fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #487 ]

[ SECRET POST #487 ]

⌈ Secret Post #487 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 09 pages, 223 secrets from Secret Submission Post #070.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 3 - too big ], [ 1 - personal attack ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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...I love you so much for saying this.

I felt exactly the same way. Tim Kring himself admitted they flubbed up the writing in Volume 2. You can't blame a characters for those shortcomings when writers have to write characters to begin with.

Help me out here.

If the character is badly written...why should I like her?

There was a reason I called Maya a malfunctioning Sylar delivery system in one of my more acidic post-episode rants.

She was badly written. Therefore, she is not a good character. She could have been a good character, but she wasn't, because she was badly written. Unlike Peter and Claire, she was never well-written to begin with, so people didn't have any positive memories to draw upon.

S2 sucked. Hard and badly.

Since the character doesn't exist except as she is written...

I mean, I can't blame Maya for anything because she doesn't exist. She's fiction. And because she's not good fiction, people don't like her. They managed to cram every Hollywood misconception about Latin culture and every bad telenovela cliche into her backstory. Not only did she have the tragic love relationship, she was also almost a nun and almost raped! It's pretty hard to get that trifecta outside of a daytime soap.

It bewilders me when people talk like there's something wrong with a fandom for not falling in love with badly written characters.

Heroes is the king of skanky race issues as it is. But the fact that she is supposed to be a character of colour doesn't absolve her from needing to be a believable character at least in some part before I can like her.

(And it probably doesn't help that the actress is relatively unknown; I will freely admit that Nathan got to coast on my Jim Profit love before I got to know him. But what can you do?)

It bewilders me when people talk like there's something wrong with a fandom for not falling in love with badly written characters.

Agreed. But there is a difference between "not falling in love with a character" and "incessantly bashing the character". Doesn't help that Maya was already labelled "the token Mexican" before the season even started.

That's skanky. There were some skanky things said on heroes_sylar too (some of my fellow mylar shippers need to take a pill and calm down). But I think that if the character had been at all well written she wouldn't be so hated.

"Well-written" is such a vague term, though, and ultimately it's up for interpretation whether a character is well-written or not.

In my view, Peter is horribly badly written. I don't know if you agree.

According to some people in fanom, all female characters have been badly written, so it's okay to bash them. Call them whores, ask for them to be killed off, etc. Someone once said that the only well-written female characters, in her view, were Claire and Molly, because only they were "good and pure". Her words, not mine. It seems like female characters have to meet very, very high and specific expectations before they count as "well-written".

I can't tell if you're complaining about other people or ascribing to me motives which I do not share.

I don't find Peter badly written although I find him kind of stupid a lot of the time. I enjoy Pcest but it took me a while to get to the point where I thought Peter deserved Nathan, lol. I think that as a portrayal of a fairly privileged rich brat who hasn't had to think too much and needed a good whacking to start doing so, Peter is OK. If I'm meant to think he's something other/better than that, then he's badly written. One of the problems I had with S2 was that after all the effort put into growing Peter up, he lost his memory and became stupid again. Gah.

I have difficulty with the whole "it's OK to..." thing. I think if you are going to call a character a whore, you need to have some evidence for this assertion. Otherwise I'm going to dismiss it as BS. I like Niki, but you could make a case for "Niki is a whore" as she is in fact a sex worker; Maya, not so much.

I think it's perfectly okay to want characters you don't like to be killed off or otherwise written out of the show as long as you accept you may not get your wish.

My impression (based on what fans, creators and characters say) is that Peter is actually supposed to be that selfless, kind person who cares for everyone. Hence why I find him badly-written. He's a self-centered jerk, and he's dumb. And he is apparantly dumb not because the character is supposed to be dumb, but because writing him as more intelligent and thinking instead of "But Nathan/Adam would never do that!" would make him too powerful. There are possibly other ways of limiing his powers, the amnesia was actually a decentone, although it was badly executed because he still could access his powers, although he supposedly has to remember the original user in order to access it. Whatever. Peter is a walking plothole, and the series would be better off without him, in my opinion.

I think it's perfectly okay to want characters you don't like to be killed off or otherwise written out of the show as long as you accept you may not get your wish.

Well, yeah. And did you notice how people complained when Maya survived the finale? That's where it crosses the line and becomes immature whining.

If Peter is supposed to be selfless, they're Doing It Wrong. I've heard that he is before. I don't actually know what Kring thinks, sometimes because I don't actually think that he does, very much.

(I have some theories about this, most of which involve the inability of the writers to deal with gender-variant behaviour. It has always annoyed the crap out of me that Empath Boy had to go and rescue Indestructo-Girl when logically, it would have made a lot more sense the other way round...but people who look like Milo Ventimiglia are not allowed to get their asses saved by people who look like Hayden Panettiere.)

I did not notice people complaining that Maya survived. But then I was kind of avoiding the fandom then because of all the omg-if-u-hate-maya-ur-a-racist crap that was all over my flist and because there was a particularly unpleasant altercation between me and someone who was offended that I hate Maya because she's a caricature of an ethnic stereotype and would quit watching the show if Nathan died because I love Adrian Pasdar more than anything and wish he would get on a show where they actually used him well and didn't keep killing him.

(I think how you perceive Maya hate has a lot to do with who is on your flist. I have way too many people on mine who think everything is political, but I love them as people so I bite my tongue a lot. That time I didn't and so it got bit by somebody else.)

Edited 2008-05-07 00:17 (UTC)

Hi, I was one of those people who complained when she survived. Why? Because she was a stereotype, an irritating stereotype that I really, really wanted to see eliminated from the show, and killing her would've been the most graceful way to do it. Right now, I'm dreading having to watch Kring et Co fuck with what white people think about Latinos again. That plot made no fucking sense--because people from the Dominican Republic totally enter the US from Mexico--and it made Maya into a trope, the Latina who is subject to violence, who is naive, hyper-religious and domestic, who brings with her an un-identified plague from "South of the Border" and is a threat to white, American society. Yeah, I want to watch that again.

So go ahead, call it whining. But I'm tired of watching this stereotype paraded in front of America as "diversity" and I hope they get rid of her quick.

I read that in your journal but I didn't process that as complaining she lived for some reason, probably because I feel the same way about her that you do.

because people from the Dominican Republic totally enter the US from Mexico--and it made Maya into a trope, the Latina who is subject to violence, who is naive, hyper-religious and domestic, who brings with her an un-identified plague from "South of the Border" and is a threat to white, American society. Yeah, I want to watch that again.

Maybe it's because I m not American and these problems are not mine, these stereotypes are not mine so I don't actually recognize them, and still see a person where you see a stereotype, sorry.

I never perceived Maya as a plague from south of the border threatening white American society. Probably because the only Americans died from Maya's power because of the manipulations of another white American, namely Sylar.
Heroes has always shown white Americans as the greatest threat to themseves and to the rest of the world. I can't really agree with deeming Maya a threat to white Americans when Sylar just went and murdered Derek.

Heroes uses stereotypes, that's hardly new, and that's hardly limited just to the South American characters. So instead of developing Maya's character further, so everyone who is at all willing can see that South American immigrants can be nice and well-intentioned people who have good reasons for having to go to the USA, you would rather see her killed off. I am sorry, but I don't think this would do any good at all, and I don't think it would honestly make you happy either.

I should be in bed now, though. G'night.

Agh, and sorry, I think Maya's and Al's difficult route to the USA was mostly made up in order to make it a long, tough journey for them. It is justified in the story by Maya having left the Dominican Republic for another country even before she thought about going to the USA at all, so they started from there instead of the Dom Rep?

To me, to someone who deals with this every day, Maya and Alejandro coming through Mexico was another stereotype. It looked like Kring et Co threw a dart at Latin America, hit the Dominican Republic, decided to go with that as a country and make it fit the plot. That whole freakin' subplot seemed like someone read a few things about Latin America on Wikipedia, watched some telenovellas, decided they knew what to do and went with it. It said "all Latinos enter this country from Mexico illegally." It said that "all illegal aliens are a threat." And I know you don't see that, but I do.

Maybe it's because I m not American and these problems are not mine, these stereotypes are not mine so I don't actually recognize them, and still see a person where you see a stereotype, sorry.

Then you need to stop talking, start listening, and recognize when someone from the US, who also happens to be Latina is telling you about American attitudes and the impact of stereotypes of Latinos in this country. Maya isn't a person, she's a fictional character on a television show that is rife with all the racial tensions and troubles in America. And as someone who deals with that on a daily basis, when I tell you that this is what Maya represents, think about why I might be telling you that.

I want strong, well-written, intelligent Latinas on television. Maya isn't. She's never going to be that. She's never going to be developed into that because the people who write her don't know how to write minorities and people of color. The entire stable of characters on Heroes proves that they have problems with stereotypes on that show, and instead of introducing new token characters in order to prove how enlightened they are, I'd really rather Kring et Co develop the characters of color they have. Don't tell me that seeing Maya further developed would make me happier than seeing her killed off. You don't know what my particular experiences are as a Latina in the US. I do want her written off or killed, either way, because she is a fucking embarrassment to me.

Why are you still watching Heroes, if you hate their general portrayal of characters of colour so much, and are absolutely certain that this won't improve?

I don't really think that American shows misrepresenting a non-American culture, or an ethical minority, is anything unusual. It's rather the standard,and I guess it shouldn't be anymore, these days, but it is. Not just for Heroes. It is still a wider, not solely Heroes-related issue. At least Heroes made me like most of these coloured characters more than their white colleagues. If that means I am watching it wrong, I don't want to be right.

Why are you still watching Heroes, if you hate their general portrayal of characters of colour so much, and are absolutely certain that this won't improve?

There's a strawman. You're setting it up that if I have standards when it comes to racist portrayals of characters in media, I'm being too picky and should just stop watching. (Because ignoring problems always makes them going away and heavens, talking about them, that's never, ever made people more aware of what's happening around them.) If I stopped watching all programs that had problematic characters of color, I couldn't watch any media that comes out of the US, or quite possibly anywhere. I like Heroes for a lot of its good points, but when the race issues in the show are bad, they're horrible and Maya was one that was particularly vile. She's particularly vile because she's loaded down with all the baggage Latinas face in the US, and because Kring et Co trumpeted this season in interviews as being multi-cultural and more diverse, and instead of giving any thought to the character, they plopped down these stereotypes and then expected us to be grateful.

If that means I am watching it wrong, I don't want to be right.

Please. I'm not telling you you're watching it wrong. I'm telling you why I, an American of Latin descent, has problems with the way Latinas are portrayed on this show. Instead of listening to that, you're dismissing me as being, apparently, too picky in my media, and if I'm going to watch a show, I'm not allowed to have problems with the way they portray people who are my race, ethnicity, religion, or gender. I'm supposed to accept it as it is and never, ever critique it. I'm going to critique my media, no matter what it is, and I feel perfectly justified in doing that. And if you think that's whining, then that's your problem. But here's a clue: not everyone hates a character because they're being petty, or they're a racist, or whatever you may think about people who dislike Maya. And if you would listen to the people who are telling you, from their experience, that Maya represents a whole lot of problems in America today, you might actually begin to understand that.

But hey, if you just want to accept your media whole, no thought required, no critique, go for it. Watch the show however you want.

Re: 08

weaselistic.livejournal.com - 2008-05-07 20:01 (UTC) - Expand

Re: 08

cleverthylacine - 2008-05-08 07:23 (UTC) - Expand

Re: 08 part 2

cleverthylacine - 2008-05-08 07:24 (UTC) - Expand

Taking the same quote

weaselistic did.

No, all of those reasons you listed are justifiable reasons not to like her. It's been a while since I watched Heroes and I don't remember much of Vol. 2, so your opinion's much better informed than mine. What bothers me is people blaming characters for poor storytelling. Even if you say the series would've been better if Maya was never in it to begin with, the fact that she's in there is because a decision was made to write her in that story. That's not to say if she was written better and more easily likable Vol. 2 would've been miles better. Great characters can make a mediocre story work, and a great story can allow you to overlook mediocre characters. When it boils down to it, it's bad writing in one or the other or all aspects of a story that's to blame.

(Can't stone you for that one. Nathan got a free pass off my Declan love, so I'm no better on that part.)

What bothers me is people blaming characters for poor storytelling. Even if you say the series would've been better if Maya was never in it to begin with, the fact that she's in there is because a decision was made to write her in that story. That's not to say if she was written better and more easily likable Vol. 2 would've been miles better.

I'm not sure quite what you mean by this. A character is what we know about them from canon. Anything else is projection. There's nothing wrong with projection--we all project ourselves into fiction--but it's not the fault of the fans if the writers didn't give us enough to love. I don't see a lot of fan love for West either, but because he's a white boy you can hate him without people questioning that you must have motives other than that he's a badly-written character.

(What is Mysterious Ways about? All I know is that Declan dresses like Adrian on his crazy days and that it was on PAX, which makes me wonder how much they paid him to keep his clothes on--I've never seen anything with Adrian in it where he didn't strip at LEAST half naked.)

I'm much too wordy for my own good.

What I'm trying to say is that characters are a product of writing, so you can't blame a poorly written character for screwing up the story, which was what I was arguing in my original comment. A number of fans blamed the new characters in general for mucking up Vol. 2, not just Maya. Maybe their inclusion in the plot was the or part of the reason, but characters don't magically poof into a story. They have to be written into that story first.

I think our problem is that we were arguing over two different things. You were making a case whether or not Maya deserves the hate she gets, while I was making a case whether or not Maya is to blame in any part for Vol. 2's failure. Since both our points involved Maya in some way so it seemed like we were debating over the same issue.

(It's been ages since I watched Mysterious Ways, but the gist of it was that Declan was investigating so-called miraculous occurrences and trying to debunk the mystery using science and logic. It had a pretty spiritual tone to it, so the commonality of naked!Adrian amuses me greatly since Declan was my first exposure to Adrian's work. XD)

No, I don't think that Maya is the reason S2 sucked. She's a symptom, not the cause.

(...I hope spiritual doesn't mean explicitly or heavily implicitly Christian, because I'm not Christian and I don't like to be preached to about it, but I really do want to like stuff that Adrian's in. Adrian only strips to the waist in Heroes but he spends large portions of Profit and several movies starkers. Mind you this is not a complaint...)

You made me rethink how I like her character, though. I think I like her too much for what she could've been instead of what we've been canonly given. Which... ouch, I am so blind.

(No, not in that sense. Just that it suggests there's something bigger than us out there, and we can't always understand how everything works. That spiritual undertone was what drew my family to the show, but it didn't try to preach any religion on you. There are supposedly torrents floating someplace for MW, but I haven't come across them yet. It was a good show, if not short-lived. Ha, naked Adrian is never something to complain about. I should delve more into his filmography, hmmm...)

Why, thank you.

I like you, too, for having said what you said above!

The problem with S2 is probably mostly the pace, but I kind of eel that it was too rigid, or too well-planned. Some of the things I liked most about S1 were late additions, the writers taking advantages of unexpected chemistry, or developing a character further because he's turned out more interesting than originally thougt. That's why the finale felt weak in comparison, it forced the series back into its overarching plot.
And in S2, the Maya/Al/Sylar storyline probably had a fixed ending planned from the start, but they were not allowed to arrive at Mohinder until the right moment in his busy plot. So they spend a lot of time on their journey. It... still was not as boring or repetitive as people make it out to be, I thought, but I can see how impatient people would not be happy.

I do agree Vol. 2 was generally lackluster compared to Vol. 1, and it could very well be because the writers did or didn't take advantage of pleasant character/actor/plot surprises in one or the other. As long as riding on those creative waves doesn't make the show lose its focus, I'm fine with that kind of writing.

That...that's it! The root of the Maya/Alejandro hate is MOHINDER! If their arrival wasn't so fixed on his plot, their story wouldn't have dragged out so long and they wouldn't have been so boring.
Okay, I'm kidding about that. It's been a while since I watched any of the series, but I can see why people think their plot was repetitive.

Personally, I think the twins would've been more interesting if they were more involved with the virus plot. Neither of their abilities were transmitted biologically like the healing properties in Claire and Adam's blood are, but their abilities still affected other people's bodies in a biological level. In my dream world they could've somehow been used to combat the virus (I'm no science major though, so maybe I'm completely off with that idea), but Maya learning how to control her ability would've made Alejandro's useless like it did in the canon either way. Poor Alejandro was doomed from the start, it seems. I can't win with these two no matter what. XD;;

That...that's it! The root of the Maya/Alejandro hate is MOHINDER!

For a certain subset of Mylar fans that's probably almost certainly true. A lot of Maya hate on the Mylar comms I read seemed to have less to do with race and more to do with "getouttamyOTPktx."

Ah, fandom and their sacred ships. ^.^;;

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