fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3521 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3521 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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02.

[World of Warcraft: Legion]

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03.

(Fallout 4)

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04.

[Doctor Who - 12/Clara]

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05.

(The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

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06.

[Bojack Horseman]

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07.

[Criminal Minds]

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08.

[Elite: Dangerous]

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09.

[Street Fighter]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 24 secrets from Secret Submission Post #503.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Every time this comes up the character I think of most strongly is Ezra from the TV Magnificent Seven, probably because it was the first time I really came across it. M7 fandom was weird when it came to Ezra. In hindsight, probably not any more weird than any other fandom with a favourite roguish woobie, but I think he was my first. Particularly the racism thing with Nathan, and also Ezra's greed. So many fics bent over backwards to explain those two things away as anything other than the fairly natural results of a man raised in the pre-war South to be a thief and a conman by a mother who seemed to prize material security above all things. The best thing about Ezra in the show was watching him learn to overcome that and let his natural brave and honourable streak shine through, struggling all the way. With, I should add, Nathan's help in a lot of ways, and usually when they blew up at each other you could see why the situation would lend itself to it. So many fics demonised Nathan to excuse Ezra as well.

Ezra in the show was a thief and a swindler who almost left a village to die in the pilot and who was blatantly racist towards Nathan in their first encounter. He was also a deeply honourable man who didn't want to be because a) he hadn't been raised that way, and b) honour in his circumstances had a tendency to get him shot at and/or arrested, and who gradually let his better self shine through over the course of the show. His character development was one of the best in the show, and it really, really annoyed me after a while how often it was swept under the rug in fic in favour of having him be a tortured innocent cruelly disregarded for his past.

Erm. Yes. Rant over. He was just my first fandom favourite woobie, I think. It stuck.

This is a great comment and explanation of how great Ezra's character arc was and how important his flaws were. I never understand why people like to flatten out wonderfully steep character development into the much less likeable and compelling "always been sorta the same, was never an ass" thing.

Years later I still have so many feelings about Ezra's arc and in particular Ezra and Nathan's arc, and I will fight people over that particular tendency in this fandom to absolve Ezra and lambast Nathan (also Chris, but I have more feelings about Nathan). Especially as they grow closer and come to care about each other and their disagreements come more from an amazing gulf of personal experience rather than any actual dislike or even real distrust of each other.

Even their early ones in a lot of ways came from that. Ezra's blatant racism disappeared fairly quickly once he got to know Nathan, and Nathan never really seemed to hold it too much against him. It was other things that came between them. The things Nathan blew up at Ezra over were usually one of two things: actions that can be interpreted as the selling and buying of people ("Working Girls" and "Chinatown"), and taking people's hard-earned money by trickery or force for nothing but personal profit (lots of lowkey incidents). Given that Nathan was a slave whose entire early life was working and suffering for other people's profit, those are fairly understandable knee-jerk reactions for him, and Ezra didn't help himself sometimes because his experiences were so different that he often didn't even see Nathan's anger/anguish coming until it had hit.

I have a lot of feelings about "Working Girls" in particular, because I think Ezra legitimately did not see Nathan's anger coming because in his head he wasn't teaching women how to sell themselves/be sold better, he was teaching the women how to be like Maude, and Maude to him was never a victim in her life. He thought he was teaching them to be manipulative and to use their 'god-given assets' for their own benefit, and then Nathan blindsided him with the idea that he was helping sell people into a more refined form of slavery. Which marriage could legimately be, if there was no love in it, and which maybe made Ezra suddenly think about Maude herself slightly differently. It was just ... this amazing gap in experience that led them to interpret the same thing in vastly different ways, with some merit on both sides, and hurt each other magnificently in the process. Which they kept on doing, especially when they ran into issues like this, but which they also kept on working through and backing each other up in spite of, and that mattered to me. I seriously, seriously hated a lot of the Ezra apologisers/Nathan demonisers in fandom.

I have a lot of pent up feelings about this fandom, apparently.

na

I think this is some great meta/analysis of their relationship. I completely agree with you

[ SECRET POST #3521 ]

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