the oldest reblogs for this post that i can find are from january 2nd of 2013. this can has been getting kicked around tumblr for almost 13½ years now
Ugly Duckling sequel where the swan is like hey it's nobody's fault and I don't think anyone did anything wrong per se but nonetheless I did feel really alienated and depressed for most of my youth and those years do continue to affect me in the present day and their mom is like, so what you're saying is that you think I'm a failure and a bad duck.
The way all the 2020s have done so far have been making me categorically against every new generation of tech that comes out is insane. Like I'm from a technological boom generation, saw the first portable phones, nokias & blackberries & flipphones etc, and the first smartphones, and the first ipods & ipads & tablets in general while still having cassettes & DVD & MP3 players around so I know how all of it work, I had computer classes in high school, I did the transition between home desktop computers to laptops and back to gaming computers. But then they started to put internet in your printer & microwave, everything has ads & AI now and every update is worst than the last. I literally loved technology and they ruined it
the poster that this incredible illustration is based on is extremely striking. but while searching for it, I also found earlier posters for conveying this message along with a corresponding one for summer, and I fucking love them. absolutely lovely graphic design work. (both are from 1924, artist is Austin Cooper)
the one I was looking for originally also has a summer variant. (artist is Frederick Charles Herrick: 'it is warmer below' is from 1927, 'it is cooler below' is 1926)
Mary Winchester (Supernatural) vs. Abby Anderson (The Last of Us)
Mary Winchester
Abby Anderson
Remaining time: 3 days 4 hours
Propaganda below the cut:
Mary Winchester:
The show brought her back to show she has flaws and wasn't a perfect mother and people act like this was a stupid decision and dislike her character for being messy and not acting like a mother to her now adult sons when that is literally the point of her character.
The fandom largely adopts the showâs misogyny towards Mary and all of its female characters. I donât actually see very much of this first hand because I am good at curating my online experience, but I do know that people tend to think she should have been a better mom and blame her for things that it makes no sense to blame her for. The vast majority of the fandom also just generally takes Deanâs/the show runnersâ perceptions of all the events in the show to be accurate, and all of those views that they take to be accurate are misogynistic.
Mary is a fascinating part of the dead girl genre, especially in how similar to Laura Palmer she is. They both had men trying to solve/avenge their murder as the whole plot of their show, but they also were both entirely misunderstood by these men. Nobody knew about Lauraâs sex life/drug use/etc. and nobody knew about Mary being a hunter. Considering that SPN drew some inspiration from Twin Peaks, I would almost think that this is on purpose, but the show itself is so misogynistic that I wonder if they could have done commentary on misogyny on purpose. Mary is the most interesting character in the show imo and Iâm sad that the fandom at large doesnât have more intelligent discussions about her.
Hated for her choices, for wanting to be her own person and not babying her adult children
She was a badass, who was thrown into an impossible situation and did the best she could with it
EVERYTHING she gets hate for is something sam and/or dean have also done or would do in the same scenario! she gets hate for making a demon deal to save her (not yet) husband. dean and john both made demon deals to save family members and they don't get hate regardless of the aftermath! (we also see what happened in a world where she didn't make the demon deal and she gets hate for it anyways.) she gets hate for joining the british men of letters, but sam (who was tortured by them) joins them too in the episode following her confession that she joined them! she hid the hunting life from john and sam did the same thing with EVERY PARTNER he had! she left her ADULT sons behind so that she could cope with being brought back to life 30 years in the future and the fandom acts like she's guilty of child neglect. you know who else repeatedly left family behind to deal with things on his own and doesn't get the same level of vitriol? SAM!
She was brought back into a world where everything she knew was gone, her sons were adults (and older than her at this point), after being violently killed, and somehow sheâs the bad one for not immediately adjusting and wanting space? Dean throws several tantrums, giving her the cold shoulder and generally being passive aggressive the entire season and then blaming her for dying and his childhood as if thatâs her fault. And Sam and the other characters support him and centre the brothersâ pain over hers when again she was brought back into this new scary world with these men who she doesnât know. Both fandom and show punish her for not immediately wanting to baby these grown men. And she has to apologise and repent by sacrificing herself. And fandom ofc eats it up, at times even calling worse than their abusive father, blaming her for everything that happens in the show and ofc the million bashing fics where Dean gets to yell at her, because SPN fans and writers love when men get to yell at women. Also they shame her a lot for having casual sex with one of the characters, because mothers arenât supposed to have sexual relationships đ
Okay, so there's a scene in Supernatural where Mary tells Dean, her son, "I am not just your mother and you are no longer a child." This is a perfectly reasonable sentiment, as Dean is, literally, 38 years old at this point. It's also an interesting statement for Mary to make imo, because it suggests that both Mary and Dean should grapple with the idea that she was never the perfect wife/mother that her husband and children thought of her as.
Dean responds to her statement with, "I never was." And there's many analyses of this scene out there written by people who use this as evidence of Dean's manpain, and his sad childhood, and how Mary was actually a bad mother all along - instead of engaging with the implications of her original statement and how that makes HER character more complex. She's a nuanced character! She's been through a lot, and that informs the complicated, sometimes good-sometimes bad decisions she makes!! Except many SPN fans are obsessed with hating Mary for "being a bad mother" (read: dying and not getting to raise her children, then coming back to life and not fitting into the perfect motherly ideal her children have constructed of her).
And the thing is: SPN is famously bad with women, right? SPN is like, the Misogyny Show, and the show kind of has a Madonna/whore complex about the female characters where they're either perfect or irredeemable. But I would actually consider Mary to be one of the better-handled female characters on the show? The show starts with her dying, and her husband going on this quest to avenge her death and find her killer, etc etc, and there's this idea that Mary was this beautiful, perfect wife/mother. But the show actually works to deconstruct this idea somewhat, and late in the show we start to see that Mary was never a perfect wife, and she had her own life, and her own secrets, and real interiority. And this really nuances her character! It's interesting!
And yet, even though the writers actually did want (for once) the audience to view Mary as a complicated character, lots of fans STILL refuse to engage with this idea. People want her to be a bad mother to act as fuel for Sam and Dean's (mostly Dean) manpain. It drives me fucking crazy.
God I could yap about Mary Winchester for HOURS. Like we all know that supernatural is misogynistic as fuck but usually it's the writers doing the heavy lifting. But in Mary's case the vast majority of the misogyny is coming straight from the fans.
Like Mary started out as a classic case of fridged woman to drive man pain. Then the writers gave her a little more depth and nuance and intrigue through time travel shenanigans but that was mostly just setting up convoluted parallels and backstory stuff rather than actually exploring her as a character. But then they did something genuinely interesting. They. Unfridged. Her. They plucked her straight out of that fridge, plonked her down into the narrative over 30 years after she initially died, then said have fun. And that is so cool!
Mary comes back to life and she gets to exist as an actual character! She gets to be more than a perfect mother and perfect wife placed on some fantasy pedestal that no one could ever live up to. She gets to be badass. She gets to be messy. She gets to be flawed and complex while still being a genuinely kind person trying to do the right thing in a terrible situation. I mean, from her perspective she literally just woke up one day and her 6 month and 4 year old sons were suddenly older than her! That is an insane situation to be in! Of course it takes her a little time to adjust.
And how does the fandom react to a genuinely complex character in a fairly unique and fascinating situation? Pure hatred of course. Her many "crimes" include: making a dodgy deal as a teenager immediately after her parents and (then) boyfriend were murdered, being dead so unable to raise her children, not magically knowing that her husband decided to neglect and abuse their children while she was dead, taking more than 5 minutes to adjust to suddenly being alive and 33 years in the future and younger than her children, not dropping everything to coddle her two FULL GROWN ADULT CHILDREN (mid & late 30s) WHO. ARE. OLDER. THAN. HER. And talking to the British (yeah that was a whole thing I'm not gonna get into just know that the writing was shit)
As punishment for those truly heinous crimes, the fandom consistently treats her with the same level of disdain as John Winchester (has several documented cases of canon child abuse and over 6000 AO3 fics dedicated to his terrible parenting) if not more. And they will only talk about her to complain.
Oh yeah. And then the writers decided to re-fridge her.
Free all the women in supernatural but most of all free my girl Mary.
Abby Anderson:
Abby exhibits all the same flaws (incredibly central to the overall story of the game) as Joel and Ellie do, but Joel gets a pass 'cause he's the beloved man and Ellie barely gets a pass because she's at least at "our" side. Meanwhile Abby is afforded no such grace. Her being muscular only makes things worse because looking "unattractive" to a general boring male audience is a crime even worse than killing their blorbo (while said blorbo can surely kill whoever he wants and the theme of the narrative is just irrelevant I suppose). Plus those same muscles lead to any femininity she has (and she has notably more than Ellie) being denied to her, 'cause. Booo, muscles. Manly.
Abby starts as a traumatized revenge-obsessed girl much like Ellie then becomes in turn. As the plot goes on she displays actual compassion over and over. She shows that she's not a monster. The way she helps Lev and Yara, the way she takes Lev under her wing. (The way she's never transphobic to him either). The way she ends up sparing Dina despite narratively having every "right" to take that life(s) for a life(s). She does that growth before the other people in the narrative do. And she deserved so much more grace, if not love, than she got.
Death threats to the actress, massive temper tantrum online, endless debates about how her physique isn't realistic, compilations of her in-game deaths going viral with comments all saying how much they hate herâŚ.. People will straight up be so smug about how "wow the game is telling me revenge is bad I already knew that" and then bullied several actual human beings as revenge for a fictional character's death. Like maybe y'all do need to have someone sit you down pre-K style and explain that revenge is bad ÂŻ_(ă)_/ÂŻ
A) she's jacked as hell B) her gameplay is amazing C) yeah she killed everyone's favorite meow meow but I support women's wrongs â¤ď¸ D) I don't even need to support women's wrongs she was kind of right
For Abby Anderson, they didnât just send death threats to her actress, they also sent death threats to her husband AND HER INFANT SON. She literally had the company she worked for consult her on how to protect her in case the more aggressive âfansâ wanted to approach her.
The alt-right backlash towards TLOU2 was pretty much entirely started because she was (incorrectly) assumed to be a transgender woman.
- it's either canon (e.g. mel/jayce arcane, arthur/guinevere bbcmerlin) or entirely plausible (e.g. prism or coupĂŠ/robert dispatch)
- fanbase overwhelmingly pairs nb man off with another nb man and disengages from the Black woman character, shunting her into a background wise & sassy caretaker role (for which there is a name) or leaving her out of fanworks entirely
- fans who do this ^ claim it is an expression of love and admiration for the Black woman character, actually, bc the nb man (who may be her canonical partner) "can't handle all that" (he may be perfectly competent and engaged; she may be totally low maintenance; it has no bearing), she's just too wonderful (too much) and out of his league (lacking in flaws and interiority and fan appeal)
have we all observed this and can we see the multiple dimensions in which it is racist âď¸ i'm not bringing it up to make any beautiful fujos feel bad abt shipping this or that, just to ask for some consideration of what ppl are saying abt Black women when they make their excuses to each other. like you can just not make the excuses. yk?
Hey, fat people deserve to have fun and get their needs met even if theyâre the least healthy mf you know. Fat people deserve proper medical care, and carbs, and to wear shorts and so many more things! EVEN IF THEY ARE UNWELL AND ESPECIALLY IF THAT UNWELLNESS IS DUE TO THEIR WEIGHT!!! Fat people deserve the world and more. Not just the healthy fats or attractive fats or small fats or fats that are fat because of medication or disability.
stormborns
snowghoul
ellievsbear
pixelskylines
baratheonpilled
titsay
germansingergirl
