case: (Default)
Case ([personal profile] case) wrote in [community profile] fandomsecrets2018-02-26 06:35 pm

[ SECRET POST #4072 ]


⌈ Secret Post #4072 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 28 secrets from Secret Submission Post #583.
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.

(Anonymous) 2018-02-27 04:47 pm (UTC)(link)
clint/coulson was similarly everywhere and shoehorned into every fic no matter the pairing, where was the outrage for that?

(Anonymous) 2018-02-27 05:17 pm (UTC)(link)
Plenty of people were massively annoyed about that and had it as the back button trigger if it was included in a fic background for no other reason than "it's popular, everyone likes it".
It also wasn't quite so obviously a thinly disguised author proxy.

(Anonymous) 2018-02-27 05:22 pm (UTC)(link)
NAYRT

True, but I don't think that translated into intense dislike for Coulson as a character the way that it seems to have done for Darcy

(Anonymous) 2018-02-27 06:43 pm (UTC)(link)
Because Coulson is just ... so ridiculously bland and boring in the movies. Darcy on the other hand is this OTT quirky loud and kind of obnoxious character who's just a tiny sliver away from a manic pixie dreamgirl trope.

(Anonymous) 2018-02-27 08:52 pm (UTC)(link)
Sure. But at the end of the day, I can't help but feel that the fact that Coulson is a male character and Darcy is a female character played some role in those reactions and perceptions.

(Anonymous) 2018-02-27 09:32 pm (UTC)(link)
As soon as you show me a male character who's actually comparable to the Darcy brand of obnoxious I might agree. This one is comparing apples with oranges.

(Anonymous) 2018-02-27 09:56 pm (UTC)(link)
But "how subjectively obnoxious you, personally, find a character" isn't something that exists in a vacuum. That's my whole point.

(Anonymous) 2018-02-27 10:22 pm (UTC)(link)
DA

Obviously not, but if you want to say that that's the problem here, the blame is better placed on the creators' end than on the fans' end.

(Anonymous) 2018-02-27 08:44 pm (UTC)(link)
Speaking as someone who likes Darcy and only cares about Coulson if he's being slashed with Fury...

I definitely saw intense dislike of Coulson in some circles, it just faded because Coulson's role in canon became larger so people who continued to complain about his popularity were regarded as kind of petty and bitter, so they all either bit their tongues or stopped caring. Darcy's role has gotten smaller if anything. She never had a major emotional impact on the plot and didn't get her own TV show the way Coulson did, and doesn't even appear in the most recent Thor movie. So where Coulson ended up becoming a decently developed character (by MCU standards) and retroactively justifying his popularity, Darcy remains a lolquirky audience stand-in. And that remains her role in the vast majority of fanfics, in an era where self-insert fics are often frowned upon and pair the spares porn (a la Clint/Coulson) are basically a fandom tradition. (Though this may be changing now that character/reader blogs are ubiquitous and more people are decrying porn as #problematic and slash as racist/sexist)

Also, Coulson started out with not much personality, which made him boring but mostly inoffensive. Darcy definitely had a personality, but it wasn't one that everyone necessarily liked, so it made her a bit polarizing.