The irony of this new breed of self-righteous AI hunters on AO3 is that they're all just copy and pasting peoples fics into AI detectors, which are all operated by AI and therefore THEY are feeding people's work into the algorithm without their consent and in some cases no doubt circumventing the locks people put on to avoid getting scraped...
Don't copy and paste anyone's AO3 work into third party websites, you're not the good guys in this situation?
liking a ship but disliking the distinct set of stock fanon that they have been assigned is like one of those punishments dante came up with when he wrote the worldbuilding for hell in inferno
jf i was vladimir nabokov and i was writing lolita i would make her an adult becaude then it would t be dark problematic media and instead a sweet romabce between two adults (woke and pure)
I always feel so cheated in stories when characters are walking around with this Big Guilt and then...you find out that the thing wasn't their fault at all. And not in a "they thought they did it but it turns out they were set up" way, or even a "accepting that just because they did A which caused B which caused C it doesn't mean C was their fault", way but where they finally lay out the sequence of events and it's clear that any thinking person would not connect them. Like, fucking commit!!! The character isn't LESS compelling if they actually did the thing! You can't have the haunted brooding meow meow who is...also completely blameless
imo you get the most out of engaging with media when you strike a balance between treating characters as people (reading interiority into their actions, considering the effect of various aspects of their identity, etc etc) and as vehicles for storytelling (what narrative purpose do they serve, how do their actions and personality function to convey the themes of the work, etc etc). because of course characters are literary devices but also there’s a reason we use literary devices written to embody realistic people in order to tell stories
Girls will convince everyone and themselves that they hate any form of attention and then cry when people don't give them the love and attention that they want
Martha Jones (Doctor Who) vs. Helen of Troy (Greek Mythology)
Martha Jones
Helen of Troy
Remaining time: 6 days 13 hours
Propaganda below the cut:
Martha Jones:
She was the first main Black companion on Doctor Who…I'll just talk about the fandom racism/misogyny itself and not the racism/misogyny in the show itself. She was subject to overt and subtle misogynoir from the fandom, especially since she came after white fan-favorite companion Rose Tyler. People disliked her for having a crush on the Doctor, which Rose also had, and was unfavorably compared to Rose. There's a lot more, but I don't want to write a whole essay.
She's a medical student, and incredibly smart and capable! In her stories, she's incredibly compassionate to those around her, and offers emotional as well as medical assistance. Also, she has incredible style!
Martha gets absolutely shafted by the fandom, most of whom cannot seem to forgive her for not being Rose Tyler. That she dares to leave the Doctor and live her own life is apparently an act more evil than any the Daleks could dream of. A lot of fans insist that Martha's race has nothing to do with why they dislike her. A lot of fans are fucking liars.
Martha is competent and intelligent and screams way less than usual for a companion so she is clearly excellent.
I think fandoms been very racist and misogynistic towards her, relagating her as some spineless woman always pining after the doctor instead of a badass MD who saved the day many times
Not only misogyny but racism too. Martha is an incredibly smart and brave character who doesn’t get half the credit that the Doctor’s other (WHITE) companions get. She gets dogged on by the fandom for a lot of reasons that are overlooked or forgiven when Rose Tyler does a lot of the same things.
She was the only RTD companion who wasn’t given superpowers in order to save the day. Girl saved the world with nothing but gumption and a good pair of walking boots.
I still see hate fics for her in the big year of 2026 please god she's not getting in the way of your ship she walked away from that bum ass alien 15 years ago
So many fans consider Martha a "rebound" companion for 10 and say that she only cares about impressing him or something. Completely ignoring the fact that she was charmed into coming with him! Just like everybody else who travels with the Doctor. She also canonically SAVED THE WORLD by giving the people something to believe in and got to leave on her own accord without something terrible happening to her. She's also shown to be incredibly smart and talented, quickly adapting to situations even if she might be freaked out at first.
And after she leaves she gets to work with UNIT (and im pretty sure she also appears in the Torchwood spin-off series) and eventually she ends up with someone who understands what she's been through.
Martha is SO MUCH MORE than just a rebound companion or a girl obsessed with the Doctor. Sheis (at the time of meeting her) being trained to be a full on doctor who has incredible will power and a clear desire to help others.
Helen of Troy:
many people blame her for so much shit she was Not responsible for. the trojan war was not her fucking fault people!!! also multiple translators have made her call herself a slut or a bitch even though she never refers to herself that way in the ancient greek text :/
give my girl a fucking break!!!! please!!!
COSMIC PUNCHLINE TO EVERY JOKE IN LITERATURE ABOTU HOW WOMEN ARE EVIL. AND WHAT IS LITERATURE IF NOT ILIAD FANDOM. ALL LITERATURE
SHE MAYBE DID ALL THAT BUT I LOIVE HER ANYWAY
I really love Helen as someone who always shows up with a Point Of View. Like she’s reduced to an object a lot (famously as Paris’s reward in the myths or “the face that launched a thousand ships” in pop culture, or even in other stories like the one about her getting kidnapped by Theseus as a kid :/) but she’s always got something
In the Iliad she’s sitting on the walls of Troy, almost a decade into this war, lonely and wondering if her brothers are on the battlefield. She’s getting kidnapped by Aphrodite to go comfort Paris (and telling her she knew it was Aphrodite because the boobs on her disguise were too good!!!) and fucking hating it but not wanting to be attacked by a god. In the Odyssey she’s just fuckin drugging people??
She’s tragic and she’s weird and she’s probably doomed by her own nature as a demigod. And i just think she’s neat :)
The fact that everyone calls her Helen of Troy (the place where she was held captive by a prince that kidnapped her) and not of Sparta (the place where she was queen alongside the man she chose as her husband, having been given more agency than almost any mortal woman of her time by having been given a choice of who she wanted to marry thanks to her divine heritage as a daughter of Zeus) says something on its own tbh
its 2026 i cannot handle any more fucking "author A obviously ripped off author B" discourse by people Who Have Only Seen the work of author B and admit themselves that they have no further knowledge of the literary landscape they are moving in. like.
Because I’m curious: reblog this and put in the tags 1) what kind of female characters you tend to find yourself drawn to and 2) if you have any thoughts about the portrayals of these sorts of characters in fiction*
*could mean anything: thoughts on what you think about the way they’re typically portrayed, thoughts on the relative abundance or scarcity of those types of characters in fiction, any character that you felt was handled particularly well or poorly. I just wanna know!
amandla
turnnoffyourmind
kianamaiart
