#not everything you do has to be explicitly feminist | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

egophiliac · 2 years

Note

hi, just wanted to say I've just started to get into Twisted Wonderland and binge read your comics and content for it, it was really fun to read! i love how you draw the different characters' expressions! im still super new to it (haven't played the game yet but i got kinda hooked on reading the main story after looking it up by chance) but id love to play it eventually! do you have any suggestions on what to look up/read next as far as character backstories/interactions go? ive really enjoyed the parts from the birthday events (? i think?) that you have done comics from, they sound really fun! thanks for your time!

oh boy, GET READY because the personal stories/vignettes are where the real meat lies. like, the main story is the main draw, of course, and for good reason -- I am champing as the start of episode 7 grows nearer -- but Twst's strength is definitely in its enjoyable characters and their slice-of-life interactions in Zany Magic School. and fortunately, there's a lot of them!

(sorry this got so long, I have many feelings about anime characters)

most of the stories and events don't have a specific chronology aside from taking place sometime after episode 2 of the main story, so once you've gotten that far you're good to jump in almost anywhere! (the more recent events, starting with Fairy Gala IF, are explicitly set after episode 6 -- though if you're going off of the English version then I don't think any of them have been released yet.) event cards also assume that you've gone through the event story first and usually have spoilers or references for it. otherwise there's no real order, so you can just pick a character you like or event you think looks interesting and go from there!

one of the things I really like about Twst is that interactions aren't limited to defined groups -- everyone has inter-dorm friendships and clubs and sub-friend groups and opinions on everyone else that range from "well, I don't know if we're exactly friends, but we study together sometimes" to "I would literally die and/or murder for him" (and sometimes "I would literally die and/or murder for him but he won't let me >:("). characters pop up in each other's stories all the time, and pretty much everyone gets some extra depth or development to them that doesn't come out in the main story, so I do think it's worth it to read through at least a few for every character.

like, if you just go through the main story, you only really get to see Nice Mom Friend Trey, and not that he's actually kind of a petty asshole who is weirdly obsessed with dentistry and goes around sticking his hands in people's mouths. everybody has things like that! Jade is super into mushrooms! Leona is a feminist! Malleus has an intense emotional attachment to his tamagotchi! Cater participates in shallow consumerism because nothing in life has any meaning and actually his friends are pretty worried about him!

tl;dr read everything because this game knows what it's about and that's ✨Characters✨

#twisted wonderland #some exec at the mouse house was like 'okay we have a big castle full of sparkly anime boys'#'what more do we need'#and from a shadowed corner comes the voice of a wise sage #'make them all so stupid. just the biggest dumbasses. there should be not a single braincell amongst them.'#'what...like...even the headmaster?'#'oh my god ESPECIALLY the headmaster'

452 notes · View notes

longing-for-rain · 7 months

Note

I know you said no bait asks, and I promise this isn't, I'm genuinely curious to hear an opinion from a Zutara shipper who seems pretty rational. (I am not a kataang fan either by the way so I'm not trying to argue that or anything.). Do you believe that Zutara is a feminist relationship in comparison to Kataang? And what are your reasons for being so strongly invested in Zutara?

Hi, thanks for the ask. I’ll do my best to explain my feelings on this, but to summarize, I think there are two questions here that aren’t inherently related: a) is Zutara feminist and b) why do I like it so much. I know this might surprise you, but even though Zutara is my OTP, I don’t consider it inherently feminist. Let me explain though because that doesn’t mean it’s a bad ship at all.

Obviously, I really like the characters together. However, I won’t go ahead and say it’s the “feminist” choice over kataang, because personally I think that discussing whether a female character has a feminist narrative should not center around which man she ends up with. The primary focus should be on her narrative independently. And if she doesn’t have an independent narrative, well…that’s not feminist at all.

But I’ll answer in more detail below because I think this is an interesting distinction.

a) Is Zutara feminist over Kataang?

Like I said above…no, not inherently. I think what this question is getting at is which relationship gives Katara as a character a feminist narrative, which is a tricky question. Only one of these ships is canon, so we only know how one relationship would have played out in the eyes of the creators. Everything else is up to the interpretation of fans.

First things first, I absolutely do not think kataang, as portrayed in canon, adds to Katara’s independent narrative as a character, and certainly doesn’t contribute to any potential feminist narrative of her character. There are many instances of Katara being damseled and/or generally reduced in complexity whenever she’s placed in a “romantic” situation involving Aang. Despite Katara also being a main character, the “crush” is portrayed entirely through Aang’s POV. And post canon, Katara ends up being relegated to the role of a healer who stays home at the South Pole (this is why I could never get invested in LoK). Which, if you paid attention to her character at all, was something she explicitly stated she didn’t want to be and fought to escape. Ending her story that way reversed any “feminist” narrative set up in ATLA. So no, this is not a narrative that centers Katara and her ambitions at all.

Now onto fanon content.

The beauty of fanon is that it’s completely up to interpretation. Fans can give the characters whichever narratives they want. This goes for both Zutara and kataang. Just because your ship is canon doesn’t mean you have to adhere to canon; many canon shippers write “fix it” type content or otherwise make changes to the canon relationship to make it more appealing to them. I’m sure there are kataang shippers who rewrite their canon relationship to give Katara a feminist narrative, but to be honest the ship just doesn’t appeal to me at all so I haven’t seen those, but I’m not saying they don’t exist.

Now, Zutara. Even though there are definitely some hints in the series, there was nothing explicitly romantic between these characters in canon. So, fans are free to interpret how a relationship between Zuko and Katara would play out, and therefore Katara’s narrative within that relationship. Some people do make a strong effort to give Katara a feminist story, and in my experience, this is often a direct response to canon. But on the other side of the coin, some people absolutely…do not. It’s a big ship with lots of content. Some of it gives Katara’s character a feminist narrative, some of it…does the exact opposite of that. I think anyone familiar with the ship is probably well aware of some of the unsavory tropes associated with it so I won’t get into that.

But anyways, for any ship, there is a variety of content featuring Katara. Sometimes she’s a great warrior, sometimes she plays an important political role, and sometimes she’s just treated like a slave. Sometimes she has her own wants and ambitions and sometimes her story revolves entirely around whichever male character the author is thirsty for. Sometimes she’s treated as a complex human being and sometimes she just exists to be a fetish. Which again, goes for literally any ship and character you can think of.

So when asking yourself if Katara is given a feminist narrative, asking which man she’s paired with is asking the wrong question. Instead the focus should be on Katara herself and what the message of the story says about her.

b) Why do you like Zutara?

Although you can probably tell from the above, I do consider myself a feminist and enjoy analyzing media from that perspective. But honestly, that has little to do with why I like this relationship so much.

Sorry if this answer is boring, but I just…like them. Everyone has different tastes. For me, I was immediately drawn to them watching the show as a kid, because I’m a sucker for that sort of hurt/comfort dynamic they had going on in books 2-3. Growing up and taking a closer look, I also found that I see Zuko and Katara as having a lot of similar values and personality traits that I feel would make them compatible in a relationship. Also, there’s the fact that I just really like Katara and Zuko as individual characters so I like the fact that Zutara allows me to explore both characters by themselves, as well as how they interact together.

But if I’m being real, the final Agni Kai scene is what sold me. The emotional intensity of that scene just had me hooked for life. It’s really not much deeper than that, but yes, I’m extremely obsessed and emotionally invested in this ship.

And yes, I do write a lot of Zutara fic and do my best to give Katara independent goals and ambitions and agency as a character. I do my best to write her in a way that portrays a feminist narrative because I personally find that important. But that’s something I could apply to any ship. I don’t think it’s inherently feminist to ship Zutara, because like I said earlier, it completely depends on the individual fans and how they interpret it. I like interpreting it in a way that gives Katara individual power and goals, but that’s just me. Not everyone writes Zutara the same way.

Hope that answers your question ❄️

#katara #zutara #fandom salt #ish #pro zutara #kataang critical #well more like canon critical #ask #anon #analysis #atla #feminism

77 notes · View notes

jenhoneys · 2 years

Text

fave autistic-coded sitcom characters

abed nadir (community) -- a fan favourite, a must love, if you will. also his special interest is refreshingly films and videography (like me !1!1!) instead of anything stem related.

frankie dart (community) -- look, if abed is on this list, frankie needs to be too. lesbian queen. strong principles. tells it like it is (but in an autistic way). is the only character to explicitly be shown to understand abed's view of life and the way he exists in the world.

jessica huang (fresh off the boat) -- if you don't think jessica huang is on the spectrum, have you even watched the show? doesn't understand the 'rituals' that people partake in when making friends (as an autistic immigrant who grew up in a white neighbourhood, i can relate), needs a schedule for Everything, hates when things don't go her way, is honest to a fault. special interest: stephen king, murder mysteries + christmas.

mary (bbc ghosts) -- love her, little ray of sunshine who has been through too much. her stims are everywhere and she never feels the need to hide them <3 plus she's played by queen katy wix (who is also autistic!)

gregory eddie (abbott elementary) -- a relatively new addition to the sitcom family, but instantly iconic. i love the way he talks about his relationship with food.

orla mccool (derry girls) -- peak Weird Girl representation. unapologetically herself and into her special interests, takes things so literally in a way that frames her as charming instead of stupid, and covers her ears when people are yelling/being too loud <3 also nb.

adrian mallory (space force) -- just a stubborn, 'sassy' man who loves space and has a very, very rigid moral compass.

keeley jones (ted lasso) -- stunner, icon, bicon, all around amazing person. also she's autistic. the Teeth thing, obsession with the colour pink (in EVERYTHING, not just her wardrobe), needs clarification a lot. doesn't feel jealousy for other women in a Strong Feminist way, a bisexual way, and an autistic way. no i do not take criticism.

coach beard (ted lasso) -- is incredibly knowledgeable about the things he is interested in, has a vast compartment of fun facts (to the extent that ted always asks when he needs more information). extremely observant, king of the deadpan face, is mostly non-verbal. special interests: chess + coaching.

tina belcher (bob's burgers) -- i don't personally watch bb, but i can dig it.

maurice moss (the IT crowd) -- like sheldon cooper, but better, but unfortunately british.

350 notes · View notes

molsno · 3 months

Text

in case anyone was wondering, I turned off reblogs on most of my posts a few days ago because I just can't take it anymore. it gets so exhausting trying to use this website as an outspoken feminist.

I've used this blog for almost 11 years. this is my personal blog. I use this website to engage with topics I'm interested in and meet new people, and that's been true since day 1. but I constantly find that when I attempt to share my thoughts on feminism as a regular person in a normal tone, or I write a joke post complaining about misogyny, people will take me in the worst faith imaginable and argue with me. they'll attack me and harass me, sometimes even with explicitly violent transphobia. they'll paint me as irrational and hostile, or take my lack of nuance in these kinds of posts to condescend to me like I'm an idiot who doesn't know anything.

I've seen it all before, so you know what I started doing? I started writing longer posts that explain my thoughts in detail, with all of the nuance necessary, while addressing all of the potential counterpoints in advance. not only do these get significantly fewer reblogs, they barely curb the problem. people still harass me over them, too. these kinds of posts are also a double-edged sword. when I write long form posts based on feminist theory I've read in a formal tone, people take me seriously, admire me, sometimes even idolize me.

I cannot emphasize enough that I am literally Just Some Girl.

do you know how terrifying it is knowing you have thousands of people will read every single thing you say? especially when some of those people put you on a pedestal?

what happens if you fall?

no matter what, I keep finding myself scared of what people will do to me if I show any moment of weakness. whether I try to treat this like my personal blog and complain about things that annoy me or try to be something of an intellectual who educates people on transfeminism using the knowledge I've acquired, I feel like I'm setting myself up for destruction. if I'm ever messy, if I'm ever flawed, if I ever say something wrong, devastation awaits me. either I receive harassment and threats from people who hate me, or I face social ostracization from people who previously liked me.

do you understand how this has caused me immense amounts of stress? how it's influenced my behavior? how it's caused countless breakdowns? how it paralyzes me? do you understand that this is the reality trans women have to live with when we reach any level of notoriety?

I just... I don't know. I'm tired. I need a break. I like talking about my interests, I like discussing transfeminism, I like educating people. I even like the fact that people listen to what I have to say. the things people say about me can be really flattering sometimes. but I've also seen the horrible things people have said about me, and how they pale in comparison to the things they say about trans women who are more notable than me.

I just want to be treated like a person. I don't know how to make that happen. sometimes I just want to tear it all down and force people to see me for who I really am, even if I have to risk losing everything.

#personal

45 notes · View notes

teaveetamer · 11 months

Text

Regarding the last rb: I think most of us can recognize how patently ridiculous it is to just blanket accuse someone of misogyny or queerphobia for, idk, thinking that starting a war is bad. It's an annoying and unfounded accusation, but it's ultimately something most of us can shrug off.

But like... I really don't think the people making these accusations are aware of how badly that plays when the criticism you're trying to defend against is calling out bigotry.

Now, let me elaborate.

A few days ago I was on Twitter and happened to see that Edelgard was trending. So I figured I'd go see what that's about because it was probably a shitshow (since there hasn't really been anything official lately that would explain it, e.g. a FEH alt or a figma or something. So, obviously, drama was afoot).

Color me surprised to see there was a lot of criticism about Edelgard's treatment of Petra in canon (primarily, how she keeps Brigid a vassal state and holds that over Petra's head the entire war, instead of immediately granting Brigid independence when she obtained the power to do so). In sum, just discussing the racism inherent to the writing (for tiptoeing around that and definitely not condemning it like it should have) and often inherent to the fanbase (for justifying everything Edelgard does, including this)

And I was seeing two main "rebuttals" to this point.

It's not her fault because she was just a poor wittle girly who is just soooo powerless (nevermind the fact that she spends five years in a position of absolute power over the nation that is currently holding Brigid hostage. And, also, she's a grown ass woman for the entire time skip and events of the war phase), and even if she did it it's not her fault because society just raised her like that (nevermind the fact that people can grow and learn and you aren't stuck with the values your society forced on you when you were a child).

Accusing the people raising these points of misogyny and queerphobia

We could debate exactly how to approach this criticism (a mark against the character? The writers? Both? Was it intentionally written to be racist? Is it a product of social conditioning and unexamined biases on the part of the writers? Some combination?).

But you know what you probably should NOT do in, like, any circumstance? Deflect responsibility for the actions because "she was just a poor little girl who doesn't know better" and accuse the people raising these concerns of misogyny and queerphobia.

This is the kind of shit people are talking about when they say the FE fandom has a lot of unexamined racism. Your first response to someone bringing up racism is to basically say "Okay, but the reputation of the White Girl PNG I Like is more important than your feelings about racist writing/handling of PoC characters. So it's not her fault, and even if it was, you're just a bigot so you're wrong"

And just, like, there's this implicit elevation of the struggles of (white) women and (white) queer folk as more important, valid, or worthy of being defended than the struggles of people marginalized on the basis of race. Let's not even get into the fact that many of the people raising these criticisms were queer women themselves, and it's entirely possible to be a queer woman and also be prejudiced (it happens ALL THE TIME. The queer community and the feminist movements have a LONG history of explicitly excluding people who are not white. E.g. the whitewashing of Stonewall and white feminists excising black feminists from the movement to try and make feminism "more palatable" to racist white men).

Not to mention the double standard here. They'll be so quick to call out racism if it's a character they don't like, but the second it's their fave? Crickets.

Hate to break it to you, but if you only care about pointing out potential racism when it involves a character you don't like, then you're not an ally. You're an opportunist leech co-opting the struggles of real people to win petty internet arguments.

Inb4 someone accuses me of having a double standard for the Dimitri/Dedue relationship, as if Dedue following Dimitri completely of his own free will because he cares about him and believes he can help rebuild Duscur is in any way comparable to Petra being a literal hostage who risks the annihilation of her entire country if she steps out of line (and she knows it). There's definitely racist elements to Dedue's writing (I've even talked about some of them) but specifically his relationship with Dimitri/Faerghus is NOTHING like Petra's with Edelgard/Adrestia.

58 notes · View notes

cogentranting · 9 months

Text

I went and saw Barbie and overall I liked it and I had a good time. But. I do have a couple pretty significant issues with it.

In short: 1. I think it's line of argumentation had gaps and its point got muddled. 2. Their depiction of the real world lacks nuance. 3. The idea of the Ken's fell short

Elaboration (with lots of spoilers) below

Generally speaking, I think what happened is this movie had a lot it wanted to say and by trying to say all of those things, a lot of the more interesting nuance ideas got lost and the less interesting very basic feminist idea of "women can do anything, and are complex; sexism is bad" took center stage instead. The gaps in the line of argument first stood out to me when America Ferrera's character had her big monologue because I didn't feel like the monologue made sense as a response to the existential crisis Barbie had been having to that point. Barbie's existential crisis didn't seem to be a part of anything that happened with the Kens taking over. And the Barbies plan to take back Barbie Land also didn't provide an answer to the existential crisis.

The movie partakes in a particular brand of feminism that very strongly sends across the idea that things are bad for women non-stop all the time. Sasha (the teenage girl) expressed it as "everything sucks for women. Men hate women, and women hate other women." Her mother makes a comment that's its more complicated than that and Ken even says that the real world wasn't like the idea of patriarchy that he brought to Barbie Land, but the movie doesn't really show a more realistic view of that. Barbie herself never gets a clearer picture of the real world-- all SHE sees of it is a constant stream of sexual harassment, cynical women tearing each other down, the Mattel board made entirely of men, and Gloria's rant/monologue about how hard it is to be a woman all the time. And, as my mother pointed out, a lot of the unreasonable expectations and societal pressures that are talked about, are put on men as well.

The movie explicitly states the idea that Barbie Land is an inverse of the real world (in a hyperbolized, stereotyped, cartoony way of course) with the roles of men and women essentially flipped. The movie is very clearly portraying the way things are in the real world as bad. Which would mean-- if you follow that line of logic through-- that the way the Kens are treated by the Barbies is bad. And, inasmuch as the Barbies have agency, the Barbies are to blame. Making Ken's reaction to the real world (where people notice him, where he gets more respect, where there are things specifically geared at him, where he can... own property and have a job) very understandable. And when the Kens take over Barbie Land, they essentially just do to the Barbie's what was done to them (which is also bad. Clearly.). But the response from the Barbies (including the main Barbie, AND the two humans) doesn't seem to really have any sympathy for the Kens or much self-reflection about their own part in it. And they recovered a little right at the end by having Barbie apologize to Ken and having President Barbie make some moves to even things out, but that felt a little like an afterthought. And more like "see how magnanimous the Barbies are" than literally the bare minimum. But they DO have that end part. THe end conversation between Ken and Barbie helped a LOT. I'm not trying to claim that the movie is anti-men or anything. But I do think how they handle men both in the real world and in Barbie Land is the weakest part of the movie and doesn't totally track with the point that the movie is trying to make.

I almost feel like there are two movies here. One about girlhood and womanhood and femininity that is about Barbie having an existential crisis and going to find herself through meeting Gloria as Gloria works through her own identity and relationship with her daughter. And one about gender dynamics where Barbie finds out that the real world still has problems with sexism and imbalance and then realizes that that imbalance exists within her own world as well and looks at the relationship between the Barbies and the Kens. And I think either one is good, but that by trying to put both into one movie they bit off more than they could chew and some themes, ideas and character arcs ended up being just a bit messy.

And that's how I would define my dissatisfaction on all three of these levels. It's not that they're BAD. It's that they're MESSY. Things are muddled or not fully realized, or are accidental implications.

But again, overall it's funny, it's a good time, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are killing it, and the production design of this movie is GORGEOUS.

#barbie movie #barbie 2023 #barbie spoilers

26 notes · View notes

addictedtostorytelling · 7 months

Note

Hi!

Hope you are doing well :) Just a fun and silly question ....

How do you think Sara and Grissom would react now if Sara were referred to as Mrs. Grissom?

I think there have only been two scenarios (I could be wrong) this has happened on CSI – in 10x2, Sara refers to herself as Mrs. Grissom, and in 11x13, the Two Mrs. Grissoms – in which both times it was explicitly made clear she kept her last name.

I realize that it’s the 21st century and it’s not uncommon that women keep their surname after marriage so no biggie that Sara, for all (personal and professional) purposes has kept her last name. But the GSR-fan in me was really hoping someone – either by way of humour or not – would refer to Sara as Mrs. Grissom on CSI: Vegas (in front of the hubby) and we get a reaction. (we got a "my husband" and a "my wife" so can't really complain here)

The version of GSR we got in CSI: Vegas was more jovial. They probably would have teased each other about it?

(I mean she could have gone by ‘Sidle-Grissom’, no?)

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts!

hi, @renb80s!

good to hear from you again!

so this topic is one that tends to be polarizing in the gsr fandom, with some people really hating the idea of sara taking grissom's last name (even as part of a hyphenate) and some people really liking it/wishing tptb would have gone that route in canon (either in the original series and/or the reboot).

regardless of one's personal feelings on the matter, the facts are these:

as you point out, sara is twice in canon referred to as "mrs. grissom," once in episode 10x02 "ghost town" and once in episode 11x13 "the two mrs. grissoms."

she is also referenced as one of the two titular "mrs. grissoms" of the latter episode in an extratextual sense.

in the first case, she refers to herself that way, albeit in jest.

in the second, she is referred to that way by julia holden.

in both instances, her reaction to being called "mrs. grissom" is to smile widely and blush.

while she does in the former case correct brass's mistaken impression that she has legally taken grissom's name and in the latter case allow her mother-in-law to correct julia holden's mistaken impression that she has taken grissom's name on her behalf, she doesn't, in either instance, appear at all offended by the mistaken impressions themselves. her responses are both very mild.

i'll take things from there after the "keep reading," if you're interested.

now.

canon never delves into why sara doesn't legally take grissom's last name.

the choice could be a personal one on her part.

given the attitudes she expresses in episode 06x21 "rashomama" re: women being treated as exchanged property in marriage, she could be opposed to taking her husband's last name after marriage on feminist grounds.

in a similar vein, maybe she feels maintaining her own identity even within the context of her marriage is important and so doesn't want to either give up her name or merge it with grissom's.

alternatively, perhaps on a more intimate note she wants to keep her family name as something of a testament to herself: to prove her legacy is not determined by her family of origin and that she can be a good, just person while still bearing the last name sidle; to show herself and the world her whole lineage isn't cursed/broken (“everything that happens to us—good and bad—is a part of us. it took me a long time to realize that it doesn’t have to define who we are. we get to decide”).

as an aside: i've always found it interesting sara doesn't change her name upon her emancipation from the foster care system. not only might one expect her to change her name because many former foster kids do once they age out (a fact sara herself even remarks upon in episode 07x16 "monster in the box"), but also because one might think, given her feelings about her family and her childhood trauma, she might be eager to get a fresh start under a new identity once she has the chance to. that she sticks with sidle even after she is at liberty to do otherwise is curious. whether she opts to retain her family name for the personal reason detailed above or perhaps only because legally changing her name would be prohibitively expensive for her (particularly as a financially insecure young adult), we're never told. however, the fact that she still bears her father and mother's last name 25+ years on from her father's murder is certainly fascinating.

i wonder if she was ever worried while she worked for the sfpd that someday someone might discover a link between her somewhat unique surname—according to this tracker, there are fewer than 1,000 sidles (spelled sara's way) worldwide—and a particular 1970s marin county homicide case?

more inanely, maybe she opts to stick with sidle because grissom is commonly called by his last name by their close friends/found family, to the extent she feels her being "grissom," as well, would just be too strange/confusing.

maybe she just likes the way her maiden name sounds due to the alliteration.

maybe she doesn't want her initials to be "sag."

maybe grissom (for whatever reason) never actually offers her his last name and she, not wanting to be presumptuous, never asks if she could take it and so just ultimately doesn't.

maybe she reasons since she and grissom aren't planning to have children, there isn't much imperative for them to all have the same name.

maybe she and grissom talk about the matter and make the mutual decision they don't want to take each other's names or hyphenate (for whatever reasons).

of course, the choice also could be more of a practical one for her.

maybe, like many professional women who have earned degrees, published, been awarded accolades, and built their careers under their maiden names, she doesn't want to separate herself from 20+ years of work and accomplishments.

conversely, her surname status may be more a reflection of the circumstances under which she gets married than anything else: under costa rican law, not only do women not automatically assume their husband's names upon marriage, but foreign citizens who get married in costa rica must use the same name that appears on their passports on their marriage certificates. while a foreign citizen who gets married in costa rica can opt to legally change their name in their country of residence once their costa rican marriage license is sent there, that step is 100% optional and is something the person must undertake to do on their own time/at their own expense ex post facto. that so, if grissom and sara have their wedding in costa rica (which i tend to think they do), then it's entirely possible sara ends up remaining a sidle after marriage by default: because that name is the one on her costa rican marriage license, and she doesn't take the time/pay the fees to make an official change stateside. this option may be especially likely if we consider she probably spends very little time in the states as a newlywed before moving immediately to france.

similarly, even if sara and grissom do marry in the us, she may end up a sidle not due to any strong personal feelings about the matter or professional considerations but simply because the process of legally changing one's name is, frankly, a pain in the ass: while in nevada, people can change their names upon marriage simply by making note of their intentions on their marriage certificates, there are still various costs associated with changing over all of one's legal, professional, and financial information to match one's new name, typically to the tune of about $100-$500. the process can also be time consuming/involved, often requiring in-person visits to prove one's identity at the dmv, bank, city hall, etc. figuring out what all you have to change and what documentation you need in order to make said changes can be confusing/laborious. maybe sara, after initially mulling changing her name, considers the time, expense, and effort required of the endeavor and simply says, "to hell with it," figuring since most people in her life would still know her as sara sidle anyhow, it isn't worth her while to jump through all those obnoxious hoops.

case in point: my mother, who has been married to my father and had his name for forty years, only recently discovered she apparently never changed over her social security number from her maiden name. the process of getting it changed over required dozens of phone calls and filings on her part (made difficult as, four decades on, she doesn't have much documentation linking her to her maiden name left to use for verification purposes) and took her several weeks to complete.

alternatively, maybe sara does initially intend to change her name and is maybe even in the process of doing so but never actually gets around to finishing the job due to the fact that, as a newlywed, she is so frequently in and out of the country, is extremely busy, (once she gets back to the states) works night hours, etc., etc.

maybe there is a paperwork glitch that makes the process difficult enough she doesn't elect to push the issue, even if perhaps she had initially been interested in taking grissom's name to start out with.

as a former ward of the state of california, she would not have access to her original birth certificate and was likely issued a new social security number when her mother's parental rights were severed. though she in theory has a redacted birth certificate and new ssn that are valid for legal purposes, maybe when, after her costa rican wedding, she goes to the state of nevada with her redacted/reissued documents looking to file her legal name change, they give her a hard time about them because they look funny ("how come your birth certificate says you were born in 1971 but according to this database your ssn was issued in 1980?") and require additional verification she simply cannot be bothered to provide.

it's also worth noting that while she doesn't legally take grissom's name either the first time she's married to him or the second (at least insofar as we know), her reasons for making that choice may be different in marriage 1.0 vs. marriage 2.0—for example, maybe the first go-around, she doesn't change her name due to the whole "we got married in costa rica" thing, whereas the second, she figures that after a 25+ year career, she wants to maintain the same name she built her reputation on.

of course, without knowing sara's exact reason or reasons for keeping her maiden name, we can't say with 100% certainty what her feelings on the matter of being "mrs. grissom" are—whether or not it's an issue she has strong feelings about, one way or another; if it's a decision she intends to stick with forever or if she ever might consider changing her name to grissom eventually; etc.

however, based on the two reactions to people referring to her that way we see in canon, i think, at the very least, we can infer she isn't adamantly opposed to being called mrs. grissom socially, even if she didn't take his name legally—and, indeed, may even be somewhat tickled by the experience, finding the notion amusing, if not even cute.

that so, i tend to imagine if someone were to refer to her as mrs. grissom or sara grissom during the events of the reboot, she would probably react much in the same way we see her do in s10 and s11: she'd get a big smile on her face, fluster a bit, and look to grissom, if he were with her. then, either she or he would, laughingly, point out she hadn't changed her name (at least not legally). maybe there'd be some playful banter about why she hadn't ("eh, i thought about it, but living in international waters? it would be a pain to file" "just say the words, and i'll take you to the consulate's office next time we're in guam, darlin'").

my take—and, full disclosure, i'm in the camp that doesn't mind the idea of her changing her name or even just going by grissom's surname more informally/on occasion (as is probably obvious from the fact that i often label my gsr gifsets as "the grissoms")—is that while she's never made the effort to actually legally change her name to grissom's and maybe even sees some advantages to keeping her maiden name for professional reasons, she has no problem being associated with his name socially and in fact kind of gets a kick out of it, which is why she sometimes refers to herself that way unprompted and doesn't really go out of her way to correct people who make mistakes about what she's called.

i can very easily imagine that after sara and grissom leave vegas at the end of csi: vegas s1, a few weeks later, a postcard arrives at the lab addressed to max, postmarked from panama, bearing no inscription other than a signoff "from the grissoms," written in sara's hand.

thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.

also, shameless plug: for those of you reading "an opposite of echoes," eventually, you'll get to see sara react to being called "mrs. grissom" in that story (on multiple occasions).

#answered #renb80s #asks: csi #**#my meta #meta: csi #meta: sara #hypothetical scenario #meta: vegas #csiverse #let's talk shop

15 notes · View notes

bourbon-ontherocks · 10 months

Note

this is the depressing ask. beware. 😂

first I want to thank the writers for so helpful reminding us of 305 with the line about naked suspects. clearly, morgane wasn’t there to witness adam’s frightful interrogation because she’d have eviscerated him then and there (that’s what I like to think, at least).

bref. the ending. are we really doing this? I feel like this conversation’s been had a thousand times before yet the show doesn’t seem to have heard any of it. or doesn’t care. (I’ll let you list off the reasons why it’s an awful twist, if you feel up to it, because I’m frankly too tired for that)

I hate the way they showed a sonogram as if to hammer home she’s carrying a child, not a fetus, when it's the other way round. I hate the mamma mia montage, as if figuring out whose genes are involved is the priority. I hate the 306 retcon, get this shit away from me, both their drinks were spiked. I hate that we’re supposed to believe none of these grown adults (the ones who weren’t drugged, at least) considered protection. especially morgane--she’s had DREAMS about this, ffs, there’s no way that wouldn’t cross her mind. I hate the ramifications of every single way this could go down (too long to expound but you get me). I hate that there’s even a shred of doubt about how this will go down. I hate that they served us some watered-down so-called feminist juice for a whole season and still decided to use morgane’s body as an open ground for drama.

given the way they’ve addressed the question in the ep, I’m very pessimistic about s4. Idk about you but my only solace is knowing it’s out of our hands, anyway, so I don’t have to waste my energy trying to change anybody’s mind.

thanks for sticking along on this ride. wouldn't have had it any other way. and good luck for the year ahead of us, everybody. the only way out is through! 🤞

Nodding along at everything you said because yeah, and also while I liked Adam's line about naked suspects, your point about Morgane finding out about it just gave me a fantastic idea to add to my WIP, so thank you for that!

Now for the ending.

I think there are two main points to distinguish here because obviously, my personal distaste for pregnancy and baby storylines makes the idea of Morgane bearing a fourth child everything I don't want to see. BUT, had the circumstances been wildly different, I could have come to terms with it and accepted it, as in "Yeah I don't like this turn of events but I can get over it because it makes sense narratively and serves an interesting purpose". What actually makes this finale awful are the circumstances of this pregnancy, and now we're getting to the essay-ish part of this post where I'll try to explain

Why HPI finale is lazy, infuriating, and profoundly anti-feminist

Just like you point out, this mamma mia scenario was already explored in… well… mamma mia, plus countless other stories, zero originality here, I expected better from HPI tbh. And I read just yesterday an interview with the producer saying "Season 4 be like, we're looking for a baby daddy instead of a murderer lolilol", yea guess what, I DON'T CARE. For a while after watching the episode, I dared to hope that the montage in the end was purposefully misleading, that soon Morgane would come to her senses and remember that she did use protection with at least Timothée and David, because I 100% agree with you, it's ridiculous to make us believe that none of these people ever had a thought about contraception. Timothée even said "We're not trying yet", which means he kinda knows how not to try, no? And also I can accept the idea that Morgane isn't on any kind of birth control because it happens (some women react badly to pills and IUDs, etc), but she was with Ludo for half a season so they must have used condoms, she has to know and think about it (and like you said, she's DREAMED of it, and explicitly said that SHE DIDN'T WANT A FOURTH KID - I'll get to that later because it makes me fume). Besides, she's had three kids already, she knows how this all works. So yeah, it's lazy and implausible.

What I find particularly infuriating in this 3-baby-daddies plotline is also the deeply misogynistic trope of seeing a female character unable to enjoy an unapologetic sex life with multiple partners without getting punished by the script with an unwanted pregnancy. This is the literal definition of slut-shaming by the way. I was going to say that I didn't see where you found feminist vibes in the show, but then I remembered how much I loved the way Morgane expresses her feminity, her desire, and her sexuality, and…. yea, this is exactly the point I'm trying to make (also I loved seeing childfree, 40+ characters who were thriving but that's another discussion I guess). Seeing that we're still there in 2023 legitimately makes me sick.

Speaking of misogynistic tropes… I guess the ONE detail that really makes me want to throw spears at the writers is the sixteen weeks' mention. By purposefully making her too far in her pregnancy for abortion, they robbed her of having a choice. I mean, they could have got her two months pregnant, and then for some bad (imo) reasons she'd have decided to keep the baby, it would have made no difference for what's coming next. I wouldn't have loved it, sure, but it would have been fine by me because at least it'd have been her decision. Here she's just subjected to the plot, and like you said, her body is used as a narrative tool, and it feels like a slap in the face. Not to mention that even here they fucked up the timeline, because she fucked Timothée, David, and Adam in the span of like 4 days, right? Literally the day after the LSD adventures she and Adam decide to wait for three months, and the montage insists on how on the schedule they are. And I'd say that 307-308 happen within a week maximum because Redbone's not one to wait three weeks for his money lol. So 3 months is 12, 13 weeks at most, which means that in the end, Morgane is 14 weeks pregnant AT BEST (which makes her still eligible for abortion, mhhhh, see where I'm going with this? 🤔), and not 16. The only valid explanation would be that it's Timothée's baby and that she was already pregnant when she had her other encounters, but since the show seems to go in another direction, then it means that they purposefully fucked up the numbers so that she CANNOT consider abortion, which is the most dehumanizing, disempowering thing you can do to a female character.

They're literally forcing a pregnancy on her, and I want to throw up every time I think about it.

Speaking of which. Morgnane's already had three kids. Also, she told us in season 2 about her first-trimester symptoms. And she's supposed to be smart, hell that's the WHOLE point of the show. So there's no way she wouldn't have noticed that she was pregnant again, unless she denied her pregnancy (which would explain her total absence of symptoms, incredulity at the hospital, and possibly the fact that her brain erased her sexytimes with Adam). Now pregnancy denial is one of my greatest fears in life, so I can hear that this was particularly triggering for me specifically, but still, this is an incredibly traumatic experience to throw at her, and a source of huge emotional distress. SHE STATED SHE DIDN'T WANT A FOURTH KID FOR FUCK'S SAFE AND YOU ARE FORCING HER TO GET ONE WHEN SHE'S AT HER LOWEST, AND YOU'RE EXPECTING US TO FIND THIS FUNNY??????? I mean just go sell potatoes and stop writing shows because this is an insult to the art of writing.

😠🔪😭

Sorry I need a minute to have a good cry and yell at the abyss.

Okay, I'll just close the 16-week essay by saying that I entirely blame Audrey Fleurot for this, and this is what I base my theory on:

I mean, cool bro if it worked for you (except it didn't, do you want to talk again about your post-partum? Is that what you're planning for Morgane?) and I get that acting can be a therapy in some way, but this is getting way too close to the target, just get the fuck out of the writing room if that's what you're going to come up with, PLEASE.

I'm not sure where you see a 306 retcon though, for me it's pretty clear they were both under the influence, had sex, and blacked out about it (which as @earanie and @hemerae-ramblings pointed out, is highly unrealistic since memory losses are NOT a side-effect of LSD, but I can hear the argument of denial here). But speaking of 306, the finale completely doomed this episode for me, because in retrospect it feels like a giant set-up. The LSD scene is ONLY here to make it possible for Adam to have unprotected sex (side point here, I'm actually not mad they hooked up, even though it's kind of frustrating to see it happen this way, because I find the "offscreen banging reveal" a hilarious yet underused trope, and also I like the messiness), and while this last point is in a way funny, the worst part is the three months window at the end, which has in fact NOTHING to do with Adam sorting his feelings or whatever but is only here to forbid the possibility of abortion for Morgane, and this makes me want to stab people multiple times.

Also, one last thing that I find absolutely disgusting is the fact that Morgane and Adam (presumably) conceived a baby against their will (there's a whole other discussion to have about consent here but I won't go there for today) while solving a case about a BABY BORN FROM RAPE. I mean, can you make it more icky than that? Do the writers even acknowledge the irony of this? Do they even care? This baby is doomed by the narrative from the fertilization stage, and we're supposed to enjoy it as a comedy?

And now I assume we'll get to watch a forced coming together between Adam and Morgane due to the circumstances, which means that even if they end up together we'll never know if they actually wanted it? What a way to kill a ship, man, I've seen shows pretty efficient at ship-sinking but this has to be in the top three.

(somehow there's a wild irony in the fact that both the showrunners and the main cast have been saying on repeat from season 1 that they didn't want to make that disappointing season that ruins most shows, and yet they managed to spectacularly fuck-up and promise the worst season ever, and they're already paying for it audience-wise...)

See, all of this is the silver lining I'm holding onto for now, in the hope of a miscarriage (which would also be incredibly traumatic for Morgane, and still an objectified-by-the-plot scenario, but at this point our options are limited. Also for now the showrunners are only mentioning the pregnancy but not the baby so maybe there's a tiny chance she actually doesn't have it), because there's no way anyone could rejoice from this. And if she does have this baby, and if it's Adam's, then I'll officially change their shipname from Brosse Adam to Brosse & Rachel, and this will probably be my last contribution to this fandom. Hated this in Friends, will hate it in HPI.

I'm not pessimistic about season 4, anon, I just don't want to consider it at all. Obviously, I'm ready to withdraw everything I said here if they choose the only acceptable outcome (abortion) and actually make an extremely powerful narrative and political statement about it, but I know it's off the table. Having to endure such a plotline in 2023, at a time when women's right to dispose of their own bodies is threatened everywhere in the world, is a very painful punch in the face, and I sincerely hope they'll get a ton of backlash on social media for this. I just saw this morning that the airing of 308 had the lowest audience numbers ever in the show's history, and I can't say that it makes me unhappy.

(I was lowkey hoping for a cancellation at this point, even though I know the chances weren't great, but I found out today that the show was officially renewed so we won't even get the solace of knowing they can't do any further damage... Eh 🤷‍♀️)

Finally, the thing that saddens me the most isn't even what they did to Morgane and to the show, it's what they did to our community as a result. I have been alone in this fandom for almost a year, and it was incredibly frustrating. And then people joined, created content, interacted, had fun, and we had such an amazing time together, writing, giffing, vidding, sharing theories, jokes, and thoughts. I've met some incredible, witty people, some of them I dare to call friends. And now it feels like everything is falling apart. Friends are leaving, or considering to. Group chats have turned into support groups. The writers didn't only ruin the show, they took away the enjoyment we gathered from it, and it sickens me. Personally, I've had a very rough first semester of 2023, and this community is what has kept me afloat. It's made me smile and laugh in times of sadness, it's given me a shiny, quirky escape that I'll never be grateful enough for. And to witness it all collapsing really hurts. I do hope it's just a bump in the road, that we'll come back eventually, sticking together and collectively despising canon, ignoring it by ferociously writing AUs, and roasting the timeline, and making Daphné-centered vids, but I'm not even sure myself where I stand regarding my own involvement in this fandom. Nothing else to say, I just miss what we had, that's all 😢

Now that I'm thinking about it, "J'avais tellement envie que ça marche entre nous" is exactly how I feel about canon right now. You know when I said that getting into a new hyperfixation felt like falling in love? Well, this shitty ending feels like getting ugly dumped.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk, anon, and thank you for sticking with me too. It's too early to say if this is officially the end of Julia's adventures with the HPI anon or not, but please know that I've loved every second of the ride and that I will never forget it 🥲

😘🥃👻

21 notes · View notes

runthepockets · 7 months

Text

Tbh I'm really tired of battle of the sexes wars. Like, if it isn't cis men and women arguing over who has it harder, it's trans men and women doing the same shit. It's article after article of (rightfully) angry women talking about swearing off dating and sex forever due to dudes being so perverted and invasive, and the worst men you've ever met having their voices amplified in retaliation, both further alienating the women whose approval and affection we so desperately crave and making it harder for other men to talk about legitimate anxieties and struggles we have navigating the world. I hate that articles about high suicide rates and high rates of isolation and depression in men has brought out women who say things like "oh wah wah men's feewings I cannot BELIEVE I have to take RESPONSIBILITY for this CRAP again men are lonely cus they SUCK MEN'S FAILURES are the reason they're miserable", even when none of the studies are implicitly or explicitly blaming women for this problem (and even if they were, there's gotta be a way to deescelate / point out the entitlement of these accusations without victim blaming).

I hate that I end up dating and befriending a lot of feminist women who routinely encourage men to be vulnerable, and then my vulnerability immediately triggers an argument or a shitty dissmissive attitude or me being accused of manipulation, and I hate that those same women having (understandable) biases against men have gotten me up in arms reacting in pretty similar ways. I hate the way men talk about women's bodies when women aren't around. I hate the way women talk about male sexuality when there are no men around. It all feels awful. And I hate that voicing this to queer friends hasn't really gotten me anything but "lol thank god I'm not straight" or something of that nature. I hate how straight relationships have the potential to be just as beautiful and vindicating and empowering as any other human relationship but we're all barred by socioeconomic factors and poor / vastly differing communication skills.

This is why I got so into Men's Liberation two years ago. It gives me a space to vent my feelings and greivances as a straight guy without feeling like a total jerkoff while also being sympathetic to feminist ideals and views. It's very grounding. I can practice run and analyze my greivances after properly grieving in a safe and educated space, then I can approach the women in my life without the cotton between my ears and my defenses lowered instead of immediately shutting down at the first sign of discomfort. It's why I'm so loud about a lot of these issues; I believe everything is connected, and if men and women's lives and experiences and socioeconomic statuses are so deeply intertwined with each other under cishet capitalist white supremacist patriarchy, they need to be intertwined in the process of abolishing it, too. But I can't do that with my trauma and anger dictating my politics, nor can the women that find themselves in my sphere. It's also part of why I stopped hanging out in woman dominated spheres as often; while I'm not going to deny women their right to vent, the anti-male sentiment was debilitating, and I deserve a life free of any more neurosis around my manhood than I already may have (there was also nothing there for me anymore anyway, being a straight dude and all).

I think this is another thing I like about being straight; as nice as it I'm sure it is to never have to worry about these seemingly trivial aspects of "straight culture", and as much as I support gay people having spaces to feel at home in their own skin and to vent about their oppressors, it also seems like it sometimes blinds you to the fact that the "opposite gender" isn't really going anywhere (or that the opposite gender even exists, generally) and gay seperatism isn't a realistic or helpful solution, even for other gay and trans people.

#men's liberation #chronicles

10 notes · View notes

sandutita · 2 months

Text

i just had another uncomfortable dream about being at a swimming hall. that makes at least three of them.

they're all a bit different obviously, but they all follow the same formula: i go to the swimming hall, then at the locker room i try to decide whether i should use swimwear to cover the upper part of my body or not. and every time i experience this conundrum i feel sad and frustrated at the injustice i and many others face.

i don't want to go swimming (in real life) anymore. not because i don't like swimming, i love it, but because of the misogyny that's ever so present in swimming areas. i've only recently become a topfreedom activist, so that's why this wasn't an issue to me before. now i dread the idea of having to face all that topfree inequality with the conscious and aware attitude i now have. i already feel so frustrated and depressed over this issue, i'd probably prefer it not being emphasised. i mean, being trans/nonbinary and having to use binary locker rooms is one thing, but everyone having to cover their chests simply because they're female-presenting is another.

cishet men have historically and repetitively sexualised, objectified and therefore also caused the demonisation of women's breasts, which is why they need to, according to current societal standards, be covered or censored in any situation or medium that is not explicitly shecksual/corno-graphic. this also results in women having to cover their chests in swimming halls and beaches (whilst men get to keep theirs nice and bare...), which is funny since we're all naked in the locker rooms and no one seems to have an issue with that. it's only when people exit the locker rooms and are wearing "appropriate swimwear" are women and men allowed to exist in the same space.

this society has normalised men being predatory so much, that if we were to propose gender neutral locker rooms to swimming halls, people would instantly object it, saying: "but then the men are going to assault the women!". are we really that weak as a society? that men cannot handle being around naked women, that they just have to assault them on the spot? no, it's not the gender neutral locker rooms that are the problem. it's misogyny and sexism. it always has been. how about we hold predatory cishet men accountable for their actions instead of punishing female-presenting people for being victims of misogyny? that could be a step in the right direction towards a better society. just fucking saying.

i dare to dream of a world where we can all exist in the same locker rooms, regardless of our gender, sex or body type and no one has a problem with it. i dare to dream of a world where female-presenting people can swim in swimming halls and beaches bare-chested, just like their male-presenting counterparts have been able to do for 100 years.

all of this is perfectly achievable in the real world, but only if we fight against misogynists and misogyny as a whole. everything counts, even the little things. if you don't think whatever feminist content you've made won't matter because of how "insignificant" it is, then you're wrong. post that shit my friend, and i just might reblog it, unless you're a terf, of course.

2 notes · View notes

travllingbunny · 1 year

Note

So it was quite weird for this person to take that and make it about Misogyny and Incels when that has very little to do with it. plus, in recent years I have seen more female villains receiving this treatment often from female viewers/readers. Characters like Princess Azula, Rei Todoroki, Catra, Harley Quinn, and Heather Chandler receive this in increasingly frequent ways often with the defense that any person who dislikes these characters is a misogynist who hates and opresses women.

(pt 4) It is unfortunately a common thing in many fandoms to do to characters, but lately it often seems that any criticism towards a female character, of groups of women, or even an individual woman. is taken to be misogynistic, born from a hatred and fear of women, and often seems to take the form that every man or even most men are just evil, malicious, people or out to get women, and control and abuse them it's quite frankly ridiculous. and I think its an absurd line of thought that needs to die

Finally to answer parts 3 and 4 of your ask.

Yes, you are right that this is also another phenomenom that's pretty widespread these days. But I don't see how you think that negates what was said about the Draco in Leather Pants trope.

In my first post answeing your asks 1 and 2, I've pointed out why I think this poster was right and that the trope itself is sexist - certainly the way it's described on the TV Tropes page is, and so is, in general, the focus on how silly fangirls are ruining everything by stanning male characters they 'woobify' and find hot - while ignoring the equally widespread idolization / whitewashing of villains like TDK Joker, Walter White, Tywin Lannister etc. by fanboys. And that also the examples on the page show that this trope can also just serve as an excuse for people to rant and complain about the fact that other fans dare like characters they hate.

Fans regardless of gender and sexual orientation (and whether they find the characters attractive or not) tend to whitewash and idealize their favorite characters, but also demonize and oversimplify the characters they hate, too. The main reason for this is people's tendency to want to see every story in black and white terms, as a Heroes vs Villains story, and it gets mixed with today's prevalent idea in pop culture that you can't just like or dislike things, you need to prove that what you like is morally superior, and that the things you dislike are morally bad.

I'm not familiar with the examples you mention, but I've certainly seen it. Sometimes it's worshipping villanous female characters (say, Amy Dunne or Cersei Lannister) who are reimagined by the fandom as girlboss feminists. It feels like the flip side of the phenomenom of fanboys worshipping male villains they admire as badasses, but now with added supposed social justice aspect. It may also be a backlash against the real and blatant misogyny that was very pervasive in fandoms (I remember the time when Sansa, Dany and Catelyn were the most hated characters in the ASOIAF fandom, with people using some... interesting arguments. The one that really got me was how many people in the fandom were hating on a pre-teen girl for not wanting to have sex with a grown man she was forced to marry by her captors who were killing her own famly... because they really liked that male character. )

It might also include the rhetoric based on a certain type of (pseudo-)feminism according to which women are inherently good and perfect and can only be heroes and/or victims, while men are naturally aggressive and abusive etc. This can get hilariously hypocritical: recently a Twitter user went on a rant against fans who like abusive male characters, while being a self-proclaimed stan of Cersei Lannister and Serena Joy.

But it's not like this kind of rhetoric is used just against men (you didn't explicitly say that, but I felt like it was implied in your ask). Women will often throw accusations of misogyny against each other, and women will often show internalized misogyny towards other women in those arguments - and both things will often happen at the same time. This also happens a lot in real life arguments about politics and social issues - especially when people use girlboss feminism to argue that anyone who doesn't support or, god forbid, criticizes their favorite female politician or celebrity, is "misogynistic" and that every criticism of her, no matter how legitimate the reasons are and how little they have to do with gender, are "rooted in misogyny". In the course of that, stans often don't have a problem with mocking, attacking and bullying any number of other (usually less powerful women), and using all sorts of misogynistic insults and assumptions about them.

Now, the tricky thing is that this doesn't mean that hatred or criticism or lack of support for a woman in real life, or a female character, is fully free of misogyny, even if the woman in question is very problematic. It probably always does play a role. Some people - maybe even a lot of people - will really say and do misogynistic things about a woman even when there are perfectly legitimate reasons to criticize her that have nothing to do with gender.

Take a female character like Cersei Lannister as an example. She is a narcissist with internalized misogyny who is abusive towards every woman and girl she had any power over, and is also extremely classist, ableist and racist. While the crimes of the GoT version were downplayed (at least before the season 6 finale), the book version, among other things, is guilty of the murders of many children including a baby, murdered her friend as a child, commits sexual assault, physically and emotionally abused her disabled little brother since his birth (she already abused him as a baby), is guilty of the murder of countless little people (just because she wanted to kill her brother), sends innocent women to be tortured and experimented on, sold a woman into slavery, orders a young boy to be whipped as a way to emotionally abuse her own son.tries to frame her teenage daughter-in-law and get her executed, and the list goes on. But Cersei is also a victim herself, and that's made very clear - of her father using her as a pawn, of her husband King Robert, who used to rape her while drunk and also is physically abusive. She feels generally constrained by her position as a woman. But her takeaways from that are not empathy or support for other women or for any marginalized and oppressed people, but the exact opposite. The complexity about her character is really more about the complexity of our response to her - her horrible behavior and personality makes us hate her, her victimization makes the reader feel pity and empathy, her delusions of grandeur are often hilarious, and there are some times when we may even feel on her side. One of those times is when, after she's done so many horrible things, she doesn't get punished for any of them, but instead gets publicly shamed and humiliated in a really gross and misogynistic way for the 'crime' of having sex outside marriage.

So, is hating Cersei misogynistic? In general, heck no! There are countless excellent reasons to hate her, and anyone who tries to argue that people hating Cersei is by itself misogyny is full of sh1t. But when some people focus not on any of her crimes but call her a wh0re or making fun of the rape and abuse she's suffered or cheer for her husband hitting her - that is misogyny.

It all depends on the type of criticism (or more often hate) - the kind of arguments, or slurs used, or when they are blatantly treated differently than male characters who do similar things. There are also certain things that fandoms are more likely to accuse of or hold female characters than the male characters and vice versa. When fans hate on male characters, you'll typically see them say the character is violent, abuser, rapist, murderer, or, a particularly popular accusation nowadays, "incel" (even if it makes no sense at all). Female characters, on the other hand, will mostly get criticized for their sexual behavior, who they have sex with/whether they have sex (they'll be either slut-shamed, or mocked as frigid women who have never had an orgasm), which male characters they reject, whether they are good mothers (male characters will get far less criticism for being neglectful or straight-up abusive fathers to their own children, while female characters' motherhood will get dissected endlessly), they will be blamed for the actions of men for the way they have supposedly infliuenced / manipulated them (whether or not there's any evidence of that) etc. while, on the other hand, actual violent crimes those or other women may commit might actually get ignored - because a woman committing violence is either unimaginable, funny or girlbossy. and that especially goes for things like rape, sexual abuse or domestic violence (because women are gentle helpless flowers who can never do such things, amirite). Female characters will also get criticized and hated and called a Mary Sue just for basically having the same tropes as male protagonists do all the time: being the Chosen One with some special destiny, being very competent in some area, influencing a lot of people. I've seen pretty much every female protagonst or supporting character who is described as being exceptional in any way as a Mary Sue - while male characters who are all those things to a much higher degree never get that.

So, there's a lot of sexism in fandoms. But there's also a lot of bad fath arguments and blanket accusation of misogyny as a convenient tool in fandom discourse, the same way that you'll inevitably get accused of being homophobic or biphobic jor racist just for not being a stan of certain characters or not shipping certain ships or preferring some ships to others. And again, there is real racism, homophobia, bisephobia, transphobia, misogyny in the fandoms, but fans will also try to use those accusations as a tool to win fandom debates and prove their side of the fandom is the morally right one, and the ones who disagree with them are bad.

I can't help but use the House of the Dragon fandom as an example, because that fandom is a huge toxic mess, with the fandom divided into Team Black and Team Green depending on which faction of the fictional dragonriding royal family fighting a civil war over the throne they like better....and the accusation of misogyny is especially popular. Quite a few of the Team Black stans are taking it to a whole new level by accusing everyone who isn't one of them of misogyny - because if you don't fully and 100% support the side that is trying to put Rhaenyra, a woman, on the throne you must be a misogynist. (Rhaenyra is the protagonist, but the story is very morally grey one without heroes or villains, and if you've read the source material you know just how morally grey it is, and that insisting that people have to root for either side is pretty silly... not to mention that it's all a fictional medieval monrachy, so why would you treat fiction as real life and also why would you then yell at people that they need to supprot hereditary monarchy in general?) The funniest thing is, however, the fact that many of those who are the loudest in those accusations are themselves making extremely misogynistic arguments against female characters on "Team Green", especially Alicent, the other main female character, who's the central charactre on Team Green. Rhaenyra gets some hate that is rooted in misogyny (such as slut-shaming or judging her more harshly than male kings or pretenders to the throne), but there are many more fans who idealize her and ignore or downplay her flaws and mistakes (in the show she's generally portrayed as someone to root for at this point in the story at least, but not as someone who's flawless - but most of the fandom hates nuance!), flattening her as a character in the process. But, since Team Black makes up around 80-90% of the fandom, it's Alicent who gets demonized, so it's much more common to find misogynistic takes about her (downplaying or mocking and making memes of her victimization and every instance of sexual abuse, rape and humiliation she's endured, arguing that she 'seduced' a grown man when she was 14 , trying to reduce her to an 'evil stepmother' trope, hyperfocusing on her as a "bad mother"- while the bad fathers, including her husband, don't get the same treatment, blaming her for the actions of the men around her...). The fandom also bullied both of the actresses who have played her, to the point that one left social media for a while, and the other has publicly spoken about the cyber bullying she was exposed to and how it affected her (and as a result of talking about it, got hated and attacked even more). At the same time, male characters who have done much, much worse and are actually murderers and/or rapists and abusers get whitewashed and adored if they are on the "right" team (even abuse against Rhaenyra gets downplayed if it's committed by a man from Team Black), and even the men on Team Green who have actually commited murder and/or rape are getting less hate than Alicent (and their crimes are often used to reflect on her).

And that's why the HotD fandom is a perfect example showing that many of the people in fandoms who use misogyny (or some other supposedly progressive issue) don't really care about it. It all just comes down to winning a fandom war.

#wow this was long #cersei lannister #alicent hightower #hotd fandom #asoiaf fandom

10 notes · View notes

angelsaxis · 2 years

Text

People keep wondering why everything seems to be getting exponentially worse all at once. I honestly think that a) this amount of violence and regression is a normal response to a nominally successful progressive movement. I remember in one of my polisci classes, our professor pointed out how progress was never made without backlash, but that eventually progress won.

But also this is the result of a huge portion of supposedly progressive people digging their heels in and insisting that we can have what we want and maintain the status quo at the same time--the status quo that is hurting us and getting us killed in the first place. Decades of ahistorical teachings about the civil Rights Movement paint it as time with lots and yelling and marching and little to no actual disruption, meanwhile MLK explicitly stated that he was going out of his way to be a pain in the ass because he knew that simply asking white supremacists to sit down and talk was not going to change their minds. We have people now who think yelling is a non-peaceful protest. We have people now who think a protest can't be an inconvenience to anyone, even though that's how they've always worked.

A lot of the progressives who want change want peace--as in no disruption whatsoever, even if that comes at the cost of maintaining the status quo. Think of the neoliberals who see that corporations are ruining the planet and try to solve the problem with more corporations. Think of the people who see that individualism and capitalism are causing so many societal issues and who insist that we need further individualism, rather than community, to move us forward.

Think of the feminists who would rather say gender roles are revolutionary than admit that gender roles' primary reason to exist is to oppress women. If you can get people on board with the idea that feminism is about choice and nothing else, you can have things like the bimbo movement--deeply misogynistic and frankly very insulting--thrive because people think playing directly into gender expectations for women does just as much work for the patriarchy as actually dismantling gender expectations for them. Choice feminism and a liberal feminism that cannot give up the familiarity of patriarchy have absolutely stalled women's rights progress in America.

The same can be said for the gay rights movement. With most of the activism of this generation being dedicated to micromanaging identities and discourse, hardly anyone lays attention to house bills being passed in states to limit trans rights. There's a mass censorship movement going on that doesn't get as quick vitriol as the yearly kink at pride argument and the haste to desexualize gay people since very many members of the community still see gay people as sexually deviant, despite insistence otherwise.

Racial justice progress has stalled because of respectability politics. Nevermind that MLK himself wasn't respectable by any means--as I said, he caused a lot of disruptions. What we have now is white people resorting to violence at the slightest itch and racial minorities still expecting themselves and each other to play nice, to play fair, to get what we want without actually making white people uncomfortable. There's the assumption that we're inherently radical for (wanting to be) antiracist, but there's little to no radical action paired with it.

There's probably more examples, but while radicalism has absolutely gone up in many ways, the mainstream portions of this movement have ground to a halt because there a very many people who simply don't actually want to give up the status quo. The pithy benefits they have from it, they believe outpace the structural harm they're facing from it. They want change without work. They want to live a fantasy without actually building it. Doing any of this would require admitting that they were, at some point, siding with the enemy, and lots of people can't do that. So they call for change through means that support the status quo.

#angel posts #the feminism lne especially bc like #im sorry but makeup will never be as freeing as a society #where women arent expected to wear it at all #angels essays

58 notes · View notes

cin-cant-donate-blood · 8 months

Text

Today on Pointless Rants into the Void I want to jot down my hot takes on radical feminism, and what went wrong with it. "Radfem" is already becoming an informal synonym for TERF, and it's spawned a few other ugly ideas too, but first I guess I should define it.

Radical feminism is a loose grouping of disparate ideas and people, but for simplicity's sake the key feature I want to isolate is reductionism. I'm using that word in a sense similar to "class reductionism," by the way. Class reductionism is the Marxist narrative that class is the only real social issue. Usually the argument goes that if we could only fix class conflict (by abolishing capitalism), then all the other issues, like racism, sexism, etc. would resolve themselves automayically: it is only through capitalism that they can keep functioning. In practice this lends itself to downright dismissal of other struggles as unimportant: why work on your silly little issue when The Class War can fix that and everything else?

In other words, according to a class reductionism, capitalism is not just a problem, but The Villain of History. It's one of those "grand narratives" you may have heard of postmodernists rejecting.

There are other social justice issues with their own reductionisms. There exists a small number of race reductionists, and once in a while queer theorists veer in a similar direction, but by far the most successful other such reductionism is radical feminism. In short: radical feminism is the notion that patriarchy is not just one of society's many problems, but that it is the villain of history (there's no precedent for that term, I just liked the ring of it).

A classic radfem take that has been echoed far and wide by as disparate figures as my aunt and Ursula K. Le Guin (both of whom I love and adore) goes something like "if women ruled the world, there would be no war."

As a silly soundbite, it's harmless enough, but I love overanalyzing things and taking them literally, so that's what I will do.

I think the first thing I don't like about this line is the gender essentialism. The notion that men are by nature brutish, aggressive and irrational, while women, presumably, possess Feminine Wisdom™ that would prevent them from ever doing something as masculine and pointless as war leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but maybe I'm just salty 'cause I'm a man.

The other, in this context less important, objection I have is that this line confuses what is rational with what is good. War is not an irrational bloodshed caused by kings flying into a rage (at least not always). It is most often a cold blooded calculation made by the elites of one country that by letting so-and-so many of their subjects die they can expand their own power so-and-so much. It's callous, but it's not irrational.

And there have of course been enough woman rulers in history for us to know for a fact that women are perfectly capable of starting and pursuing wars of aggression. Among such girlbosses we can count Catherine the Great, Wu Zetian, and Septimia Zenobia (and many more).

This isn't just harmless pop history, mind you. This is explicitly an essentialist view on gender that reduces very complex issues to a single, simple source. This source is notionally patriarchy, but in practice, just as many leftists blame the rich rather than capitalism, and so on with other social justice issues, the villain is often simplified to be men instead.

Radical feminists go pretty far with it too, sometimes explicitly stating that men are the ultimate problem. A way this expresses itself would be in men being dismissed when they (correctly) point out that patriarchy hurts them too. "You're the ones who made pateiarchy," I have heard people say. That's obviously absurd.

Again, the parallels to other social justice issues are obvious: capitalism is bad for the rich, too, Marx said. Homophobia hurts straight people too (especially that eternal fear of being being seen as gay), etc. etc. And yet this is dismissed. "Your pain is lesser," it is said. As if pain could be objectively measured. As if pain is a competition. It is an inevitably toxic idea.

That's why radical feminism crashed and burned and on some fronts has all but openly allied itself to neo-fascism. Because it channelled the pain of women into an excuse to cause pain for others. It dismisses what it does not want to hear, blames people instead of systems, and most importantly, it makes its adherents just as miserable as the victims they deny having.

It may have been something nobler at some point in the past, but today it is just a cycle of abuse masquerading as an ideology.

#feminism #mini essay #takes #intersectionality

3 notes · View notes

devilsskettle · 1 year

Text

currently thinking about the trend in a lot of films right now is to deconstruct various genre conventions and what makes some of them work so well and some of them totally miss the mark and i think there are levels to meta and how effective it is. so here’s what i think it is:

level 0: establishing the conventions. whatever tropes common to a particular genre are done in earnest, reifying those tropes’ typical presence in a genre. either doing it for the first time (as in genre establishing films) or continuing the trend. just to be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this lol it’s literally just what any piece of media does unless it’s meant to be ironic/satirical/meta. it’s honestly kind of weird to see this trend towards irony and commentary, feels a bit like a cultural rejection of sincerity. but i digress

level 1: acknowledging the conventions. the tropes are present, but it’s with a little wink from the filmmakers. we’re all in on the (often self-effacing) joke that it’s such a stereotypical thing to include in a movie of this genre. it’s ironic!

level 2: deconstructing the conventions. the filmmakers don’t just acknowledge the conventions, but comment on them, either implicitly or explicitly. often critical of the function of the tropes (for example, the trope of stoic masculinity in a western is shown to be toxic, or the archetype of the “slutty” female character in an exploitation slasher movie is shown to be sexist. conversely, a positive example might be when the final girl trope in slasher movies is framed as feminist). the filmmakers have opinions about what these tropes mean and they invite the audience to also form opinions about them

level 3: subverting the conventions. the filmmakers 1. acknowledges the tropes, 2. deconstructs the tropes, and then 3. uses those tropes to do something different in their own film. they take the expectation of the audience and twist it around (an example of this is the scream franchise; in the first movie, it’s all about deconstructing the slasher genre, picking apart, analyzing, and poking fun at its “rules” - i.e. the slasher movie genre conventions. then in scream 4, they continue to play around with these “rules,” but the main killer turns out to be someone who would never fit into the archetype of the killer in a traditional slasher movie. in doing so, they comment on the roles of both the slasher and the final girl in this genre while turning them on their head, using them to say something new within the framework that the genre conventions provide) (you know who else did the same thing? ovid! it’s a roman literary convention to take old stories and do something new with them, twisting them around in exciting, interesting ways for the modern readers of that time. metamorphoses is all about adapting myths, not just straight retelling them. if anybody uses ovid as a source for greek mythology, punch them in the dick because he’s saying nothing about ancient greek society and everything about the culture in which he lived - rome) (just like scream is quintessential 90s media and says nothing about the 70s and 80s when the slasher genre was being established) (but yeah - retellings/adaptations of any myth/folklore do the same thing, which is why i think we need to be critical of how these stories get retold and what implications using certain traditions has about our own culture) (anyway. what was i talking about)

i feel like the reason so many meta movies fall flat is because they don’t reach the point of subversion while trying to get credit for being groundbreaking, when all they did was deconstruct genre conventions. not that all films do need to subvert conventions! (the first scream movie itself only deconstructs, but it does it well and that’s what makes the difference imo) but when they purport to and don’t, it’s very frustrating. fake deep. like okay you’re aware of certain tropes, but did you do anything with them? did you actually say anything new about them? it’s like how they teach people to grade standardized test essays; you can’t just make a statement and get full credit, you have to elaborate and demonstrate your point. and then of course there’s the issue of the subversion being effective in the first place, like, did using this genre convention actually muddy the waters more in terms of what your message is? but that goes back to good old fashioned quality of writing. and understanding how the conventions function in the narrative/what they represent (if you don’t know what their purpose is traditionally, then you’re not able to comment on them, which means you’re not gonna be able to subvert them, because then you’d be going through a whole lot of effort to say absolutely nothing). you gotta learn the rules before you break them. so like some movies i’ve seen recently that imitate effective deconstructive/subversive films but fail include the menu (extremely muddy, disingenuous messaging imo, a hasty composite of popular modern thriller aesthetics from the past couple of years) and scream 5 (tries to deconstruct the slasher genre for the 2020s but fails because it doesn’t say anything true and specific about the genre, grapples for some pattern in modern horror that could count as a genre convention to deconstruct but never lands on anything concrete). anyway.......

idk i could complain about butchered meta and ineffective deconstruction forever. i guess it bothers me because it’s an easy way for lazy writers to sound like they’re saying a lot of smart shit without really having to say anything at all, it just sounds good and people like feeling like they’re in on the joke with them and they can play off of the pop culture imagination we have around a genre and make broad generalizations about patterns that actually aren’t so ubiquitous in the real genre. and it sounds progressive! and sometimes it is. but like. how many people have watched meta horror without ever watching a slasher movie? or a neo-western without ever watching a western? or how many people have read modern adaptations of myths purporting to “reclaim” them for women, without reading any mythology beyond percy jackson and bulfinch in elementary school, or having any familiarity with ancient greek culture? they get to be high and mighty about a genre they know nothing about lol it’s ridiculous, don’t you think? just the rhetoric around it now. idk this little ramble has gotten away from me

12 notes · View notes