fandom meme, any/all: X, Y, Z?
it’s been an age & a half since i requested asks so PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE TIMESTAMP IN THE CORNER. i love & appreciate everyone who sent me an ask and am slowly getting around to it now that real life is slowly settling back into something approaching normal! 💛
X / TOP 5-10 CHARACTERS WHO YOU WILL DIE DEFENDING.
well, i answered a "top ten characters" a while ago here but the phrasing of this question makes me go in a slightly different direction! so here's five characters that fandom/canon has made me fiercely protective over, either because they got a raw deal from the writers or because fandom-at-large mischaracterizes them. (for example, in every universe matt murdock is a Very Good Boy, but because he's the pov character of a long-running title & the fandom woobie, i don't think he necessarily needs defending in a way that some other characters might.)
aki izayoi of yu-gi-oh! 5d's. i literally think the first online catfight i got into was someone on a yu-gi-oh forum claiming that aki hadn't faced any hardship in comparison to yuusei. anyway aki is my alive girl, my role model and my first crush, the best female character in the ycu (yu-gi-oh! cinematic universe) as of the time i stopped watching, an angel that has never done anything wrong in her life, and half of the only valid het couple (with yuusei). i will not be taking questions at this time.
erik lehnsherr of marvel (all verses but especially xmcu). ok in fairness he did do pretty well for himself canon-wise (original trilogy is NOT canon in this house, we don't stand for that nonsense here) but when i first got into cherik i found that overwhelmingly he was cast in the role of the oblivious asshole across from long-suffering saint charles. & there's nothing wrong with that! it just started to get a little stale when every fic i read was like that. i mean, i adore charles, he is my son, but like, he can be a saint and a trashbag!! let charles drink from a volumetric flask and say the wrong things at the worst moments. so i uh. made a tag. #Erik Lehnsherr Defense Squad, if you're curious.
steve rogers of marvel (mcu). okay this is like. half a fanon thing and half a canon thing which adds up to a whole injustice. that's how that works, right? so the canon thing is endgame & all the articles that were written by mainstream news sources about how steve choosing to live in a timeline branch with peggy made no sense whatsoever. and i even adore steggy!! the fanon thing is that both of the main steve pairings, stony & stucky, had a... tendency, shall we say, to only care about steve inasmuch as he could heal his love interest's emotional wounds & also fuck them. not all stucky/stony fans! not even most. but i think someone once said that steve was more like a glorified walking dildo than a character for certain writers of these tendencies, and... yeah. that was apt. i don't know if it's like that now, i haven't read mcu fic in a long time (except for whatever sabre has going on), but the two moderate irritations combine to make me massively defensive over him.
samuel chung / blindspot of marvel (616). WHY IS HE NOT A MAJOR CHARACTER IN ZDARSKYDEVIL? RACISM. THAT IS WHY.
mary winchester née campbell of supernatural. the fact that she was NOT immediately embraced by the fandom upon her resurrection is absolute garbage. i was writing garbage mary meta in like, season eight pushing back against the perception that if mary had raised sam & dean instead of john, everything would've been perfect and wonderful and canon would be solved, as though she wasn't a deeply fucked up person just from the glimpses we saw of her in seasons 4 and 5!! as though she didn't pioneer the issues that made sam girls cry over him!! anyway mary got resurrected and turned out to be kind of selfish, but still no one beats carver-era sam and dean for selfishness, and also her children were grown, how was she supposed to demonstrate unconditional love? anyway mary DID effectively utilize girl power by betraying her sons and hooking up with Bad Ianto.
wanda maximoff (616 and the good mcu version that lives in my head) & jean grey (all realities), who i love in theory but have also never had a storyline that i liked. whitney frost (agent carter), raina (agents of shield), & melinda may (agents of shield), who i straightforwardly adore but haven't engaged in enough discourse around them to like. be mad about it. they all want what izayoi aki has, which is well-written redemptive character arcs. 😔
if this looks comics/marvel-heavy to you... you're right. 😔 no one knows how to abuse a character like marvel comics/studios. even if they do right by one version of a character (xmcu erik) they will make up for it by raking another version of them over the coals (ults erik. i love him but also i love the cw show supernatural. my taste is questionable in the extreme).
Y / YOUR SECONDHAND FANDOMS
in order of my personal familiarity with the source material: she-ra, various marvel runs i personally don't vibe with (avengers vol 3, new mutants, & venom come to mind), the witcher, london spy, various parts of fassbender's and mcavoy's ouevres 😔, bts (NO ONE CANCEL ME I JUST LOVE A WOMAN WITH BAD TASTE), dc comics & related fandoms, star wars esp. the mandalorian, [this is the point at which i stop enjoying the fanart and posts i don't understand], good omens, hades the game, the old guard, the magnus archives, mdzs / the untamed.
but honestly if something comes up on my dash enough that i have no familiarity with, i'll block it? there was a period of time right after the old guard came out where i couldn't throw a stone on my dash without hitting an old guard post, and i was really seriously avoiding any information for fear i might get sucked into it. so i blocked it. no shade on whatever i've blocked or its fans whatsoever (sometimes i still read the posts, for example i block "star wars" but read most of the posts anyway--what can i say i am not immune to space himbo/cgi mark hamill) & in fact i hope my use of unique tags encourages people to block my fandoms that they're not into!
Z / JUST RAMBLE
this has been less of an issue lately, but one thing i used to see a lot was posts going around encouraging people not to complain that they didn't like a certain trope, or wished a fandom generally wrote a character differently, etc. the reasoning was usually "a writer--fragile beings that they are!--who does write that trope/that characterization will see it and feel bad." & while i understand that, and i have come around to the idea of erring on the side of not leaving criticism on fic when no guidelines are given, i really think that there needs to be room in fandom for people to complain about it for comletely trivial reasons without being met with snide responses of "if you want to see it, write it yourself."
it's not that i don't completely believe that it will make writers feel bad--i was a particularly sensitive writer for years and seeing those "i hate when writers ______" posts absolutely didmake me feel awful--& it's not about thinking that writers need to "grow a thicker skin" or anything like that. it's more of an appreciation that sometimes these people are also writers, & that a general "i don't like when" post is very different from going onto someone's fic and saying "fuck you specifically" in the comments. it's about the way nowhere else do we say to people with petty complaints "hey you shouldn't make this post on your blog about how you hate the sound of trumpets, it could make beginning trumpet-players really sad!" it's about the way that a rule of "only positivity in fandom please!" can quickly stifle criticism of actually important things, like racism & ableism. not to mention that, well, complaining about shared pet peeves is the foundation for many a fandom friendship.
anyway. just let me be crotchety. get off my lawn, etc.
