for the choose violence ask game: any 2 questions you want to answer :3
ooo ooo fun. i think i'm gonna go with 8 & 16
#8 : common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about
cuddy fandom characterization!!!!! i think a lot of the fandom tends to lean way too far into cuddy being nurturing or "motherly" in their depictions of her. which is very funny lol. because she really isn't. she's actually very indifferent (borderline avoidant, one could argue) to the personal lives of her employees. she comes of as antagonistic towards them more often than she is nurturing. i think the biggest example of this is her relationship with cameron in the first three seasons. where she is especially harsh to her when, i think, if the fandom's interpretation of cuddy was true, she would likely go the easiest on cameron, due to their similarities and cameron's position as the odd-woman-out in the team.
this is not to say that cuddy isn't a good mother. because she is! but she can be a good mother and also not have those qualities extend to the people she employs (whom she has very little personal relationship with lol.)
ALSO. since we're here. the idea that cuddy is weak-willed / lets house walk all over her, which even the show can lean into at times. and it's just. not correct. as per The Right Stuff, we know that the main reason cuddy lets house do the insane things he does is because his explanations make sense to her, in a way that they do not to a majority of people. which is what sets ppth/cuddy herself apart from the rest of the in-universe medical world. season 4 tackles this really well and i'm hoping to write more about it. but anyway. cuddy is not as easily manipulated / weak-willed as many think her to be, she just... understands house's brand of insanity.
#16 : you can't understand why so many people like this thing (characterization, trope, headcanon, etc)
ok. people are not going to like this one. but the trans/lesbian cuddy headcanons. i see both of these a lot and they lowkey get on my nerves but i get a little scared of critiquing them out of fear of being called -phobic (which is funny as i . am a lesbian and also trans . ) but i'm going to use this as an attempt to articulate it. (though, i'm going to focus mainly on the trans one here because the themes i refer to are much more prevalent where i am at currently in the show, whereas the sexuality stuff is explored more later on. though i can definitely make a different post discussing that if anyone's interested ^_^)
i think that these headcanons only really have merit if you've only watched the first season lol. because post-season 1, not only is cuddy being a cisgender woman incredibly crucial to her story, but so is her attraction to house (though, to a lesser extent at that point), who is a man. i've seen arguments against this, writing it off as unimportant, mostly with the belief that the argument is only rooted in 'she canonically has a uterus/persues ivf/etc' and that that alone isn't a good enough reason to keep people from headcanoning what they want.
and i see the appeal of that argument. if it were true! but... it isn't. cuddy's infertility (i'm really on this train recently, huh?) and what it means for her character is the real root here. making her transfem waters down all of the intricacies that come with that. because with that, instead of her infertility -- and how it deeply wounds her and affects her view of herself/her life -- being something that is important to her character, it is just a side effect of her being a trans woman. it's watered down completely. there is nothing to grapple with there, because trans women know they cannot get pregnant, but for a cis woman -- cuddy, specifically --, being infertile can feel like a personal failure. a betrayal of the body for the one thing it was built to do. there's a lot of neat character stuff there (which i alluded to a bit in my last post). and that headcanon completely writes it off.
add the fact that this storyline is basically the only main cuddy storyline that we get outside of her attraction to house, and... yeah, i don't like it being written off for the sake of a headcanon. sorry. this alone changes (erases) so much of her character on a fundamental level.
not to say that trans people cannot have complicated relationships to parenthood, and that there shouldn't be stories that reflect that (there absolutely should), but i am saying that cuddy's story isn't one of them! and i think it's disrespectful to the writing of the show/cuddy as a character, cis women whose stories cuddy reflects, and trans women who do struggle with their relationships to motherhood, to try to act like it is.
and then there's also the people who say shit like "it explains why she's an endocrinologist and infertile" and to those people i say: i don't respect you enough to write another argument.
thank you for the ask :))) i got very ramble-y here oops.
sometimes i have Stuff i posted on twt that i Think Would go Nuts here but the idea of Crossposting like that makes me feel like im Industry Planting SO HARD...
