At the risk of getting myself mad again, it is kind of wild that the 911 program on the American Broadcast Channel created an entire episode where the character whose most defining line is âlove me anywayâ got loved anyway and it was just setup to make the guy who loved him anyway that whole episode walk out the door and then for the next 2 seasons, heâs, like, barely tolerated by the people around him.
Sometimes you log on to tumblr dot com and see your beloved mutuals thirsting over unrisen sourdough men and you have to say a very very quiet âpassâ to yourself and let it go because inevitably the flat circle of time will bring around your turn to go gaga over some butterface dude or bug eyed girl and you must know that your beloved mutuals are saying a quiet âpassâ to themselves and leaving you to your moment of insanity in peace.
I mean like yeah i think Kamilaâs a cheater who got away with it on a technicality and Iâm not thrilled about the return of Russians to international sport because I know theyâre still running a state-sponsored doping program. However I also live in the real world where thatâs damnably hard to prove and when it comes to the politics of it all itâs next to impossible to argue for the exclusion of Russians on political grounds while continuing to allow Americans. While Americans at least have the freedom to vocally and vehemently disavow our current administrationâs actions, as seen with Amber and Alysa, the fact remains that the US is currently actively engaged in unauthorized warfare overseas and fucking the whole world to death when it comes to oil, and plenty of members of Team USA did show up to the White House this week so. Fairâs fair.
It is gonna suck to see the slobbering the judges will do on the Russian knob, but judging has always been about maaaaany factor$ out$ide of actual performance. Figure Skating is unfortunately an extremely bullshit sport. A bullshit sport that I love, but. Bullshit nonetheless.
I feel like modern people are not sufficiently despising the Bennets for being filthy rich and saving exactly nothing. Probably because a lot of people are under the misapprehension that they are poor. They're not, they are in the top 1% of income for their era. Compared to the average earnings at the time, their yearly income is around ÂŁ1.5 million.
But lets make it more accessible and say they have an income of $500,000 USD. Every single year. Every single year since their children were babies. Babies cost almost nothing. A nursemaid is like ÂŁ10/year and baby clothes are white for bleaching and are passed on through the children. The expenses at this time are very minimal.
Mr. & Mrs. Bennet had $500,000 for at least 15 years when the girls were small and saved exactly $0. Instead, Mrs. Bennet hosted parties where the food was 50x better than Lady Lucas's and, I don't know, bought herself fancy lace. Mr. Bennet probably purchased books. The education budget for their children was basically zero because they never had a proper governess.
Imagine the article, "I am a housewife. My husband and I make $500,000 per year, though about $200,000 of that must go to running our massive estate that we inherited and don't have to pay a mortgage on. We have no savings. When my husband dies, my daughter and I will only be left with only a tiny amount of money ($50,000 every year without lifting a finger) and the estate will go to a cousin. My daughters have no education and no money to inherit. I don't know what to do!!!"
Wouldn't you be reading that in absolute disdain? It is totally ridiculous that neither parent saved a single shilling. It is so stupid. They are both wasteful idiots. They both deserve our disgust.
Honestly, when Elizabeth visits Rosings and Lady Catherine is all like...
"You didn't have a governess?!"
"Your mother didn't even set work for you to do?!"
"They didn't even get you a tutor (aka go to London for the masters) for the subjects you were interested in?!"
"Your literal teenage sisters are Out even though they are teenagers?!"
We should be siding with her.
Like, I was home schooled and there is a lot of bad stereotypes about home schooling... But then there's the family that the home schoolers think are weird. The Bennets are that family.
#oh my god YES#this is the thing i am prepared to rant about at a moment's notice#modern audiences usually do NOT grok that the bennets are RICH rich#they are the 1%!#they are just INCREDIBLY BAD WITH MONEY#they ARE the people making $500k+ a year who STILL live paycheck to paycheck because they keep maxing out their credit cards on dumb shit!#they have a BUNCH of money coming in every year and they have been saving NONE of it because saving money is boring and tedious!#also it's fully insane that they are rich people who didn't send their daughters to school OR hire a governess#they gave those poor girls NO proper education even though they#(unlike many/most families in the time period!)#had the RESOURCES to educate their daughters exceptionally well!#the WAY Lady Catherine and Darcy phrase their initial criticism of the Bennets is rude and snobbish#but the criticism ITSELF is BEYOND VALID OMG#i am forever banging pots and pans#begging moderns viewers who have only seen 2005 P&P to understand that THE BENNETS ARE NOT POOR#OMG SERIOUSLY NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT#THEY JUST SUCK ASS AT HANDLING THEIR MONEY#pride and prejudice
Eve (The Bible) vs. Buffy Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Eve
Buffy Summers
Remaining time: 5 days 7 hours
Propaganda below the cut:
Eve:
Hi. It's me. I run this blog and make the polls. I submitted Eve because I kept waiting for someone else to do it and then no one did, so the blasphemy you see before you is all mine.
Anyway, it seems kind of silly to explain why Eve is a victim of fandom misogyny. It's pretty self-evident. But I went and reread the relevant chapters in Genesis for this (because I'm just that dedicated to procrastinating lol) and yeah, unsurprisingly, Adam's agency in the eating fruit from the tree of knowledge incident is totally erased. The Bible does acknowledge that Eve was talked into trying the fruit by the snake, just like Adam was talked into trying the fruit by Eve, but Eve is depicted as a far more active agent than Adam. Here's the quote (using NIV for the sake of simplicity): "When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it." So apparently Adam was just standing there the whole time ig? Just twiddling his thumbs, having nothing to say while his wife actively broke the one rule God gave them about living in the garden of Eden (and He threatened to kill them btw if they didn't follow this rule). And then Adam also breaks that rule, not out of any desire to do so, but just because his wife gave him something to eat. So I guess he has to eat it. It can't be helped!
But of course it has to be written that way, because the point of the Adam and Eve myth is to be an origin story for the patriarchy. That's how creation myths work; they're explanations for the way the world works. There are seven days in a week because that's how long it took God to make the world and also take a nap ig. And women exist because God didn't want Adam to be lonely. But that's not why women have to be subservient to men, it's specifically a punishment for Eve's crimes, or as God so delightfully puts it: "Because you have done this [âŠ] Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."
Also, let's be so for real, God totally set Adam and Eve up! He builds this beautiful garden right? And then in the middle of the garden He puts a tree that Adam and Eve aren't allowed to eat from. But importantly, the tree's fruit are what grants you knowledge of right and wrong, and also knowledge in general. Before they eat the fruit, Adam and Eve do not have the capacity for knowledge. Like everything else in the Adam and Eve story this is is yet another creation myth explanation for how life works; this is how humanity gained the ability, or at the least the potential to be knowledgeable and ethical. So, in other words, not only is God sticking this really enticing thing right in front of Adam and Eve and just daring them to test His boundaries, He also does this while deliberately denying them the capacity to differentiate right from wrong!!!!! God basically punishes them for pursuing the very thing that could have prevented them from eating the fruit in the first place! Total set up!
Anyway, I know just spent a long time talking about the text, and this is a tournament about fandom misogyny, not the misogyny of the source material, but I think it's relevant because the Bible is famously a pretty influential book. The Adam and Eve story didn't invent the patriarchy, it's a creation myth, an explanation for something that already existed. But it did provide annoying sexist uncles everywhere with ammo for their bullshit sexist beliefs. You see, they insist, we can't challenge the patriarchy, because it's not some bullshit artificial hierarchy that ultimately makes the world worse in every way. No, it's divinely ordained because God decided it would be womankind's collective punishment for Eve's actions.
All of which is especially annoying given that literally all she did was eat some fruit! Her son Cain killed his own brother for no fucking reason! And this was after Adam and Eve gained knowledge and like ethics or whatever from eating the fruit and presumably passed that ability down to their descendants and by extension to all of humanity. So when Cain killed his brother, we know he did so with the capacity to understand right from wrong which is not something Eve was capable of when she committed her big sin (eating fruit). But somehow Eve's actions, not Cain fully murdering his brother, are the origin of all sin??? Make it make sense!!!
Well actually, the reason it doesn't make sense is completely the fault of fandom misogyny. You see, the concept of "original sin", i.e., the idea that Eve invented sin by eating the fruit, is actually not in the source material at all (and by source material I mean the Old Testament of course). See that stuff is a later Christian interpretation that takes the already quite misogynistic text and makes it way more misogynistic for no real reason. I cannot stress this enough, this shit is fully Christian fanon. As a Jew, I can't remember a time when I didn't know this story, but I only learned that Christians believe that original sin shit about Eve by reading His Dark Materials when I was like eleven. And another thing that's fully fanon is this common portrayal of Eve as this like sexual seductress who uses her feminine wiles to make Adam eat the fruit. As you saw, that actually has zero basis in the text. That fucker didn't need any convincing. She literally just gives him the fruit and he eats it like the fucking dope he is.
Speaking of which, because the Bible needs Eve to be the guiltier party compared to Adam, in order to justify her punishment and by extension the patriarchy, it inadvertently results in Eve being a way more interesting character than her husband. Adam is a passive loser who does nothing of his own accord. Eve gives him fruit from the tree of knowledge, and he has no thoughts about it, head fully empty. He eats the fruit because his wife gave it to him. But Eve has motives! It's not just the snake manipulating her, she wants to gain wisdom! She's curious! Within this creation myth framework, she is the reason human beings have knowledge and wisdom. If it weren't for her eating the fruit (and getting Adam to eat it too, because he certainly wasn't making going to make any decisions on his own), we wouldn't have the capacity to know things, to understand right from wrong, or to learn. Eve gave us that!!!! She's kind of amazing!!! She's not supposed to be, obviously, we're supposed to judge her for her disobedience. But idk, I like having knowledge. Learning is one of the best things about being alive imo, and according to the Bible's creation myth, we only have that capacity because Eve decided to break the rules, to defy God openly. And she lived to tell the tale. That's fucking iconic, who's doing it like her?
So shout out to my girl Eve! What a legend! She doesn't deserve the hate and it's definitely not her fault that her husband is a little bitch.
Buffy Summers:
The fandom and punishes her for having relationships outside their OTP of choice
Fandom blames her for Spike's attempted rape of her and in general acts like she owed him her love. In general, fandom is very focused on fighting over which of Spike vs. Angel "deserved" her.
She's an iconic hero with cool hair and deserves better than being reduced to a reward for either manpire.
She gets reduced to just the question of which hot vampire she's going to end up with and then people say crazy victim blaming shit about her to top it all off.
She's the TV Protagonist of All Time.
Moderator's note: this next propaganda entry was too long to put in list format (at least according to tumblr, i tried) so it's indented instead:
I've seen a lot of people in the notes confused at Buffy's presence in this tournament and claiming that she's universally beloved. And I sort of get why they think that. From what I've seen at least, in recent years Buffy Summers has become a lot less controversial due to a variety of factors. And I get how that can make it seem like she's not actually subjected to much fandom misogyny. But what people need to understand is that a big part of the reason that Buffy (the character) elicits such defensiveness in some fans is because a lot of us witnessed literal decades of absolutely rancid misogynistic bullshit directed towards her.
When I first joined the fandom (circa 2012) like every other take I saw was about how Buffy was the worst part of her own show. This is an insane opinion to have, not only because Buffy is just such a fantastic character, but also because I cannot stress enough just how central her character is to show. It's her bildungsroman, everything is a metaphor for what she's going through. The tone and vibe of any given season is entirely dependent on how Buffy's feeling at the time. Like half the characters are there to be narrative parallels to her. The supporting cast is great, don't get me wrong, but I don't think I've ever seen a protagonist who protagonisted harder than Buffy Summers. So I genuinely don't understand what there is to like about the show if you don't like her.
Anyway, as I was saying, she was hated on constantly, called whiny for having what is essentially textbook clinical depression, called selfish despite constantly sacrificing her wants and needs for the sake of everyone else, victim blamed for being sexually assaulted by her ex, and generally punished for not grovelling more for forgiveness for her every mistake. Newer fans might not be aware of all that, hence the confusion, but I was there Gandalf. I remember.
And you don't just have to take my word for it, I have proof.
gabriellabelle ran a livejournal dedicated to Buffy between about 2006 and 2012. It's honestly kind of a miracle that her livejournal is still up. It's a really valuable resource, in part because a lot of her meta still holds up (I don't agree with everything she says or anything, and some of her takes are certainly of their time, but she does have some interesting and insightful analysis that I'm glad is still readily available) but for my purposes, it's also a very well-organized reminder of what the fandom was like back then. gabriellabelle was a Spuffy shipper who actually liked and cared about Buffy as a character, and this put her in conflict with a lot of other Spuffy shippers (not all of them obviously, and it's worth noting that misogyny in the Buffy fandom was certainly never a phenomenon exclusive to Spuffy shippers, that was just who this blogger specifically responded to most because it was her corner of the fandom) who often reduced Buffy to being nothing more than Spike's love interest and reward, while also simultaneously hating on her for not being nice enough to Spike. And I think you can really get a sense of just how dire things were by reading what accusations she had to defend Buffy from. So here is a sampling:
In this post, she argues against the legitimately common take at the time that Spike's actions in Seeing Red should not be constituted as sexual assault. If you're not familiar with that scene, I'm not going to go into specifics, but trust me, the idea that this was ever up for debate is patently absurd. And for all the many many problems with how the writers handled this scene, one thing they never did was suggest that the nature of Spike's actions were even remotely ambiguous. Multiple characters (including Spike!) describe what Spike did as a rape attempt, because that's just obviously what it was. To suggest otherwise requires a level of mental gymnastics that is almost impressive in its delusion. Truly, these people were shooting for a gold medal in fandom misogyny.
In this post, she responds to a lot of anti-Buffy takes, but the main one she addresses is that a lot of fans felt that Buffy didn't do enough to atone to Spike (yes, that Spike) for her treatment of him in season 6, and demanded that she deserved to be punished more.
In this post, she responds to fans calling Buffy selfish, which again, that's just a very very odd thing to say about Buffy Summers.
In this post she defends Buffy from people who call her whiny for having depression.
Also, she wrote this crackfic that was a parody of a lot of Spuffy fics from this era in which Buffy has to beg for forgiveness from Spike and her friends for how horrible she is. It's a pretty accurate if over-the-top summation of what a lot of fic at the time was like.
There's probably a lot more you can find by looking at this livejournal and older fandom stuff in general. I just need people to understand that the state of the fandom on tumblr now is not reflective of how things used to be. And to be clear, it's not like there's no modern day fandom misogyny directed towards Buffy. I've seen posts from this year where people victim blame Buffy for the bathroom scene, and the only real difference between those posts and the type of shit people were saying back then is that nowadays people use woker language to try to obscure the fact that they're doing textbook victim blaming, whereas back then people were comfortable saying whatever. But things used to be so so much worse, so it annoys me when people (unintentionally) whitewash that by saying that Buffy has always been beloved or whatever.
This isn't all the Buffy propaganda that's been submitted, there's also this ask and this ask but tumblr is really giving me trouble with the lengthy propaganda under polls, so i'm just going to have to link those two.
Abbie Mills (Sleepy Hollow) vs. Claudia (Interview with the Vampire)
Abbie Mills
Claudia
Remaining time: 5 days 7 hours
Propaganda below the cut:
Abbie Mills:
Some fans hated her for threatening the Ichabod/Katrina ship and for being a black woman main character of a genre show.
Abbie Mills was a hero with a great backstory and really fun banter with Ichabod. I have to stop there because if I get into the fuckery that occurred on the show itself my blood pressure will rise.
Black police lieutenant who hesitantly throws in her lot with Ichabod Crane, even to the point of leaving him sticky notes around her house explaining how modern things like indoor plumbing, coffee machines and co.puters work. Gradually they become very close, to the point that when reunited after separation they run to each other and she jumps into his arms. At one point he holds her close, whispering into her hair to remember their bond and that he'd be back for her. Naturally, the primary white fandom basically ignored her in favor of Crane's dead (white) wife Katrina. Around the time it was airing I was cursed with seeing 'racebent' (aka they made her white )art of Abbie because apparently the artist 'couldn't relate to her' as a Black woman. Oh and the series itself did her dirty by killing her off at the end of the first season and carrying on without her for the second. Justice for Leftenant Mills (Leftenant is what Crane calls her, he's British you see.)
The whip-smart second lead who got so shafted by the writing team by season 3 that she was barely appearing anymore (and nearly all the cast were complaining about it, not just her actress) by the time they killed her off for cheap shock value (and some would say killed the show with her, considering the massive ratings nosedive).
Claudia:
She's a young black woman who is constantly ignored over the men in the show and reduced to nothing more than tragic pieces of the mens' life story by many of the fans and sometimes even the showrunners.
Not only is she just the best girl around but she's so incredibly complex---we as the audience still don't know the real and true her. I would die to get to know her but it's shocking a large part of the IWTV fandom isn't the same!
I can't speak to her treatment from book/movie fans but TV fans literally only talk about her in relation to being Louis and lestats "daughter". By the end of her life she's in her 40s and yet the fandom only treats her as their young daughter and she is defined by that instead of her actual character
due to claudia being a black woman who is directly opposed to everyoneâs white male pookie (lestat) there has been a lot of misogyny thrown at her in the form of calling her a liar because the events of her personal diary (that was never supposed to be read by anyone) donât align with lestatâs own account of events. she is seen as manipulative and selfish and someone who was trying to drive a wedge between louis and lestat, and her own classification as a victim of abuse in this family dynamic is undermined by her efforts to remove herself and find her own community. the abuse she faces by other male leads like louis and armand is minimized even if fans are able to see lestatâs abuse for what it is, even though armand staged a lynching for her, louis, and her companion madeleine and lied about it, alongside louis minimizing lestat and armandâs actions against her. the fandom is happy to take all the male characters at face value but as far as claudia is concerned everything she did was duplicitous and self-serving.
claudia deserved better from her âfamilyâ and it breaks my heart that her life in the grand scheme of things was cut so short just as she was finding her happiness. she is incredibly funny and the love she finds with madeleine is so beautiful. the struggle of being a woman in a body that is at odds with you and who you really are and what you want to be able to do in the world is very compelling and easy to empathize with from so many different avenues whether itâs by race, disability, and/or gender/sexuality. she is such an incredible character that should be seen as more than just an obstacle and loustatâs dead daughter. her and madeleine are the best lesbian vampires and everyone should be tuning into the yuri.
She's either a horrible and manipulative girl who lies in her own personal diaries for some reason about the abuse she faced from her white father or she's an idiot who got what was coming to her when she was lynched or just a tool to be used to further the relationship between two men. Her story is quite literally never her own, her diaries shared again and again without her consent and picked apart by both the characters in universe and fans.
She's literally so interesting and so well acted by both of the actresses who play her. She has such depth and her life was cut short due to racism, misogyny, and ableism. She deserves more than to be reduced to nothing but a liar or a tragic figure to be used to further the relationship between two men.
even people claim to like her will call her stupid for her actions in season two, even though she quite literally spells out her reasons for being so desperate to join the coven. In season one she's shown trying again and again to turn a person and make herself a companion. In season two she tells Louis (her father/brother who she loves but at this point he had gotten physically violent with her when she tried to convince him to kill their maker Lestat once and for all) that the only vampires she's known are him, their white maker (who beat Louis half to death, threatened Claudia by mentioning her rapist, got violent with her, and tried to kill her), the aforementioned rapist, and her white father's white side piece who he was planning to replace her with. She wants to belong somewhere with people like her, yeah she endures humiliation at first but considering what she'd been through at this point, it makes sense that she can justify it for a while to be a necessary evil. It's also important to note that she doesn't have all the information! Louis does not tell her that Armand threatened to kill him the night she was inducted into the coven. There was no way she could have predicted Lestat coming back or Armand and the coven's plan to lynch them. Why does a woman, and especially a Black woman, have to be completely objective and rational and borderline clairvoyant all the time to be deserving of sympathy?
A major theme of s1/2 (I'm not watching s3 lol) is that nothing is really ever about Claudia. Even when Louis says he's doing something for her, it's not really about her. Even her death wasn't about her, it was about Louis and Armand and the coven's relations with each other. And yet the fandom picks up on this, but does not critically examine it. So in fandomâŠ..nothing is about her. It's about Lestat, or Louis, or occasionally Armand, or Loustat's relationship. Nobody ever puts her first despite her being one of the most interesting characters. It hurts my heart!!!
Another big part of the show is how infantilized she is and how much she hated that. She HATED being seen as a little girl. When she dies, she is in her 40s or 50s. And yetâŠyou guessed it⊠fandom sees this and is like "aw, Loustat's little daughter" or "Louis's little sister" when she actively fought against being treated like a little girl and has an (amazingly well acted, kudos to Bailey Bass) breakdown in s1 over the fact that her mind will age but her body will not.
Justice for my fully grown mature adult woman!
