jemmaprophet replied to your post: Fandom latching onto Caleb is entirely predictable...
His dad/big bro stuff with Nott is cute, but I quite enjoy most everyone else more. (And Mollymauk is a DELIGHTFUL WONDER) Ah well. Throw a white boy into a show and the fandom swarms him like chum.
re: that last bit: Yep. I’ve fallen into that trap myself, so there’s only so much finger-pointing I can do, but I keep getting warier of it. It was Tales from the Borderlands that really wore me down. I mean, I did the predictable fandom thing! I slashed two of the characters (Rhys and Vaughn, in my case), like you do! But the fandom got so overwhelmed and overpopulated by Rhys/Jack content, and the whole thing became way more about romanticizing the villain of the series than I could deal with. (Long story short: especially given our current national state of affairs, I was not in the mood for going all head over heels for an abusive corporate megalomaniac.) Meanwhile, everyone completely shoved aside the fact that the canonical romance in that story was between Rhys and Sasha -- a woman of color and a great character who got completely erased for the sake of making hot boys fuck.
I started feeling so uncomfortable, in part because I knew I was part of that problem, but when the R/S story I did write got almost no eyeballs in comparison to anything else, it also felt like I’d just be dumping all my time and effort down a hole if I tried to do anything about it. I eventually stopped writing in that space, started filtering an awful lot out of my feed, and pretty much pulled out of the fandom. It just wasn’t fun anymore.
Critical Role, by contrast, was such a breath of fresh air where shipping was concerned -- and, sure, I'm focusing here on my favorite ship in particular -- in that for ONCE, people actually gave a fuck about canon. People weren’t shoving Vex off in order to make Percy boink someone else, and in fact everyone pretty much universally agreed that Vex was on top of things in that pairing (because, well, obviously). Was fandom perfect about it? Nope. Did it still center a broody white boy? Sure. Did it at least not erase the woman in the plot, and let her be vibrant, interesting, in charge, and unreservedly loved? For once, yes.
I’m feeling less great about where fandom energies and sympathies are going this time around, and the way people were so quick to make shipping and sexuality their top priorities before we knew enough about the characters for it to make any sense. It still feels awfully premature to me. But take one look at AO3 and...oh boy.
So: yeah, I’m feeling like an awful misfit in these parts again, and I’m not loving it.
That said, yes, Molly is a delightful wonder, i love Jester beyond the telling of it, I want so badly to know what’s going on with Fjord, I want to hang out with Beau, I’m getting awfully attached to Nott, and I want as much of Yasha as we can possibly get. I love the cast, for the most part. But Caleb is bothering me, and I can tell where fandom wants to go with him anyway, and it’s making me cranky.
