I think a lot of morally gray women enjoyers in this fandom don't actually want to deal with the consequences of a morally gray woman. You can't call Jason a nazi or a cop and let Barbara "pro cop surveillance state that uses the governments bombs with pretty much no opposition" Gordon slide by with a stamp of moral superiority. Bruce/Jason/Dick can't be obsessed with their man pain to selfish ends and unable to get over themselves while Cassandra "whole personality and moral philosophy is a trauma response she has never actually evaluated the effectiveness of" Cain is walking around projecting on anyone she sees a passing resemblance to herself in. You can't criticize Slade's emotional neglect/lying/cheating but make Adeline seem like the victim of their relationship as the one with objectively more power in their dynamic for most of their marriage (older than him, position of authority, better combatant/very prone to putting her hands on him, the one with the financial power and family support and public relations due to her old money family in the older comics) those bitches are toxic4toxic and Adeline has always held a lot of agency in Deathstroke comics that characters like Rose or Tara are denied.
I'm not saying fans of these characters are bad/the characters are bad/that you HAVE to criticise their every action to enjoy them, but I am saying if you don't give their actions the same narrative weight as the men YOU are contributing to the inequality problem. The "women are allowed to be evil because they're women but when men do it they really are evil" rhetoric is a form of infantalization. It's just "women/femininity are inherently good and pure while men/masculinity is inherently dirty and bad" bioessentialism repackaged under #girlboss that, in attempting to wave away any analysis that might invoke criticism, ultimately undermines the complexity of the characters as a whole. These women are messy! They're not bastions of moral righteousness and responsibility who are always right!
They fuck up, sometimes they hurt people, sometimes they do it on purpose, sometimes they impose their will on others because they believe their way is the right way and they violate people's privacy, autonomy, and boundaries to do it! It's okay for women to have flaws that aren't quirky and sexy that's the goal of complex female characters actually. Let them be complex that's what we want. You should want people to put weight on the actions of your characters and acknowledge their flaws and do fun story things with them instead of sanding them down into The Normal One, or The Mom Friend, or The Big Sister, or The Sad Ex Wife or whatever. Fanon is not going to stop doing that if even their fans handwave the batshit/dubious/straight up bad stuff they do and never actually analyze them from the same perspective they do the male characters.
blakekathryn
germansingergirl
prguitarman
romaincrisis
janainaart
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
dailybridgerton
