the reason buffy summers is a much better protagonist than a lot of the main characters in other teen supernatural shows is that those characters tend to be good people in a passive, boring way. they're generally nice and care about doing good, but they're rarely placed in situations where they have to make difficult decisions with no good outcomes, or pushed to extremes that force them to contend with the ugliest parts of themselves. btvs meanwhile is absolutely obsessed with the idea that passivity is inherently unethical. as such, in order for buffy to be a good person, she constantly has to make active choices. she never gets to be indecisive in the face of a moral dilemma. she always has to choose, to make tough calls, and that makes her genuine heroism and goodness far more compelling than a character who's just kind of passively nice.
i know i've been saying this for years, but i can't get over how fucked up the slayer system is. the slayer is the most important person in the whole world, the only human being on this earth who can prevent the demons from doing an apocalypse whenever they feel like it, but because slayers are immediately replaced when they die, they're also treated as completely interchangeable and disposable. with other chosen one gigs, as much as being chosen sucks a lot of the time, the upside is that your safety is of paramount importance to everyone around you. other characters will risk their own lives to protect you because if you die, the rest of the world is fucked. but if a slayer dies she's just immediately replaced. there's not even like a gap between slayer eras. it's the only chosen one gig in all of fiction where being chosen is, paradoxically, synonymous with being canon fodder.
everyone who is not currently in the process of moving please pause and take a moment to be grateful that you're not currently in the process of moving
Was trying to make a joke about TV writing to my friend the other day and had to pause and go "...does the phrase 'surf dracula' mean anything to you?"
image description: tweet by @/topherflorence, reading: back in the day if u did a tv show called surf dracula you'd see that fool surfing every week in new adventures but in the streaming era the entire 1st season gotta be a long ass flashback to how he got the surfboard until you finally get to see him surf for 5 min in the finale /end description
my eyes roll all the way to the back of my head whenever i see people saying things like "btvs isn't good exactly but it is iconic 90s television." it's okay to admit you like something without adding a million qualifiers to protect your ego. buffy is a good show. it wouldn't be so iconic and influential and beloved if it weren't good. it's got plenty of flaws, obviously, and the showrunner was not a good person. but i feel like some people need tv shows to be glossy ass golden age of television ten hour movies about brooding white guys before they feel comfortable expressing genuine appreciation for them. or alternatively, they need to prove that they're not morally deficient for liking something that they have criticisms of. and that's a fucking skill issue, not a reflection of the show's quality. btvs is a good show with good characters and good writing and compelling themes. if it didn't have all those things going for it, people wouldn't still be so passionate about it 30 years after the fact.
I really did love rgu for its character writing too is the thing, it wasnt just an aesthetics and abstract themes and concepts show to me. Like I specifically love Utena and I specifically love anthy
have said it a lot but love is kind of something utena views as having to earn through performance. her childhood prince will be her true love, IF she never loses that strength or nobility even when she grows up. & its partly why shes so devastated when she loses the duel and anthy reverts to referring to her more formally and distantly as âtenjou-sanâ despite their prior closeness, as though utenas failure here can cause anthy to revoke her love for her. utena is widely adored - she has crowds of admirers, multiple people who have professed her love for her - but she still longs to be loved because none of it feels genuine to her. they love the image of her, her princely nobility and her beauty. but her fangirls think she looks better in a skirt or in a dress â for all they assert they admire her, they would MORE, conditionally, if she conformed properly. akio would approve of her more if she dressed and acted more feminine.
lowkey hate the take that anya was right when she said that buffy should charge people whose lives she's saved for her life saving services. is that not just the superhero equivalent of making people pay a thousand dollars for an ambulance ride? how can you advocate for universal healthcare and then turn around and say that people should have to pay to literally not be murdered? and then people try to justify it like, well angel charges people but they don't let buffy do it, this is clearly because of misogyny. and maybe it is because of misogyny idk. but also, just because angel is a capitalist shill doesn't mean that buffy has to be. personally, i think it's good characterization for buffy to take a strong and consistent ethical stance about this, one that is unaffected by whatever the fuck her ex is doing.
don't get me wrong, buffy deserves to get paid for slaying. she deserves to get paid sooooo much. but there is canonically a wealthy organization in charge of slayers that pays giles a salary but doesn't pay buffy. clearly the problem is that the watcher's council doesn't pay her for the grueling, dangerous, and highly traumatic labor that buffy performs on a daily basis. not that buffy won't charge vulnerable people for something that they can't control.
Buffy Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) vs. Yennefer of Vengerberg (The Witcher)
Buffy Summers
Yennefer of Vengerberg
Remaining time: 1 day 6 hours
Propaganda below the cut:
Buffy Summers:
The fandom and punishes her for having relationships outside their OTP of choice
Fandom blames her for Spike's attempted rape of her and in general acts like she owed him her love. In general, fandom is very focused on fighting over which of Spike vs. Angel "deserved" her.
She's an iconic hero with cool hair and deserves better than being reduced to a reward for either manpire.
She gets reduced to just the question of which hot vampire she's going to end up with and then people say crazy victim blaming shit about her to top it all off.
She's the TV Protagonist of All Time.
Moderator's note: this next propaganda entry was too long to put in list format (at least according to tumblr, i tried) so it's indented instead:
I've seen a lot of people in the notes confused at Buffy's presence in this tournament and claiming that she's universally beloved. And I sort of get why they think that. From what I've seen at least, in recent years Buffy Summers has become a lot less controversial due to a variety of factors. And I get how that can make it seem like she's not actually subjected to much fandom misogyny. But what people need to understand is that a big part of the reason that Buffy (the character) elicits such defensiveness in some fans is because a lot of us witnessed literal decades of absolutely rancid misogynistic bullshit directed towards her.
When I first joined the fandom (circa 2012) like every other take I saw was about how Buffy was the worst part of her own show. This is an insane opinion to have, not only because Buffy is just such a fantastic character, but also because I cannot stress enough just how central her character is to show. It's her bildungsroman, everything is a metaphor for what she's going through. The tone and vibe of any given season is entirely dependent on how Buffy's feeling at the time. Like half the characters are there to be narrative parallels to her. The supporting cast is great, don't get me wrong, but I don't think I've ever seen a protagonist who protagonisted harder than Buffy Summers. So I genuinely don't understand what there is to like about the show if you don't like her.
Anyway, as I was saying, she was hated on constantly, called whiny for having what is essentially textbook clinical depression, called selfish despite constantly sacrificing her wants and needs for the sake of everyone else, victim blamed for being sexually assaulted by her ex, and generally punished for not grovelling more for forgiveness for her every mistake. Newer fans might not be aware of all that, hence the confusion, but I was there Gandalf. I remember.
And you don't just have to take my word for it, I have proof.
gabriellabelle ran a livejournal dedicated to Buffy between about 2006 and 2012. It's honestly kind of a miracle that her livejournal is still up. It's a really valuable resource, in part because a lot of her meta still holds up (I don't agree with everything she says or anything, and some of her takes are certainly of their time, but she does have some interesting and insightful analysis that I'm glad is still readily available) but for my purposes, it's also a very well-organized reminder of what the fandom was like back then. gabriellabelle was a Spuffy shipper who actually liked and cared about Buffy as a character, and this put her in conflict with a lot of other Spuffy shippers (not all of them obviously, and it's worth noting that misogyny in the Buffy fandom was certainly never a phenomenon exclusive to Spuffy shippers, that was just who this blogger specifically responded to most because it was her corner of the fandom) who often reduced Buffy to being nothing more than Spike's love interest and reward, while also simultaneously hating on her for not being nice enough to Spike. And I think you can really get a sense of just how dire things were by reading what accusations she had to defend Buffy from. So here is a sampling:
In this post, she argues against the legitimately common take at the time that Spike's actions in Seeing Red should not be constituted as sexual assault. If you're not familiar with that scene, I'm not going to go into specifics, but trust me, the idea that this was ever up for debate is patently absurd. And for all the many many problems with how the writers handled this scene, one thing they never did was suggest that the nature of Spike's actions were even remotely ambiguous. Multiple characters (including Spike!) describe what Spike did as a rape attempt, because that's just obviously what it was. To suggest otherwise requires a level of mental gymnastics that is almost impressive in its delusion. Truly, these people were shooting for a gold medal in fandom misogyny.
In this post, she responds to a lot of anti-Buffy takes, but the main one she addresses is that a lot of fans felt that Buffy didn't do enough to atone to Spike (yes, that Spike) for her treatment of him in season 6, and demanded that she deserved to be punished more.
In this post, she responds to fans calling Buffy selfish, which again, that's just a very very odd thing to say about Buffy Summers.
In this post she defends Buffy from people who call her whiny for having depression.
Also, she wrote this crackfic that was a parody of a lot of Spuffy fics from this era in which Buffy has to beg for forgiveness from Spike and her friends for how horrible she is. It's a pretty accurate if over-the-top summation of what a lot of fic at the time was like.
There's probably a lot more you can find by looking at this livejournal and older fandom stuff in general. I just need people to understand that the state of the fandom on tumblr now is not reflective of how things used to be. And to be clear, it's not like there's no modern day fandom misogyny directed towards Buffy. I've seen posts from this year where people victim blame Buffy for the bathroom scene, and the only real difference between those posts and the type of shit people were saying back then is that nowadays people use woker language to try to obscure the fact that they're doing textbook victim blaming, whereas back then people were comfortable saying whatever. But things used to be so so much worse, so it annoys me when people (unintentionally) whitewash that by saying that Buffy has always been beloved or whatever.
This isn't all the Buffy propaganda that's been submitted, there's also this ask and this ask but tumblr is really giving me trouble with the lengthy propaganda under polls, so i'm just going to have to link those two.
Yennefer of Vengerberg:
Fandom cannot deal with a complex female character who does bad things and wants her to just be Geralt's hot gf
She's selfish she's loving she has a traumatic backstory and mommy issues and she's the most powerful sorceress of all time. Also Anya Chalotra acts her ass off playing her
netflix yennefer is almost entirely overlooked in favor of white boy sidecharacter despite being 1/3 of the main characters herself. id argue that fan content centering jaskier existing on the scale it does is in itself misogynistic, especially because he is frequently directly taking her place both as geralt's love interest and ciri's parental figure, but she tends to get unfairly villified or surface level girlboss characterization on top of that. she is the third most popular character in the general witcher fandom on ao3, but has less than half the works Jaskier does for reference. of the 12k (out of overall 52k witcher fics) fics that have her tagged, Jaskier/Geralt is still the pairing on 5.5k of them. Yennefer in game and book fandom spaces is still often treated with misogyny, and some of this stems from the source material, but the way she has been essentially replaced as one of the protagonists of the show by jaskier is egregious.
we're also concerned Yennefer of Vengerberg may fall under the radar somewhat here when the principal reason many people don't like her or prefer Triss as a romance option in The Witcher 3 (obviously the most popular article from the franchise) is because she's 'mean' and 'not nice' when her banter with Geralt is an established aspect of their relationship and if you actually listen to what she's saying and don't assume she's being nasty (given that these two are known to be in love) she's actually just pretty funny and dry whereas Triss is established in the books as someone Geralt has no interest in and in the previous games as someone who gaslit him ad absurdum following his amnesia but noooo they're a much better couple because she's nice to him and Yen is mean .we're not articulating our point well but
buffy summers crushed under the pressure of being buffy summers so they got a robot to be buffy summers for some time and it crushed under the pressure of being buffy summers too. incredible work
