fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2265 ]

[ SECRET POST #2265 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2265 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 05 pages, 106 secrets from Secret Submission Post #324.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ].
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10. http://i46.tinypic.com/zkr3as.png

On the one hand, no, it's not enough for something to exist if it totally sucks.

On the other hand, yes, the relentless negativity gets tiring and I suspect some people will never be satisfied.

That's the key there. A lot of the more vocal complainers WANT to be angry. You can't satisfy them even with what they just asked for.

You save a lot of energy when you stop trying.

Sadly, not everybody has the skill or pride to focus on the more important part, making your story (and x character in said story) not suck.

Just because a minority is represented doesn't mean it's good representation. Not having any Asians on your show is just as bad as having an Asian who wears thick glasses, talks in an incomprehensible accent, runs a laundromat, drives horribly, and constantly corrects everyone else while essentially bullying their child into Harvard.

MTE, but seeking out things to be pissed off about is a different matter. Say an Asian character does none of those things and the fandom obsessively fixates on that one single time he helped a kid with maths homework as making everything about him a horrible racist stereotype that ruins the whole show forever?

This. Or, similar to the OPs example: An man that's racially Asian, but he's a Truck driver from Texas with a Texan accent.

They've erased his PoCness! He's just a white man with an Asian wrapper! Yes this was a real thing.

Just... Fuck. I mean seriously.

I don't think we should just be satisfied by female characters because they exist, but I do think that fandom tends to be really unnecessarily hard on female characters. It's like female characters have to be perfect in every way, but it's okay for male characters to have flaws. In fact, male characters seem to be loved because of their flaws. And yes, this is even by people who call themselves feminists.

huh sounds like everyday life

(no subject)

astridv - 2013-03-16 20:58 (UTC) - Expand

It's like female characters have to be perfect in every way, but it's okay for male characters to have flaws. In fact, male characters seem to be loved because of their flaws.

female characters (and minority characters) are judged more harshly because there are usually fewer of them, so they're burdened by the weight of representing All Women.

there's more variety in male representation, so they're free to be anything. dumb, smart, manipulative, funny, brave, skittish, a fool and so on.

Some of this might go back to the numbers again, I think- when there are fewer characters of a given group (gays, women, Indians, disabled people, etc) in a work or in media as a whole, each one is bearing a larger share of the representations of that group.

Because there are so many straight white male characters (and because they tend to be treated as a sort of default), they have more room to be flawed because their flaws reflect on them as individual characters than on any of the groups to which they belong.

In my experience when you actually do have a work with a lot of varied characters within a group, the responses tend to be considerably more low-key.

Yeah, but wouldn't it be better if there were multiple women in the story, with all different flaws and strengths, instead of just one or two who are seemingly supposed to represent all womankind?

Which is to say, no, I'm not glad for something just having a woman in it, because that's pretty much the bare fucking minimum, and most series don't have an excuse for not having more female characters.

Many people aren't pleased even with ones that do have multiple varied women, but yeah, reasonable people should not be satisfied by the bare minimum.

Yeah. Personally, I just want more female characters. I feel like with male characters, people care much less if someone is poorly characterised / not 'strong enough' (ugh) / not this or that, because there's always some other male character to latch onto. But meanwhile female characters are held up to this annoyingly high level of scrutiny, and they have better be always perfect, which is limiting (and discouraging, I guess). So I just want more characters, because I guess it'll improve the chances of there being a strong character in there - and because I want it to be also okay for a female character to be fallible or even a bit shit and for it to be perfectly normal and not the proof that everything is wrong with women today.

And when they are practically perfect in every way, fandom screams about Mary Sues for days on end. It's a double edged knife and a lot of things about the way fandom operates would have to change to see any major difference in behavior.

I want more variety too. When there's a token lady character, or so few in a cast, of course it magnifies the criticism. I would actually buy the whole "I don't hate this woman character because they're a woman, I hate them because they suuuuck" if there were more in general. Depends on the title of course, because not all things lack in female characters, but yeah.

Yeah this is sort of a problem that female characters often share with minority and gay characters. With any group that is underrepresented or misrepresented all the characters gain the disadvantage of being judged by people on the criteria of, "is this character a good representation of our group?" rather than what we should be judging them by, "Is this a good character period?". It tends to result in people forcing their own views onto the characters in question and holding them up to a standard that mainstream characters are only rarely held to.

When a woman appears in a story there are people that will feel compelled to hold her as a spokesperson for women in media in general, and will ravenously demolish any perceived flaws as attacks on women or feminism as a whole. On the flipside, if a male character is hated its because he as an individual is flawed, no one says that a poor male character is misrepresenting males or making all men look bad.

Ultimately, this double standard means that minority characters are judged far too harshly, far too often, and ultimately held to a standard that is rooted more in an individual's views on social issues rather than the actual strengths or weaknesses of the character. This also confuses the hell out of producers, writers, and directors, because characters that would be perfectly acceptable as white males are torn to shreds under the scrutiny of being mouthpieces for gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation as anything else.

Even if we start getting more roles and more varied characters for women in media, it will still be at least partially up to the consumer to put aside these kinds of judgements and judge female characters on their own values rather than how they represent women as a whole.

can't we just be glad there is a woman in the story at all

Oh thank you, thank you, kind writer, for including a female character! We thank thee on bended knee for remembering there are two genders!

The Gor novels had tons of women in them. If I said "thanks" for each one of them, that'd be my whole day shot to hell.

Yeah, I was surprised no one else brought up this.

What, women are just supposed to be happy with scraps? I wonder what you feel about extremely underrepresented groups having criticisms.

Thank you for saying that.
I used to be in Transformers fandom (a place filled with a special brand of misogyny since "robots don't need more than one gender: they're ROBOTS").

A lot of fans, even a lot of female ones, want the female-coded characters to stop existing. They're even popular authors who have managed to make their no-females-allowed canons extremely popular and beloved, since it's "so logical to have no female-coded robots".

But the funny thing was/is: whenever there /was/ a female-coded robot (not all canons lack fembots) she was/is criticized into the ground.
"She is too sexy, she is a mary sue, she is too femme, she is too smart, she is too cool, she is too good, she is too bad,she is too strong, bla BLA B L A" while completely one-dimensional male-coded characters were clebrated and loved just because they were "sexy" or "fuelling my fetish for XY so harrrd".

So whenever I brought this hypocricy up I was accused of "sexism" (lol) or people told me I should be thankful that some canons even /had/ a token female and stop "bitching" since female robots were "illogical" anyways ;)

It's not a surprise I quit fandom and went back to enjoying my robots for myself again.

Yeah, the negativity sucks...but...

No, we shouldn't "just" be happy that we are given a female character at all. That shouldn't be an excuse for a badly written one, either.

"Oh, well...you're lucky you even GOT a female character, so shut up and enjoy her and quit complaining!" just screams of misogyny to me.

Yeah, this. Criticism isn't the same as hate.

I just go "I like her" or "I don't like her", just like I do with male characters. It's about 60/40 for me, just like with male characters. Once I decide that I don't like a female character, I usually pick her apart, but I do that with male characters too.

So I kinda agree with you, but I don't embrace all female characters just because they're female.

Ehhh...no. I mean, I mostly agree, but "can't we just be glad there's a woman at all"--no, that's not like a bonus or something to be grateful for, that's like the bare fucking minimum. That is, unless the story has a logical reason for being mostly dudes (like, it wouldn't really make sense to complain that Band of Brothers was too male-centric, for example). This is why I get annoyed about people over-praising reasonably well-written POC characters--like, yeah, it's great, but that's how it should be; we shouldn't be THAT excited that they're deigning to get it right.

i hate when this gets used against female antagonists. yes, having the only female in the cast a one-dimensional baddie is stupid. a female antagonist in a canon with other female characters with various personalities? bring it on. women don't have to be good all the time, why can't they be a manipulative asshole and still three dimensional like male villains?

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