oh i felt like i should maybe make a pinned "about me!" post and then i realized i have no idea what, about me, exists
hi i'm helen slash tumblr user all-pacas (full title). i've been in fandom for a very long time and i use this tumblr mostly to completely detach from my life, which means that i really don't talk about / post or reblog anything that isn't fandom. i tend to hyperfocus fixate on one thing at a time, but my past fandoms remain in my heart forever. i have a Very Specific character type and this embarrasses me.
right now my fixation is House Medical Doctor. i don't know how either. i use 'malpractice posting' for your blocking needs!
i write fanfic. i love getting asks and answering asks and writing meta and writing fanfic on request; i get self validation from it so for real do not hesitate! i have two sideblogs: @some-pacas for fanfic and fanfic requests, and @none-pacas for my dabbles into gifs and image sets!
eta: also my pronouns are she/her and i really am very boring
Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”
So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”
Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.
Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.
#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)
i had a dream last night that the big fandom du jour was this doorstopper fantasy book series from the 80s. a exiled prince and his dnd party band of companions infiltrating evil castles and doing political machinations to reclaim the throne, assisted from afar by his loving but imprisoned father, who is merely a figurehead to the forces of evil.
and then there was Karen. she was, in my dream, My Blorbo. my favorite. i would meet with fans on thursdays just to talk about her, but she was controversial because people believed she was an Unfeminist Objectification Device. which to be fair was probably true. karen was:
found by the party in a dungeon, hanging by her wrists as a prisoner, mostly naked. she is tall and blonde and has ENORMOUS breasts, she is built like a sex doll or. you know. a typical 80s fantasy novel cover heroine. she is rescued by the party.
there is a running Bit that she Does Not Wear Clothes. the other woman in the party (a blue skinned alien/elf/magic princess type) is more modest; karen not only wears a chainmail bikini but contrives to always lose her shirt. less for fanservice -- it WAS fanservice, but it wasn't an "oh noooo my clothesssss" situation, she would just always take Clothing Damage and be unbothered.
the hero/prince is absolutely infatuated with her. she's largely oblivious. she LIKES him as a friend, but has no romantic interest. they have a 3 day fling, mostly because she feels grateful to him for saving her.
she fights with a massive battle axe, but personality was more "himbo" than "barbarian warrior woman"
hi matthew matthevil here im getting into arguments on tiktok and like. this is just objectively not true, right? like I don’t even really think fauxcest is a thing but I feel as though even if it were it isn’t a thing in this case. im getting irritated and I can’t word my thoughts properly
I'll be honest, I'm not even sure what they mean: are they saying House/Chase is good? Bad?
There is a case you can make for Chase seeing House in a similar vein as he does his father: Chase's usual way of trying to ingratiate himself to House is by sucking up, trying to win points, but specifically by doing what he perceives House wants, that is, by imitating House (badly), or by cold reading House and saying what he thinks House wants him to say (for example in Paternity, where Chase does it repeatedly). Chase will also fairly regularly put his own beliefs or opinions aside in order to appease House — both because he wants that approval and because he doesn't want to be on House's shitlist ("I'm against the death penalty in theory. In practice, however, watching a murderer die offers me a lot less grief than annoying my boss"). Chase is kind of a pragmatist: he wants to get along, in as far as he wants to make his own life easier.
This is something that, by implication, he very much learned from his father. As House himself puts it in Damned if You Do: "Good boys" do what they're told, like going to med school when it's the last thing they want. Foreman brings this up later in Finding Judas: Chase does "whatever his father tells him." Foreman means it as an attack, but Chase himself is pretty explicit about how much this sucks: he's in a career he didn't particularly want (or at least choose), in a country on his father's behest (Rowan got him this job, after all), and in return… his father neglected him well past the point of abuse. Chase has always been a Good Son. He does what he's told. He's eager to please, eager to kiss ass, eager to Win Points. It didn't work with Rowan. It also doesn't work with House, who among other things is considerably friendlier to Chase after Chase gets over him and starts pushing back and challenging him in the latter part of S3.
So yeah, you can make a case that Chase, if he didn't see House as a father exactly, did fall into the same pattern of behavior he learned from his father (be obedient, seek approval, put aside your own feelings/wants to make him happy). What this leaves out, of course, is that this is not a good thing, that Chase does not seem to enjoy it, and that as soon as House returns the favor by assaulting him in the hospital lobby, Chase stops chasing this relationship in that way (you can even argue that this started by The Mistake: House never gives Chase anything, and Chase knows it). Chase has always found House to be funny and liked the guy, but he also basically shrugs and moves on and gives up on winning points after S3: even when he returns to the team in later seasons, he enjoys House's company while never trying to connect or admire or even accept House's concerns. S1 Chase probably would have been a bit awestruck by House telling him he was sorry and wanted better for him; S8 Chase can't wait to quit PPTH and get out of the shadow.
(There's also the fact that, you know, even if Chase might have — subconsciously or consciously — been trying to emulate his relationship with his father through House, House very much never was interested in that dynamic or relationship. See again how much more House likes him after he stops.)
So yeah: Chase probably does, at least to the extent that he treats all authority figures as distant and uncaring and people he needs to impress and appease (he even does it to Dibala), see House as something like a "father." But this isn't a good thing. It's born out of abuse and out of trauma and neglect, not love and affection. It's not exactly something to applaud.
a non-exhaustive but unordered list of things i really really like about robert "robert" chase
he is so good with kids :( he clearly loves kids, he even weirds taub out with how tirelessly he plays with the sophias, he's so protective of kids with bad parents, it's soo
when he gets frustrated and just say the MOST out of pocket things. "works for spaghetti!" "do you think tv is the work of the devil or?" and every time people turn to him and he's just. ahem. oops
the fact that he is a huge troll. him coming up with a million reasons why a patient might not be on drugs to an increasingly annoyed foreman, only to reveal he has a drug test result. him delighting in teasing cameron all thru spin. this is why even tho his sister is a retcon i'm like. yeah checks out. man has insane annoying big brother energy.
super fake idafer. makes a big stink about hating nuns, then falls over himself to comfort the patient when she's sad. hates his dad, but follows his career obsessively. tends to fall in love after one date. can't stay mad at ANYONE.
b o w l i n g c h a m p
the way he just. avoids drama. so unsubtly. like he'll leave the room. he'll ask if he's going to be fired and then walk away. he is a fake dgafer but he also truly does NOT care about the things he does not care about he is gone
he's a hugger?? he hugs people?? hugs his dad. cameron. house. 13. i think he hugs more people than anyone else on the show (don't correct me). the fact that he is so emotionally Weird about some things but so ready and willing to Engage and reach out and hug and fall in love. ughhh my boy
the way he's just. such a Guy. he is the most Guy. he likes Beer and Cars and Girls. he plays like 5 different sports. he was on the football team (not soccer/football: AFL). he probably only listens to 80s rock.
i find it oddly endearing how this man, who looks about 12 years old even in the back end of s8, ALWAYS has 5-o'clock shadow. chase could grow a full beard in 10 minutes if he let himself and that is very funny of him
i enjoy his atrocious fashion sense. most of his individual shirts are fine, but they never ever go together. he loves a Vest. he dresses like a 62 year old statistics professor and looks like a model. he's not pulling it off in a "dorky academia" vibe he just looks Weird. man who went to private school and misses his uniform highkey
no poker face. always making the wildest faces. a canonically terrible liar. he's so funny
his habit of trying to show off in the stupidest ways. his shark story. failing to kick down a door. breaking his ankle jumping off a roof. he's just such a Guy lmao
his terrible flirting more generally. he's so cheesyyyyyy. he talks about his favorite john hughes movies and tells fake stories and doesn't know he's good looking and has inexplicably great one night stand etiquette.
After rewatching Unfaithful and starting discussion on the casual biphobia in that episode, it got me thinking about character biases and, beyond that, how similar biases affect fandom’s view of characters. So let’s talk about it.
No one can be completely unbiased, and in a well-written character this also means that characters will have their own personal biases. However, there are times where the creators’ biases bleed into the characters they are writing, and sometimes it becomes difficult to tell the difference between what’s intended as a character choice or what’s simply unintended author bias. A very simple and obvious example of this is something Helen/all-pacas has discussed at length before, being that the show’s writers/creators being Jewish heavily influenced the references to Judaism in the show, and in House’s character (despite House himself not being Jewish). However, there are more subtle examples of this that I will get into later, tying back into the original biphobia conversation that sparked this.
To begin, let’s talk about something that gets brought up often in discourse around Chase: fatphobia. In Heavy, Chase makes several fatphobic comments. Most of his bias here is clear; he’s an athletically-built, attractive man. He doesn’t experience issues with his own weight, and he’s influenced by both popular culture and the medical system to believe that to be “fat” is to be unhealthy and lazy. But there’s something else here I want to talk about that goes a bit deeper: a non-American’s biased view of Americans.
In the episode, Chase says this:
CHASE: What I haven’t seen lately is a kid eating an apple or riding a bike. You Americans can’t even compete with the rest of the world in basketball anymore, unless, of course, it’s the type you play with a remote control on a big screen TV.
There’s a commonly held idea by many people worldwide that “everything is bigger in America”, with larger portion sizes at restaurants and larger clothing sizes pointing to a country majorly affected by an obesity epidemic. Chase, as an Australian, is more likely to hold these beliefs. These are his biases.
Now to move on to the related fandom biases. There is a large portion of the House fandom that hates Chase, and a lot of that hate is rooted in his behavior in this episode. Obviously he was wrong to say the things he did, but other characters have said much worse, so why condemn Chase and not the others? The answer is fandom’s personal biases, of course! The House fandom’s demographics are more likely to be affected by fatphobia than other issues (such as racism, especially on a website that’s largely white, but that’s a topic for another day), therefore their biases affect the weight of these characters’ actions. House fans can hate Chase for being fatphobic, meanwhile disregarding every racist or other discriminatory comment from House, because they are affected more by the fatphobia than anything else.
Coming back to the biphobia issue, in Unfaithful there are a few comments that point directly to common stereotypes about bisexuality.
Example 1:
KUTNER: Or the hardship'll bring 'em closer together. She'll invite friends over for Foreman to share.
This relates to the stereotype that bisexuals are somehow more “sexual”/have more interest in sex than monosexuals, which is of course entirely untrue. Taub does counter this idea: “she’s not a nympho. She’s bisexual…”.
Example 2:
TAUB: It's just a matter of time before one of you finds the other in bed with another woman.
This perpetuates the stereotype that bisexuals are more likely to cheat (or, to cheat with someone of the opposite sex than their monogamous partner). Which, from Taub, kind of makes sense—he’s a chronic cheater, after all—but the phrasing of “with another woman” is a blatant dig at Thirteen’s bisexuality.
We can agree that this kind of rhetoric is bad, right? That these stereotypes are harmful? Great. Now, let’s talk about fandom’s perpetuation of biphobia.
The biphobic rhetoric I’m going to discuss differs from the kind of biphobia the show itself displays; while the show is a product of an era where bisexuality in characters was used often to sexualize women and/or sapphic relationships, the fandom of the modern era takes it in a completely different direction, instead participating in bi erasure in favor of seeing only same-sex relationships represented in fandom content.
The phrase I hear so often is “she should be with a woman”, and not only applied to Thirteen, a canon bisexual. But let’s talk about her first, since she is the only canon queer character in the main cast. Statements like the one I just mentioned come from a place of bias, of course: the queer members of fandom would prefer to see a “queer” relationship to a “straight” one (which, let’s be honest, is harmful language to begin with, because a m/f relationship does not imply by nature that either party has to be heterosexual, and calling it a “straight” relationship erases the identities of queer individuals within that relationship). Queer people want to see themselves represented in the media they consume, and there’s nothing wrong with that! As a queer person myself, of course I’m going to be biased in what I want to see! However, it’s the language used that creates the issue: “she should be with a woman” has much different implications than “I would like to see her with a woman”. “She should be with a woman” implies that the bisexual character should “pick a side”, and that same-sex relationships are superior.
This rhetoric extends, as I mentioned, beyond the canon bisexual character: this statement is often put onto both Cameron and Cuddy as well, women who are canonically interested in men. Instead of headcanon-ing either character as bisexual, fandom would rather disregard their relationships with men entirely and claim they should be lesbians. This rhetoric is influenced by so many various biases I couldn’t even begin to list them all, but the main two I’ve seen are: 1. sapphics who are biased against men, and 2. People who see lesbianism as a way to completely remove a female character from being in competition with a m/m ship.
Regardless, fandom’s personal biases inform their opinions on characters and ships, but the amount of overlapping biases between members of the fandom can lead to us forgetting that we are biased in the first place and instead believing popularly held opinions to be universal truth. It’s important for us to each take time to reflect on our biases and experiences, and acknowledge that each individual has their own biases that inform their opinions.
a non-exhaustive but unordered list of things i really really like about robert "robert" chase
he is so good with kids :( he clearly loves kids, he even weirds taub out with how tirelessly he plays with the sophias, he's so protective of kids with bad parents, it's soo
when he gets frustrated and just say the MOST out of pocket things. "works for spaghetti!" "do you think tv is the work of the devil or?" and every time people turn to him and he's just. ahem. oops
the fact that he is a huge troll. him coming up with a million reasons why a patient might not be on drugs to an increasingly annoyed foreman, only to reveal he has a drug test result. him delighting in teasing cameron all thru spin. this is why even tho his sister is a retcon i'm like. yeah checks out. man has insane annoying big brother energy.
super fake idafer. makes a big stink about hating nuns, then falls over himself to comfort the patient when she's sad. hates his dad, but follows his career obsessively. tends to fall in love after one date. can't stay mad at ANYONE.
b o w l i n g c h a m p
the way he just. avoids drama. so unsubtly. like he'll leave the room. he'll ask if he's going to be fired and then walk away. he is a fake dgafer but he also truly does NOT care about the things he does not care about he is gone
he's a hugger?? he hugs people?? hugs his dad. cameron. house. 13. i think he hugs more people than anyone else on the show (don't correct me). the fact that he is so emotionally Weird about some things but so ready and willing to Engage and reach out and hug and fall in love. ughhh my boy
the way he's just. such a Guy. he is the most Guy. he likes Beer and Cars and Girls. he plays like 5 different sports. he was on the football team (not soccer/football: AFL). he probably only listens to 80s rock.
character ask game... chase.... 1, 2, 3, and 9 !!!
1. Canon I outright reject
i know you're expecting me to say carrot or stick here but instead i'm going to name my other least favorite s7 scene, which is in the episode where chase hires a psychologist and it's just a massive joke about how he's horny and wants to sleep with her and useless. and there's two reasons i hate this.
i can buy that chase is bad at hiring. that doesn't bother me; he's never been put in charge of anything before so yeah, let him do it badly. but the episode tries to split the difference: he calls out foreman (and is framed as correct to do so), and his hire actually does prove useful in the end. so was his hire a good, but unorthadox choice? was chase just trying to get laid? is he an idiot (he didn't understand her resume), or is he smart? the episode is so busy trying to make him a Dumb Slut it splits the difference. it's weird.
but the real reason i hate the episode? there is a long detour into she looks just like his mother, lol, chase wants to fuck his mom. you know. his abusive parent. the women he hates and resents. this was established in season one; they make her even more abusive in s8. but haha, isn't it funny chase wants to sleep with someone who looks like her? it's tonally insane. it really feels symptomatic of s7 as a whole: implications don't matter, the flanderization does.
2. A canon or headcanon hill I will die on
.......he and cameron totally hooked up again at house's funeral come onnnn. uh a bit more seriously. hmm. well, speaking of his mother: she was the one who taught him how to surf and chase Does Not Think About It.
3. Obscure headcanon
he's a very light sleeper, but he's also the kind of guy who can fall asleep and take a nap anywhere, so it kind of balances out.
9. Scene that first made me love (or hate) the character
i don't knowwww, probably one of the times he solved a case or had a Smart Idea in s1: i'm actually not at all immune to chase being brilliant moments, and i love that character contrast type.
