rest of her family, and her leading Dom’s jailbreak alongside Brian at the end of Fast and Furious gave me hope that she would finally get the recognition she deserved. She’s much softer and more feminine than Letty, yes, but she proved to be a capable driver and fighter in Fast Five. Then they did the usual, and made her pregnant. Suddenly, Mia was fully set in the Wife/Mother trope and relegated to the sidelines for good. They even went the stereotypical route of having Owen Shaw kidnap her in Fast Six. She got a moment of being the hero by aiding in bringing down Shaw, but then she was set aside once again. Come Furious 7, and she’s pregnant again, worried about “holding Brian back” from the life he truly wants. What about what Mia wanted? I understand why they wrote Brian out the way they did, but I still think it was a mistake. In “retiring” the character, they’ve sentenced Mia to a future of being casually name-dropped but never seen again. You can’t tell me that it made sense that Mia was okay with being uninformed and kept out of saving her brother from going rogue. Brian, too, for that matter. As heartbreaking as it would have been, Cipher killing Brian off-screen would have provided just as much of an impetus for the team to go after her as what they went with. Then, Mia could have had her own revenge arc - I would have been much more interested in seeing sweet Mia go dark than Dom.

LETTY ORTIZ

Oh, Letty….Where do I begin? They completely destroyed her character in Fast Six. Here’s a strong, powerful, talented, independent woman. What should we do with her? Let’s give her amnesia and make her the bad guy! All to give Dom and Brian more manpain to struggle with. That’s on top of the fact that Letty “died” IN THE FIRST PLACE so Dom and Brian could suffer. There’s a deleted scene in Furious 7 where Letty goes to Mexico in search of what happened to her. There, we get a flashback of Gisele bringing Letty to the hospital and Letty speaking to a nurse who knew what had happened to her. I so wish they had kept this scene, as it gives Letty some semblance of a storyline outside of her relationship with Dom. In F8, Letty - who, up until now, has shown no interest in a family of her own - seems ready and raring to go on the babymaking front. By the end, despite Dom very clearly betraying her and the rest of their family instead of trusting them to help him, she forgives him without a word and wordlessly agrees to raise his child with another woman. Speaking of…

ELENA FREAKING NEVES

Let’s talk about all the ways Elena got screwed over since first appearing in Fast Five. She was an obvious replacement for Letty, who got pushed aside after fan backlash led to Letty being brought back. When she was no longer necessary for Dom’s storyline, she was pushed over to Hobbs. I had hope that we’d get some kind of agency after she went to work for the DSS. At the very least, I hoped that we’d get to see her working alongside Hobbs. But, of course, she practically disappeared after that in Furious 7. Then F8 comes around, and I had read that Elsa would be in the film. I was excited, I actually like the character of Elena and could see the potential she had as an ally for the team. Imagine my shock and horror to find that she had been brought back purely to torture and manipulate Dom’s character. I know the intention was for the viewer to feel Dom’s anguish at Elena’s captivity, and the revelation that she had (somehow) found time to secretly give birth to a child between Fast 6 (the last time she and Dom were together) and F8. Instead, I only felt revulsion at the knowledge that Elena was going to be the latest female character to be sacrificed at the altar of Dominic Toretto’s Manpain. This is especially ridiculous because we never had a chance to really care about Dom and Elena’s relationship. They flirted in Fast Five, were suddenly in a relationship at the beginning of Fast 6, and then he dropped her without a word when Letty came back into the picture. You knew that she was on borrowed time from the moment Cipher revealed her and Baby Brian to Dom. No way were they going to let her stick around and co-parent with Dom while Letty was there. So, when the time came and Rhodes pulled the trigger, all you could really do was throw your hands up and say “of course.”

[klarolinedrabbles]

I personally think Klaroline would never be trashed the way other ships were on tvd/to because they were both secondary characters and on equal footing in the writer's eyes, that was a big appeal for me when they were on the show. Neither character's narrative had taken over. Klaus' manpain wasn't the center of everything and Caroline wouldn't be sacrificed at his altar like with Stefan. Overall we'd get less screentime for both the characters and the ship but we'd be fine I think.

I adamantly disagree, I gotta say. Absolutely everything suffered bc of the writing, and Klaroline would not have been an exception. 

[constancecream]

Sherlock season 4 premiere: “The Six Thatchers” offers a disappointing end to a 3-year-old mystery

Sunday’s episode dropped a major character death — that of John’s wife, Mary — into the middle of an already-messy series of plot complications. Frustratingly, the only real reason for Mary’s demise predictably seems to be to examine its impact on Sherlock and John.

The lack of surprises — note: a plot twist is not always surprising — includes the occasional unworthy cliché, such as a slow-motion bullet hovering on its way to its target. On the other hand, a struggling, gurgling, smashing fight in a swimming pool is a refreshing change. It’s a jolly enough episode, but not as thrillingly stylish as some past adventures. Dare one suggest that we need more Moriarty? As it is, the Holmes brothers, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock and writer Mark Gatiss as Mycroft, remain the most stylish performers though — or because? — they talk RP in a general swamp of mockney. Modified rapture, then. It would be a shame if the new series sinks into the peremptory and mechanical.

Amanda Abbington’s arrival as Mary Morstan at the start of Sherlock season three seemed to accompany a shift in the show’s overall direction away from crime-solving and toward a rhetorical plot cycle in which John attempts to swap his dysfunctional relationship with Sherlock for something healthier, only to fail because in the world of Sherlock, all roads and all people ultimately lead back to the title character himself. The people around him, even John, ultimately seem to exist only as extras in his world, showing up when needed to lecture, scold, or spurn him into a renewed sense of purpose or a showing of human decency. (This trait is so well developed that all the characters who appeared in 2016’s one-off, 1890s-set holiday special turned out to be Sherlock’s mental representation of them as pieces of his conscience.)

Mary, who was initially the only character whose storyline seemed totally independent of Sherlock’s, fully upset this pattern for a moment. Ultimately, however, the show gave her very little autonomy; in the final episode of season three, her entire mysterious and unrevealed history — which fans have spent the last three years debating — was framed as an insight into John’s character rather than Mary herself. We learned that she was a secretive former assassin, and that she lied her way into John’s life after stealing a new identity; but this entire story was framed as a story about John, not Mary — a story of how John was drawn to her because he was a reckless thrill-seeker.

This moment is the inevitable result of three seasons’ worth of Sherlock’s hubris and refusal to heed warnings or take seriously the judgment of anyone besides himself; and when Mary just as inevitably jumps in front of him, sacrificing her own life for his, it should feel like a wake-up call and a moment of reckoning. Sherlock registers a glimmer of self-awareness that her death is his fault, but by this point, the show seems to be so far immersed in the cult of worship around its anti-hero that the scene is hardly more than an afterthought. By episode’s end, Mary herself — via posthumous “If you’re reading this, I’m dead” message sent to Sherlock via a video file — is giving Sherlock permission to insert himself right back into the center of John’s life, thus making her death all about his relationship with his best friend.

John, meanwhile, had cheated on Mary emotionally before her death; his grief sees him processing his obvious guilt as anger toward Sherlock for failing to protect her. Given all the terrible things Sherlock has done to John directly over the course of their friendship that John has inexplicably managed to forgive — including lying to John, drugging John, sending John into a PTSD-triggering war zone, and making John watch as Sherlock faked his death before pretending to be dead for two years — the fact that Sherlock’s failure to save Mary is the final straw that threatens to cause a permanent rift in John and Sherlock’s friendship does even more injustice to Mary’s narrative. Her story was never her own story; it was always and ever about fueling the heart of the series, the relationship between Sherlock and John.

At this point, does anyone even really care if Sherlock and John are in love?

Much has been written about the way Sherlock queerbaits — that is, the way in which it arguably exploits queer identity by making John and Sherlock’s relationship into the ongoing subject of homoerotic speculation and subtext, even as the show’s creators insist, again and again, that they’re not writing the two men as queer. Almost every episode of Sherlock up until now has contained some sort of side-speculation by one character or another that John and Sherlock are gay and/or in love. “The Six Thatchers” was notably devoid of this kind of interaction, and was in fact extremely straightforward about John and Sherlock’s friendship without any of the usual frustrating homoerotic overtones.

Except, of course, Mary is now dead, and she has charged Sherlock to “save” John after her death. This sets the stage for an even deeper level of intimacy forged by mutual grief over her loss. Before “The Six Thatchers,” we had queerbaiting in the form of a lot of gay jokes. Now the gay jokes may be gone, but the show has traded them for something that feels even more insulting: the death of its most independent female character purely to further some manpain that in the end probably won’t bring John and Sherlock together as more than friends. It’s kind of a mess. And it really only justifies the impending narrative for the rest of season four — in which John will push Sherlock away as Sherlock awkwardly tries to help him recover — if you ultimately think their relationship is worth salvaging. Frankly I’m not sure that it is. Sherlock, for all of his occasional attempts to be a friend, is a perpetually selfish individual who seems to need John more as a reflection of a certain version of himself than because he values who John is. John, in turn, appears to still be the PSTD-ridden soldier who can only snap out of his stupor when he’s chasing the adrenalin high of crime-solving that Sherlock offers him. If this is friendship, it’s darkly co-dependent; if it’s true love, it’s a tragedy. Sherlock has never been forced to reckon with any of the utterly unconscionable things he’s done to John over the years (look back at that list — it’s a horrific list!). And if the show is going to sacrifice entire characters on the altar of “Johnlock,” a.k.a. the shipping name for their eternal love, it should probably make Johnlock something worth caring about. I’m just not sure that it has. Also, though this may be an afterthought for a series that has built itself around its own cleverness, it’s just not very much fun anymore.

Still, at least Abbington and Mary got a fierce send-off. Whether it will be worth the loss in the long run depends on how willing Gatiss and Moffat are to really have Sherlock undergo the moral reckoning that would justify her death, or whether they intend to keep spinning out the same empty, self-satisfied love story of two crime-solving bros who would probably each be better off alone — or at least without the other.

Vox