was doing a first aid course and it kept talking about how when applying first aid to a child you have to ask the PARENT for consent and how the child's consent is not enough unless you cannot reach the parent. and then immediately after there was a unit on shaken baby syndrome, and then mentioned abuse as a common source of children getting injured. and they didn't see the irony there. i later asked the instructor what to do about parental consent if the medical emergency was from the parent abusing the child and she was like "you still need to obtain parental consent. you can report the abuse though" not even acknowledging how fucked the whole system is. i hate it here. youth rights now
call me terminally academia-brained but i do think a lot of the fun of character analysis is figuring out how to build a compelling argument for a particular reading using lines of evidence from canon as well as meta/intertextual support
and you could say that what i’m saying here is basically “a lot of the fun of doing character analysis is doing character analysis” but let’s be real a lot of fandom character analysis is pretty heavily vibes-based. and i think that’s where i really chafe up against the traditional thought-terminating fandom attitude of like, everyone’s opinions hold equal weight and any interrogation of that is inherently hostile. because i think it’s fascinating to dig into where others are coming from in terms of their views on characters or dynamics or whatever, especially when they differ significantly from more commonly expressed views, and part of that digging is asking people okay what parts of canon are you drawing from to support your opinion? what parts of canon are you disregarding or downplaying? how does this argument hold up in the light of how race, gender, class, ability, etc. operate both in the piece’s in-fiction and real world contexts?
Claudia (Interview with the Vampire) vs. Korra (Avatar: The Legend of Korra)
Claudia
Korra
Remaining time: 6 days 4 hours
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!
Korra:
Fandom picked her apart, called her a b*tch, blamed her for every bad thing that happened TO HER in the plot, disliked that she's loud, disliked that she's strong, disliked that she's confident in her strength, disliked that she's not like their beloved boy Aang. It's been years and you still can't sneeze in this fandom without something starting to yell that Korra is the worst Avatar ever.
She is so so strong. She did her best. She faced down enemies and cataclysms like most Avatars before never did and she fought tooth and nail for both humans and spirits, almost dying in the process, multiple times. Her personal growth and the character arc of such is impressive and well done. She's ride or die for her friends and for strangers too. And the fact that she takes no crap and can punch someone's face in for it is a bonus, not a flaw.
She gets an insane amount of hate for not dealing with everything that happens to her "better", mainly for showing traits considered cool in male characters like being a hothead and choosing violence
My bisexual queen went through the horrors while saving her world four times and she does not deserve the hate she gets, give her a break
She made mistakes and experiences "negative" emotions. People acted like she was the devil incarnate. Meanwhile; those same people fawned over Zuko, who is not only notoriously hot-headed but also literally raided and burned whole villages. People also do not seem to hold the same contempt for Azula as they do for Korra, which I believe is in part due to racism/colorism.
She was trying her best and she had the whole world on her shoulders with very little help to hold it. also, put "korra back muscles" into the search engine of your choice and behold.
She is the next iteration of the Avatar after the original series' beloved Aang. She also is a woman so as you can imagine fans were Very Normal about that. (especially the "it's forced diversity!!" crowd)
It's so frustrating because Korra is a character that the writers tried to make the exact opposite of Aang, presumably to avoid treading the same ground again. And it makes her interesting! and imo a better fleshed out character than Aang. but fandom doesn't seem to like that opinion a lot!
People act like there's an explicit line between friendship and romance like This is how Platonic Friends act and if two people act like That they are a Romantic Couple. Buddy I have crossed the line so far that it's actually surprising to me and it's still friendship
"being aromantic means you never cross The Line" well maybe I'm so aromantic that no matter how far I cross the so called line I will never enter the romance territory. Get on my level.
they should invent a term for shipping were I don't think they should be in a romantic relationship however I believe they are each others parasite and separating them is not an option
A friend of mine says that every war
Is some violence in childhood coming closer.
Those whoppings in the shed weren’t a joke.
On the whole, it didn’t turn out well.
This has been going on for thousands
Of years! It doesn’t change. Something
Happened to me, and I can’t tell
Anyone, so it will happen to you.
we have to bring back the erotic thriller. in the 1970s a beautiful man could go to a beautiful italian villa and fuck every member of the family living there and then leave and that was the entire movie. and you could smoke indoors
God Is Looking Back @hillhouseeleanor - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
