a lot of phm fandom sadism tends to be focused on grace and, like, i get it, he's got a lot in common with one of those stress toys with the eyes that pop out of its skull in a way that's kind of cute and kind of viciously satisfying when you squeeze it, but the amount of times i see rocky being overlooked or even being the one to lead the efforts to violate his hard-won and precarious safety - with the best of intentions, but at the end of the day, well, he's an alien with alien cultural norms and values that might affect his judgement [pause while i roll my eyes] - it does honestly make me wonder if we watched the same movie. especially the scene where rocky tears down the only thing protecting him from dying in prolonged and hideous agony with his bare hands to save grace from suffocating in adrian's gravity. yeah, he has unimaginably horrific (try to conceive of being alone, truly isolated in the most literal sense of the word, for 46 years. you can't.) abandonment trauma and outwardly lacks much sympathy for grace's boundaries (which are themselves the product of a lifetime of experiences more nuanced and not necessarily beneficial to him or anyone else than uncomplicatedly right), but he values grace; values his life and everything that entails - his comfort and safety and happiness, his desires and needs and opinions - while he values himself very little by comparison. so many of his efforts to connect with grace cost him just as much, if not more, of his comfort and safety, but he does it anyway because he loves him beyond rationality and because he would rather die than be alone again, and that isn't hyperbole. rocky would delay his return home by years if it meant that grace could make it back alive, even if he'll never be able to see it. rocky would do anything in his power to fix a problem, including die trying. grace understands that rocky isn't responsible for the deaths of 23 people, we as the audience understand because grace explains it to us, and any reasonable person would also understand if the same facts were presented to them, but rocky doesn't have that kind of faith in himself. rocky will make sure that if it has to be even one more, it won't be grace, or adrian, or any other eridian or human he could have saved if he was only good enough to fix it. because if he can't, then what's the point of him having survived, just to be left alone again when everyone else is gone?
Hen Wilson (9-1-1) vs. Edelgard von Hresvelg (Fire Emblem)
Hen Wilson
Edelgard von Hresvelg
Remaining time: 2 days 14 hours
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!
Edelgard von Hresvelg:
DIMITRI FANS BLAME HER FOR GENOCIDE(?!) AND RUINING HIS LIFE AS HIS EVIL STEPSISTER. SHE WAS LITERALLY SEVEN
she is one of the most interesting, complex, and tragic figures in the game, but people frequently flatten her into a militaristic fascist and treat her as unrepentantly evil because she’s the main antagonist on most of the game’s routes, even though it’s clear that many of the other characters agree with her goals, just not her methods.
she is a beautiful, tragic, complex woman, and the single most interesting and nuanced character in the game. if she wasn’t, the game’s entire plot would fall apart.
All of Dimitri's short comings and mistakes are waved away/excused as being symptoms of his PTSD. Meanwhile Edelgard's trauma and the clear signs of her C-PTSD are ignored to instead label her as an irredeemable bitch.
Edelgard comes from a game where every main character is meant to be morally ambiguous but hmm for Some Reason edelgard isn't given the same grace as her male peers, I wonder why. If she were a man, she would dominate the fandom with no competition. Like it is that obvious.
Also, she gets hit with the misogyny mallet on both sides like most women, the "she's the source of all evil in the world" and "she did absolutely nothing wrong!" which while well meaning, still reduces her character down. She DID do wrong things, they all do! That's the Point. She's meant to be as complex as her male peers but fandom refuses to give her that complexity (and again, they would be frothing at the mouth over her and her complexity if she were a man)
She is from the "choose your favourite war criminal" game, they're all supposed to have very questionable flaws. But she isn't given nearly as much grace by the fandom as the popular male characters are.
please read this even if you're not indian. especially if you're not indian.
you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.
first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.
now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:
in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.
and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.
and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.
it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:
• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.
• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.
• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.
• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.
• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.
• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.
and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.
what i'm asking:
if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.
if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.
india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.
one of @itsmoonpeaches's weakpoints for FE Art Scuffle was "Felix realizes in a devastating fashion that he cares for someone." so i delivered with CF!Felix killing Sylvain + big scary Dimitri about to avenge Sylvain :)
※ please do not repost my art ※
➜ commission and ko-fi links in bio
Love to write a book with an aroace protagonist and get reviews complaining that it didn't have a love interest :| 99.9%* of YA books have a romance plotline, can we not have 0.1% focused on other kinds of relationship?
Not every book is for everyone, sure, if you're looking for romantic YA then mine isn't for you. But there's a difference between "this book wasn't for me because I prefer romance" and "this book was flawed because it didn't contain romance" and boy, the latter hurts when your life doesn't either.
*Statistics absolutely pulled out of my arse here.
Oh boy, I was just venting and planned to delete this (in case anyone thought it was personal when it was actually about a recurring theme), and then I went offline for five hours to clean my house and came back to notes, wow.
I have been reading people's tags and to those who said this was something that put them off reading as a teenager or a reason they were reading MG long after they were "expected" to have moved onto YA... I feel you! This was something I felt so strongly as a teenager -- it seemed like I was being told that friendship was something you grew out of, and if I wanted books actually aimed at my age group, I could only have them with a ton of romance. (And, given that we're talking 10-15 years ago now, it was all straight. Which is at least something that has changed since I was a teenager.)
I started writing The Butterfly Assassin at eighteen with the explicit intention to write a dark, stabby upper YA book of the type I liked reading, but that didn't have romance. I wanted a protagonist who didn't get distracted by kissing in a life-or-death situation, or abandon their principles because somebody was hot. It took another eight years for it to be published, and in that time a lot of people told me I would have to add romance if I wanted to find a publisher, but I didn't, and I sold it, and it exists.
To those asking what books I'm referring to, it's my trilogy The Butterfly Assassin, The Hummingbird Killer and Moth to a Flame. They exist. If they sound like your thing, I'd be grateful if you could check them out, and share with your friends who like stabby complicated aroace girls being exploited by the arms industry.
