Mmmmm even more crimson peak/beauty and the beast parallels floating around my brain

girls when they feel misunderstood

trick or treat!

sending you the négyeshatos tram because somehow it's both a trick AND a treat:)

these kinds of posts have infuriated me since 2013 because most disney princesses were victims of abuse, patriarchy, corruption, etc. and are strong role models because of how they dealt with adversity. through that they also found love and happiness which they deserve! and not all of them actually married the men right after meeting them (:

I think Tumblr should have "the place where people send death threats to one another because their favorite villain did the same" for their app description.

in all honestly that is not a trait unique to tumblr, most websites with significant fandom populations will have conflict just bc of how people in groups tend to be

...that being said, it should have a description that says 'even if you persistently post that you are not interested in true crime or someone's fetish for recent active serial killers, and you block their asks every time you get them, theyre still gonna send you spam asks about how 'uwu kawaii' these murderers are that they also send to 20 other blogs at a time bc they don't know how to behave themselves online'

you wouldnt happen to know anything about that, would you? because i'll be honest with you, getting this ask right before yet another one of those spam asks is suspicious at best. what villain do you feel you're being harassed for liking? is it a fictional villain, or are you fetishising and glorify a recent killer so you can play fangirl to them? are you actually being harassed, or are you just mad that the blogs you spam with asks about these people aren't interested and don't want to engage with you?

I feel like when people think lesbian they often associate with being a girlboss but what about the cringe fail guy lesbians. I am not breaking glass ceilings, i am just an awkward guy.

so luz went from the girl at school failing her classes with no friends, completely misunderstood by her teachers, other kids, her mom even, to the girl with friends for life (and an awesome girlfriend) who has half the people on the boiling isles show up for her quinceañera because turns out she's a hero and she's found the place she belongs and is understood and completely loved for who she is

willow went from miserable, bullied girl who didn't believe she could do anything right and tried to make herself so small to a natural team leader and complete girlboss (with a cute boyfriend) who just...oozes confidence in everything that she is, there is no way you can look at her and believe people once dared to call her half-a-witch and if anyone did now she could take them to the cleaners except she couldn't care less and the rest of the hexsquad would do it for her anyway

gus went from the kid who didn't think he could do anything right to a confident teacher who gets to show students his passion for the human realm (and he can pop in and out all the time which is the dream!) and being a prodigy is really a gift now, not something that sets him apart and makes him a target but instead an awesome teacher who can empathize with students having a hard time and is just plain cool on top of all that as he teaches them not to eat paperclips

amity went from one dimensional mean girl actually desperately trying to earn her parents' approval to wild, adventure seeking author who made up for who she was, cut ties with her emotionally abusive mother and terrible friends, has a close relationship with her dad now plus the best friends ever (byeeee boscha), and also has an awesome girlfriend as she travels all over the isles doing exactly what she wants with no one controlling her

and wow okay hunter went from the golden guard who obeyed belos' every order out of the insane desire to be needed and special without realizing if he messed up belos was literally growing his replacement because he was always just a copy of someone belos both hated but couldn't let go of haha that's dark to being just hunter who has guardians he doesn't have to flinch away from and tons of friends and he gets to carve palismen just how he wanted and his girlfriend could definitely bench press him and he'll always remember the first friend who ever found him (chose him!!) and saved his life in so many ways THE HEXSQUAD IS SO GOOD I JUST!!!!!!!

god i keep getting this podcast ad for some podcast about greek mythology that purports to be uncovering the "secret hidden true versions" of the myths and of course it's all "medusa was a girlboss" and "xyz male hero was actually a rapist" and it's making me want to scream bc that's not how folklore works!! i know a lot of people think of greek mythology as somehow different from the folklore of other regions or time periods but it's really not!! you can't uncover the "true" version because it doesn't exist!! the version of the medusa story where she's a monstrous villain is equally as "real" as the version where she's a misunderstood abuse victim bc folklore is a long term ongoing collaborative process!!

coquette girl aesthetic 💌🎀🐇

Even if Medusa wasn't a sympathetic "villain"/ the actual victim, I'd still side with her.

Even if she was just totally evil and not relatable, I'd still claim her as my girlboss.

Woman with snakes for hair. Superior. Transcendent.

No notes. Perfect character design. Greece got her backstory fucked up, but peak understandable villain. Misunderstood feminist queen.

Y'all hate on Medusa cuz you hate women, plain and simple 😔

I cannot overstate my loathing of retellings of stories from the villain's point of view where they are just misunderstood victims who don't do any villainy. I can't even tolerate when they're well-intentioned but use evil means. Give me some actual evil, some villainy. Infantilized adults with zero media literacy love the "actually the villain was justified and misunderstood" angle because they feel uncomfortable with the thought of finding a fictional villain enjoyable to watch, and they can't cope unless they spin it so that actually they were the good guy all along.

Harley Quinn and The Joker are two of the worst to get hit with this whack ass trend. Joker as a sad little guy who doesn't understand why society is so mean to him is so fucking stupid. If I'm seeing something from his POV, I want to see him be an evil mastermind. Joker in Joker (2019) is a little pissbaby with no goons, no evil schemes, and no motives other than being a misunderstood victim.

Harley Quinn got an even worse treatment. I can't believe all the pearl-clutching over the fact that she was in a toxic relationship with an evil bad guy. Yeah no shit, that's the whole point. Not only is she not allowed to have evil intentions anymore, she's not even allowed to have bad taste in men. The toxicity is what made her interesting, it was cool and unique that her motives and path to villainy were rooted in fascination and a corrupting, romantic obsession with a terrible person. It was something different that stood out from usual motives of power or base cruelty. This whole angle got flushed because it was incompatible with her status as a girlboss role model protagonist. Abysmal.

Give me EVIL! Give me VILLAINY!!! I want them to be selfish, I want them to be cruel, I don't need to find every character morally agreeable to find them compelling or entertaining. If I'm going to see a story about a villain, they had better actually be a god damn villain.

As always, (no pressure) reblog for more votes, etc. <3

Children's media can absolutely and does radicalize kids when written correctly,it's just that shitty bigoted adults in fandoms deliberately misenterpret their messages and trick them into believing they're canon and that's how we got here.Bleach had Ichigo be a goth punk dude who's a fantastic older brother and choose his female love interest because she's his best friend and he finds her weirdgirlness to be enchanting which is good rep for us because being punk is about nonconformity and so is the fact that he never joined the military system his species was largely a part of because he didn't give two shits about them but over half the fandom is convinced the mangaka is a 'sellout' and 'pandering' for not making him essentially a paranormal cop for the sake of pairing him up with the fem mc that he has a familial and queerplatonic relathionship with as confirmed by the aformentioned mangaka

Pjo had Percy hate the gods as much as Luke does and act on it too but directly TO them instead of grooming younger halfbloods to work for him as soldiers and in fact he basically adopted every one of them he came across as his siblings and pseudo-kids and this is explicitly framed as why he's a hero and Luke's evil but you see nonstop erasure of his anti-corruption and anti-authority mentality and direct action despite being his core character traits to make him more palpable as an 'average fantasy protagonist' when the point of him is that he's not normal in any way

The Owl House had 3/5 of it's mcs be poc with the two white ones being an autistic and ocd lesbian and the other a disabled boy with zero conventionally physical traits that're never made out to be ugly and the protag is an inmigrant afrolatina girl while the big villain is a puritan colonizer and every single ship on the show is queer including the m/f one and the token white boy has almost all the important characters to his arc being black and the only one who isn't is a fat asian girl who's also disabled but the HUGE amount of positive rep in the show is deliberately taken out of context for bad faith critisism by a bunch of 20/30/even 40 year olds who've never written actual good stories themselves and this includes them adoring and gushing over the colonizer guy while dismissing the poc and women in the cast as irrelevant

Across the Spiderverse had an EXTREMELY black in every way character literally named SpiderPUNK who makes his beliefs clear in every single one of his lines and isn't all talk for a single second but he's reduced down to 'annoying edgy older brother figure' and made to listen to Taylor Swift and go to Hot Topic and called 'obviously a skater boy' and every other poser punk trope in the books

Atla had Aang and Katara be a gnc boy of a lesser known type of asian race and Katara a brownskin native girl that reclaims femininity for herself with their character drives being to save the world with Zuko's arc hammering it in again and again that while he always had good in him,he WAS evil,he DOES have a lot of bad traits and that made him do a lot of bad things and THAT'S why he needed a redemption arc to be a hero but Aang gets called racist for following the buddhist belief that in-universe he was sole remaining follower of that killing humans is bad,Katara gets adultified and stripped of her actual personality to make her just 'hashtag relatable teen gurl' and Zuko gets infantalized and upholded as the least problematic character in the whole show

And my last and not quite like the rest example is Harry Potter,including the spinoffs and fanon.Everything in it is neoliberal bs and the fandom just made it worse-Oh,the house that's a metaphor for fascism and white supremacy legacies?They're just misunderstood little babies and every minority-coded🥺The lower class family who canonically were Jkr's best attempt at good people that still flopped?Awful homophobic bastards😡All the female characters?Perfect slay 'You can't sit with us' girlboss,precious little baby angel who can't tie her shoes without her reverse harem's help or manipulative self-obsessed hyperfemme pick me,those are the only three categories they can ever fall in.Marauder's Era not only existing but being very,VERY popular is nothing but whiteness-What is there for you to be attached to there exactly?With the canon cast i can least see why you'd have nostalgia but M Era is literally nothing.You just CHOOSE to pick a franchise that's violently bigoted towards basically everyone and who's creator actively influences and helps caused that hurt irl oppressed groups instead of making ocs since you're already building them from scratch anyway

It's not the fault of actual good creators and especially not kids in fandom that grown ass bootlickers couldn't accept that their precious 'escapist comfort media' isn't apolitical at all instead of absorving it's messages like they should have since they have no care for other people despite insisting how kind and unproblematic they are

does the fandom constantly claim your fave is "just misunderstood and need of protection? has it turned your blorbo into just a silly soft boy? are you tired of everyone forgetting they're actually very capable?

well, look no further. welcome to the war of the woobified, where characters reclaim their status as a badass

or whatever. anyways

welcome to the show! i'm your host, mod jelly, previously pollrunner of ungodly-amounts-of-godly-trauma. let me know if i should change the url i don't mind

rules:

gonna be loose with the definition of woobified here. it's up to you but you do have to justify it. if you don't tell me why or how theyve been woobified i'm probably not gonna put them in unless i need to fill up space

submit as many characters as you want. probably will not do a prelims unless necessary

uhh no problematic media or whatever

okay thats probably it ?? have fun be nice :)

characters can be submitted through asks, submissions, google form, or even uquiz

tagged some of my favorite poll blogs under the cut for exposure :)

@badass-queer-couples-battle @battle-couple-battle @victimsofyaoipoll @mommy-daddy-issues-poll @morally-grey-girlbosses @underrated-adversaries @generic-anime-boy-bracket @crossover-enemies-competition @autistic-anime-girls-bracket

also. @shejustcalledmeafish as per your request