#malpractice analysis

[namelessvoid77]

something i really like is house's (character) obsession with like... media that people often deem "simple", in various ways. he watches medical soap operas especially throughout the early seasons, in prescription passion he treats an actor from his favorite soap, in unwritten we learn he's a fan of a popular children's series that the patient writes. it points to an interesting form of escapism. in these stories things get wrapped up nicely. while there's obviously drama and conflict throughout, things are expected to have a happy, or at least neat, ending. this contrasts with house's perception of and experience with real life. in fact, in unwritten, when he learns the open-ended ending of the patient's jack cannon series, he hates it. he initially considers the way she wrote it to be part of her mental status, but when she's cured and says she isn't going to change it, he's baffled. there are too many open threads, too many unanswered questions. she insists things are better this way, that the reader can theorize about their own answers. he says that stories should have beginnings, middles, and ends; she says that real life isn't like that; he almost lashes out at her and tells her the real way her son died before he notices cuddy watching. he doesn't want his stories to mimic real life. he wants to use them to escape from it. this is a really interesting aspect about his desire for romanticism and idealism, for a happy ending, but his simultaneous belief that that's not how reality works. his life has enough tragedies, unsatisfying endings, mistakes, hardships-- he wants his fiction to be simpler, more straightforward, easier. it's so hard for him to be happy because he genuinely, thoroughly believes that everything will end in tragedy, but he so badly wishes that weren't the case.

[namelessvoid77]

it is so crazy how much people hate cameron for leaving chase after dibala, or hate cameron in general for her reaction to the entire dibala situation, when like… she kind of has the average persons stance on the subject doesn’t she? she’s morally opposed to treating/actively helping him, she clearly wouldn’t be upset if he died of his illness or if an unknown third party assassinates him. however, she’s not going to pull the trigger herself, and she’s shaken when she learns someone she knows and loves has. how many people passively wish death on whatever dictator/corrupt leader/politician; how many of them are actively planning to show up with a gun at their next speaking engagement? cameron isn’t hypocritical for this. she’s reasonable. she’s probably just like you. even if she was hypocritical for her stance…. isn’t chase then too? he shouts out a warning to save dibala, he tells cameron that it’s “completely unnatural” to be wishing death upon him and that only a psychopath can kill someone without losing it, and then… he kills him. directly. of course she’s shocked, of course she’s shaken, of course she wants to respond by leaving or doing something differently. she wasn’t even initially planning on leaving him. how exactly did you want her to react?

[namelessvoid77]

also like tbh some of you do textual analysis of characters as if they were real people with relevant parts of their lives unknown to us. which is just, not how that works. to use lesbian cameron as an example: is it possible that there’s a real life human being out there who is having regular and enthusiastic sex with men to the extent that cameron does who is a lesbian experiencing comphet? probably. sure. the human experience is vast and complex. but cameron is not a real person. she is a character on a show who is operating as a narrative device to communicate something. and we are expected to assume that what we learn about that character— or, in cases, something deliberately and obviously concealed about them— is all the relevant information we need to draw conclusions about their characterization and their function in the story. calling cameron a lesbian requires the assumption of a lot of internal feelings on her part that we have legitimately zero evidence of, both in terms of lack of attraction to men AND attraction to women. if she were a real person, sure, maybe those things are just going on out of the public’s eye. but when you start assuming that things could just be going on without the audience knowing with literally NO evidence to back it up… you’re just making things up. sorry! like, imagine if you did that in an english class or something. imagine basing a serious character interpretation off of something that MIGHT have happened that we weren’t privy to and has no evidence suggesting it. like… you can’t do that! make AUs til you die but like, you’re not engaging with the text and i’d like it if you stopped pretending that you are.

[namelessvoid77]

it's been established people (willfully or not) misinterpret house's jokes about being gay as him actually being gay/written as queercoded as opposed to pretty straightforward homophobia, but i honestly think people do the same thing with calling house potentially autistc because of lines in the sand. he says: "i don't pity this kid, i envy him" about a high support needs autistic child. i see a lot of people reference this to call house potentially autistic. to be fair on the people who headcanon him as such, wilson himself does bring up aspergers (which, i'm sure most people know is an outdated diagnosis and would know just be known as autism spectrum disorder) but also... i'd remind people that wilson does not actually think house is autistic. it was a lie.

my main point here is that "i envy this autistic person" is not actually an indication of autism or any other form of neurodivergency, it is ableism. this is an extremely common thing people say to people with... well really any form of disability. oh, you have a wheelchair? i'm so jealous you get to sit all the time. oh, you have adhd? i'm so jealous you get to turn in assignments late. oh, you have chronic fatigue? i'm so jealous you get to sleep all the time. oh, you have autism? i'm so jealous you get to get out of traditional social niceties.

the reason saying these things is ableist, if it needs explaining, is because these statements ignore that all the stuff you are "jealous" of are either accommodations or symptoms that actually make life incredibly difficult in a wide range of ways. people don't "get" wheelchairs, they need them to have access to mobility, and many places are incredibly inaccessible for them. people with chronic fatigue don't "get" to sleep all the time, their bodies literally have to, and depending on severity it can have severe impacts on quality of life or the ability to participate in it. people with autism don't "get" to avoid being polite, avoid eye contact, avoid small talk, etc. they in many cases literally cannot participate in/pick up on these things which can lead to being misunderstood or severe social isolation. im... assuming most people are familiar with this? which is why i am a bit annoyed at people interpreting house's "i envy him" statement as a symptom of neurodivergence. if anything, it's really an indication that he's not. it illustrates a severe misunderstanding of what autism is and how it affects people. it was an ableist statement, plain and simple, even if the show itself may not be framing it that way.

this, by the way, does not mean you cannot headcanon house as autistic; in the same way i think everyone is free to headcanon him as gay. i just think... taking this specific episode as evidence of it is a severe misinterpretation, and honestly i think the entire episode has A Lot going on that is a very 2000s understanding of what autism is-- it rubs me very much the wrong way when people imply this episode is evidence of house's neurodivergence.

[namelessvoid77]

How much of this sexuality discourse do you think is rooted in thinking one sexuality is superior to another (or, conversely, thinking liking men is worse than liking women)?

also i'm so sorry for all the asks you've been getting recently for having correct takes

i think less of it is about pure superiority and more about being unable to relate to experiences that aren't your own.

the trend you'll see with a lot of queer headcanons, especially ones that go explicitly against canon, is "well they're my favorite and i'm a lesbian so they have to be a lesbian". which is obviously fine in a very "playing dolls and not actually analyzing the text" way, you're allowed to have fun, but people lose the plot a little [quite literally lmfao] when they start implying that those headcanons are genuinely the case in the actual text of the show. it truly begs the question: why can you ONLY care about this character when they share a sexuality with you? and, if that's the criteria for you, why are you choosing to push that label on a canonically straight character when there ARE real lesbian characters out there? of course, there can always be more queer rep in media, but also some people really aren't trying very hard to engage with what does exist.

i do think there is something to be said about the sort of faux feminism people often weaponize when they call a character a lesbian. "fuck all men, only date women, cheat with a woman and divorce your husband its better for you" etc etc. though it may not look like it at first, this is misogyny: there is nothing inherently "pure" or "better" about sapphic relationships, they can be equally as toxic and devastating as any het relationship; there is a lot of misogyny in ignoring a woman's choices about her own relationships, it doesn't really matter if he's "right for her", it matters if she wants to be with him or not and that applies to wlw relationships as well; treating a grown ass woman as someone who's "lost" and "needs to be saved" is patronizing and misogynistic; equally, the woman placed in the position of the "savior" is being assigned a lot of emotional labor they likely wouldn't want or be able to provide. in that sense, i guess you could say people are painting lesbian relationships as falsely "superior" in some way.

the irony of it all is that i think this entire ideology is actually most harmful to lesbians. telling women that dating other women should "fix" them and implying that those relationships can't be toxic or abusive is actually extremely dangerous rhetoric, especially for trans lesbians who are most often the targets of abuse. i also feel like it plays into this sort of... sanitization? of lesbianism that i've seen especially online, which is just a whole other topic lmfaoo.

i'll also note that a lot of the women people want to hc as lesbians are conveniently the second half of a ship that "interferes" with an m/m ship. in house fandom cuddy is probably the best example of this: do people really care about seeing her as a lesbian, or do they just want to get her out of the way of their preferred yaoi? a lot of fics under f/f on ao3 are also tagged with h/lson, making it pretty obvious what the nature of the femslash ship is in the fic. this is more obvious misogyny.

in general, i have noticed that fandom has a tendency to... commodify queerness, i think is the word. every character gets a queer label whether or not it makes sense in canon, and this is apparently Woke and Queer Activism; i find it interesting that this isn't ever done on a wide scale with other identities. people also like to use labels, transness especially, as a sort of way to ragebait a creator or actor, or even just like... "fix" an otherwise problematic media. people only headcanon chase as trans because jesse spencer is transphobic. it really makes me mad, because you're not at all exploring transness in a genuine way or how that character interacts with gender identity, you're using it as some kind of weird self-satisfying revenge that the person isn't even going to be affected by. that is literally just transphobia. [meanwhile, canon trans characters get ignored or vitriolically hated. interesting isn't it.]

people in fandom pride themselves on their ability to queer-ify everything, even if that queer-ification is actively harmful in many ways, while turning the other way when it comes to misogyny, racism, ableism, etc., a lot of which they are perpetuating through those queer headcanons. some of it is, of course, projection which circles back to my original point: why can you only care about characters you have something in common with? why do you feel the need to disguise that fact and insist something is true in the text when it's not? why are you even engaging with a text that you seemingly want to change in every conceivable way?

[namelessvoid77]

i think it happens multiple times that they have a munchausens/ suspected munchausens patient and house specifically REALLY pushes for them to find if there is a legitimate physical root to their condition. and idk! i just really like that. if someone IS actually sick, even if they are faking some symptoms, a munchausens diagnosis is basically a sentence to never be taken seriously by medical professionals. so his persistence is not only something i just… like about him (as someone who is often not taken seriously by doctors), it also makes so much sense with his infarction and his character in general.

[namelessvoid77]

watching these early seasons really makes me sad how much they lost house's character later on. he literally drops his cane and runs to save a baby in forever. as much as he's cynical, an asshole, pretty racist, etc etc, he cares. he wants things to have a happy ending, he just rarely believes they will. but i think they fell away from that especially in s7 and 8. they lost "cares and is secretly kind of a romantic" but kept "cynical asshole". its sad.

[namelessvoid77]

what do you think about lesbian cuddy

given the influx of other asks of this nature ive been getting this is almost certainly not a legitimate question but its more fun for me if i treat it like one so im going to

so like, no, cuddy isn't a lesbian. it's too important to the story that she is actually in love with house for that to be textually true. i think a lot of people who hc her as a lesbian are actually just doing it to get her "out of the way" of h/lson, or even just to write huddy out of the story completely and do whatever they want with femslash pairings, OR using the defense of "being with a woman would fix her", all of that obviously being misogynistic toward her character. HOWEVER, i've always been able to see more hypothetical merit to exploring cuddy as a lesbian because she is like, very very Weird about relationships. the way she constantly pursues what she feels like she's supposed to want, what the "correct" way for her to be happy and settle is. i can certainly see how that resonates.

but like what's really going on there is that i think house md in general has a lot of themes about perception and conformity-- with all the characters, not just cuddy-- that resonate with queer people, along with other groups [neurodivergent and disabled people for one. i mean, cuddy herself is disabled and so is Literally The Main Character]. i think we can identify a character or story as having themes that are adjacent to queerness or that could even be read through a queer lens without disregarding that that isn't what's happening in the source material.

all that being said, when i pair cuddy with women [well, one woman. and its masters. ask me about lesbian masters. please. she is the only character in this show i see as a lesbian] i prefer to make her a] bisexual because she obviously likes men b] just equally as Weird in relationships with women. no, being with a woman wouldn't fix her, i actually want it to make her worse in many ways. her problems run deeper than house and i think that's beautiful.