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Okay yes we laugh and joke about Ilya never winning an argument in that marriage, but we have proof IN THE SHOW that Shane will not stay mad at him for ANYTHING.
Shane got ghosted for 6 months and after yelling at him for 20 seconds folded under NO PRESSURE and was giggling and cheesing when Ilya came near him. STAND UP
So anyway, let’s talk about what happens when Shane finds out that Wiebe is bisexual.
Because during The Long Game, Ilya decides not to tell Shane because it’s not his secret to tell, and Shane has to find out eventually, right? Wiebe says something like “I’m sure Ilya has told you that I understand a little bit about your situation.” And Shane is thinking like, what, you definitely don’t, you were a mid player at your absolute best. But eventually Wiebe gets the point across and it goes, I think, one of a couple different ways:
One: Shane HATES this information and tries to memory hole it immediately. Shane has had a complicated psychosexual attachment to every hockey coach he’s ever had, which is fine because hockey coaches are straighter than God. Even though both Shane and Wiebe are in happily married monogamous relationships, finding out that it’s actually hypothetically possible for a coach to experience reciprocal attraction to him is the worst thing that’s ever happened.
Two: Finding out that Wiebe is bisexual pushes Shane over the edge into having a meta-textual breakdown. Shane: “It’s fucking ridiculous. It’s absurd! We’re already the gayest team in the league. The gay married team. And now we have a gay coach?” Ilya: “Lubimiy, he is bisexual, do not make me ask Harris to give another PowerPoint presentation on bisexual erasure.”
Three: Shane pours over stats from Detroit’s 2001 season and figures out who Wiebe’s teammate was in less than 60 minutes.
laughing about the idea of shane who has no real firsthand experience with curls (beyond messing them tf up while fucking ilya) trying to make ilya presentable after sneaking off with him to smooch but who just ??? seems to be making it worse?? oh fuck??
like his memories of hair fixing someone else are his mom finger combing his hair? but that appears?? to be making this worse?? oh god??? wait no?? stop getting frizzier!! be neater!! everyone return to your assigned curl!!
and ilya who COULD be helping is just. letting this happen. no help at all. shane increasingly is just making it worse and more obvious what they've been up to and ilya is just enjoying being pet and watching shane get flustered.
a man who has never denied himself anything meets a man who denies himself everything and the hedonist tries to lure the self-abnegator into succumbing to the pleasures of the flesh and succeeds but their rendezvous makes accidentally clear that true pleasure is derived from the perilous destructive nature of intimate connection and eventually true actual love and so we come to conclude that in fact the hedonist is the one who has never allowed himself anything true while the self-abnegator has never strayed from the path of his want and then they put them on ice skates and gave them sticks
#the shadow acting as bars of a prison cell forcing ilya to hide himself in russia vs the overflowing of light at shane's cottage that allows him a place to be free and completely himself
my friend's puppy has baffling levels of attitude for someone who's only been around for a handful of months. he understands concepts like deceit and civil disobedience and other things i didn't fully grasp until well into my 20s. this guy doesn't even know the seasons loop yet. he's probably like okay spring. what's next. some other new bullshit i bet
idk it's just Shane reaching for Ilya's hand on the team bus and Ilya dragging Shane onto the ice by his hand for practice and Shane and Ilya holding hands waiting for the hotel coffee machine and Ilya sitting on Shane's left at tape review so Shane can still take notes if they hold hands and Shane scrolling on his phone while Ilya catches up with Harris and they're holding hands and
Human beings b like. *sits and stares peacefully at a fire* *sits and stares peacefully at the ocean* *sits and stares peacefully at a sleeping animal*
Hen Wilson (9-1-1) vs. Sansa Stark (A Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones)
Hen Wilson
Sansa Stark
Remaining time: 15 hours 16 minutes
Propaganda below the cut:
Hen Wilson:
Constantly overlooked by the fandom in favor of men, and when people do focus on her it's all about how she helps the m/m ship du jour get together, or supports them, or guides a man in his sexuality discovery. People outside the fandom are constantly being bombarded with the noncanon ship between two white (passing) men, and never even hear about the Black lesbian main character. The OG animals facts girlie but everyone gives that trait to her (white) male coworker.
BADASS Black lesbian firefighter who joined the crew at a time when it was rife with racism and misogyny. Had to fight three times as hard to earn her place and boy did she! Multifaceted, makes devastating mistakes, lashes out, is sososo compassionate, funny, and the smartest character on the show! And her wife is so hot
Hen is a main character who has been in a lesbian relationship since the very first episode(!!!), and yet it's only when the white male lead comes out as bi that fandom celebrates how wonderfully queer the show is and put his face on all the fandom Pride events and artwork! I guess it's not queer rep until it's a white man doing it…
Hen is brave, kind, has a huge heart, makes mistakes, loves, laughs… She's such a wonderful and vibrant character and she doesn't deserve to be overlooked by both the writers and the fandom!
Fandom turns her into a cheerleader for their fave m/m ship, usually Buddie but sometimes Bucktmmy (the latter being especially crazy considering her history with Tommy). Fans also hated on her for what she said about feeling like no one supported her after Bobby died because Buck made her fill out a grief checklist one time, even though that speech (while maybe not super supported by the previous episodes) had very clear subtext about her being the only black woman at her workplace.
Hen is a friend to all animals and is extremely messy in her personal life, two great qualities for any character.
fandom refuses to give her the same rich inner live her male coworkers have, because she's just allowed to be the mothering, wise, funny black woman. it's not that fans hate her, they proclaim to love her, but everytime she gets a storyline they complain. everytime she behaves like a human being, with flaws, on the show they complain. anyone's guess whether that's misogyny, racism or misogy-noir
Henrietta fucking Wilson, smartest person you'll ever know (except for her rocket scientist wife) is a firefighter/paramedic, she is badass, she's a mom, she's a lesbian, she's a great friend and she has this incredibly dry wit sometimes. she has flaws, she's stubborn, she tries so hard not to burden anyone that it's burdening, she makes decisions and takes the fall for them. she!!!
This is a complicated answer but here's my thesis. Hen (main character) is sometimes (sometimes!) not served that well by the canon, and I think it's because they are (since s1) afraid to let a black lesbian character be too messy. But this is about fandom, not canon. And she does have some really juicy storylines. And what I have noticed is that fans love to hate the show and they like to say Because Hen Has No Story as one of the reasons. And then when Hen has a juicy story, many of these some fans will insist it's Bad Actually and will come up with some of the most convoluted nonsensical reasons the storyline is objectively bad, when they are in fact clearly just upset their fave didn't get more attention that ep, but they can't say that because that would be racist and they are Not Racist, you see. So some really fun and interesting stories gets crickets at best and torn up and discarded at worst and sucks.
She marches to the beat of her own drum. She's compassionate and kind and brilliant. She's Judging You. She is SUCH a good friend. She is constantly celebrating people and making sure they feel appreciated. She had a really cool villain foil in s5 and nobody ever talks about how good it was. She loves animals. She's had to carve out her place wherever she goes. She has excellent intuition and she's daring and kind of egotistical about her ability to save lives with risky ad hoc medical hail marys. It's hard to sum her up, she's been here 9 seasons. In some ways the family dynamics of the team started with her.
I am a big gay dyke and I've had multiple (three) people recommend me 911 (before I started watching) on the basis that there is queer rep and the queer rep in question that three (THREE!) people went out of their way to mention to me (lesbian) was BUCK. NO ONE TOLD ME ABOUT THE LESBIAN!! WHO WAS IN IT AND MARRIED FROM THE BEGINNING!
Sansa Stark:
Perpetually a victim of the plot, denied agency, hated for being whiny, PLUS the whole deal where they changed the plot of the book so they could show her being raped in the show…
Sansa is an incredible character for the exact reasons I hated her ass when I was 14. She's often passive, conforms to expectations, and lashes out at her younger sister for being the opposite. Her arc finds her struggling to navigate a dangerous, violent world that hates women using only the tools she was taught as a girl would keep her safe and make her successful (her passivity, her virginity, her femininity, etc.).
Bashed as the worst and most useless character of the whole series for not immediately killing all the Lannisters ig despite literally watching her father’s head get cut off at thirteen years old. Also catches flak for thinking mean things about the fandom’s chosen son Jon Snow and her sister Arya Stark, but like. This is a middle schooler.
The WHOLE POINT of her character is to illustrate how the game of thrones corrupts innocence, ERGO the character HAS to start from an innocent place. Obviously she’s naive at the start of the series, why would any child raised in a loving household far away from court politics develop any political acumen? But despite this, she does learn quickly, and her character development is among the most exciting in the show (and I’m sure it will eventually be in the series as well)
I could write a dissertation on this one but if you say Sansa is worse that Joffrey you’re a misogynist. In my opinion people hate her because her abuse arc is painfully grounded in reality.
The very first man to use her as a pawn was her father and yet the fandom blames her for this. Sansa’s arc was supposed to be a mirror of her sister’s to show that if they comply (Sansa) if they rebel (Arya) no girls win in a patriarchal society but so many people would rather hate a fictional little girl because she didn’t girl boss her way out of oppression.
According to Sophie Turner (the actress who played Sansa), people hated Sansa so much that they would actually go up to Turner in real life and go "i don't like you" (and Turner would have been in like... her teens/early twenties at this point)
I really need fans to not need her to marry a creepy old pervert to prove that she isn’t vain and put her in her place. She’s twelve. Also these creepy men like her because she’s pretty. It’s also not her job to fix their defective personalities.
George R.R. Martin wrote a really complex world with layers of story and metaphors. He has something to say about climate change and nuclear weapons, these metaphors are obvious. Then he challenges us to look at government, power structures, patriarchal systems, concepts of honor vs what’s actually right, gender roles, and how to meaningfully change all of these things. Then to have people take away nothing other than the book is about a feud between to little girls, Sansa is the villain, and the story will be about defeating her. Sansa and Arya love each other. One conforms, one rebels, neither can win in a patriarchal society. Their arc is why this society is bad for all girls but so many fans willfully miss it because of their own misogyny.
Everyone loved the idea of a free and independent North under Robb or even Jon but they seem really agitated that Sansa was the one who saw it through. They are angry at her when she’s meek and even angrier when she exercises her agency to give her homeland something they seem pretty unified in wanting.
Ned was the very first man to use Sansa. He used her as a cover while investigating the Lannister’s without any sort of regard for how dangerous that is. Yet fans blame Sansa, an eleven year old girl for killing Ned. Girl argued like a lawyer on his behalf, the milk of the poppy defense was great and Ned was ready to through it away because honor. What’s sad is I don’t think that Sansa herself is able to process how much her male family members fail her because it’s too much to handle. People also expect Sansa a kid to stand up to Joffrey at the Trident when Ned a grown adult won’t stand up to Robert. The saddest thing is that I believe if Joffrey wasn’t a bastard Ned would have married Sansa to him. He would have felt bad about it but he would have upheld the system. Fans would naturally see this as Sansa’s character flaw and proof that Ned is good because he feels bad.
I'm going to preface it by saying I genuinely have no ill will towards, nor trying to argue nor shame nor start drama with the person who submitted it. I just have to say, gently and respectfully, that the part in the Sansa propaganda that talks about her being passive feels wrong (and maybe even be a result of unintentionally swallowing some of the character slander we are otherwise successfully fighting against!) for reasons the original submitter might consider below.
Sansa Stark is not actually passive. I know it can seem that way because she dissociates a lot (for very understandable trauma related reasons) and cannot directly bring out a massive narrative change on her own because she is both effectively a prisoner as well as completely isolated, but she is actually a fairly active character, it's just that she is active in a more femininely acceptable way in the society of her world.
She takes initiative in front of an entire court she doesn't understand the customs of to speak up in defense of her father, thinking on her feet and coming up with an extremely reasonable defense for him that some real world lawyers in modern day use in court (and that would have worked if the authority figure was ANY character in the entire narrative other than who it was at the time).
She keeps choosing kindness. She tries to persuade her abusive captor to be kinder and gentler to his younger brother who wanted to honour him on his birthday and was unsuccessful at doing so, she shows courtesy and understanding to a cousin who is from the same family of her abusers (Lancel after the blackwater), she modifies her behavior to appear as acceptable to the people who hurt her and use any insubordination as an excuse to hurt her further, so she uses the facade of a completely nonthreatening helpless unremarkable individual to the point of falsely appearing stupid to actively conspire about her own escape in the godswood (a site of religious significance to her that almost nobody around her cares enough about to frequent and check up on).
She operates within the socially acceptable role of a lady which she has been taught her entire short sheltered life, in order to make herself seem less threatening to avoid being targetted by the horrible people around her. She analyzes her situation and acts accordingly by choice. Sure, it can seem passive because that is how women need to appear in a world where the majority of power is held by Men, too many of whom desperately want to keep women powerless and subservient, but she actively tries to make the choice to be good and kind to the young, the innocent, and those who deserve compassion and mercy.
She wakes up every day in a world that shows her endless cruelty, she analyzes the risks her behavior might incur, and she keeps choosing kindness despite it all and in the face of it all. And it's not an easy decision. Many people, even in our world, get slighted once and choose to burn every bridge they can find for the rest of eternity to get even.
Sansa Stark is not actually passive. She just disguises herself as passive to survive. And people who think that is what she is are proof that her effort is paying off.
Submitting propaganda for my girl Sansa Stark in the form of an anecdote, I once watched the first couple episodes of GoT with a man and he immediately hated Sansa and started saying bad things about her and thats when I knew i didnt want to hang out with him anymore.
Claudia (Interview with the Vampire) vs. Guinevere Pendragon (BBC Merlin)
Claudia
Guinevere Pendragon
Remaining time: 15 hours 18 minutes
Propaganda below the cut:
Claudia:
She's a young black woman who is constantly ignored over the men in the show and reduced to nothing more than tragic pieces of the mens' life story by many of the fans and sometimes even the showrunners.
Not only is she just the best girl around but she's so incredibly complex---we as the audience still don't know the real and true her. I would die to get to know her but it's shocking a large part of the IWTV fandom isn't the same!
I can't speak to her treatment from book/movie fans but TV fans literally only talk about her in relation to being Louis and lestats "daughter". By the end of her life she's in her 40s and yet the fandom only treats her as their young daughter and she is defined by that instead of her actual character
due to claudia being a black woman who is directly opposed to everyone’s white male pookie (lestat) there has been a lot of misogyny thrown at her in the form of calling her a liar because the events of her personal diary (that was never supposed to be read by anyone) don’t align with lestat’s own account of events. she is seen as manipulative and selfish and someone who was trying to drive a wedge between louis and lestat, and her own classification as a victim of abuse in this family dynamic is undermined by her efforts to remove herself and find her own community. the abuse she faces by other male leads like louis and armand is minimized even if fans are able to see lestat’s abuse for what it is, even though armand staged a lynching for her, louis, and her companion madeleine and lied about it, alongside louis minimizing lestat and armand’s actions against her. the fandom is happy to take all the male characters at face value but as far as claudia is concerned everything she did was duplicitous and self-serving.
claudia deserved better from her “family” and it breaks my heart that her life in the grand scheme of things was cut so short just as she was finding her happiness. she is incredibly funny and the love she finds with madeleine is so beautiful. the struggle of being a woman in a body that is at odds with you and who you really are and what you want to be able to do in the world is very compelling and easy to empathize with from so many different avenues whether it’s by race, disability, and/or gender/sexuality. she is such an incredible character that should be seen as more than just an obstacle and loustat’s dead daughter. her and madeleine are the best lesbian vampires and everyone should be tuning into the yuri.
She's either a horrible and manipulative girl who lies in her own personal diaries for some reason about the abuse she faced from her white father or she's an idiot who got what was coming to her when she was lynched or just a tool to be used to further the relationship between two men. Her story is quite literally never her own, her diaries shared again and again without her consent and picked apart by both the characters in universe and fans.
She's literally so interesting and so well acted by both of the actresses who play her. She has such depth and her life was cut short due to racism, misogyny, and ableism. She deserves more than to be reduced to nothing but a liar or a tragic figure to be used to further the relationship between two men.
even people claim to like her will call her stupid for her actions in season two, even though she quite literally spells out her reasons for being so desperate to join the coven. In season one she's shown trying again and again to turn a person and make herself a companion. In season two she tells Louis (her father/brother who she loves but at this point he had gotten physically violent with her when she tried to convince him to kill their maker Lestat once and for all) that the only vampires she's known are him, their white maker (who beat Louis half to death, threatened Claudia by mentioning her rapist, got violent with her, and tried to kill her), the aforementioned rapist, and her white father's white side piece who he was planning to replace her with. She wants to belong somewhere with people like her, yeah she endures humiliation at first but considering what she'd been through at this point, it makes sense that she can justify it for a while to be a necessary evil. It's also important to note that she doesn't have all the information! Louis does not tell her that Armand threatened to kill him the night she was inducted into the coven. There was no way she could have predicted Lestat coming back or Armand and the coven's plan to lynch them. Why does a woman, and especially a Black woman, have to be completely objective and rational and borderline clairvoyant all the time to be deserving of sympathy?
A major theme of s1/2 (I'm not watching s3 lol) is that nothing is really ever about Claudia. Even when Louis says he's doing something for her, it's not really about her. Even her death wasn't about her, it was about Louis and Armand and the coven's relations with each other. And yet the fandom picks up on this, but does not critically examine it. So in fandom…..nothing is about her. It's about Lestat, or Louis, or occasionally Armand, or Loustat's relationship. Nobody ever puts her first despite her being one of the most interesting characters. It hurts my heart!!!
Another big part of the show is how infantilized she is and how much she hated that. She HATED being seen as a little girl. When she dies, she is in her 40s or 50s. And yet…you guessed it… fandom sees this and is like "aw, Loustat's little daughter" or "Louis's little sister" when she actively fought against being treated like a little girl and has an (amazingly well acted, kudos to Bailey Bass) breakdown in s1 over the fact that her mind will age but her body will not.
Justice for my fully grown mature adult woman!
Guinevere Pendragon:
The vitriol towards her seems to have calmed down within recent years (at least what I have seen) but especially when the show was airing people treated her horribly. Her being a black woman very much played a part in it, as well as the classic fandom dogpiling on any woman who supposedly 'gets in the way' of a m/m ship. They hate to see a woman in power.
She is consistently kind and loving throughout the story, demonstrating bravery and an unwavering willingness to defend and make sacrifices for the people she loves. She is a positive influence in the life of literally everyone she interacts with, even those who eventually betray her. She is emotionally rich and complicated due to her background as a commoner with a close yet strained relationship to the monarchy. She's lovely and she's interesting, and for a show with a fandom that often cares to dissect the relevant queercoding within the text, not nearly enough attention is given to her interactions with other women (imo). She is more than just a love interest, I swear!!!
Made to be an obstacle to the popular m/m ship
Constant sidelining her in favour of that whiteboy ship and reducing her role in the show, either villainising her and calling her misogynistic slurs (how funny that the other characters have also shown attraction to different people but only she is called a slut for having like two crushes and one serious relationship, I wonder why) or refusing to engage with her character on the basis of ‘she’s too underwritten and boring’, also a complete refusal to ever give any weight to the horrendous treatment she got over the course of the show (nearly being executed multiple times, the love spell, the torture and brainwashing, the strange racist plotline where a Middle Eastern-coded character captures and almost forces her to have sex with him??) like it’s so hard to see how over the years she’s consistently been hated and gets the least amount of grace and sympathy than any of the other (white) characters do
Despite the show’s writing failing her often, she’s the sweetest specialest girl of all time and everyone in that show loves her so bad likeee that is QUEEN GUINEVERE OF CAMELOT, and with a much more coherent character arc than fans give credit for, her progression from supporting other characters to do what’s good and right and bring change to the kingdom to gaining the confidence and power to take on an active tole herself, also Angel Coulby is soooo beautiful<33 Honestly my Once and Future Queen<333
In a lot of fanfics she's only there to act as a cheerleader for the popular m/m ship, one half of whom is her husband. and that's if she's even included at all
She is the best character in the show and i adore her. She's funny and brave and kind and does not take any shit from her love interest, but because she's played by a black woman she got shit from day one. Angel coulby has been harrassed, bullied, and treated like absolute shit for the crime of (checks notes) playing a fictional character. It's made even worse bc she "gets in the way" of merthur even though the show is literally based in mythology and we all know that's arthur's future wife. Free my girl /immediately/
gwen propaganda incoming because i genuinely think The Hunter's Heart accidentally proves why Gwen is one of the strongest characters in the entire show.
Because every discussion about this episode ends up being about Arthur, or Morgana, or the love triangle drama, and meanwhile Gwen is over here carrying the entire plot on her back.
She's been falsely accused. Exiled. Separated from everyone she loves. Forced into poverty. Living completely alone. Still heartbroken. Still believing Arthur hates her. Still believing she deserves her punishment. And then she gets captured by raiders.
Most characters would be having a complete breakdown at this point. Gwen doesn't. Instead she immediately starts adapting.
No matter what happens to her, she survives.
Helios objectifies her? She plays along just enough to stay safe. He invites her to dinner? She keeps her composure. She's trapped in an enemy camp? She keeps her eyes and ears open.
And because she's paying attention, she's the one who discovers the conspiracy against Camelot.
Not Merlin.
Not Arthur.
Not the knights.
GWEN.
The exiled servant everyone threw away. The woman everyone assumed was powerless. The woman who technically owes Camelot absolutely nothing at this point.
And what does she do with that information? She risks her life trying to warn them anyway.
Gwen has every reason to be bitter.
Camelot failed her. Arthur failed her. The court failed her.
And yet the moment she learns the kingdom is in danger, her first instinct is still:
"I need to stop this."
Not because anyone will thank her. Not because she'll be rewarded. Not because it'll clear her name. Because it's the right thing to do.
THAT is Gwen.
People talk all the time about Arthur's nobility. People talk all the time about Merlin's loyalty.
But Gwen is just as noble as Arthur and just as loyal as Merlin (IF NOT MORE)
The difference is that nobody ever gives her credit for it.
And honestly one of the most heartbreaking parts of the episode is that Gwen still believes she deserves exile.
Even after everything. Even after being manipulated. Even after losing everything. Even after surviving completely alone. She still tells Merlin that she can never see Arthur again because she got what she deserved.
Meanwhile I'M sitting on my couch screaming: GWEN YOU ARE LITERALLY THE BESTEST PERSON HERE.
She keeps choosing kindness when she has every excuse reason not to. She keeps choosing loyalty when loyalty has cost her everything. She keeps choosing courage when she's terrified.
And The Hunter's Heart is honestly one of the best examples of that.
Because underneath all the weird Helios stuff, the episode is really about Gwen proving exactly who she is when nobody is there to help her.
And the answer is: A hero.
(oh and if you were wondering, no the helios stuff is never brought up again, much like everything concerning gwen)
