#that's just a Sexy Lamp but replace 'sexy' with 'sad'
Text
Is it just me or has fandom overall...changed a lot in how it talks about its favourite characters over the past few years?
It used to be people who really liked a character would be like “this character’s the best at everything, they can do no wrong, they’d win every fight, they have a plan for everything, they’re the coolest cleverest most attractive person in the whole story!!!”, and like...that could go too far, it could be annoying or just really really inaccurate compared to canon (I used to know a Jill fan who insisted that Jill could easily beat every single character in the series in a fight--and look, Jill is very cool, but Chris was canonically the best in hand-to-hand combat at STARS and was also training HER in marksmanship, Jill is of course extremely capable but...she really does not have to be the best at everything to prove why she’s your favourite...for that matter, Wesker fans who were like “Wesker in RE5 has to be a clone/a fake/whatever because the REAL Wesker would never LOSE because Wesker can’t make mistakes!”...always made me go *stop, please, it’s embarrassing*), but it did...make sense why someone who really loved a character would say these things about them?
But now it seems like the kind of comments people make about their favourite characters, and the way they portray them in fics, are...pretty much the opposite of that? People will be like “my blorbo is SO STUPID! they’re so useless they can’t do ANYTHING! they’re a pathetic weak little wet paper bag!”
Like, a few years ago if I’d seen a post saying things like that about a character I’d assume it was written by someone who hated them?
And obviously...sometimes a character you love is kind of a dork, or makes some silly mistakes sometimes. Other times a character you love is a terrible evil person. I’m not saying everyone should equate liking a character with thinking they’re perfect. But...most popular characters AREN’T actually completely stupid and incompetent at absolutely everything, and I can never quite get my head around it when people seem to hold this view of a character and it’s clearly not true, like...if you really think they’re pathetic, stupid, and can’t do anything right...do you really like them that much?
I’ve seen fandom call characters stupid/idiots when they are either science geniuses, or they’re brilliant inventors who build sci-fi gadgets, or they’re scheming chessmaster strategist types who manipulate all the other characters for years and come very close to taking over the world, or maybe they just canonically speak several languages and are well-read, or even if canon doesn’t focus much on their intelligence you’ve got characters like Chris who was a USAF fighter pilot--which means he has a degree, judging by the timeline probably an Air Force Academy one, which means he was likely in the top 3% of his high school classes and DEFINITELY didn’t “barely scrape through” as I often see headcanoned (not just by people who want to bash him but people who are like “I love him! He’s such a big dumb himbo! He’s so stupid!!” like. what.)
Similarly I see characters who are canonically very confident and self-assured, never really doubting themselves for a second, and who canonically react to things going wrong by calmly adapting their plans and moving forwards without ever getting discouraged, get tagged on posts about “pathetic wet paper bag men who’ve never had a good day in their life and an insult from a child would make them cry”.
Or characters who are shown in canon as dangerous, powerful and near-fearless fighters get written in fics, by people who say they’re their favourites, as spending all their time crying and flinching and not even trying to defend themself from whoever’s attacking/trying to hurt them (and not because they went through some major trauma previously in the fic that left them in this state, either--often the fic is set during canon and the character is just...like that rather than something having happened to change them from who they were at that point in their life in canon)... personally, while I enjoy whump, whumping a character who’s ALREADY weak and helpless and spends all their time curled up in a corner crying BEFORE whatever you do to them in the fic can easily just feel like kicking them while they’re down and is honestly boring because it doesn’t show anything NEW about the character, so it’s particularly odd to see fics written that way when the character in canon is exactly the confident powerful type that I do think is fun to whump.
(For a specific example, RE canon is that Wesker and Sergei had a rivalry and Wesker seems to view Sergei mostly with disdain and see him as an annoying obstacle. Wesker never gives any sign of being scared of or intimidated by Sergei, and certainly doesn’t seem to start panicking the instant Sergei enters a room. And even before he had his powers, he had extensive combat training by the time he met Sergei, and Sergei being taller and heavier doesn’t inherently mean that Wesker would be defenceless and go down in one punch in a fight, or even that Wesker would LOSE a fight against him. Canon doesn’t depict Wesker as a helpless victim for Sergei to beat up...hurt him by all means but it’s OOC if Wesker doesn’t give as good as he gets.)
Oh, and characters who are canonically master manipulators who are experts at getting people on their side and gaining their trust being portrayed as so socially awkward and clueless that they’re incapable of holding a conversation without coming across offputtingly weird...
Maybe I’m the odd one out here but I can’t really get why you’d want to present your favourite character as LESS capable, LESS intelligent, LESS brave or confident or powerful or whatever other impressive traits they might have in canon? Like I wouldn’t go so far as to say I ADMIRE all my favourite characters, because some of them are murderous evil monsters, but...I generally do see them as either having some kind of admirable personality trait (courage, integrity, confidence, determination... or maybe just a lot of charisma and a good sense of humour, though I feel like charisma tends to overlap with confidence a fair bit...), or at least as being very good at what they do. I can kind of get the appeal of the “sweet and kind and caring but not that bright ‘golden retriever man’ type”, even though they’re not usually MY type, because I know some people primarily like characters who they think it would be good to be friends with (and most of those types of characters aren’t USELESS, at the very least they tend to be good at listening and being supportive), but when someone’s favourite character is a bad person AND they seem to think they’re stupid, useless, incompetent and pathetic on top of being evil it’s like...so what do you even like about them?
#I can even enjoy seeing a character at their lowest saddest point#but there has to be some contrast#otherwise it's just one-note#'sad' on its own is not a trait that will usually make me want to spend time with a character#if a character does nothing but mope about and feel sorry for themself throughout the story and never tries to improve their situation...#that's just a one-note 'damsel in distress' trope but as the protagonist#and it also just gets really monotonous#and I also just don't want a character who is always miserable existing in my head all the time#of course there are great and interesting characters who struggle with clinical depression#but there are ways of writing that#without making your character essentially replaceable with a wet tea towel with a sad face drawn on it#who gets bounced around the plot like a pinball#that's just a Sexy Lamp but replace 'sexy' with 'sad'#and while the Sexy Lamp test is meant to be about whether female characters are written as flat characters out of sexism#a flat useless male character might not be sexist but he certainly is boring#if all I know about them is 'they're sad and weak' that doesn't motivate me to want to spend time with them...#even 'they're an awful person but they're fun' is much more appealing than that
9 notes
·
View notes
Text
It's hard to say that Emilie Agreste haunts the narrative of miraculous since you could replace her with Gabriel having cancer and get basically the exact same plot, just with him trying to heal himself instead of his wife.
For a character to haunt the narrative, they have to feel like a character. Their actions have to feel unique and meaningful and I can't say anything like that about Emilie. We know nothing meaningful about her. She only exists to be Gabriel and Nathalie's motivation and to give Adrien an occasional reason to make sad kitty eyes. The lack of thought put into her character is glaring once they start trying to sell that she was "a perfect soul too good and pure for this world!"
While I will fully admit that I like the idea of Emilie as an at least semi-decent mom for reasons I won't get into here, I can only make that work if I ignore the fact that canon literally said, "Adrien was locked away for the first 13 years of his life and was only let out once his mom was gone and we're never going to justify why that happened!"
This is what happens when you don't figure out your character's backstories before you start writing your story, which is absolutely what happened here. Go rewatch season one. Adrien is not written as being sheltered and never allowed to go out. That only shows up after Origins. Five bucks says that they didn't come up with the idea until then. I'm pretty sure there's even an old script floating around where the peacock wasn't in the miracle box in earlier drafts, which I have no trouble believing given how shoehorned the sentiplot is.
All of this is extra true given season five's ending and its actual content. Emilie only exists to talk about Adrien and Gabriel. She has no desires or personality outside of being a wife and mother. Now that she's filled her role as Gabriel's sexy lamp/McGuffin, her statue is gone, turned into Adrienette's new make out spot because Adrien is too busy dating to mourn his mom or his newly deceased father.
Given Adrien's lack of involvement in the narrative, his lack of negative emotions about its ending, and Emilie's lack of narrative importance, it really reads like Adrien was someone else's kid.
53 notes
·
View notes
Text
Doctor Who, but Chronologically 30
Okay OKAY so we have just watched the Christmas Armistice of 1914, but now we move on to one of my favourite episodes of ALL TIME. In fact, full disclosure, this is one of my favourite TV episodes of anything ever. This is one of my go-to options for comfort TV. If I’m ill and sad and cwtched up on the sofa, this is in the Emergency Elanor First Aid Kit. I love it. I love it so much that I will not be quoting any of it, because if I do, I will be posting the whole script. You cannot imagine the extent to which I had to sit on my hands so I wouldn’t do a full episode review accidentally.
It is 1926, my friends, and this is the Unicorn and the Wasp.
Tennant and Donna are back!!!! DREAM TEAM. We haven’t seen them since they were running around Pompei in episode one, my lord that was a while back now. And Jesus, what a return to quality. The companions have been failing the Sexy Lamp Test for so long. The only break was Martha in the Human Nature two-parter, and that was an emotional wringer. But here!!! Donna!!! You could NEVER replace her with a sexy lamp. She is 1000% the co-protagonist. She and Tennant are best friends and they love each other intensely and platonically and they travel through time and SOLVE CRIME while being, at all moments and seconds of every single scene, two halves of a whole idiot, and it is joyful and wonderful and amazing.
Okay okay so
They land in a country manor in England, a part expertly played by Llansannor Court in Wales if I’m not much mistaken, and the interiors are 1000% Tredegar House because I know my Welsh country manors. The Doctor and Donna get ludicrously excited about going to a garden party in 1926, all giggly. They even go and get dressed up, by which I mean Donna does – she exits the TARDIS and gives a twirl.
“What do you think?” she teases. “Flapper, or slapper?”
“Flapper, definitely,” the Doctor beams. “You look lovely.”
… I am having violent flashbacks to Capaldi calling Clara ugly.
Anyway they meet Agatha Christie in time for an honest-to-god murder mystery. It’s fucking phenomenal. It’s silly and camp and the murderer is a giant wasp, except in true Agatha Christie style, there’s a complicated twist involving a secret pregnancy, an expensive gem, the hot young woman (played by her from Rogue One) actually being an accomplished jewel thief impersonating a socialite, and a prodigal reverend. One of these people is the aforementioned giant wasp, except the joyful sci-fi plot is really running around a playground with a balloon and giggling, so it has been primed to kill people in libraries with lead piping like a Cluedo game.
I literally cannot list every moment I love. It’s just too many. So I shall try to name check some top moments:
“MAIDEN”
“It was a good once”
“I am Inspector Smith from Scotland Yard, and Miss Noble is the plucky young girl who helps me”
“Copyright Donna Noble”
“Major snap out of it. No, right out of it –“
“HOW IS HARVEY WALLBANGER ONE WORD”
The ENITRE reveal scene holy shit
“Ah, let’s see, it’s filed under C” *box contains a Cyberman part, a Carrionite egg, a bust of Caesar, and cables*
Fuck. I just. *clenches fist* I love this episode so damn much
Okay so plot threads. Well! No new info about Donna’s back, unfortunately, so nothing to tick off there. Only, as ever, things to add. There’s a scene where Donna is comforting Agatha (and finding vital clues), and she explains that her last partner ran off with a giant spider. That’s a hell of a thing. Oh, also Donna made her second reference to bees disappearing. But that’s it.
Fuck me but I would burn so much Capaldi for so much more Tennant/Donna.
Anyway the list of plot threads is now going under a read more, Christ on wheels
“She” (an unknown person) is returning (perhaps River returned as Missy. Maybe Me? Maybe Clara???!)
There is something on Donna’s back
An entire planet, Pyrovilia, just… disappeared, somehow. (Maybe because the TARDIS is exploding??? Saturnine was also lost, and that WAS because of the TARDIS exploding. The lion man’s planet was also lost but he was a bit of a knob about it if I’m honest.)
Amy is maybe dead (she’s not)
The Doctor has been cubed (he’s out, but how?)
River is possibly blown up (unless she’s Missy)
The TARDIS has blown up (It’s fine now. Except it’s sort of melting now because it’s corrupted, but it’s fine again)
The universe appears to have ended (the universe is back again)
The Doctor has employed(?) Nardole
(And Nardole was “reassembled???” Nardole had glass nipples and invisible hair?? WHAT THE FUCK IS HE)
There’s a vault in the TARDIS and it contains Missy but we don’t know why (sometimes she knocks for the bants)
What has happened to all these companions and where are the new ones coming from?
There’s an immortal Viking girl now. Her name is Me and she’s now looking after the people the Doctor abandons
What’s With The Silence?
Why was Rory entirely unconcerned by the entire world suddenly going silent when that is Not Normal and should have been, at the very least, extremely disconcerting?
What did the Doctor do to Queen Lizzie One?
Who is Captain Jack Harkness? (Is he the one who gave the companions a warning about the lone cyberman?)
Why is Amy seeing a one-eyed woman in a vanishing window?
What’s with the Doctor’s future involving getting shot by an astronaut?
Is Amy pregnant and why is it inconclusive?
Who is Sarah-Jane Smith?
How is the Doctor Bill’s teacher and why/where does he have an office?
What is going on with the Cyber War and the Cyberium???
Who did the Doctor lose to Cyber Conversion?
What happened with the Other Cyber War?
What happened with the Third War that deleted the void?
Why does Rose seem particularly important?
What’s with the Weeping Angel statues, and why can’t you blink at them?
What order do these Doctors go in? (Eccleston, Tennant, uncertain, Smith, Capaldi, Whittaker)
Which companion just… forgot the Doctor, and how?
Yaz and Vinder are about to die as Mori/Mwri/Muuri
There is a Lupari shield around Earth.
What’s a Time War?
What’s the Rift?
What’s Bad Wolf?
What happened with Amy’s pregnancy?
In which war did the Doctor become a war criminal, and how?
Who is the Master?
Why has Amy forgotten Rory?
Is Rory plastic or not?
Why is the Doctor sulking on a cloud?
How exactly does the Doctor have a cloud?
What exactly happened with Strax to, uh, tame him?
Which friend killed Strax?
Which friend brought Strax back?
Where did this lesbian lizard and human couple come from?
What happened with Clara as Souffle Girl and the Daleks?
How does Clara actually join?
Why so many Claras?
Why is Missy apparently in robo-heaven?
Why is probably!Missy pushing Clara and the Doctor together?
What is Trensilor and what happened there?
Who is Handles?
The Doctor is about to be dissolved by a beautiful geode man
The universe is being crushed by the Flux
Will the Doctor open the fobwatch?
Sontarans are invading Earth again
Who is Kate?
Who is Osgood? Another name of Clara’s again?
The fuck is the deal with the Grand Serpent
Does Martha get to go to an ice cream planet with 12-fingered massage aliens?
How did the Doctor forget Clara?
Who is Bill’s puddle girlfriend Heather?
How did Nardole die?
When does Bill get Cyberman-ed and die?
When does the Doctor shrink and enter a Dalek called Rusty?
Whittaker is falling to her death rn
Was that ring relevant?
Does anyone know the Doctor’s name?
When did Yaz talk to Dan about fancying the Doctor?
When did Dan talk to the Doctor about fancying Yaz?
Who was the Doctor’s wife?
What's happening with the bees?
What happened with Donna's ex and a giant spider?
103 notes
·
View notes
Text
Anonymous asked:
I actually happen to think that the authors can't make Adrian better because he's not a character. He's a plot device. Because of the writers mistaken sense of 'feminism' it's as if he can't be a character that grows and changes in risk of him some how being more interesting than their feminist icon. Lies made that very apparent to me. He was barley an autonomous character in that because they didn't want to risk the 'love square' .
That and the fact that he’s “perfect” to them.
soap-lady asked:
I think Adrien is the male version of the Sexy Lamp. You could replace him with a lamp and change nothing. He has no ambitions, no dreams for himself besides "winning" Ladybug. It's sad that he's just this "Nowhere Man". #badwriting, #livingMacGuffin
And then they had a chance to give him something in “Wishmaker” and basically just admitted that Adrien has nothing.
Anonymous asked:
Adrien IS incredible, i don't think any other character could ever go through what he does and stay exactly the same. No matter what happens, his character doesn't develop at all. Incredible
kjfhgFDKGJRDFG THIS IS MY FAVORITE ASK
Like--wow, right?
So impressive. Amazing.
64 notes
·
View notes
Text
that song that we used to make love to [b.d.h.]
billie dean howard x fem!reader
requested: i’m begging for something sexy and/or sad with billie dean
disclaimer: strong language, sexual nature, smut/masturbation
Your bed had been calling you for hours now; coaxing you to peel the uncomfortable work uniform from your skin and crawl into the blankets where you were free to drown in your own thoughts without interruption.
When you finally did have the chance to crawl into bed, the sheets were cold from being untouched all day. The music that echoed softly from your headphones only encouraged you to pull them up and over your shoulders.
You settled on your back, eyes closed and phone discarded somewhere on the nightstand as you let the shuffle of songs soothe your aching head.
The beat of silence between songs only reminded you how empty the entire house felt now.
Billie had only been gone a few months; whether she was traveling the world or settled at Murder House with Constance, you weren’t sure.
Hell, for all you knew she could have been filling her bed with a few of the many fans she had accumulated from her tv show’s newfound fame.
You had little time to think, though, as an all-too-familiar melody began to echo into your head. You froze, trying hard to swallow the lump beginning to form in your throat.
By the time you began to fish blindly for your phone it was already too late, the song was into its fifth or sixth line and the sound of it was enough to rip the breath from your lungs but you craved the sort of hurt it brought you.
You started to be able to see her. The way she used to usher you into the room pawing and gripping at you like a lifeline. The way she used to knock over everything in her wake - lamps, vases, flowers - all to get you in the bedroom fast enough to fill her need for you.
You could almost feel the heavy feeling of her hovering over you, breath ghosting against your lips as she trailed kisses along your burning skin.
Before you knew it, your hand was wandering into the confinements of your underwear where you easily found your throbbing clit and pressed the pad of your finger against it.
A low moan ripped from your throat as your eyes screwed shut, imagining the way she used to touch you; feel you.
Your breath caught in your throat as you mimicked the usual ministrations of her fingers, delving deep inside yourself with the palm of your hand pressed firmly over your clit.
You could only picture her; the look in her eyes as she fucked you, the sight of her hand between your legs working with so much skill that you were almost sure she was using some kind of twisted magic on you.
“Billie,” you groaned, outloud to yourself. You were squirming and whithering now, chest heaving as you worked on yourself to the best of your ability. “Fuck,” you grunted.
You thighs twitched as you desperately chased the feeling you craved so bad. God, you wanted to hear her voice milking the orgasm out of you. You wanted her to whisper in your ear and scrape her teeth against your pulse point.
Cumming felt nearly impossible without her smell suffocating you, but still you tried. The stinging heat felt nearly too hard to reach as you rode your own fingers.
You were beginning to lose control and patience, disregarding any sense of dignity as moans of her name kept falling from your lips - over and over again.
A groan, just slightly louder than the music in your headphones caused you to shoot up from the bed. Your hand flew from between your legs to rip the music out of your ear.
“Billie?” You blushed profusely as you met her eyes. She was standing in the doorway of your bedroom, tightly clutching one of her many dresses in one hand and her house key in the other.
Neither of you knew what to say to the other; you sat in silence as she stared at you and you desperately tried to catch your breath.
“Get out!” You shrieked, tightly clutching the blankets to your chest. Despite being fully clothed, you felt exposed to her.
You knew you were caught when her eyes shifted to the headphones on the floor; you could still hear the song playing from them as it hummed just over the silence in the room.
You shifted your eyes to her and a smirk broke out across her face. You scoffed, “Stop looking at me like that.” You we’re still mad at her for leaving.
Billie didn’t speak, instead she moved to stand at the end of the bed. What was in her hands collectively clattered onto the floor as she let it all go.
“Did you miss me?” She already knew the answer to her question as she bent onto the bed and began crawling towards you after her shoes were discarded on the floor.
Your ears were hot as she moved to level your faces. You thought she was going to kiss you but she paused when her lips were inches from yours.
“Say it,” her voice was low and teasing. How you were supposed to talk louder than the heart pounding in your chest, you didn’t know.
Her confidence faultered as you whimpered out a strangled ‘I missed you’, something soft flickered in her features.
But just as fast as it had come, it had gone and replaced with a look of pure need. She lunged forward to connect your lips, not giving you time to breath before her hand clutched at your chest.
Without missing a beat, her hand replaced the emptiness between your legs. You moaned loudly, your own hand shooting up to tangle into your hair.
“Oh, pretty girl.” She praised, watching you throw your head back into the pillow as her fingers circled around your clit.
“Please, please, please!” You pleaded; to what? You had no clue. But you were far from in control as her finger pushed inside you and curled deliciously.
Strangled moans and cries filled the room. Billie watched between your thighs, admiring the way you took her fingers.
“I fucking missed you, sugar.” She mused, eyes flickering back to your face as you bucked your hips against her hand. “...missed you so much.” She mumbled, slipping a third finger inside you as you gripped onto the sheets for dear life.
“There she is,” You could have cum from her words alone. You had gotten the exact thing you had longed for this whole time. She was feeding it to you on a silver spoon.
“Billie!” She felt your hand tighten around her hair and her lips found yours.
Suddenly, she was soft and gentle. She was savoring the feeling of you and letting you feel every excruciatingly perfect inch of her fingers.
“Come for me, sweetheart.” She kissed your earlobe and then the pulsing vein on your neck. “Come on, babygirl.”
Her words sent you directly over the edge with a loud cry of her name and hand never ceasing its hold on her hair. She was quick to prise you, wiping away the sweat beading down your forehead.
There was a moment of pure bliss between the two of you, her smiling down at you and you struggling to regain any sense of control.
You began to speak through your heaving chest and Billie only shushed you, “Shhh, we’ll talk later. Rest, sugar.”
Taglist: @mssallymckenna , @proudnlittle , @coxmicbabygirl , @sapphicpaulsxn , @its-soph-xx , @fand0m-obsess3d-g33k , @paulsonix , @madamevirgo , @saucy-sapphic , @kikaykimkim , @billiedeansbottom , @d14n4ol
It’s almost 6 in the morning and I’m ✨ soft ✨
#billie dean howard x reader#billie dean howard imagine#billie dean howard#sarah paulson x reader#sarah paulson imagine#sarah paulson#cordelia goode x reader#cordelia goode imagine#cordelia goode#sally mckenna x reader#sally mckenna imagine#sally mckenna#ally mayfair richards imagine#ally mayfair richards x reader#ally mayfair richards#wilhemina venable imagine#wilhemina venable x reader#wilhemina venable#american horror story#lesbian imagine#wlw x reader#wlw imagine#wlw love#ahs x reader#ahs imagine#ahs murder house#ahs apocalypse#ahs fanfic#billie dean howard smut#american horror story murder house
243 notes
·
View notes
Note
Kishimoto treats his entire female cast like trash
Sakura never does anything with genjutsu
Hinata is a prop to get hurt and make Naruto rage
Ino’s a love rival to Sakura and nothing else
Tenten is….nonexistent.
Even the female kages get tossed around like garbage on the regular. Tsunade’s most impressive feat in the whole series was using all her chakra to keep people alive. Which is really really cool. But it’s something that is accomplished off screen.
The only female character that has any kind of profound impact on the narrative and doesn’t come across as a prop was Chiyo when she uses Sakura as a literal prop and then dies so Naruto can have Garaa back
Aaah, the ask came back!
To clarify, I still see where you're coming from, but don't agree with this entirely, anon. If this were true, I don't think fandom would be able to engage with kunoichi the way it does--it would be like trying to get excited about furniture. Naruto, for all its faults, does pass the sexy lamp test. If we could truly replace all the female characters with sexy lamps without affecting the story, I don't think even the most imaginative fans would want to draw/write/discuss them. I don't think this ask would exist, because we both would've dropped the story from the beginning and not given it a further thought.
For me, the majority of the frustration with Kishi's depictions of women is around aborted potential--how sometimes the characterization of various kunoichi is *promised* and seems to actually be going somewhere positive, but then ends up disappointing at best.
Sakura is canonically gifted at genjutsu...but then it's never mentioned again. Her relationship with Ino could have grown into a great friendship...but it stays largely centered around the rivalry over Sasuke before kind of petering out. Tenten does exist...until she basically vanishes from the narrative.
Lots of broken narrative promises, yes, but those promises were real and implied. If you're familiar with the writing proverb about Chekov's gun, the idea is that a writer should never introduce a gun (or any other narrative element) without also planning for it to go off. For something, anything to happen with it. But that's what Kishimoto does over and over again throughout the series: introduces the seedling of a good idea, then proceeds to completely ignore it in favor of whatever his flavor of the moment is. And it's almost always a development that favors a male character, especially his favs *coughUchihaclancough*
To be fair, he smashes that abort button a whole lot, not just with respect to female characters. That whole thing about how the ninja system Might Be Unethical After All? It was introduced as far back as the Zabuza/Haku arc, then actually developed as an idea all the way through the various sad backgrounds of Akatsuki, the reveal about Itachi, the many attempted destructions of Konoha...as an idea, it got plenty of narrative development over a long period of time, and even that was eventually just handwaved and shrugged off as eh, ninja system is fine after all, nbd.
If Kishi could do that to something that was becoming the main fucking theme of the series??? I mean. At least he's consistently disappointing, lol.
If you want to dive more into exactly how/why depictions of gender in Naruto are disappointing--because they are uniquely so regardless of Kishi's other narrative failures--I recommend this post by sub-textual: https://sub-textual.livejournal.com/29019.html
Personally, I always say fuck the canon and enjoy what you want. Life is too short to stay mad long about disappointing media, no matter how egregious.
#asks#fanalysis#haven't used this tag is aaaaages lol#believe it or not this blog actually used to be about meta#how far we've fallen
10 notes
·
View notes
Text
ao3 link
It’s safe to say 2020 is a son of a bitch.
Who would have thought that it would be a worldwide pandemic that brought their battle with Chuck to a halt?
Once lockdowns were announced in their state, Castiel and the Winchesters decided to put up extra warding against anything and everything they could think of and hunker down until it was deemed safe enough to leave again.
After all, even hunters could catch a deadly virus and, after everything, that would be a shit way to go.
What they hadn’t expected was for this lockdown to last for months.
So they’ve been through most of Netflix. Dean taught Cas how to cook an awesome burger. They even went out onto the stretch of fields surrounding the bunker for some fresh air.
But now, it’s three months into lockdown. And it’s raining.
Dean finishes cleaning the Impala for the thousandth time and goes to find Castiel.
He finds the angel in the library. But instead of reading, like he’d taken to doing a lot more of, he has a deck of cards piled in front of him and it looks like he’s trying to build a house of cards.
“Watcha doin’, Cas?” Dean asks, moving to sit in a chair opposite him to keep him company.
Castiel doesn’t look up from where he is carefully leaning two cards two cards against each other on top of an already established row of cards. “Please, Dean, I’m not opposed to you keeping me company but please keep away from the table. I do not want this tower to fall.”
Dean holds his hands up innocently and moves himself away ever so slightly. The tension leaves Castiel’s shoulders and he continues with building, eyes squinting at the cards stacked precariously.
Time passes with small conversation between the two of them. It’s hard to find new topics to talk about when you’ve been in each other’s pockets all day every day for months. Watching everything together, eating together, sleeping together, and sleeping together.
Eventually, Castiel picks up his final two cards, ready to place them upon the top of his tower. Just as he brings them together and is about to rest them on teetering construction, Dean puts up a hand and tells him to wait.
Castiel protests immediately. “No, Dean. Leave it.” Castiel breathes, not daring to raise his voice in fear of the cards toppling down.
“It’s fine, Cas. I’m just taking a photo of you finishing it. We gotta remember this moment. It looks amazing.”
Castiel just rolls his eyes and nods slightly at Dean, telling him to be quick.
Dean grins and pulls his phone from his pocket. He lifts it to get a good angle of the proud look on Cas’ face. “Go on, Cas.”
With only slightly shaky hands, Castiel places the cards down and slowly moves away.
Dean keeps taking photos even though the construction is complete because he can’t bring himself to look at the quiet pride on Castiel’s face.
“That’s awesome, Cas.” Dean smiles. He lowers his phone and quickly flips through the photos he’d taken. Castiel really is one of the most beautiful creatures he’d ever seen. “I’m gonna go get Sam to show him. He’ll love this.”
But as he leaps up to find Sam, his knee catches the table.
And as if in slow motion, the cards come tumbling down, leaving nothing more than a messy pack of cards.
Dean grits his teeth and slowly brings his eyes to meet Castiel’s.
The fury he sees on the angel’s face is intense.
Castiel takes a deep breath. “You have three seconds to run.”
Dean knows not to mess with Cas when he looks like that so he takes the out and legs it out of the room.
Sam passes him on his way out but Dean doesn’t pause. He doesn’t stop until he’s in the comfort of the kitchen. Castiel rarely comes into the kitchen because he doesn’t have to eat and when he does it’s because Dean has made him something special.
However, when it gets to the later evening and Castiel still hasn’t made an appearance, Dean realises he’s messed up and Castiel wouldn’t just forgive him after having a bit of time to cool off.
So, given that he’s in the kitchen, he decides to make Castiel some of his favourite burgers. (But what Dean doesn’t know is that they’re Cas’ favourite simply because it’s Dean who makes them).
Half an hour later, Dean sheepishly enters their bedroom with the food on a tray.
Castiel is perched on his side of the bed, watching something on Netflix, probably a documentary about bees, on Dean’s laptop.
Despite the pout still slightly gracing his features, Castiel looks up when Dean enters and closes the laptop when he notices the tray in Dean’s hands.
Dean shuffles over to take the laptop off Castiel’s lap and replace it with the burgers.
“I’m sorry, Cas.” Dean apologises. “I know how hard you worked on that house of cards. I didn’t mean to ruin it.”
Castiel maintains his glare at Dean, but seeing the sad look on the hunter’s face makes him soften his own and roll his eyes. He pats Dean’s side of the bed next to him.
“It’s okay, Dean. I forgive you. Thank you for the burgers.” Castiel smiles and picks up one of the buns, as Dean takes his place next to his angel.
“Thanks, man.” Dean grins. He cuddles up to Castiel a little more and grabs the laptop from the nightstand where he’d moved it.
Expecting to see a documentary paused on the screen, Dean opens the laptop.
Instead, Dean is met with Doctor Sexy’s face.
“You started the next season of Doctor Sexy without me?!” Dean exclaims, turning to shoot Cas with a betrayed look.
Castiel just shrugs and continues happily eating his burger. “Now we’re even.”
Dean can’t help but relent and tilt his head in a ‘fair enough’ gesture.
He goes to select the first episode again, he knows Cas won’t mind starting again from the beginning of the season.
It doesn’t matter a few hours later when they’re half way through the season and Dean looks down to see Cas curled up against his side. The angel has drifted into sleep. It doesn’t happen often so Dean always treasures it when it does.
He slides the laptop off his lap and onto the nightstand, carefully reaching over to click off the lamp.
Just before he joins Castiel in sleep, he unlocks his phone to change his background to one of the pictures of Cas building his tower. Looking at the photo, Dean just can’t believe - as much as they get on each other’s nerves (even before this virus) - how lucky he is to call the angel his.
(Tags below)
TAGS: @eccentriccas @starrynightdeancas @credentiast @imbiowaresbitch @starclaire @cockleslovesdestiel @bend-me-shape-me @destielfactory @dea-stiel @wendeano @wingsandimpalas @aggressivedean @flowersforcas @chill-legilimens @pancakesofthelord @caslikescoffeeandfreckles @assbuttboyfriends @breathingdestiel @simplymisha
@thekingslover @aelysianmuse @2musiclover2 @cas-you-assbutt-dean-needs-you @50shadesofsubtext @destielle @carryoncastiel @winchester-novak @angelwithashotguun @misha-moose-dean-burger-lover @chaoticdean @jensenacklesruinedmylife @huckleberryhusbands @good-things-do-happen-dean @irlydontknoanymore @little-greek5 @joana-the-banana @findingfantazja1627 @fevercas
#destiel#destiel fic#destielfanficnet#dean winchester#castiel#myfic#1k#fluff#canon#established relationship#ayy i finally posted something after like a week and a hald#*half#not my best but it's motivated me to get my next one done which im really excited about
102 notes
·
View notes
Text
Together p4
REAL LIFE FALLOUT
COUPLE TBS X READER
RATING FLIRTY+ SAD AF
It had been months or so the calendar has told me, the days bluured together with little to distinguish one from another. The bombs fell above us sometimes near, sometimes far. Meal times came and went whenever we got hungry, and at times we would sleep or try to atleast. Other sounds could be heard above us, moving, crashing as the world above us fell apart. In this life I cared now only that I was alive, I was breathing, I was eating, I was washing. And that Jane was safe and sound here perfectly safe.
Thomas began to grow rather attached to us both but he rarely showed it, he would sit for hours apon hours listening to the radio for the hits marking them on his map if needed, and as much as I hated to admit it we had grown closer.
Of all the times to do so I suppose.
We would share a kiss or two over the course of the day heads and cheeks mostly as we went about business in the shelter, we would almost always be talking mostly thought Janie as she rarely spoke for herself but a few words here and there. We had got you could call it very comfortable with each other, being unable to hide much as we shared and bed and a bathroom. And when he asked it off me, I would please him in our bed. It was never much just my hand and maybe some more intense kisses, but I'd let his hands wonder wherever he wanted to put them and he very much liked this arrangement. I never felt pressured or anything like that to do so and he always offered something for me too but I had little interest in such things.
I finished up the prep for dinner and picked Janie up from the floor where she was playing sitting in the bed moving my dress to feed her, I looked up as she began to feed and saw Thomas sat at the table looking at me
"Yes?"
"Nothing, nothing"
"What is it?"
"When is it my turn?" He smirked
"Never, you don't need them she does"
"... I need them"
"No Thomas you want them there's a difference"
"I see no difference"
"You wouldn't" I giggled as she finished up so I fixed my dress and set her back down to play while I returned to the kitchen to finish odd with dinner as I did standing over the pot cooking up left overs if left overs from a few nights past into a stew I felt hands wrapping around me and kisses up my neck
"I need them, just as bad as she does." He smirked moving his hands to grab my breasts I didn't stop him I saw no reason too honestly "ummm... The feel so good" he groans
"Thomas… Janie will hear you!"
"She won't she's playing with her toys, come on let me play with mine" he growled
"Dinners almost ready" I said absent mindedly
"Dinner can wait. I'm not all that hungry" he smirked "ummm, fuck you feel so good" he groans rubbing across all of my skin with his hands and arms, pressing himself against my back completely "you are such a beautiful woman, aren't I Lucky to have you down here with me" he smirked trying to move a hand under my dress but I kept stopping him "doesn't my sexy lady wanna feel good too? I just wanna make you feel as good as you make me feel"
"Not today Thomas"
"You keep saying that, don't you want me y/n?"
"It's not that Thomas, it's just… complicated" I answered "well talk about it later okay?"
"Okay," he smirked as he continued anyway "ummmm…" he groaned rubbing his hard erection against my dress "I'm gonna fuck you so hard tonight babydoll" he whispered in my ear
"What?" I asked quietly in a mild shock at those words
"Umm Humm… I am gonna fuck you so fucking hard babydoll, till you scream for me" he smirked kissing down my neck "as soon as Janie goes to bed" he smirked kissing my cheek I went to speak but jane began to cry "I've got it" he smiled going over and picking her up, I severed up dinner still a little shaken by it all but I smiled as I watched him moving around the little shelter floor, being careful not to step on her toys, holding her tightly, safely and sweetly in his arms, her head on his shoulder and chest, her rattle in her hand, the radio turned off from the news, he was gently singing to her and dancing with her, she didn't cry a single tear in his arms, infact she giggled with joy till he put her down and came to dinner.
"Your good with children Thomas"
"Yeah" he shrugs focusing on his food
"Why?"
"..... It's a long story"
"We have forever"
"I know we do" he says
"Thomas, what are you worried about?" I asked "it's not like we can go anywhere" I smiled holding his hand as we finished up dinner
"I don't know, it's complicated y/n. Very complicated" he says taking the dishes and going to wash them "it's time she went to bed" he says I nodded and took jane to bed wrapping her up and giving her, her favourite teddy and she happily fell asleep, Thomas made a cup of tea for each of us I took the cup and we sat in bed against the headboard in our PJs our little lamp the only light on down here. "You really wanna know?" He asks and I nodded "okay" he sighed sipping his tea "when we first met… what did you think about me?'
"Honestly?"
"Honestly."
"I thought you where handsome" I smiled and he blushed a little "handsome, but an asshole"
"That's a fair assessment" he laughs
"What did you think about me?"
"Honestly not much, I didn't know much about you, just that you where single and you had a little girl. Nothing else really, you seemed sweet enough, beautiful, a little… lonely" he says
"Why are you good with kids Thomas? It's unusual someone like you"
"Someone like me?"
"The fancy clothes, the flash car, the… mild attitude problem."
"I did say it was completed."
"Then explain it to me" I said "please Thomas."
"I wasn't always like this. On my own I mean. I had a wife, a house, kids, a crappy little car for all the kids shit" he laughs stroking his mug with his thumb
"What happened?'
"It all went to fucking shit" he sighed "her name was Mary, she was beautiful, a little intense sometimes but … I liked that back then. We where fresh out of college and I just, I thought I was so in love with her, I'd do anything for her, so I married her. Got a dead end job, bought a shitty car, bought a house… all the stuff your meant to do"
"What about children?"
"We had three, a boy and two girls. Arthur, penny, and eliza. I spoilt them, I adored them, anything they asked for I'd do my best to make it work,"
"How old?"
"Now, arthurs nine, Penny's six and little eliza should be three now"
"What happened?"
"The usual" he shrugs "I came home from work one day and, there she was. Fucking my best friend. I broke down and she wanted a separation, I thought for months to get to stay begged her to let us try and make it work but she didn't want anything to do with me anymore, he made more money then me, had a bigger dick then me, all that stuff so, she wanted a divorce. I let her have it, so I moved away came here and started life again, in my own."
"What about the kids?"
"I haven't seen them in over a year now, eliza was only two months old when I found out about, marys affair. She won't let me see them, she says there not even mine…."
"Would you want to see them?'
"Of course I would, even if there not mine, I raised them, there my kids and… I can't even see them. Now. I don't think I'll ever see them again"
"Thomas… I'm so sorry"
"It's okay, I'll get over it" he sighed "I know it's a little weird but, I don't feel that bad about it anymore…. Guess I have you and Janie to deal with now." He laughs "not like I'm replacing- you know what I mean"
"Yeah, I know what you mean" I smiled giving him a kiss and a cuddle he cuddles me back as we sipped our tea till he spoke up
"Y/n?"
"Yes?"
"... You don't have to answer but." He began "where's janie's father?"
"That Thomas… is a very complicated story" I said sipping my tea nervously
"Will you tell me?"
"It's a long story"
"We have forever babydoll" he smiled taking my hand "I'm just curious."
"I told everyone he was dead, workplace accident."
"Is that true?"
"Not in the slightest."
"Then who was he?"
"I don't know"
"... You, you don't know who her father is?"
"No, some random man who sold his stuff" I giggled
"Sold his- you mean… she wasn't conceived-"
"Naturally? No." I smiled "I uhh I can't have kids Thomas. Accident a few years back, they saved a few eggs but only a few. I knew I couldn't afford to keep them saved so, I used them all trying with various samples but Jane was the only one who took. She's my little angel. She's all I have and all… I'll ever have"
"So, how was she born?"
"I gave birth but I was in the hospital for so long with it all going on, I wanted to hide it from people they didn't need to know."
"Ohh y/n, come here babydoll" he says giving me a cuddle "if you want" he spoke up "were going to be here for… atleast the next few years. Those are formative years for her, I might not ever see my kids again, and it's very likely you'll never know when her father is. I wouldn't mind… us becoming a family?"
"Us?"
"The three of us, she'll grow up with a mummy who adores her, and a daddy who loves her more than anything, she'll be loved and cared for so she's happy. And… neither of us have to be so alone anymore"
"I'd like that Thomas" I smiled
"I'd love that y/n" he smiled.
10 notes
·
View notes
Text
Stargate SG1 full series review
How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?
43.6% (ninety-two of two hundred and eleven).
What is the average percentage of female characters with names and lines for the full series?
23.23%
How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?
Thirteen.
How many episodes have a cast that is at least 50% female?
Three.
How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?
Seventy-two.
Positive Content Status:
Well, it’s altogether not impressive - on the plus side, the one (1) original female lead on the show is a legitimately great character and a strong feminist icon who has thus far withstood the test of time, but on the negative side, it’s fucking slim pickings for quality female representation beyond that one character. I’d also like the register my displeasure at all the times when the intense heteronormative male-obsessed writers room churned out content which was so rooted in straight-white-cis-male-Christian-American ideology as to be utterly absurd when applied to alien beings and cultures, but with zero evidence that anyone had reflected in the least on that fact. It’s science fiction, morons. Get a clue (average rating of 2.96).
Which season had the best representation statistics overall?
Season ten has to take it - as the only season with two women in the main cast, it passed the Bechdel 80% of the time (its closest competitor in that regard was season five at 54.54%, the only other season to even make it over 50%). Season ten also scored a 26.93% female cast, which is rubbish compared to most shows, but it’s the second-best score in that category for this show: the season which got the highest female percentage was season two, at just 27.5%. Seasons two and ten also tied for the lowest number of 20%-or-less episodes, and season two had three episodes at 40%+ and one at 50%+ (whereas ten had only the one 40%+, and no fifties), so weird as it seems, we gotta dive back into the nineties to claim season two as the runner-up for best overall statistics.
Which season had the worst representation statistics overall?
It’s a battle between seasons six to nine: season nine had the series-low for Bechdel passes (30%), and for the female cast (an abysmal 19.07%). However, season six barely did better on either score (though it was not second-worst - that was season eight, on both counts), and on the other hand, season six had a below-average positive content score, and the highest number of 20%-or-less episodes for a single season (twelve - though, season nine hardly did better, at eleven - tied with season seven, which also had a below-average positive content score, and only 20.53% for its female cast, which is the ‘best’ score of that latter cluster of seasons, but to such a negligible extent it’s hard to pretend it matters). The only thing in season nine’s favour, really, is that it didn’t tank its positive content score, but coming in at average isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement - it’s gotta take the prize for worst overall statistics, with seasons six, seven, and eight all jumbled in to second-worst, because the numbers are altogether just not that different from each other. It’s a sad showing.
Overall Series Quality:
If you can stomach the absolute overload of white dudes (both onscreen, and making their identities sooo fucking obvious all the way from the writer’s room), it’s...pretty delightful. They really don’t make exciting adventurous shows like this anymore, and more’s the pity, because sometimes the wonder of stepping through the ‘gate and discovering grand, varied, bizarre, and challenging new things on the other side is exactly what we need.
MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:
Woof.
I did say, going in, that I did not expect this show to perform well, but that I was interested to see if maybe it’d do better than it appeared at first glance. It didn’t. Boy oh boy, it did NOT. As I have also said, as I’ve gone along, they increasingly surprised me in a bad way with their escalating inability to conceive of female characters, existing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: they were better at being inclusive of women in the nineties. They weren’t necessarily good at handling those women in respectful or intelligent ways, but they bothered to remember them in a limited capacity, and that was...ok, it wasn’t much of anything. I’m not going to praise the early seasons for having better numbers than the later ones even though ALL of the numbers sucked, any more than I’m gonna praise season ten for pulling the least-crappy scores out when we all know that’s a direct consequence of having two women in the main cast, and nothing more substantive than that, no actual effort or attempt to be better was involved. Early on, I thought that the fact that the Powers That Be had allowed Samantha Carter to move beyond her uncomfortable written-by-men straw-feminist-caricature origins to become a person in her own right was a great positive sign for the future, but that turned out to be a misdiagnosis. Not of Carter - she’s fantastic - but a misdiagnosis of the creative team as men who were willing to learn and develop and expand their intensely narrow perspective. That never happened. These writers did not learn.
To put the numbers in some additional perspective, let’s look at what we got in terms of recurring characters: as established, we had just the one main female character for the entire duration of the series. Vala, our final-season addition (appearing in just shy of thirty episodes out of more than two hundred), was not the second-most prevalent female character on the show: that would be Janet Fraiser, who was killed off in season seven but who appeared in almost half the episodes up to that point (almost half to that point, not for the show in totality, mind). So, we have Carter in over two hundred episodes, Fraiser in less than eighty, and then Vala, in twenty-eight. There are ten male characters who appear in as many episodes as Vala or more - five who appear in over one hundred episodes. After Vala? The next most prominent female character is Carolyn Lam, Fraiser’s eventual replacement, in a measly eleven episodes. Considering the show ran for TWO HUNDRED and eleven (three of those being movie-length episodes, none of which featured any of the female characters mentioned other than Carter)...in at least as many episodes as Lam, we have an additional ten male characters, bringing us to TWENTY recurring males, and four female. Carter, Vala, and the two primary base doctors. That’s IT for recurring female characters who appeared in at least ten episodes of over two hundred. Male characters? Take your pick, we’ve got soldiers, scientists, politicians, aliens, villains and friends and ambiguous third parties on and off Earth, we have a bounty. We’ve got random extras with no story of their own who look exactly the same as all the other random extras (do I mean Reynolds, or Marks? Doesn’t matter, they’re both more prevalent than Lam). Want one more female character, to make it a top five? It’s Adria, who appears in six episodes exclusively in season ten (no wonder that’s the season with the best numbers). You get another thirteen male characters in the process, so we’re at thirty-three to five. You want a top ten for female characters, you gotta get all the way down to the ones who only appeared in three episodes, and it’s a joke to really call that ‘recurring’ on this scale. When I say this show had a male-dominated problem, I am not exaggerating.
Where is the variety? You’re either a female lead (in which case, a primary part of your function is simply to BE female - and traditionally attractive - so that there’s some eye candy for the presumed straight-male audience), or you’re placed in the Compassionate Caregiver role as a doctor, or you...don’t exist. Certainly, you don’t exist in a way that sustains story for multiple episodes. As noted, if you’re a dude you don’t even NEED story, you can be a regular-recurring extra, but a woman? Forget about it. Even the female villains never last more than five episodes, if they manage that (the nameless Priors recurred more often than Adria did). And as the show wore on, episodes in which Carter was the ONLY woman became more and more frequent (until season ten, which just makes a big ol’ last-minute mess of the series-long trends). While this was good news in terms of having less sexy-lamp female guest characters popping in to single episodes to look pretty, be useless, and never appear again, it was bad news for women, existing in the narrative in any way, because evidently, these male writers struggled with the concept of women with actual functions. Even with such a variety of settings, a variety of planets and cultures and walks of life of all the dizzying kinds a person could think of (IT’S SCIENCE FICTION, MORONS), we still somehow get stuck with this itty little version of society that matches the comfortable white-Christian-American illusion of life that has been perpetuated blindly in television since its inception (pro tip: women existing in all different career paths and walks of life have been a thing since before tv shows were a thing). There’s more social variety on this planet in the real world, right now, but these dumb bastards couldn’t muster the effort to be creative with alien cultures. Hell, they failed to even be thoughtful or do basic research into historical social structures in order to reflect those in their transplanted-from-Earth-centuries-ago peoples (who had a lot of different ways of doing things, ya know?). And don’t even get me started on the gendered obsessions of genderless symbiotes...This show could be delightful and weird and wonderful with some of its ideas, but thoughtful, open-minded, PROGRESSIVE? Not at all. When you think about it, it’s actually quite alarming, just how reductive they could be. It’s like they made some minimal effort with Samantha Carter and then decided that’s it for anything or anyone who isn’t a straight-white-cis-Christian-American-man. Our work here is done.
Of course, I’m not inclined to give them credit for Samantha Carter anyway - as I noted back when I reviewed season one, credit goes to Amanda Tapping for sticking up for the integrity of a character who was originally written without any; just like the writers don’t get to take any of the credit for the work Christopher Judge did in making the Jaffa into less racist caricatures (including addressing the misogyny the writers had embedded in Jaffa warrior culture - bless you, Chris Judge), I am not going to pretend that Carter’s success as a feminist icon for the ages belongs to anyone but Amanda Tapping herself. A-Taps saved her character from the trash-heap of history to which she would have been relegated if she had continued in the model that the early episodes laid out, and whatever struggles she had behind the scenes with the kind of content she was handed (in particular I mean He Who Shall Not Be Named, Schmete Schmanahan), she never relaxed her grip on who Samantha Carter is, what she stands for, and what that means for the audience looking up to her. It’s a huge achievement, really, that despite the obvious brainless sexism of the writing staff, and despite the test of time which has claimed so many other nineties feminist icons as ‘good for the era, but actually incredibly problematic’ (we’re talking Dana Scully, Buffy, and their ilk), Carter is still pretty much unblemished; she’s close to a platonic ideal of her archetype. Again, I really don’t think it’s deliberate on behalf of the show-runners, and especially considering the rest of their atrocious track record with female characters it would be a mistake to suggest they actually knew what they were doing with Carter and/or that it mattered to them to make a truly strong female lead. If all they did was occasionally cave to Amanda Tapping when she told them to do better, well. They can have credit for not being too egotistical to listen, even though they failed to extend that ability to being basically receptive to the world outside that one interaction. Excuse me if I still think they’re fucking idiots. Because I do.
The thing about the closed-mindedness of the creative team on this show is that it translates into the storytelling in a very particular way: not just in the obvious sense (where only straight white American (*Canadian*) men are real people), but also in the context of the ethos of the show, the perspective. The characters learn and change as individuals, but the overarching attitude of the series does not develop in self-awareness to encompass the knowledge of the universe achieved by humanity at large, and that’s because, plainly, there is none. For all that the show deals in exploration, discovery, and advancement, these things are framed heavily as being scientific in nature, and just as the writers seem so confident that they know everything about the way the world works to the exclusion of even trying to understand the perspective of anyone different from them within their own culture, so the show itself never goes through self-reflection upon the America(n-military)-knows-best approach to interstellar exploration. While some early episodes - pretty much just in seasons one and two - toy with the idea that Earth knows little about the ways of the galaxy and we’re all ‘very young’, etc, there’s no development or change in approach over time which would be indicative of growth, and as the SGC garners more tech and allies and accelerates into scientific comprehension (largely applied through military enhancement, yay), questions about whether or not the gung-ho charge they lead into other worlds (sometimes with apocalyptic consequences) is really a good idea essentially dry up. There’s an overriding arrogance about this show that seems to be a by-product of that lack of self-reflection, the assumption that the audience will agree with whatever they see because, well, it seemed right to the creators and the fact that there might actually be more nuance to the issue never occurred to them. This can lead to some wild assertions and some truly shocking decision-making that is delivered straight-faced (season ten gave us the good guys committing genocide, in the name of the Ancients whom they uphold as a great species despite THEIR arrogant and terrible coloniser legacy throughout the universe, and somehow no one is troubled by any of that), and it’s a prime example of why an open-minded, considerate and understanding approach (and a diverse creative team to help facilitate that with their naturally different perspectives) is a really important thing in storytelling, even beyond the immediately obvious issue of representation: if everyone in the room has created an echo chamber of the same incredibly limited point of view, you lose the ability to recognise that alternate interpretations exist and that from some angles, what you’re making could be illogical, offensive, propagandistic, or evil.
So, here we are. With me, wrapping this thing up with a reminder that despite just accusing the show of sometimes supporting evil ideologies through the blind ignorance of its self-absorbed show-runners, I actually really enjoy Stargate SG1 and will always hold a special place for it in my heart. On an entertainment level, it is pretty reliable, there are some duds in there for sure (some of them duds for various illogical, offensive, propagandistic, or evil reasons, some of them just fucking boring as Hell), but for the most part it’s solid, and sometimes it digs up a gem and really shines. Every virtue it has is a virtue that could be vastly improved upon (and every flaw is easily solvable with just a little bit of Goddamn thinking), and the full template is there, primed for a remake of the more inclusive sort, something that’ll play the game of alien cultural variance and the intrigue of Earth-based politics and the gravity and wonder of galactic exploration with the seriousness, creativity, and gusto that it all deserves. The heart and soul of SG1, what made it work for ten years and what makes it delightfully re-watchable despite being infuriating upon analysis, that core part of the story is pure. Damned if it doesn’t just need a broader, more considered take on that core, because it ain’t got a bless’d thing to do with being a straight-white-cis-Christian-American dude. That’s not how universality works.
28 notes
·
View notes
Text
Sirius x Reader / Remus x Reader -- Part III
I feel like this part is wicked long, but I’m way too into this now, I can’t stop myself lol
Tag List: @ideas-nocturnas , @evyiione , @a-hopeless-and-imaginative-girl , @intense-sneezing , @ghostlyrose2 , @peasantview , @la-fille-en-aiguilles , @toasterking , @too-involved , @onthebroadway
"All right, Prongsy; out with it."
"Keep your voice down, you pillock!"
"You've hardly said a word all day. You didn't even attempt to help me set Reg's tie on fire when he popped off about United. And Evans walked past you three times between classes, and you didn't do that daft shit with your hair once."
"As touched as I am by your concern, under the cloak on the way to the kitchens isn't really the best time for a chat, on account of how Filch isn’t deaf."
"Untwist your knickers. I checked the map before we left, he's out in the greenhouses, probably having a kip. So what's going on? Somebody book the pitch for the day you wanted tryouts? Is it because it was sticky toffee instead of treacle for pudding last night? Did you find out Evans is secretly betrothed to Amycus Carrow? Alecto?"
"Fuck's own sake! Would you shut it and tickle the pear already?"
"No amount of sexy talk is going to distract me from this."
James yanked the invisibility cloak off, shoving it into the waistband of his pyjama bottoms and shaking his head in frustration.
"You truly are the most obnoxious knobhead breathing. What any girl at this school sees in you is beyond me."
Sirius struck a regal pose and gestured up and down his body, then dodged as James aimed a foot at his shin.
"Well? You asked. A pretty face, a pile of money, and a seat at the Noble and Most Ancient Table at every banquet and ball from now until death do us part."
He reached out and wiggled a finger over the pear in the fruit bowl portrait, his smirk replaced by a sudden scowl.
"In other words, they don't see a goddamn thing in me. Just the candy coating."
James remained standing in the corridor after Sirius had yanked open the secret door to the kitchens and stalked inside. The past eight hours had been little more than a blur. He vaguely recalled stumbling up to the tower with significant help from Sirius and Peter. He also seemed to remember being deposited in an armchair near the windows after Remus announced that, as the Marauder with the strongest sense of smell, he was hereby granting himself the power of banishment over anyone who posed "a spewing threat". James didn't know how long he'd slept before he was woken by the sound of voices, but he wished like hell he'd stayed asleep.
He hadn't meant to spy on you and Lily. He'd wanted to stand up and announce himself as soon as he sussed out who was talking -- and, particularly, what they were talking about -- but he was afraid the two of you wouldn't believe him if he said he'd just woken. He'd thought about trying to crawl up to his dorm but knew that would look even worse if he was caught. As a last resort, he'd put a pillow over his head, but it was just too quiet in the room; he could still hear every word.
Admittedly, he'd taken the pillow down when you'd started talking about Sirius. Not to purposefully eavesdrop, but because he'd never heard you sound that way before. There was awe in your voice, excitement, and he knew it was subconscious. He knew it was honest. So now, here he was. For all intents and purposes, his "sister" was in love with his best friend. And James didn't know whether he should sit idly by and watch things play out or try to subtly do what he could to make sure everyone came out happy on the other side.
Why did you have to go and fall for Sirius? You weren't shallow or hung up on money and status like the girls Pads was talking about just a moment ago. But then... that was just it, wasn't it? You knew Sirius as well as James did. You knew the Sirius behind the aloof playboy mask he wore for everyone else. The wounded and lost yet still caring and kind boy who'd take the fall for his friends without a second thought, who was the first to step between them and anything that might cause them harm. From that perspective, not only could James see why, he frankly couldn't think of a better thing that could've happened to Sirius. He deserved someone who understood him and would take care of him, and James knew you could be that person.
But Sirius was complicated. Overly, even at the best of times. And James was worried about how he'd react if he knew. First off, there was the small matter of not knowing whether Sirius had similar feelings. He undoubtedly loved you as a friend, and he always seemed to be at ease with you. You were a perfect sparring partner when it came to both his smart mouth and his talent, and he flirted with you regularly... although, that wasn't much of a reliable indicator when it came to Sirius. He flirted with McGonagall and the Grey Lady just as often.
Secondly, Sirius was incredibly unpredictable. His parents had never done a good job of anything, save turning him into the most self-loathing person James knew. He never thought he "deserved" to be happy, settling instead for "entertained from a distance". And he didn't do well with emotions or letting people get too close, always afraid his family would find a way to take anything -- or anyone -- they knew was important to him away. So while part of James was telling him he should probably just stay out of the whole thing, another part insisted it couldn't hurt to feel everyone out. After all, what would become of the five of you if you confessed your feelings to Sirius and he didn't share them? And if Sirius didn't want this -- or couldn't handle it -- it sounded as if Remus might. You and Remus could be good for each other as well, James thought, and if Moony really was in love with you, he deserved the chance to let you know in his own way.
James jumped as Sirius kicked open the kitchen door.
"That's it! I know what's wrong with you, Prongs, my lad."
"Enlighten me."
"You've developed a crippling fear of house-elves. But fret not, I bravely stormed the kitchens with absolutely no help from you."
Sirius dropped onto a nearby bench, setting a sack full of food down beside him.
"What're you doing?" James asked. "We can't sit around here in the open, we need to get back."
"Not until you tell me what's going on. And look," he added, digging in the sack. "If you fess up like a good boy, there's a treacle tart of your very own in it for you!"
James slowly sat down on the bench, trying desperately to think of something, anything, he could use as an excuse for his mood. Then it dawned on him. All the rest aside, there was one portion of the early morning's events that would have had him on cloud nine all day if not for the awkwardness of everything else.
"Owing to the fact I was dumped in the common room like a sack of potatoes this morning, I accidentally overheard Y/N and Evans chatting. Evans told her she found me less 'disgusting and intolerable' these days."
"Ace!" Sirius yelped cheerfully, reaching over to violently ruffle James's mop of black hair. "Have to make sure this is properly mussed for when you ask her out at breakfast!"
"Keep... your bloody... voice down!" James hissed through his teeth, whacking Sirius's hand away from his head.
"Why so gloomy, then? I'd've thought you'd be bouncing off the walls over that."
James snatched the treacle tart out of Sirius's hand and took a large bite.
"Well, she followed it up with the fact that hating me less still means the majority of her hates me."
"Semantics. Y/N called that one; you're growing on her."
"Y/N did call that one. She's usually right about these things, isn't she. Good at reading people, I mean."
"She's got all our numbers, that's for sure." Sirius grinned to himself; James took note and continued to watch his face as Sirius munched absently on a sausage roll.
"Now we just need to get the numbers of these blokes who're always sniffing about. I saw Morgan chatting her up again in the courtyard yesterday."
Sirius shoved the last of the roll into his mouth and folded his arms over his chest, glaring at the floor.
"One would've thought a few Stinging Snowballs -- patent pending, Sirius Black, 1975 -- would've gotten the message across."
"Guess we'll have to start getting even more creative. Y'know, since it'll be worse this year."
Sirius looked up at James. "Worse?"
"Oh, sure. We're fifth years now. Before, we really only had to worry about the blokes in our year. Now, we're all fair game for fourth and up. Four years' worth of hormones stampeding around the castle like a rogue erumpent."
"Sons of bitches..."
James quickly took another bite of tart to stop himself grinning.
"Yeah, we'll have to keep our eyes open now. She's a real corker, and everybody's starting to notice it."
“I know she's a corker," Sirius pouted, crossing and recrossing his ankles anxiously. "Have since we were kids. So I guess Duane bloody Morgan's not all that swift on the uptake for a Ravenclaw, is he? She can't... she wouldn't really... she's not serious about these gits, she just went out with them to be polite. She's got to learn to say no to people is all. People who don't really care about her, I mean. The candy coating people."
This time, James didn't respond. Sirius was staring at the ground again, this time with something like sadness in his eyes, and James reckoned he'd learnt enough for one night. He stood and began unfolding the cloak.
"We'd never let her get hurt. Now, come on. Moony and Worm'll think we got nabbed."
James and Sirius made their way back to Gryffindor Tower, where the Marauders stayed awake for another hour or so, eating and playing Exploding Snap. Sirius didn't say much, and his appetite seemed to have disappeared. Eventually, the lamps were put out, and the room was soon filled with the sounds of deep breathing and occasional snores from Peter's bed. Only Sirius was awake to hear them. His thoughts racing along paths they'd never travelled before, he lay staring up at his canopy until first light came creeping through the space at the top of his curtains.
"Mr Black! If I have to remind you one more time that firewhisky does not, in fact, contain medicinal properties, I'm banning the lot of you."
Sirius reluctantly placed the flask in her waiting hand with a sigh. "I'd just hoped you of all people would be open to advancements in the field, Poppy, that's all."
Madam Pomfrey glared at him before making her way to another bed. "You're a doll for trying," you said to Sirius, propping yourself up on your elbows and watching as Pomfrey set about liberally applying lotion to the boy lying five beds down.
"Strange, don't you think, how Morgan managed to mistake poison ivy for betony leaves when he was trying to make that paste for his dog bite? Professor Sprout doesn't generally keep poison ivy in the greenhouses at all, much less where the betony usually is."
"We mustn't be too hard on her," Remus said, fixing his eyes on something suddenly interesting beyond the window behind your bed. "It could happen to the best of us."
"Strange, too, that he had a dog bite in the first place. I don't know that I've ever seen a dog on school grounds."
"You never know what sort of mad beasties are lurking about in the forest," Sirius said, lazily toying with a string on the hem of his Thin Lizzy shirt. Peter snorted, and James elbowed the boy in the ribs. "Gesundheit," he muttered as Peter doubled over.
You shook your head and dropped back onto your pillows with a smile. Taking a bludger to the head didn't typically fall under the category of a blessing, but in your case, it'd been close. In the fortnight since you'd confided in Lily, you'd tried your best to just put the entire mess out of your mind. But with Lily constantly asking if you'd talked to the boys yet and you working overtime to appear extra nonchalant whenever they were around, it was an impossible task. That fact was punctuated rather violently at tryouts: Your attention split between trying not to get caught staring at Sirius and worrying over what Remus and Lily were talking about in the stands, you'd had none left for the bludger one of the new beater candidates had missed.
You were out cold the rest of that night and all of yesterday. You woke this morning to the boys all chattering at once in their relief, pressing flowers and sweets -- and an immediately confiscated flask of firewhisky -- into your hands as Madam Pomfrey did her best to shoo them away. The ensuing few hours had felt blissfully ordinary. If it took blunt trauma to knock some sense into you, so be it. You glanced up at the sound of Remus and James arguing over the last of your Chocolate Frogs to see Sirius looking down at you with clear concern.
"Promise you're all right?"
"If you think I took it hard, you should see the bludger."
The corner of his mouth twitched upwards, but the wrinkle of worry remained between his brows.
"I should've been paying attention. I should've blocked it."
"Sirius, we weren't even in the same drill. I'm the one who wasn't paying attention. But I'm fine. Promise. She said I can go tonight after a few more potions."
You reached over to pat his arm reassuringly. Sirius looked at your hand for a moment before slowly placing his on top of it. You froze. Afraid to look up, you stared instead at his hand, willing your own not to tremble despite the fact every nerve in your body was. Your mouth had gone bone dry, and you licked your lips, trying to think of something to say. James and Remus were no longer bickering, and you could feel their eyes on the two of you. Panicked, you were about to pull your hand back when Sirius's squeezed down around it, moving it from his arm to the edge of your bed. He held it there while he reached into his robes. A moment later, you felt the cool metal of a flask sliding beneath your palm.
Sirius cleared his throat slightly before removing his hand from yours. But he didn't just lift it away; he slid it lightly down and off the edge of the bed, tracing the length of your hand with his fingertips as he went. You looked up. His eyes could have burnt a hole through you. And maybe they were; maybe that would explain the heat spreading like Fiendfyre through your entire body. Better that than acknowledge the fact that you knew you were blushing furiously, that all of them could see it, and that there wasn't a bloody thing you could do about it.
Mercifully, Sirius looked down, and you quickly tried to fill the silence.
"How many of those do you have in there?"
Sirius grinned and opened his robe just enough for you to catch a glint of silver.
"He cast Geminio on it," Peter snickered, and Remus heaved a sigh.
"I'm going to be the first prefect in Hogwarts history to be stripped of his badge within a month, aren't I."
Before anyone could answer, Madam Pomfrey's shrill voice cut through.
"Mr Black!"
"HOW DID YOU EVEN SEE THAT?!"
The matron came marching up the aisle, and Sirius quickly pulled the flask out of his pocket, holding it towards you.
"Cheers!" he said with a smile that thoroughly melted you; a genuine, sweet smile, the sort you remembered from when you were all kids and nothing was complicated. You returned it as you tapped your flask against his, and you both managed to get a couple of healthy swigs down before the flasks went flying out of your hands and into Pomfrey's. As soon as she touched them, two more flasks sprang into being, clattering to the floor.
"Out!!" she ordered, but the Marauders were already halfway to the door. "See you tonight!" James called over his shoulder as they disappeared into the corridor.
"Would it be too much to ask for you to exert a positive influence over your friends?" Madam Pomfrey asked, casting an exasperated look at you as she plunked a creamy purple potion down onto your side table.
"Sorry, Madam Pomfrey, but how terribly dull would that be?"
The corners of her mouth ghosted upwards for a split second before she side-eyed you and returned to Morgan.
"I assume our resident juvenile delinquents weren't leaving willingly," Lily's voice came from the doorway, and you turned as the girl approached your bed, a bag of Chocolate Cauldrons in her hand.
"Bless you," you said dramatically. She handed you the bag with a shrug. "Personally, I don't think these should be sold to anyone who isn't of age, but you've had a traumatic experience. A needless, easily preventable traumatic experience. How are you feeling?"
"Not up to arguing with you over the barbarity of Quidditch."
"Fair dinkum."
"And if you like, in future, you can get me toffees. To be honest, they're my favourites, but nobody knows that because nobody around here ever figures anyone wants anything ordinary. They remind me of my gran, though, and I love them."
"Noted. And that's sweet. Now, let's talk about the boys."
You groaned loudly. "Why don't you just use Crucio? At least it's quicker."
Lily stood and began plumping your pillows, her voice softening.
"I'm not trying to torture you. But don't think I don't know why you got hurt. You're not the seeker because of your awful reflexes. You've been miserable, and you're not going to be un-miserable until something changes. And I think you should know that neither Sirius nor Remus left your side the entire time. When Remus wasn't sitting here reading you Oscar Wilde, Sirius was trying to play you Led Zeppelin songs on his harmonica until Madam Pomfrey made him stop it."
You chuckled at the thought, but amusement was quickly replaced by the turmoil you were becoming so accustomed to when you thought of Remus reading one of your favourite authors. The tightness in your chest flooded back, the constant worry tying your stomach into knots.
"See?" Lily asked. "You can't even be happy for two seconds. So what went on after you woke up?"
You took a deep breath.
"Well... everything was basically normal for the most part, aside from the fact Morgan's over there because Sirius bit him in dog form and then they replaced one of the betony plants with poison ivy so he'd accidentally make a remedy out of it. They all think I don't know they're Animagi now so they can keep Remus company during his transformations, and that's because Remus told them not to involve me because he was too afraid that I'd get hurt, but I was incredibly offended by that, as you can imagine, so I did it over the summer. Became an Animagus, I mean. I really lucked out with the sky being clear the same night I finished with the leaf and it being really stormy for days after that. But they don't know that I've done it. Yet."
You paused for fear that if Lily's jaw dropped any further, it'd dislocate. "I was obviously going to tell you, Lily, there just hadn't been a good time yet."
"Yeah, and now was great," Lily sputtered. "I don't suppose the four of you are registered? Of course you're not, it's the four of you. And Remus is a prefect... I'm a prefect!" she shrieked, as if just remembering the fact. "How can you be sure it'll even work? Do you have any idea how dangerous this is? Do you care at all what will happen to all of you if you're caught?"
Lily buried her face in her hands, breathing heavily, and you remained quiet, allowing her to process. After a few moments, you reached out and squeezed her shoulder. Lily had been your walking, talking conscience for four years now, for all the good it did her, and while she usually managed to overcome her shock fairly quickly, you worried you might have finally found her breaking point. Finally, she exhaled loudly and gave you a weary look.
"What's Potter?"
You grinned. "A stag."
She contemplated a moment before raising her eyebrows and nodding in apparent approval.
"All right. We'll come back to that another time. So what happened that wasn't ‘basically normal’? As if any of that was normal..."
You chewed your bottom lip a moment before continuing. "Sirius had my hand because he was slipping a flask into it -- don't give me that look -- and when he took his hand away, he did it... really... tenderly? And then he was staring at me, and I know I was blushing. They all had to have seen. Remus had to have seen. Then, right before Madam Pomfrey chased them out, he smiled at me, and he looked so happy, Lily. Actually happy... and I can't let myself believe that it had anything to do with me, but Merlin, I wish it had something to do with me."
Lily hopped up onto the edge of your bed and pulled you into a hug. "Only your love story would be heavily sprinkled with illegal activity and alcohol. So you know you and Sirius have to talk, right? Because if it does have something to do with you, then you two need to figure yourselves out for your sakes and for Remus's."
"How am I supposed to do this, Lily? I know them both so well, they both know me so well... somebody is going to get hurt before this is over. How do you come back from that?"
Lily's eyes were suddenly faraway and sad, and her shoulders slumped. "I don't know how you come back from that," she whispered.
"Lily? What's wrong?"
"Nothing," she murmured, straightening. "It's just a good question. Unfortunately, I don't think there's a good answer, though, so you have to just remember that people get over being temporarily hurt, but regret over things you should've done and didn't -- that doesn't go away. And love is worth taking all the risks in the world for. Now. Drink your potions, eat your Cauldrons, and I'll see you back in the room tonight."
"Think Y/N's out yet?" Peter asked.
"What does no one understand about not talking in the bloody corridors?!" James seethed. "This is a Cloak of In-vis-i-bil-i-ty. Not a Cloak of Soundproof...ness. When you talk, people CAN HEAR YOU!"
"Shhhh! Honestly, Prongs, would you stop that yelling? People could hear you."
"Fuck off, Padfoot. Dissendium."
The hump on the statue of Gunhilda of Gorsemoor sprung open, and, one by one, the Marauders hopped inside, sliding down into the tunnel below. The amount of stooping it took to navigate the space now that they were taller limited conversation to the occasional "Hurry up" and "That was my heel, you clod", and once they'd reached Honeydukes' cellar, they collapsed onto boxes to rest a bit before collecting sweets for what they'd elected to dub your "Welcome Back to Consciousness" party.
"I still can't believe she got clobbered like that," James said. "She's quick as a cat, that one."
"She wasn't looking," Peter said, digging around in an adjacent box of humbugs. "She was staring off at something when the bludger came back at her."
James rubbed the back of his neck. That explained it, then. He'd seen you staring at Sirius more than once during the drills.
"I thought I was going to be sick when she didn't wake up right away," he said. "I know she can take care of herself and all, but seeing her lying there in that bed just made me feel sort of..."
"Useless," said Remus.
"Helpless," Sirius said at the same time.
Remus was bouncing his leg up and down in agitation. Moony hadn't been this antsy in ages, and James was becoming increasingly distressed about knowing the reason why. He still believed Remus deserved a chance to talk to you about his feelings, but he'd also seen the way you and Sirius had looked at each other that afternoon in the hospital wing. You would never hurt Remus intentionally, but what if it was inevitable at this point?
"I need to say something," Remus remarked suddenly, and James tensed. He hadn't expected this.
"Say it later, yeah?" he suggested, abruptly standing. "We should get the sweets and get back."
"No, Prongs, I need to say it now. I need... advice, I guess? I don't know exactly... I feel like sort of an idiot, but--"
"Did you guys hear that?" James tried desperately. "I think there might be somebody upstairs, we really should get--"
"I think I'm in love with Y/N," Remus blurted.
Silence came down like a lead weight, and James quickly shot a glance at Sirius. He looked stricken, and James's heart sank. He'd still been in the process of trying to gauge Sirius's feelings, but everything that had happened in hospital the last two days combined with the panic in his eyes right now spoke volumes. James couldn't let his best mate suffer. Not when he knew the truth.
"I don't really know if I am or not, though... maybe I'm just being stupid, maybe it's hormones... fuck, why did I even say that, please forget I said that, I'm probably just imagining it, it's definitely not worth ruining a friendship over," Remus was stammering, clearly mortified.
"Moony... yeah, to be totally honest with you, mate, I really don't think--" James began, but Sirius cut him off.
"Nah, Moony, you can't think like that," he said, his voice quiet and unreadable. "If you think you love her, you should tell her. It's worth it. She's worth it."
James watched, stunned, as Sirius stared at the floor for a moment before standing and giving Remus's shoulder a pat. Without another word, he walked over to a shelf at the back of the cellar and grabbed a large bag of toffees before dropping back into the tunnel.
#sirius black x reader#remus lupin x reader#young!sirius black x reader#young!remus lupin x reader#sirius x reader#sirius black fanfiction#sirius black imagine#remus x reader#remus lupin fanfiction#remus lupin imagine#marauders#marauders era#marauders era fanfiction#marauders era imagine#sirius black#remus lupin#james potter#peter pettigrew#lily evans#moony wormtail padfoot and prongs#harry potter fanfiction#harry potter imagine#marauders imagine#marauders fanfiction
193 notes
·
View notes
Text
I haven’t been talking about the treatment of Bucky’s character because my blog is filled with posts about Civil War’s treatment of Bucky’s character and this is just the natural progression from there. They dunked the character in a garbage disposal and obviously what remained was a character that can’t pass the Sexy Lamp Test (just replace the sexy lamp with a pretty machine gun) except for his One Feature of Characterization: he smiles in front of people, but he’s sad.
He started his journey from there, sad and scared but putting on a cheerful face. And instead of growing, instead of healing, at the conclusion of the cinematographic saga he’s still exactly in the same place. He’s always been in that place. He’s sad but forces himself to smile at you, like a depressed housewife from the era they threw Steve back into.
He cannot be anything else but Sad (But Not Bothering You With It)(TM) because he needs to be punished for the abuse he’s endured, but also needs to perform the emotional labor of not burdening people with his own feelings.
As I’ve said before, he was objectified and deprived of agency by Hydra, then he was objectified and deprived of agency by the narrative. They turned him into a tool, and punished for his own trauma and disability. (Yes, his Winter Soldier brainwashing is a disability, they harmed his brain and made him lose memories and cognitive agency, and Sebastian Stan himself based his portrayal of Bucky in CATWS on people with neurodegenerative diseases.)
They built a feminine-code character, with a history of misogynistic-coded abuse, with physical and cognitive disabilities, with mental illness, and arguably a queer vibe, then they used it as a tool for other male characters’ conflicts, they punished him for what he was, and wrote him out of his own story.
You see why I’m not excited for any Disney+ wonder they have in store for him? Even if they magically pulled out a wonderful arc of healing for him, that can never erase the fact that he was thrown out of his own story, because he was too inappropriate for it - too queer too disabled too subversive - and his own story wasn’t worth telling where it was. He needed to be sad and smile.
#endgame spoilers#cacw#avengers endgame#not mcu friendly#not civil war friendly#bucky#my mcu thoughts#mcu
243 notes
·
View notes
Text
I’m so annoyed by the fact that people read ‘treating someone as an object’ to mean ‘finding a woman sexy’. The point isn’t that she’s sexy. The point is that her narrative of her own life is erased; she is denied any agency in the decision making in her own life, her thoughts and feelings are ignored, and she’s treated as secondary to the opinions and goals of the person talking about her. People can’t ‘objectify themselves’ - that’s not a thing. However, it’s not necessary to find someone sexy to objectify them, nor to interpret their life in a sexual manner (as anti-sex work people do when speaking about sex workers).
Common examples of non-erotic objectification include the ‘heroic disabled’ narrative, the lazy homeless person, and pretty much every token minority in any work of media. There’s also this idea that things get done without considering the fact that someone has to be doing them; this ties into the feminist issue of undervaluing feminine labor, of course, but also the broader issues of overworking and underpaying employees generally, of not giving people enough notice or time to prepare (even for social engagements), of expecting things to happen without thinking through the logistics. For example: expecting restaurant workers to serve food until closing without any breaks to clean the place down, but also expecting the place to be cleaned down by closing without anyone putting in for overtime.
We talk about objectification in relation to sex, because this is really commonly seen in men’s narratives about women, both socially and in literature. A woman in a man’s novel is often there only to be his love interest; she has, perhaps, sexual and romantic needs and desires, but other than that, all her goals are predicated on his. (Women write this, too, of course; this is what people refer to as the ‘not like other girls’ phenomenon. Women can interpret their own agency of course, but often don’t question the widespread lack of agency assigned to women in general.) Women in literature are often stylized as the bimbo, the ingenue, the femme fatale, the mistress, the wife, the whore.
However, even when speaking specifically about women, we have to consider other types of objectification. Women are also often stylized as the mother: a comforting, nonsexual character, whose interest lies only in the welfare of her children, whose goals align with theirs. The sister: a fun, nonsexual character, whose interests directly parallel the main character, either identical or in juxtaposition, and whose goals do the same. The daughter: a confrontational, nonsexual character, whose interests are inscrutable, and whose goals are entirely to unsettle or pose difficulties for the main character. Note the common thread; women are written and spoken about in relation to other people, rather than in relation to themselves. Men are ‘the lawyer’, ‘the drunk’, ‘the balding man with the navy coat’; women are ‘his coworker’, ‘the neighborhood busybody’, ‘the girl I hated in high school’.
But characters other than women are reduced to this all the time. In mainstream media, we frequently see them as the comic relief. This is someone there to make quips and puns, or to congratulate other people on making them. We rarely see their inner life, hopes, dreams, or self image, except when the author takes the time to explain how because of their backstory they wanted to be a stereotype. They can’t be replaced with a sexy lamp, no, but they could easily be replaced by one of those keychains that tells jokes. Or they could be replaced by a motivational poster. Or a sticker on someone’s laptop. Or one of those shelter pet videos with the sad music. If you can replace someone with an inanimate object, they’re being objectified. (If the thing in question is an inanimate object, that’s not objectification, that’s art criticism. Even when it’s a statue or painting that looks very much like a human.)
Objectification is just any time you look at someone you don’t know, and you say: x should do y. Or x does y because of z. Or I don’t know why x can’t just do y. You’re failing to look at the internal logics of actual human people, or you’re failing to flesh out representations thereof and not even realizing what you’re doing. It refers to both the way people fictionally represent a real group, and the way real people are treated as if they’re fictional representations. But you have to understand that ‘she only dresses that way because she wants sex’ and ‘she only dresses that way because she has low self esteem’ are both objectification.
1 note
·
View note
Text
i finally watched 10.10! here are some thoughts. you might maybe not want to read this if you really enjoyed adam’s plot in the episode, because i, uh, have some reservations.
i started laughing during the “previously on” flashbacks when adam told tamiko that she could get free of her yakuza ties because “look at me. i did.” are you sure, adam? are you sure you’re sure? because every single subplot you’ve ever had over your nine or so years on this show seems to contradict that, fjdkfd.
oof, poor adam has to fight his attackers utterly butt-naked, which is not the way you’d want to start your day. also, i mean, they have tamiko. double bad.
fdjkfd adam wakes up to tamiko’s dad’s men cleaning up the signs of struggle in the apartment and the dad standing over him, and adam’s been covered up with a sheet (very thoughtful mob men!) but that’s, uh, a very awkward position to be in with your girlfriend’s dad.
“we’ll leave five-0 out of it.” no adam, bad. bad idea. [sprays him with water bottle]
tani being the voice of reason in the face of junior and lou wanting to keep a tiny pink kid’s bike that samantha will have zero use for anymore is a thing of beauty, even if i do understand junior’s position.
fjdkfdjkf lou: “that’s right. [the victims are] all male, all in their early forties.” steve: “ooy. prime of their lives.” quinn, quietly but not so quietly steve won’t hear her: “guys in their forties love saying that.” haaa, i love her. so far, this is a GOOD episode for the women, omg.
steve talking about his health and getting older, even if it’s just that he’s a little down about it because his doctor says he can’t eat steak anymore (the horror!!!), is kind of very wonderful to see on screen, gosh. that’s the kind of content i want.
adam: “i came down with a bug or something.” yes, the bug is in his brain and it’s called i-have-a-stupid-need-to-tackle-my-problems-on-my-own. many people in five-0 are familiar with it, so you might want to ask their help, adam.
so. so here’s the thing: i never really liked adam for kono, and then i warmed up to them as a couple, and shortly after that they got divorced. i never really liked adam on the team, and then i started warming up to him as a member of it because he was being a genuinely good guy, making friends with a homeless man etcetera (and his last big yakuza plot was finally wrapped up), and now he’s going rogue and assaulting an informant and acting behind the team’s back, and he’s probably about to do worse things and get deep into yakuza business again, idk, and honestly, i just. i just don’t really care. i started to like him when he was kind and now he’s suddenly Bad Adam out of nowhere again (i mean, it’s because his girlfriend was kidnapped and that makes some sense, but we don’t really know her and i have zero investment in her or their relationship and she’s more of a prop than a person and it’s all just kind of whiplash-y and i wish i cared but i’m afraid i just don’t. they keep flipflopping between making adam a really sweet good guy and a violent, bad one and i wish they’d just choose, or at least make the seesawing more understandable and interesting. his motives and the stakes are too undefined to me, i guess. it doesn’t carry any weight.
quinn obnoxiously and loudly eating a malasada in front of steve while refusing to share for steve’s supposed health is wonderful though!!! i mean, steve almost gets into a car crash while trying to snatch a malasada, which shows slightly skewed priorities, but at least the desire for a donut is something i can relate to. that’s a good plot. (i kid, but not entirely.)
aha! duke finds out about adam’s activities for the day.
the adam plot is coming to a head and they have tamiko back but her dad’s been shot, and i know i just said i don’t really care and i still don’t for the most part, but my god, tamiko, that poor woman? she’s been kidnapped and drugged while naked and then there were people shooting over her head and just when she thought it was over, her father is dying, and doing a lot of violence to a woman is not the same as building a character or plot that makes me feel something (do! not! confuse those two!), but it does still make me feel something.
h50 is generally a fairly black and white show (the bad guys are bad and the good guys are good, and people who are in prison deserve to be there and worse), far more so than in any way fits into my own moral view of the world, so i really like seeing this plot in which a guy gets to be freed from incarceration by our main cast because it turns out he didn’t commit any crimes! it’s a nice turn around from viewing all prisoners as irredeemable bad guys - here’s a man who claims he’s innocent and actually is innocent. (even though his story also makes my heart hurt because he’s already been in there TEN YEARS and jfc, he’s going to need more therapy than tamiko.)
we get lou on the phone with samantha and it’s really cute! and then he also talks to tani and junior about how will’s gone now too, and it’s good to at least know that (i mean, we could guess, but we’d never gotten any kind of confirmation before), but it also puts into stark contrast that we still don’t actually know for sure where grace is this year, fjdkfd. we can infer that she went to college, but like. mention it. (hashtag don’t let grace be the next female character that disappears on this show, please.)
dsfjdkfjdkfjdfjdk right SO. adam has realized that the guy who now inherits tamiko’s dead dad’s power probably plotted to murder tamiko’s dad, and then the guy is like “let’s finish our business” and essentially, it boils down to adam having kidnapped and tortured a guy for information and now that man is about to get killed while adam’s there and very definitely guilty of a number of things and i’m screaming because this gives me extreme déjà vu feelings to the time adam killed two guys in the woods and that time he tortured another guy, i think? both also after he’d finally gotten onto the right path, and then he ended up in prison. i guess they want adam off the show again, so they had to make him do ~bad things~ that were definitely totally absolutely against his will for [cue dramatic music and wind machine] The Woman He Loves! [dramatic zoom on Adam’s face or something, idek, eagle cries in the distance]
now adam is being threatened by New Baddest Guy and i am genuinely confused, because i think we’re supposed to feel sorry for him when the guy says adam’s career with five-0 will be over? but i kind of, um. kind of think that might maybe be a good idea? not even just because he did bad things, but also like, adam keeps getting drawn into this yakuza shit and he just really, really needs to move states and start a new life from scratch that doesn’t involve law enforcement but accounting or painting or modelling or what have you, because this is like an addiction that keeps pulling at him and it’s good for no one, least of all him.
dude gets shot (the one adam abducted and hand delivered), adam looks shocked. WHAT DID YOU EXPECT, ADAM.
and then steve calls adam and asks him to come to hq and we get a little scene showing us that duke brought steve all the evidence against adam, and the episode ends. oh boy.
so i liked some things about this episode! all of tani and quinn’s lines, lou talking about how he feels about his kids moving out, tani and junior’s interactions, steve’s health being a topic that gets brought up even if it’s jokingly, the general substance of the case steve and quinn solved. i feel like i’m being very negative about the adam plot and if you’re someone who does like it, obviously that’s cool, and i’m happy for you! i’m glad you can enjoy that. i just. personally, i’m so tired. this makes very little sense to me in ways that aren’t “i don’t understand this” but rather “this doesn’t logically work for me” (and i’m also simply not very interested in it, i’ll admit) and if this is a thing leading up to adam leaving, then if this is the version of adam we’re going to get for the forseeable future, i honestly wouldn’t mind. i liked good, kind, found-a-good-place-in-life adam! but oh dear lord, i’m tired of watching him slide back into yakuza drama over and over and over again because the writers don’t seem to want to think of a different storyline for him that might not involve... whatever this is. (also, tamiko absolutely failed the sexy lamp test in this episode (as in, she could have been replaced by a sexy lamp and the plot would have been the exact same) and it makes me sad.)
#h50#10.10#i guess there's some#h50 criticism#*#honestly the longer i'm in this fandom the more i realize that what i really want#is all of the characters sitting in steve's backyard or at rumfire or wherever for the entire episode and just talking#about their day to day lives and how they're feeling and when they last talked to x character we haven't seen in a while#idk let them discuss football or something#i don't know the first thing about football and i don't give a hoot about it but most of the characters would enjoy it!!! that's all i want#and i know canon is never going to give us an episode like this because that's not how this show works but gosh#it's a shame
8 notes
·
View notes
Text
How Do You Move On From Heartbreak?
Tina walked into the Parisian hotel room, looking around and taking it in. It was so different from her brownstone apartment in New York, yet it was roughly the same size. There was a bed tucked into one corner and a desk next to it, a lamp on its edge. A bedside table sat in between the bed and sliding glass doors that led to a small balcony; a small potted plant was situated in the corner between the glass doors and the door to the small bathroom.
Tina took off her dark coat and hung it on the coat rack. Looking through the glass doors to the balcony, she caught a glimpse of Paris. She walked over to the doors and opened them, stepping out into the cool September breeze.
She tried to take in her surroundings: a large public garden in the foreground and the River Seine in the background. The magnificent Parisian architecture that stretched for miles around her. The sunset staining the sky reds, pinks, and oranges. Yet her heart rejected it all, surrounded by a thick blanket of melancholy that might as well have turned the world black and white. Colors had no value. Tina had hardly smiled since she left New York. She walked back into the room and looked around, waiting for something interesting to magically appear for her to do.
She tentatively sat down at the desk and slowly opened up a drawer underneath filled with sheets of paper. She took one out, an idea forming in her mind. In another drawer, she found a pen and took one out. She paused, thinking of what she should write on this blank page full of possibilities.
She looked around the unfamiliar room for inspiration, refusing to write about what happened with N- him, even though writing down her feelings would probably help assuage the pain. She fingered her golden necklace absentmindedly, wishing her parents were still alive so they could shower her with hugs and kisses and tell her it would be okay, even if it wouldn't. She opened up the locket, revealing a photo of her mother and father on either side. Tina had her father's same brown hair and eyes although her hair was naturally curly. Not like Queenie's tightly wound curls, long ones that didn't bounce around. Queenie had their mother's golden curls and green eyes.
Dear Mother and Father,
Tina's pen etched the strange words onto the page. It still hurt, even after all these years, to know that they hadn't been at her Ilvermorny graduation, or around when she finished her Auror training. Her father wouldn't give her away when she got married, her mother would never get another card for Mothers' Day. They'll never be grandparents because they're dead. Most of all, they'll never see their family again, see who their daughters grew up to be.
I regret that you left Queenie and I so young. You'll never know what it's like to have grandchildren or see Queenie and I get married. I wish you were here. You would know what to say to get Queenie and I talking again, you always did.
She paused and studied the smiling faces of her parents. They would know how to move on from heartbreak. Because of course, they would. They knew everything. How to braid hair, how to kiss a boo-boo and make it all better, how to make the best strudel. At least they'd left the recipe for the strudel.
But they weren't here. All Tina could do was ask her questions and hope that, somehow, she would get an answer.
How do you move on from heartbreak? What if you fell in love with a strange man who showed you another side of the world you had never seen before? What if you were exchanging letters across the Atlantic ocean after he left for England? What if, in one of his letters, he wrote, "If I could, I would" and crossed it out and you desperately wanted to believe the rest of the sentence would have been "take a boat to New York just to see you again"? What if you are hopelessly in love with this man and find out that he is engaged to another woman? What if you thought he might be "the one"? What do you do then? How do you fix a broken life?
Tina swallowed and felt her throat constrict as tears collected in her eyes. She gripped the pen tighter in an attempt to ground herself in reality.
Mama. Papa. Why does everything I love have to be stripped away from me? First, you two and now him and Queenie. Why do I walk this lonely path? Am I really being true to myself? Is this really who I am meant to be? What did I do to deserve this?
She paused and took a deep breath, trying to hold back the tears. Even after everything she'd done to get over Newt-him, all the crying, the screaming, the mistakes, the fights, the running, she just... thought that it would finally stop hurting. But it hadn't.
Throughout all of it, Tina'd had one objective: save Credence. Maybe she couldn't save herself, but she could save him.
What if I dreamed of a future between us? What if that dream has been replaced by a painful void in my heart? How do I move on from heartbreak?
Tina couldn't hold back the tears anymore. Her breathing was erratic and she shakily set down the pen, a tear hitting the paper. The hurt was, if anything, stronger. Maybe because she had come to terms with it, that she wasn't just going to wake up one morning and learn that it was all a dream. That he really didn't love her the same way she loved him.
She took refuge in the bed, slowly and deliberately covering herself with the blankets as if to shield herself from the pain she felt within. She couldn't stop it. She couldn't save herself from the pain, no matter how hard she tried. If only her parents were here to make her cocoa and wrap her in hugs.
For an upsettingly large number of nights in the past three months, she had cried herself to sleep. This night was no different. Quiet sobs wracked her body as she wished that she had never met the awkward wanderer from England last December.
Ever since their parents had died, it had always been Tina and Queenie, Queenie and Tina. And then, suddenly, their duo had become a foursome with Newt and Jacob. Those few days had felt so right, like finding a part of herself she hadn't known was missing. Like finding family. When Newt left and Jacob was obliviated it had felt like another blow to her soul. But she'd found solace in the fact that Newt would come back to give her his book. But he hadn't come back. He'd gone off and gotten engaged to another woman. Even when her parents died she hadn't felt as sad as she had when she'd found out. Although, how would she really know? She was pretty young when that happened.
Then it was Tina and Achilles. She had been happy. Ish. He'd been a good friend. But now? Now it was Tina. Tina and her pain. Tina and her broken heart. Tina, who cries herself to sleep because she fell in love with a man who tricked her into thinking he might actually love her back. But who could ever really fall in love with a girl like her?
Who? Who could love the girl who'd been obsessed with unicorns when she was too young to be able to spell it? Who could love the girl who had trouble being "normal"? The girl who didn't wear makeup or dresses to work because it was impractical? The girl who preferred to work alone so she could think clearly and act swiftly? Who never acted sexy because it made her feel uncomfortable? Who?
Outside the hotel was the City of Lights, the City of Love. Yet Tina wasn't feeling the light. She felt heavy, burdened by this private sadness she carried with her wherever she went. She wasn't feeling the love. She felt lonely and was desperately in need of one specific person to find her.
Luckily, that person would travel to the end of the universe and back to find Tina. This man would undoubtedly risk Azkaban for the woman he loves.
Actions speak louder than words. When you're feeling sad, the people who love you the most have a way of finding you, even if you're trying to hide. Sometimes they find a postcard you sent to your sister and decide to find you even though it could mean they go to jail, not to mention that they refused to do the exact same thing except to find an evil wizard instead of you. Sometimes the people who love you the most do stupid things and you have to save their ass. All in a day's work when your one of the only ones in your family who has any practice saving the day.
Tina may yet feel light and love. Maybe just not in Paris. Or maybe in Paris. Maybe she'll get to fall in love with "the one" twice. Maybe she'll remember why she fell for him in the first place.
You know, the Zouwu is just a big kitty. It loves that little toy stick thingy to pieces. But not as much as Newt loves Tina. Love is the strongest magic. Newt is a prickly porcupine on the outside but a cuddly Zouwu on the inside. And Tina loves that about him.
#fantastic beasts#queenie goldstein#newt scamander#reflection#achilles tolliver#tina goldstein#character study#wizarding world
15 notes
·
View notes
Text
The Obligatory Strong Female Character Post
What constitutes a "strong female character" (or SFC for short). As a person on the internet, I’m obligated to weigh in on this. Everybody’s doing it! But what do we mean by “strong”? Is a strong person the same as a strong character? And do we need more SFCs in fiction?
Physical Strength
Obviously, “strong” and “weak” can describe someone's physical attributes. A strong person is physically fit and muscular. They can lift heavy objects and carry weights great distances, and sometimes know how to fight. A physically weak person, on the other hand, might be sickly or flabby and can't lift or carry much at all.
Hollywood churns out many physically strong female characters, although many of them are played by actresses who might blow away in a strong breeze. Most of these so-called SFCs could be replaced by sexy, physically fit lamps, because while admittedly strong, these ladies are not in fact characters. They are hollow beings with very little personality and characterization beyond “She kicks butt!” Thus, while these are "strong female somethings", they can't be called SFCs.
I have two issues with people who think that there are not enough of this type of “SFC”. One is that there is an underlying idea that, to be as good as male characters, the female in question must be as physically strong, if not stronger, than her male counterparts. Because apparently physical strength is the height of worthiness and likability, or something? Often the idea of role-models comes into the conversation regarding SFCs, in that people think little girls need better role-models. To such people, I ask, would you teach little boys that in order to be good enough, you must be as physically strong or stronger than your peers, and that anything less than that is not worth imitating? Of course you wouldn’t! So why should little girls learn the same lesson?
As an aside, I also think it’s funny that in a time where we are so cognizant of unattainable female body images, we perpetuate them in the type of physically strong female characters we portray. Again, Hollywood has willowy actresses habitually dropping men three times their size with one punch, not with magic, nor with martial arts designed to make up for smaller body sizes, but just sheer physical strength. And this actually does have an effect on real-life expectations: I went to a firing range as part of a Citizen’s Police Academy class, and the men in my group could not get it through their heads that I—a tiny, 5'3" wimp—couldn’t lift a police-issued shotgun long enough to aim it properly. I physically could not do what they could do without trying. I’m not saying writers can’t have physically strong women characters, I’m just saying that, maybe, take into account that that strength might require a larger body, muscles, training, or strategy. But I digress…
Strength of Character
Thankfully, most people who call for more SFCs are not talking merely about physical strength, but instead something more like strength of character, or strength of will. Someone with a strong character doesn't give up easily. They've got chutzpah, and moxy, and gumption, and a bunch of other words that are fun to say. Yet I quibble with people’s call for more and more such SFCs, because there are already plenty of characters like this. And there always have been. Books for children have always featured girls with just as much grit and wherewithal as boys, as have many classic books for grown-ups. Think about Elizabeth Bennet, Anne Shirley, Mrs. Frisbee, Mina Harker, Sara Crewe, and Gerda from The Snow Queen, just to name a few off the top of my head.
So where is the "there aren't enough SFCs" crowd coming from? These people, in my opinion, want women who never need, nor want, any help. Such a character is smart and capable enough to do everything by herself. She not only has a strong will, but is strong-willed. She doesn’t ever cry or get freaked out or feel helpless—because these are signs of weakness! She has guts, i.e. plot armor so thick that she will never ever meet an obstacle she cannot surmount. Which is… really boring, honestly.
Captain Marvel is a shining example of this type of so-called SFC: literally nothing affects her, physically or emotionally. There’s this line about how she’s supposedly too emotional, but she never shows any feeling besides a little smirk. Is cockiness an emotion? Anyway, there’s one scene where she finally realizes that everything she knows is a lie and that she’s been used by a genocidal race of space goons. This would have been a great moment for her to lose it, to scream, or cry, or use her powers so much that she accidentally blows off her inhibitor chip. But no, having her get frustrated or sad would show that she’s not 100% in control of everything, which would make her look weak. And human. And relatable on any level. I don’t know if you could tell, but I did not care for Captain Marvel.
Again, people who advocate for this type of SFC want role-models for little girls to look up to, without realizing that these super-capable, unassailable SFCs are just as unattainable an ideal as physically strong yet-muscleless ladies. Some girls are naturally shy and mild, other are unsure of themselves, and a few have actual anxiety-related issues. Are these types of girls weak? Again, let’s look at our male counterparts. Would you tell a shy little boy that he’s weak because he’s not as bold as his peers? Or that he shouldn’t seek help from others because he should be strong enough to do it by himself? Or, instead, would you tell him how to show true strength—the Mina Harker, Mrs. Frisbee, Sara Crewe type of strength—by persevering even when things are hard, and you do feel small, and things don’t go your way? Maybe we should be teaching girls the same thing.
Strong Characters, Female or Otherwise
So then, what is a strong female character? Is it a character who is a strong female, like a woman who can take down twenty guys in a fight? Or is it a female with a strong character, who never gives up no matter how tough it gets? I submit that it is not—necessarily—either. An SFC is, in short, a strong character who is female. Clear as mud, eh?
What no one ever seems to ask in all the SFC discourse is what, pray tell, do we mean by a "strong character"? Maybe the easiest way of answering this would be to find some examples of weak characters of either sex.
Bella Swan springs readily to mind, as do half-a-dozen female YA protagonists who might be described, in the most charitable terms, as “one-dimensional”. They lack agency and personality, generally because they are meant, more or less, to be reader inserts, so that the audience can imagine themselves in that role.
I submit that Ray, of the new Star Wars trilogy, is also a weak character, but in a different way. She makes decisions, sure, but without any motivation. She wants to stay on her planet and wait for her parents, because she needed a backstory, but then she’s fine going across the galaxy with Finn to drop off a droid, because otherwise she wouldn’t be in the rest of the movie, and she eventually decides to join the Resistance because that’s what a protagonist would do. Then she goes to train with Luke, apparently forgetting that she was waiting for her parents. Then she goes to try and turn Kylo Ren good because that way they can have a cool fight scene. She definitely has strength of character, in that she makes good decisions and isn’t easily swayed from doing whatever heroic act is required in any given scene no matter the odds, but there’s nothing behind any of her actions. There’s no there there. She does what a protagonist would do, not for any reason of her own—for example: because of her deep love of the Jedi, because she wants to find out the truth of her parents, because she’s wanted on her home planet for droid theft—but because the story requires it. And “because the story requires it” is never a good reason for doing things!
Lest you think I’m picking on the ladies, let me name the weakest character of all (and I apologize ahead of time to fans of the series): Ender Wiggan, of Ender’s Game. He has less agency than Bella and less reason for his actions than Ray. He might make one or two decisions in the entire book, the rest of the time just sort of moving around and doing things without purpose. We never see why he wants to do anything. His one character trait—and an informed one at that—is that he’s smart. That’s it. You could replace him with a lamp that’s intelligent enough to complete the objective of a war game (no, really, there’s a scene where all he does is complete the object of the game—get to the goal rather than focus on killing everyone on the other team—and he is lauded as a super genius) and nothing would change about that story.
What do all these weak characters have in common? Lack of personality, agency, goals, interests, quirks. Put simply, they are not well developed; their characterization is weak. Developing a character is a lot like developing film: the better you do it, the clearer the image should become. Thus, weak characters are a dark film that someone wrote on: “Bella is average and loves Edward”, “Ray is Force-sensitive and always tries to do the right thing”, “Ender Wiggam is a genius”. The end. Those don’t give a very clear impression of who we’re dealing with.
A strong character, i.e., a well-developed character, is one who we will know like the back of our hand by the end of the story, because we have such a clear picture of them. We know what drives them, or what makes them content. We know what they like, hate, and fear. We know odd little facts about them the way we know our friends’ foibles and eccentricities. A strong character feels like a real person.
Note that this in no way means that characters who are strong in the other two senses—physically fit or strong in character—can’t also be strong characters. There are plenty of multifaceted bruisers, fighters, and macho characters of both sexes out there—just watch anime! There are also, obviously, characters who never give up but, rather than being one-dimensional heroes, have traits that make them interesting and likable, like those who do what’s right despite wanting glory and money instead, or who are pure hearted but kinda dumb, or who became a hero due to some complicated backstory that still informs their actions. What I’m saying is, it’s possible to be a physically-strong strong character who also has strength of character!
But that’s not a necessity. Obviously, physical abilities are not a prerequisite to a well-developed character, but nor is a strong moral compass and grit. Take someone like Starscream, the ever scheming and completely untrustworthy second-in-command of the Decepticons in Transformers. Although tenacious in his own way, I don’t think anyone would hold him up as a model for “strength of character”. He’s backstabbing, weaselly, and willing to betray anyone (even himself!) to achieve his goals. No one would describe him as a weak character. What about Javert, from Les Miserables? He’s definitely got wherewithal—he needs it in order to obsess over one stolen loaf of bread for twenty years—but in his final hours, he gives up and chooses suicide over a world that doesn’t jive with his vision of justice. That might, ultimately, make him a weak person, but it cements him as one of the best examples of a strong character: he has a worldview and a goal and an obsessive personality; a real person like him would do something like that when his world comes crashing down. Many weak people, if depicted intricately and written clearly, might make strong characters.
We Need More Strong Female Characters
So, with this as our definition, do we need more SFCs in our fiction, or are there enough already? Yes, we do, and no, there aren’t. I’m not one of those people who demands a 50/50 ratio of male to female characters, but I do wish that the female characters we do have were stronger characters. The problem is that when we say “SFC”, writers hear “woman who can hold her own in a fight”, “woman who can save herself”, “woman who can’t be beat”, etc, and think that that absolves them from giving said women anything resembling a personality. They check the SFC box and pat themselves on the back for how great they are at writing "strong females", forgetting the “characters” part of the equation.
Honestly, I think the reason so many so-called SFCs are weak is precisely because it’s currently anathema to present a woman as anything but totally strong. Take Rey: having grown up on off-brand-Tatooine, she could have been savvy and money-hungry, perhaps planning on selling BB-8 back the Resistance instead of just delivering him. She could legitimately want to help Finn and the little droid get home, but might as well make a quick galactic credit while she’s at it. This would also payoff later, when she learns that she’s Force-sensitive, because there might actually be a temptation to the Dark Side—the easy side—contrasted with her innate desire to do the right thing. Wouldn’t that be interesting? Too bad! Because girls aren’t greedy! Girls can’t be tempted to take the easy way out! Girls need strong role-models! Role-models can't show weakness!
Which is dumb, because real people—men and women—are weak sometimes. People have physical and mental ailments. People have blind spots, and bad habits, and temptations. Even characters who are meant to be role-models can do so by showing that weaknesses can be overcome.
And this next statement might blow some people’s mind, but not every character, not even every female character, needs to be a role-model. The dearth of female characters in a lot of stories isn’t going to be solved by adding in a dozen women who are all do-gooding übermenschen; if you’re going for realism, you need characters with a diversity of goals, traits, and personalities, not just a diversity of sex.
Give me those meek and mild well-defined female characters. Give me shady, cowardly, or stingy ladies who feel like someone you could meet in real life. Give me musclebound fighters who have intricate motivations and backstory, or snarky fly-boy type ladies who totally can’t put her money where their mouth is. Give me female characters who struggle to do the right thing, or get exasperated with other people who they don’t consider up to snuff, or are super gung-ho with their hero duties to the detriment of their own safety, or any combination of the above. Basically, give me female characters who are as multifaceted and developed as the average male character.
We do need more SFCs in fiction, so we need to stop praising half-hearted, one-dimensional substitutes who happen to be female, because such characters are anything but strong.
#strong female characters#female character#female characters#strong female character#strong characters#writing characters#writeblr#writelr#characterization#sexy lamps#writer blog#author blog#we need more strong female characters#female representation#female role-models#women in fiction#females in fiction#writing analysis#writing women#writing female characters
31 notes
·
View notes
Text
iZombie 5x10 "Night in the Zombie City" Review
With just three episodes of iZombie left, we are inching closer and closer to the truth about the cure, and characters are going to more drastic measures as time ticks on.
For this week’s murder, a young sex worker and private eye detective are killed back to back. Liv eats the detective’s brain, bathing the episode in noir. Sad saxophones, light bars across the eyes, and long trench coats. A thunderstorm plays in the background for the whole episode, making every scene feel like a dark and stormy night. The power goes out in the station, giving it a 50’s black and white movie vibe. Bunny, the sex worker, was one of Candy’s girls, so the investigation naturally winds up at Don E Be Good’s. All signs point to the waitress, Jane, who ends up returning to the scene of the crime. Blaine confronts her near the bar, and right before Jane is about to shoot him, Crybaby comes in and knocks her out cold. Blaine eats her brain in hopes of finding out more, and he has a vision. The private eye detective had managed to secure a cure for Bunny, and Jane caught wind of it. Trying to steal the cure for herself, she killed both of them. Of course, getting another cure would be in Blaine’s best interest, and so he eats Jane’s brain in hopes to figure out where she stashed the cure.
Blaine and Liv cross paths at the private eye’s office while working on the case, but tensions finally boil over between the two when they are looking for the cure in the kitchen of Don E Be Good’s. Peyton gets Liv to come out drinking, and Peyton drowns her sorrows and delivers wobbly karaoke. The fun comes to an abrupt end when someone tells Peyton that she was a bad mayor. She tells him exactly what she thinks about that by sockin him right in the mouth. A huge bar fight breaks out. “Seriously? On karaoke night?” Don E moans. If only he knew the knockout, drag-out Liv and Blaine were having in the back. This is certainly not the first time that these two have come to fisticuffs, but this time it gets ugly. Crybaby intervenes again, with more intentions to kill. Right before he brings the bat down on Liv’s head, Clive comes to the rescue. Blaine throws Crybaby under the bus for Jane’s murder, which is what Blaine does, and Crybaby truly should not be shocked about it.
Peyton is also arrested. Poor girl is clearly having a hard time dealing with not being mayor anymore. Now that she’s off the hook for all of Seattle’s problems, what else does she have to do? “Did I ever tell you I wanted to be a paleontologist?” she tells Liv. “Seems hard to get fired from that job.” I hope in the next three episodes, Peyton can get her groove back, rather than taking up an extended stay in Margaritaville and getting arrested for bar fights.
Another character who has been under a lot of stress lately, as well as a new relationship, is Don E. In a bought of frustration, he calls the murders a “hassle” for business, which rubs Darcy the wrong way. Confused about what he said, Liv soothes him while sipping on hard liquor. “Dames got you dizzy, Don E. It’s what dames do.” He has a sweet moment with Candy, where she encourages him to get Darcy back, and it seems a little bit like a final goodbye. Candy has been an unsung hero of this series. She has never had a full plot on her own, unfortunately always at the mercy of the unethical men in her life. We aren’t often in tune with her thoughts and feelings, but she has been with us since the beginning. So when we see her steal the cure for herself and get on the back of a sexy motorcycle, I cheered out loud. Cue the Lucille Bluth “Good for her!” gif! Although it sets our heroes back, yet again ending an episode cure-less, I can’t help but feel like out of all the people to get one of the rare original cures, Candy deserves it the most. Be free, Candy!
Darcy agrees to speak to Don E, and she tells him that she was angry at his reaction to Bunny because his chief concern was finding a replacement for her. Darcy doesn’t have much time left, so she was worried that would be Don E’s reaction to her death as well. Don E has matured the most out of any character on this show, and so when he tells Darcy that he’s hardened by all the death in his life, but still loves her, it feels like a hard won, vulnerable moment from him. He asks Darcy to marry him, which was the perfect mix of corny and sweet. At first I was sure that we would see Darcy die by the end of the season, but I’m beginning to wonder if the show has a future for these two after all. If there’s any zombies standing after Liv and Martin’s showdown, that is.
Ravi wastes no time telling Liv the truth about her father, that he also, in fact, is Father of all Zombie-kind. In turn, she wastes no time confronting him about it. Not only is she angry that he withheld something so major, it also means he holds the key to the cure. He created the recipe for utopium that could be the solution to all their problems. He quickly tells her that he was high all the time in those days, so there’s no way he remembers the recipe. The audience knows this isn’t true, and it’s only a matter of time before Liv and the group find out. But not before Ravi lapses judgement a little and tells Martin he was testing rats with Max Rager, the energy drink that gives extreme psychological effects. When it’s paired with utopium, it turns people into zombies. Ravi explains that it stimulants the frontal cortex. Martin seems incredibly interested at this piece of information, and we found out later that Max Rager is the last piece of the puzzle that he needs to control his army.
At Fillmore Graves, Major is begging for a distraction from the negotiations with the government. His second gives him a note that the keycard system needs to be replaced. While she mentions that it’s “just boring stuff,” it turns disturbing fast. Major catches a janitor with a huge carton of Max Rager with two keycards. When Major tells him that he wants to ask him some questions, the janitor runs into a shower hook, impaling his brain rather than talk. When Ravi hears what the janitor was trying to steal, he brings up to Liv the conversation he had with Martin. Liv proposes sneaking into Martin’s house while he’s in an AA meeting, and boy do they hit the motherlode. Not only do they find the exact recipe from the night of the yacht party that created the first zombie outbreak, but they find the army too. Ravi pulls aside the curtain, hoping for an escape route, and finds a pack of Romeros staring back at him behind a cage.
Meanwhile, two of the weakest plots of the show finally meet each other and seem to resolve. As a little recap, Hi Zombie is the webseries that Peyton got fired for funding. The premise is two families move in next door to each other — one human, one zombie — and they root out all the stereotypes they have against each other. Every clip or scene we’ve seen of this show has been didactic and a little forced, but surely it was a plot device to build some kind of crucial bridge. The threat of nuclear warfare has been looming over New Seattle for quite some time now, and I mean a long time now. I understand this is a big decision, but it’s been stretched to the point of taking the wind out of the story’s sails a bit. I never actually believed that New Seattle would get nuked, and now we know it’s probably not going to. Why? All because of Hi Zombie! The chairman walks in on her grandson watching the show, and leans over to watch it with him for a while. Over the course of the evening, she has a change of heart about the zombie community. When it comes down to a vote on whether or not to nuke the town, she breaks the tie by voting no. “They have the capacity to become monsters” she says, but she can’t base her vote on “for fear for what they might become.” All of this is certainly not good enough for General Mills, who pays a phone call to our favorite local criminal, Dolly. These two make a toxic team up, for sure, but how will they factor in to the grand finale?
Final thoughts:
Ravi does an amazing noir detective monologue that I can only assume is based off Harrison Ford’s Bladerunner voiceover
Was it just me, or was there extra alcohol in this episode?
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead” “You’re already dead.” It seems unbelievable to me this joke hasn’t been played yet
“We’re not talking about your book. By the book. My book.” I’m going to miss Malcolm Goodwin rolling with every brain swing. He’s exasperated by a brain nearly every week, but this one particularly got under his skin. He tells Liv she’s off the case until she eats a brain tube, but that certainly doesn’t stop her.
“That was just a love tap!”
I always feel frustrated when this show uses terribly dated language, like “hooker” and “junkie.” It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
“The classic lamp reveal.” Finally, a brain that matches Blaine for his dramatics.
Don E’s laugh when Peyton starts singing is pure iZombie
“We’re going to Don E Be Good’s.” “Good’s enough!” Again — so obvious but brilliant.
Haley’s episode rating: 🐝🐝🐝🐝
iZombie airs Thursdays at 9/8c on the CW.
5 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
parasocialites
beloved
mrrobertforeman
Robert J. Foreman Tumblr
noelia-muy-lia-blog
SUNFLOWER🌻
imtryingbutok
🌙 z a u r i 🌙
quadrantmodelquotes
Quadrant Model Quotes from 2013 Lectures