#I never thought I’d get to this point - being a huge stickler for canon once upon a time lmao

[fromtheplanethexagon]

the robot problem: a critical look at tobecky, 5 years late

hello wordgirl fandom i am back :) and i have a lot of thoughts that i never got around to expressing before i moved on from the show. so be aware that everything i'm saying is based on my experiences during the 2012-2016 era of the fandom & state of tumblr in general, and i am not familiar with more recent fan content.

it's been over five years since the show ended, and @ifbrd​ reminded me (along with some great analysis) that while tobecky was super popular since before the show technically started (thanks to the play date shorts), it's pretty unhealthy in a lot of ways that tend to be excused or flat out ignored in fanworks. i'd like to reflect on that a bit (a lot); specifically, how both the show and the fandom approached this enemies-to-lovers ship, and how easily this ship can slip into uncomfortable territory if we're careless about how we interpret the ship and create fan content of it.

i will admit, i'm mostly writing this as a response to past me and my old creations - though i moved on from the show as a whole years ago, i do like taking the time to reflect on old interests once in a while, and reevaluating my thoughts on them. and this ship is probably the biggest one that still lurks in the corners of my mind once in a while, so let's go.

cherish is the word: a short positive note before a much longer negative one

i wanted to start this essay off with some positivity, because i am going to be very negative after this. tobecky was, in some ways, cute. it's obvious from the very beginning that these two characters are on pretty equal ground, even if one of them isn't aware of it. and that's part of the fun - the irony of how unaware tobey is that his nemesis/crush/person that pretty much always wins against him is someone that he completely dismisses as incompetent. i want to point this out because honestly, in general i don't like enemies-to-lovers because a lot of them use a power imbalance within the dynamic, and i hate power imbalances, especially when it comes to actual life-or-death scenarios (at least, as much as cartoons can do that). in most episodes, becky is never actually forced to go along with his wishes. she's not held in a 'date' against her will, nor is she ever really outwitted by him. i bring this up because there is one huge, uncomfortable exception, which i will get to later.

another big plus to the ship is the fact that they just... get along? even when fighting? of course we get brief moments where they just hang out and talk about paintings or whatever, but i'm talking about how much they get each other, even if they don't realize it. like the word banter, for example. been there since day one. becky loves words, and while most other people in her life don't really care (ranging from 'eh, that's cool i guess' to her brother calling it annoying), tobey gives her a chance to show off and thus treats her as a worthy adversary as herself, not because of her more generic superpowers - something that we've seen in canon that she feels self-conscious about (see: her motivation in patch game). one of the less noticed examples, to me, is "it's your party and i'll cry if I want to", because it's just - okay. they both are excluded from a social event, and while it's obvious that tobey deals with it by destroying the city, it's also pretty obvious that becky also deals with her frustration by fighting in that battle. like, yes, realistically it's just objectively bad that he's destroying buildings. but they're also providing each other with a way to work through their frustrations, first by fighting and then by talking things out, and finally by hanging out together instead of dwelling on being excluded from the party.

so it makes a lot of sense to me that many tobecky fans gravitated towards writing far-in-the-future fic, usually by implying that some growth had taken place before starting to write the ship. (there are, as far as i'm aware, 2... maybe 3 exceptions, that take the time to attempt a real redemption for him, at least when i left the fandom.) because if you take away his worst moments, either by reasoning out that he was 10 years old and a mess, or that he was a cartoon character in a cartoon world where everyone's actions are over-the-top, or by just flat-out pretending that certain episodes never happened, there's some pretty solid ground to start a ship on.

go gadget go: we all do not see it, we simply close our eyes (review of canon)

when the show began, i was the same age as the characters. a lot of other people were, too - at least in my cohort of the fandom. i think it's pretty safe to say that many of us have fond memories of the show's earlier seasons, and held on to that interest as we got older, for whatever reasons. so like, not to be all 'as an OG fan...', but i remember seeing the shorts air for the first time in 2006. i have a diary entry in july of 2009 about how i, a 12yo with no concept of the idea of 'shipping', was disappointed in the new tobey episode because i wanted more tobecky interactions. (that was robo-camping, btw, lol.) and so i remember how exciting their rivalry felt, watching them as someone literally their exact same age, and then watching that again as a nostalgic 17yo, and then uh... growing up, to put it frankly, and realizing just how unhealthy most of their interactions were.

okay what i meant to say was, this section is an overview of the relationship's canon portrayal throughout the years.

first, we have early tobecky: this includes the shorts and the first few seasons. this is their classic relationship: he likes her and takes robots on rampages to get her attention, she majorly disapproves and has fun taking him down. we've all seen the show, you know what i'm talking about. his backhanded ways of trying to find out her identity often feature prominently in the episodes, which - sigh, i've mentioned this whole issue before, but it's kind of a grey area in the whole uncomfortable-factor thing, because while trying to find out her identity is VERY invasive, it's something that like... everyone in the show tries to do, even her canon crush (scoops). on the one hand, it's really not a great look, but on the other hand, this is a cartoon meant to parody a genre in which this trope is extremely common. so i just wanna say that i have Issues and Thoughts on this aspect of their relationship, but there are other things i find more important to discuss here.

second, we have late tobecky: this is seasons 7-8. this is... a very strange and huge shift from the previous dynamic, though it's not necessarily obvious. what i mean by that is that for some reason, the show writers made it so that half of tobey’s rampages have nothing to do with his crush on wordgirl, even though that used to be the sole reason for his villainy. seriously. we have the birthday episode, where he's upset because he feels left out; wg vs tobey vs the dentist, where he's mad that he has a cavity; and trustworthy tobey, where his robot goes on a rampage... after becky accidentally makes it malfunction. the two outliers are ‘guess who’s coming to thanksgiving dinner’ and ‘patch game’, but they still differ from previous seasons because 1) his destruction is isolated to a forest far away from the city, and 2) his motive is still to impress wordgirl, but his methods are relatively tame. also he completely gives up on the secret identity thing??? i may have missed some things but i think he straight up tells her 'yeah there's no way you're wordgirl, lol' and the subject is just dropped for the rest of the show.

i also want to include 'the robot problem' here, because it's one of two season 6 tobey episodes, and follows the 'doesn't destroy buildings to get her attention' pattern: in fact, he teams up with her to try and stop someone else from going on a rampage (even if his reasons are selfish, lol).

and finally. the other season 6 episode. we have go gadget go, the bane of my time spent in the fandom. because GGG is the single episode where tobey truly manages to take away her autonomy, and proceeds to abuse that power for an extended period of time, for his own amusement. it's bad. it's Very Bad. put in the context that it's a white boy doing this to an (ambiguously) brown girl, it's REALLY REALLY BAD. and the more i look back on it, tbh, the more weirded out i am that the show not only made it seem like she wasn't affected at all within the episode, it just... forgot about it (which is not unusual for shows and especially children’s shows, but WG does make some efforts to either retain continuity or create canon reasons for why things are forgotten about). it's the kind of thing that you can't excuse and honestly you can't redeem (like at this point, you gotta ask yourself why you're spending so much effort trying to redeem this guy when becky has several other possible ships that are nowhere near this unhealthy - violet, scoops, honestly even victoria if you want another hero/villain ship, my absolute fave rarepair rose, etc).

so if you want to still ship it you have to just pretend that it never happened. (i remember trying for weeks to write something exploring the aftermath of this episode, to try and make myself feel better about it, but the more i wrote the more i realized just how traumatic this event should've been, so i eventually just dropped it.) and i brought up my own timeline of experiences earlier to point out that this episode aired eight whole years after the show started. which means that when i saw it, even though i was a huge stickler for canon at the time, i'd built up my own idea of the show and characters strongly enough to go 'yeah, no, this episode sucks and i am going to pretend that it doesn't exist'. and i think a lot of other people did too, because i really saw like... no one mention it, ever, except for some rogue fanfics over on ff dot net that already liked dynamics like that.

because here's the thing, and i don't know if people nowadays are aware of it? but i'm 80% sure (cannot find a source, so the other 20% is that it was just a rumor) that the show was originally supposed to end after season 6. and even if it's a rumor, it makes a ton of sense, because we get 1) an 'ending' to tobecky, which is a bad one, 2) a permanent wordgirl identity reveal that significantly changes one of the major dynamics in the show, 3) an episode where TJ gets to work with wordgirl and get a nice potential ending for their sibling dynamic, 4) an episode where we see Two-Brains explore life without his henchmen... the list goes on, and idk how many of these are just major stretches. but the point is. if the show had ended there, that would've been a pretty solid ending for many things, including their relationship: aka, it would prove that it was only ever heading somewhere bad, and when tobey finally has his moment of triumph, he is truly evil about it. and this provides us fans who HATE go gadget go with an easy reason to dismiss it - we can say that it was an attempt to conclude things in a way that wouldn't have happened if the writers had known they'd get more time. but despite that... it is still a canon episode.

it is odd to me how dramatically the dynamic shifts after that, though, because we seriously go from 'worst case ever, tobecky is toxic, your ship is dead' to 'no actually they get along and hang out and get ice cream together and tobey isn't even pressuring her into it, she's happy to go along with it :)' like, immediately. i never knew much about the show writers, so i don't know if the writers changed in between these seasons, but i would absolutely not be surprised if they did.

the earlier episodes are definitely problematic as well (though they pale in comparison to GGG) but i think everyone who ships it is aware considering that tobey is, yknow, a villain. from memory, he destroys buildings to get her attention, lies to her about the level of danger that people are in to trick her into spending more time with him, blackmails her into reading his poetry, and he creates a robot based on her that’s supposed to be devoted to him (but of course, all of these things backfire). not great stuff of course, but like... he’s a villain, that’s the point of his character. and considering that he’s a child these are things that can be redeemed, if done thoughtfully.

anyway, to sum up this section, the show starts off with a pretty standard 'enemies with an unrequited crush' setup, takes a really dark turn for a single episode, and then for the rest of the show takes their dynamic in a direction that makes it much, much easier to ship. as long as you ignore a lot of previous content.

wordbot: where's becky's autonomy in all of this? (misogyny)

we've finally gotten to the fandom. i recognize that a lot of this is going to come across as hypocritical considering how active i used to be re: this ship, but like... i'm a very different person now. anyway. disclaimer i guess - i don't write this to accuse all tobecky shippers of being like this - i know a lot of us aren't/weren't! but boy do i have things to point out, so without further ado:

it is very hard to ship this without allowing some bit of misogyny to slip into it. very, very hard. the entire premise of the ship involves a girl falling in love with a boy that repeatedly pressures her to date him via threats to the safety of herself and people she cares about, which... it's 2020, i shouldn't have to explain why that's terrible & a terrible example to set for children (which is why i am glad they never made it canon, tbh). best-case fan content has tobey stop pressuring her and start working to redeem himself out of an actual change of heart, which leads to becky seeing him in a new light. worst-case fan content treats his incessant pressuring and sometimes outright threats as something romantic - and even worse, romantic to the point where he deserves her attention and love as a reward for not giving up or whatever. i did see this pretty frequently for a while, especially in the earlier 2010s (didn't read much, Not My Thing At All), but i don't feel like going into detail here because of how obviously problematic it is. one medium (but still bad) case is where the fan content makes him start his redemption, but treats her liking him back as a reward for not knocking buildings over anymore. another not great case is where she tries to fix him with her love, which is a very common and very dangerous romantic trope. both are just... so incredibly unfair to her.

in content where she tries to 'fix him'... yeah i feel like it's really obvious how misogynistic that is. girls and women should not feel responsible for the evil actions of men, plain and simple. idk what else to say here i just really hate that trope and hated it back then and it just sucks! so can we not do that anymore, thanks.

in content that treats her like a reward for good behavior, there really isn't much of an explanation for what she sees in him. if she just goes 'oh wow, you're good now, i am going to fall in love with you for it' the whole thing falls flat because it makes NO sense whatsoever. we get to hear so much about tobey and his feelings and why he likes her and how he feels about it, but where is that energy for becky? why does she choose to trust him, to spend time around him, what does she enjoy about his presence? where is her getting over scoops in the process of falling for tobey? where is her telling her friends about this, confiding in them, asking them for advice? where is her choice in the matter?

win a day with wordgirl: do you guys even like becky or do you just like the idea of her (misogyny... 2!)

it was pretty standard for all fandoms the early-mid 2010s, but that's still not a good excuse for why so many tobecky fanfictions centered specifically around tobey's feelings while refusing to give becky the same level of empathy and nuance. it is true that to ship them comfortably you have to redeem him to some degree, which means spending time figuring him out and trying to find ways to pull him to the light without feeling super OOC. but ships take two people??? and there was so much potential for fanfics to explore becky's complex feelings on the matter - because she is! complex! she's heroic and kind but she's petty and has a competitive streak, she easily befriends villains but also doesn't trust them and doesn't believe they can ever really change, she's the savior of an entire planet but has feelings of inadequacy as her civilian identity and struggles with feeling like she can be successful without superpowers, she's great at the straightforward meanings and uses of words and loves reading but struggles to write passages that aren't dry as hell, it can be easily headcannoned that she's neurodivergent (special interests, issues with fitting in with her peers, taking things very literally, etc)... seriously there is SO MUCH to explore about her character, and a lot of it comes into play when you add tobey into the mix (literally ALL of the things i mentioned are explored at some point using tobey as a parallel or foil), but i rarely saw fanfiction that explored her thoughts on things further than 'he's evil but... maybe good?' or 'he's evil but... i kind of like him anyway?'.

if you want her to fall for him while being a villain, explore it!! why does she go against her morals? does she lie to herself about it to feel better? does she feel like she has to 'fix him' as part of her superhero duties to the city, and if so, how does that affect her as she tries and fails to help him? does she fall for him when she believes that he's turning good, only to feel betrayed when he starts acting worse because he feels like he can get away with it? it's such a shame that fanworks spend so little time even considering these questions, and it is absolutely a product of how deeply misogyny is/was baked into how we approach media (especially back then).

tobey goes good: but wait, i thought this show was progressive (a conclusion, i guess)

ifbrd wrote a great meta recently about how the show is a bit misogynist, despite being progressive in several ways. honestly i don't have much to add, but i'd really recommend reading through this; it makes a lot of great observations about the ways that male and female characters are presented differently through the show

i have little to add, so i'd just like to conclude with a reflection on the ship from my current viewpoint. i do think part of the reason so many of us latched onto the ship, despite how obviously problematic it was, is that the show treats a lot of things that would be serious in real life as normal or even comedic - which is fine lol, i'm not going to pretend that it's not a show for little kids, so they have to keep the tone light.

but if we, as teens/adults, decide to engage with this content in a more realistic manner, we have to be prepared to confront how messed up so many of the things going on really are. and if you still want to ship it, there's nothing inherently wrong with that! there's a lot of interesting things to explore in this ship, no matter what stage of enemies-to-friends-to-lovers you write them at, and it can be really helpful to have a space where you can explore a dynamic such as this in fiction. (speaking from experience here tbh, writing some fic for them helped me deal with complicated feelings about some ex-longtime friends.)

so to write this ship at all means that there are canon issues that you need to deal with if you want to have them end up in a healthy relationship in any manner that makes sense (unless you create an AU where none of that is applicable, which, power to you then). and i’m not saying ‘write them with a healthy endgame or you’re Bad’, not at all lol. but at least please, please take a step back once in a while to examine the dynamic that you’re writing, and please be careful about whether you mean to be romanticizing whatever behaviors you end up portraying as good.

#wordgirl #becky botsford #tobey mccallister #tobecky #tobecky critical #has anyone ever used that tag before LMAO #anyway: i may come back and reword the ending because i am not totally happy with it #but wow this is so many words. so many. send help

[accioscorp]

writer tag game

Thank you for the tag @xpectopatronerd

(Apologies for how long this got !!! I’m on the app and can’t add a “keep reading”)

write late at night or early in the morning

I usually prefer to write in the morning/late afternoon as I get tried sooo early but there has definitely been times where I’ve stayed up until 3am to write (literally happened the other night) but yeah I’d say early in the morning !

Prefer dialogue or description

100% description !!!! It’s truly my favorite write and I just love being able to hopefully give the read a vivid and clear image of what I’m attempting to describe. I also love writing fics that are solely description with zero dialogue, they have ended up being some of my favourite pieces I’ve written !! I’m not a fan of writing dialogue and it’s something I struggle a lot with to make it flow properly and not feel forced ...

Drink caffeine or I’ll stick to water

I do love myself an iced coffee buuuut usually I just drink water !!

Loves prompts or prefers to choose yourself

I don’t think I can decide here !! I do love that feeling of coming up with my own idea and jotting down plot points and all that buuuut there is nothing better than seeing an prompt and being able to develop your own story around that !! I do love both and my works are definitely a mixture of original ideas and prompt I’ve seen but changed up a little !!

Stickler for canon or preference for au

I do love a good canon fic but au’s are ones I truly love to read !!!! I loooove reading (and writing) a good muggle au and getting to explore what these characters may be like if they lived in the muggle world but there’s something about canon that I love to and seeing how other writers interpret that !! Also I’m a huge a huge sucker for a sports au soooo

One-shots or multi chapters

I’m definitely a one-shots type of person when it comes to reading and writing. I have very little patience so it’s always been hard for me to either have the patience to read or write a multi chapter or to find the time to read an entire multi !! I have to say though some of my favourite fics have been multis !! I just love being able to read a story that is fully thought out but it may only be like 3000 words, there’s just something I love about all that. With myself, I only have one multi and the rest are all one-shots. Even though writing my multi has been such a great experience, there’s nothing like sitting down and bashing out a new oneshot in one sitting !!

Won’t take on more than one project at once or constantly juggling several

Well when I started and for a long time after, I would always just focus on one and when that was finished I’d move on ..... but now ... I have so many random wips that either will be sitting there for months or I’ll get around to finishing eventually !! It’s so bad

Abandoned fics or completionist

I’m definitely a completionist !!! There’s been very little fics I have ever just abandoned and usually I come back to ones that have been there for a while and finish them eventually!! I don’t think I’d be able to function if I knew a fic was just abandoned completely

Gen fics or ship first fics

Definitely ship !! I always look through the ships when deciding what to read and then have a look at the summaries etc

Pwp or plot heavy

Plot heavy ! Personally I am not a fan at all of pwp so I stay as far away from it as possible !! I’d much rather read a fic that is plot heavy with lots of plot points and twist and classics tropes we all love thrown in everywhere !!

First person or third person

Always third person ! I find fics written in first person to be very hard to read and I struggle to relate and connect with the characters or to the story !!

Angst or happy endings

Can I choose angst with a happy ending ??? I’m huge sucker for angst and possibly it’s my favourite to write !! I love a good fix that can jerk on the tear ducts and cause a little tear to escape !!! But happy endings are always just so so lovely to read, I’m not the biggest fan of sad endings but I’m not against them !!!

Ff.net or Ao3

Ao3 100% !!! I’ve never actually used ff.net and tbh the website confuses me sooooo

Crossovers or one fandom only

I’d have to say one fandom only !!! I’ve never really read any crossovers but I feel I would get very confused and just probably wouldn’t enjoy the reading experience???? But then again maybe I would like it, I’d definitely be open to reading one if the write one appeared but I prefer to stay to one fandom only, just for the lack of confusion !!

Friends to lover or enemies to lovers

Friends to lovers !!!! It’s possibly one of my favourite tropes *cough* scorbus *cough* .... I love it so much buuuuut I do love me a good enemies to lovers fic as well

Slow burn or they’re together from the start

Writing wise, they’re together form the start. Reading wise, slow burn. I myself would not have the patience to do a full on slow burn fic because I want them to be together !!! The slowest burn I’ve probably written is “I Never Planned On Someone Like You” and lets be honest, it’s not subtle their feelings ..... but I truly love to read them, there just something about getting THAT moment in the final chapters of a multi or after 8000 words of a oneshot and they finally get together *chefs kiss*

I’d like to tag @sunshinescorpiusmalfoy @hyperiius @sapphicfangirll and anyone else who’d like to do this !!!

[killian-whump]

My relationship with the CS ship is strange. First I didn't care about it. Then one day suddenly I was a HUGE fan, I was eating, breathing, dreaming and living for CS. I was in every group of fans, I wrote FF, I went to ComicCon. Then everything started to fade away to the point that I gave away all my memorabilia. For years I didn't think about CS and just recently I started to feel some nostalgia for those CS years. I'm not a huge fan but I think I'll always look back at them and smile.

Aw, that’s sweet, Nonny <3 Thank you for sharing your story with me :)

I’ve had a bit of a rocky road with CS, personally. I was a Hooked Queen shipper when Hook first came on the show, because... Well, I never really cared for Emma as a character. It was the main reason I skipped out on Season 1. I just hadn’t really liked Jen in House, and I was disappointed she was the lead in Once, because the premise was interesting, but I just couldn’t get into it. Also, as much as I love fairy tale variations (I was a HUGE fan of Fables!), I tend to get antsy when storylines revolve around the audience knowing something (in this case, that they’re all fairy tale characters) that the characters don’t know.

ANYWAY, back on the subject at hand... I loved Hook the moment I laid eyes on his sexy, sassy self. So I was a casual watcher of S2-3, but solely for him and him alone. I basically just wandered into the living room whenever I happened to hear his voice, lol. “Mmm... I hear eye candy in the next room...” XD

Anyway, I didn’t really like him with Emma. I ended up missing their first kiss with my casual viewing habits, or else I might’ve gotten on board when she kissed the ever-loving crap out of him (that’s my jam, don’tchaknow). Instead, I only started to think “I could ship this” when he flung himself into the portal after her in the S3 finale. S4 is when I became a full-time watcher, because there were TWO things I wanted to see at that point: Hook’s smexy face and Frozen.

I still wasn’t super into CS, though. It was okay, yeah, but I still wished he’d been paired with Regina instead. That ship, though, had sailed.

Anyway, I fell completely and irrevocably down the Hook (and Colin) rabbit hole in S5, when the whump-o-rama went on in the very middle of the season. And when I fall fully down a rabbit hole... I always wanna write lots of ridiculously whumpy hurt/comfort fics. But that left me with a conundrum, as I still didn’t really care for Emma/CS - but also didn’t feel right pairing Hook with anyone else in my fics (I’m kind of a stickler for canon compliance).

So I decided to rewatch ALL of the CS scenes from Hook’s first appearance all the way through to the current (at the time) episodes... and that was when I fell down the CS rabbit hole and came to actually enjoy it :) And, as a result, I also came to enjoy Emma, as well. I still wouldn’t say she’s one of my favorite characters... but I don’t dislike her as I once did. She’s cool. She can stick around, lol.

But then S6 happened... and OH MY FUCK was I mad. They took everything I liked about CS and more-or-less ret-conned it and replaced it with all the very things I didn’t like about it in the beginning. Like... Fuck you, show? They literally made me angry almost every episode. I wanted to throttle someone. I felt like I’d invested in a ship just to have someone pull the rug out from under me and be like, “HAHAHAHAHA BITCH, YOU THOUGHT” and I no likeyed that.

And then S7 happened... and I fell back down the Hooked Queen hole in a MAJOR way and I would’ve shipped the fucking hell out of that if the show had continued, but alas... I shall have to be content with the great content we got in the finale and just assume that Wish Hook and Regina totally got together post-series. No, I am not accepting criticism about that at this time ;)

So... yeah. A bit of a bumpy road there for me and CS. But ultimately, I DO enjoy them and I think Colin did a great job playing a romantic lead and I don’t know if he really would’ve pursued that kind of role, so I’m glad it turned into what it did, so everyone can see (including Colin himself!) that he can do it so well :)

But admittedly, my interest in CS has majorly waned as of late. It’s not anything about the ship itself that’s done it - it’s more a matter of me being more invested in Colin’s recent and upcoming roles than I am in Hook... and also the fact that Brightwell (from Fox’s Prodigal Son) has completely taken me by storm and is my #1 OTP at the moment.

Like you, though, I have no animosity for it. The ship’s like a warm blanket on a cold winter night. Or a leather-clad pirate bringing over a space heater and rubbing my shoulders <3

#ships #shipping #about me #not whxmp #anonymous #kw ask box