#which is SO FUCKING HORRIFIC but also. wow what great fuel for me to draw things!

[sorunort]

The Scooper only hurts for a moment. 🍦

hi do you ever think about how horrific that week with ennard was for michael. i think about it.

#fnaf #sister location #michael afton #ennard #sammi draws #i love taking a lil guy and just giving him issues disconnecting with his humanity #this art brought to you by the concept of michael being conscious with like 4 robots piloting his body #which is SO FUCKING HORRIFIC but also. wow what great fuel for me to draw things!

[fuckyeahcharmcaster]

Pot, Meet Kettle

So, was looking for more Charmcaster content and came upon these comments related to the reboot episode “What Rhymes With Omnitrix?”  And...wow. I won’t name names out of respect for privacy and will put this all under a cut so that only those interested can read it, but the hypocrisy here is just so mind-numbing that I needed to comment on it.

Kevin stans unwilling to admit to his faults, do not engage.

What she did to Kevin was not conning in any way, that was clearly and blatantly magical enslavement complete with chains, torture, and mindcontrol. You can’t just downplay that shit like this and expect me to go along with it, not when the sequel series already tended to pull that, especially with regards to Charmcaster doing that sorta shit. You do not get to blatantly show Kevin being forced to do things against his will, being tortured for fighting back, and then try to pass it off as him having been tricked into working with her. What the fuck is with this franchise with having Charm do horribly evil shit and then just waving it off?

Remind me: how much horribly evil shit did Kevin commit, even in the sequel series themselves where he was a good guy, that got downplayed, justified, waved off or swept under the rug? Murder, war profiteering, aiding other criminals when it suited his interests, letting his friends take the rap for his crimes, etc?  

Sequel series Charm was incredibly shitty, there’s no denying that, probably shittier than sequel series Kevin honestly given the sheer lack of consistency in her character and over-the-top extremes they had her go to. But guess what, that doesn’t make sequel series Kevin un-shitty. If you’re not holding the same standard to how they’re written, your argument loses credibility because it is intellectually dishonest.

More to the point, what about all of the crap that reboot Kevin has pulled? Does none of it bother you? Is him walking free sensible given the stuff he’s done? Ex: he enslaved Glitch, who is a sentient being, against his will twice. He wasn’t taken to task for it afterward, even though he felt no remorse and went on to do more evil deeds. Before getting controlled by Charm, he was about to beat Ben to death. And even before he got his Antitrix he was a vicious bully who traumatized Ben to the point of being scared of public bathrooms. So why is all of that excusable and you can “go along with it” when the show doesn’t dwell on any of it afterward, but you draw a line in the sand when Charm, a villain, does something bad to Kevin, another fucking villain? That’s like hating on Kevin for manipulating the Weatherheads or Steam Smythe and expecting the show to make a bigger deal out of that, or hating on Zombozo for screwing Vilgax over or hypnotizing Kevin and expecting the show to make a bigger deal out of that; it makes no logical sense. Villains are gonna villain, it’s what they do.

With Charmcaster, it was a case of Kevin trying to puff himself up and seem big and bad and Charm responding with ‘great, let me have your brain for my own’, followed by an episode of him fighting viciously against her control until she took 100% over. But he was ‘working with her’, the writers say. And given how much the sequel series were into brushing the awful shit she did under the rug, I really don’t have patience for it here.

Again, I ask if you’ve checked under Kevin’s rug from the sequel series lately. Lot of awful shit there. And if you had the patience for all of that, you can have the patience for this.

And as for what sparked this whole outburst, the ‘working with her’ thing was in reference to that in his puffing Kevin outright said that she ought to take control of him. She told him upfront that she wanted to control Ben against his will to have him attack Gwen, and told him to be on his way because he wasn’t Ben. Kevin could have gotten out unscathed. But, not thinking straight because of jealousy, he protested and said that she should want to control him because he’s more powerful. Charm’s response (basically “OK, if you insist!”) made him realize all too late what he had just said and what it actually meant would happen to him.

It’s not trying to excuse what Charm did as right or justifiable or undermine it in any way, it’s just acknowledging that Kevin also played a willful part in making it happen too due to his hate-boner for Ben, just as Charm did due to her hate-boner for Gwen.  He wasn’t just minding his own business until Charm up and took control of him for no reason: he was about to murder Ben and got accidentally pulled over to Charm who mistook him for Ben, she told him to leave when she realized her mistake, and then Kevin insisted that her plan to control Ben was dumb because Ben was weak; she should want him because he’s stronger. His claim of Charm “conning” him into getting controlled is him lying to himself about what happened, acting as though Charm deliberately manipulated his jealousy to make him say what he did, rather than admit that he had been a stupid, jealous kid who badly fucked up.

It’s not even that they don’t treat her as being in the wrong, it’s that they want her to both be redeemable and also to do things that may or may not be irredeemable. It’s a theme of every sequel series and now the reboot as well.

Except that Charmcaster hasn’t done anything remotely irredeemable in the reboot series. And if you think that she did, then you’re being intellectually dishonest because, again, Kevin has done literally the exact same things and usually for the exact same reasons. He’s not against controlling, enslaving, manipulating or relishing in inflicting pain on people either. He may not be a psychopath, but he still is written as lacking in basic empathy, just like Charm.

It was also absolutely a theme for him as well in the sequel series, probably even moreso since they did a whole fucking arc about it w/ Ultimate Kevin, where he did horrific things that were irredeemable and yet he’s still redeemed and those actions are swept under the rug with the whole “it wasn’t his fault, it was the energy he absorbed that made him do it!” excuse, which is the same kind of cop-out as the Alpha Rune was for sequel series Charmcaster. If you can buy wholesale into that excuse but can’t for the Alpha Rune, you are operating under a double standard. Either both are cases of awful character writing that exist purely for the writers to avoid having to write actual redemption arcs, or neither of them are. Pick one.

SO they have her do these things and then either sweep them under the rug, downplay the shit out of them, or tell us that we should feel sorry for her that she felt the need to do that.

....I...I really can’t right now.  I just can’t.

This literally describes Kevin too. Swap names and gender pronouns, and it’s the same.

And yet every time Kevin does something horrible, your reaction seems to be “oh, my son!”, sweeping it under the rug or downplaying it, and you feel sorry for him that he felt the need to do it; you still understand and sympathize with his troubled mental state regardless of what inexcusable acts of villainy it drives him to do. But when it’s Charmcaster? Fuck that bitch and cue violent fantasies of what Kevin should do to her for revenge just because he happened to be the victim of her actions (oh yeah, and about those: what the actual fuck!? Honestly, the hypocritical bitching about Charm being some kind of writers’ pet wouldn’t bug me half as much without this totally uncalled-for shit accompanying it.)

It sounds to me that this has nothing to do with morality: it has everything to do with a bias toward your fave and anger that he got hurt.  It sounds to me that Kevin can hurt Ben, Gwen, Grandpa Max, Glitch, or anyone else and you’re fine with it - heck, he can hurt Charm and you’re fine with it given the aforementioned fantasies. But when Kevin is hurt, the one who did it MUST be held accountable at every turn and suffer the painful consequences!

He’s your fave, I get it, but the emotions involved with that should not rule out objectivity. Nor should it fuel torture porn fantasies toward another character, especially a female child one who already has being physically abused by a boy as part of her goddamn backstory. (Humiliating slapstick like the show itself uses is fine though, she definitely deserves it.)

The way you are going about it, you come off as a pitiful MRA-type always bitching about how them damn women get away with everything and men get screwed as a result, even when it’s not at all reflective of reality. If you really think the writers of the Ben 10 franchise have historically held some kind of bias toward Charm and didn’t toward Kevin, then just look at Kevin’s screentime throughout the franchise compared to Charm and then come back at me with that shit (same goes for Gwen for that matter; stack her up against Ben and Kevin in terms of significant arcs, actions and development, and you’ll find she falls woefully short.)

And the thing is, for the reboot at least, she’s young enough I’m willing to give her some leeway, but the tempering damages that by making it feel like the writers don’t see what she does as an issue.

It’s not that the writers don’t see what she does as an issue. It’s that you see it as way too big of an issue while also not seeing the same thing happening with Kevin as an issue at all. It’s a double standard, pure and simple: Kevin is your fave and so he can get away with anything in your eyes and you don’t consider it to be troubling writing if he gets let off with a slap on the wrist for it. But you can’t do the same for Charm because she’s not your fave and - more importantly - Kevin is negatively impacted by what she does. If he wasn’t, then I’m pretty damn sure that no evil deed she commits would actually bother you at all. You want the show to fixate on how evil what she did was not because you hold some standard against magical mental enslavement in general, but because you’re angry that she did it to Kevin. This is all about you taking offense on behalf of your fave, not about the writers messing up in any way.

And before anyone gets on my case for bashing Kevin, I’m not! I love reboot Kevin! None of what I described above about him bothers me in any way because I can look at him objectively and enjoy him as the troubled but undeniably nasty little shit that he is, just as I do with reboot Charm. They’re both villains who do villainous things, and the show’s lax attitude toward it is due to its light-hearted tone and the fact that they’re both children (ditto for the likes of Billy Billions and Simon Sez). But more to the point, they’re supposed to be hypocrites in regards to each other, because what they hate about each other is actually the worst of themselves reflected right back at them. They are the same kind of person and they project like crazy, this is a certified fact per Word of God. Their FANS, however, shouldn’t be following their example because they ought to be smarter and more mature than that.

It goes all the way back to this post, and what I said there still applies: Why are male characters allowed to be bitter, angry, hateful, vengeful, insolent, insulting, anti-social, violent and manipulative without reproach while female characters always get demonized for it?  Why does such behavior in a male character get the “my precious son!” reaction, while the exact same behavior in a female character get the “that horrible bitch!” reaction? Why are bad things a female character does to a male character considered irredeemably awful, but what bad things that male character might do to her for revenge considered an appealing fantasy and totally justified? Why can a male character be allowed nuance despite their deplorable acts of villainy, and yet when it’s done with a female character it’s proof that “the writers don’t get that what she did was wrong because otherwise why try to make her appealing or sympathetic in any way?” Why this double standard?

I don’t know, but I do know that it’s wrong and I am not here for it.

Tl;dr: don’t hate on Charm for things your fave is equally guilty of or things that a witch-themed supervillain is gonna naturally do just because it’s your fave who gets hurt by it.