astridv | (no subject)

That post made me twitch violently.

It took a lot of restraint to post this reply here and not over there, I'm telling ya.

I can't think of a more appropriate use of your icon. Ugh.

From

x_varda_x

That was a very odd post indeed. How can one claim to be an SGA fan and dislike a main character? I've had this argument before with a whole load of Rodney haters - it's like headdesk over and over and over...

Wow. What a sucker. (And that re: SGA, of all shows!)

PS: Your icon! I love it!

It did feel like the right time. *g*. (Here's another one. Heh.)

You know what, I honestly prefer the Keller hate when it comes in this form - unveiled, in-your-face and easy to spot. No need to bother coming up with a well-reasoned rebuttal, we can just point and laugh at The Stupid. It's refreshing, in a way. :P

That was a very odd post indeed.

That's right, you came to LJ more recently, I think? Until a few months ago Jennifer-bashing posts in fandom-wide comms weren't the exception; it's gotten somewhat better at least, since people started to speak out against it. Be glad you missed the worst of it, the character hate on display was simply offputting.

How can one claim to be an SGA fan and dislike a main character?

Well... her two big problems are: a) she's not a guy b) she came between Rodney and John, who have been the main, all-domineering fanon pairing on LJ for years. The woman in this scenario tends to get hated on and bashed, no matter the fandom. Sometimes fandom sucks. *shrugs*

Well, we haven't had a post like this in, what, weeks? I guess it was overdue. Hey, on the plus side, another name to add to the killfile.

Troll?

Don't think so. I went to check that poster's user info first thing... only one entry, but the journal has been created years ago. And while this seems almost too over the top, I've seen posts just like this made by others who've been around LJ for a while.

I've been reading a lot of pro romances lately and found a theme in one kind of novel. One style of story has a villain who is a woman trying to come between the hero and heroine. While the heroine is all things good and capable and has skills out the wazoo, the female villain is generally shallow, beautiful outside but ugly inside, a harpy to women and a sweet charmer to men, and will do anything to win the hero from the heroine. I think that sometimes some fans are overlaying this stereotype on canon female love interests in the same way they femme up one guy (shorter, more emotional, slimmer curlier hair!): because she's getting in the way of the one true love of the hero and the hero, she must be the harpy villainess.

Oh, wow! That's...something, alright (expressions fit for polite society fail me).

Just saw that and had to tell her off a little, because I'm sorry, but no.

Hmm - this is a neat theory, one I haven't seen before. It makes sense; fans often are given to assigning roles to characters (like the uke/bottom stereotype you mentioned), and interpreting their actions through the lens of that role. The interloper in a perceived pairing is often hated (hence it's more often female characters who are hated by slashers, because most male chars in slash pairings are only paired romantically with women in canon, so male chars are not a threat) but I hadn't realized that part of the hating was resorting to a classic stereotype. It's not even that the hating fans see the female char as a bitch, so much as they *want* to see her a bitch; it's more emotionally satisfying to see her fulfilling the "proper" role of being an obstacle in the path of True Love.

(Ironically, in the romance novels you mention, the female villain char is *supposed* to be hated; if you like her, you're reading the text subversively. The problem is that in canons like SGA, the female chars are not supposed to be hated, because they're not supposed to be in that kind of story. So the bashing and hating doesn't make sense to anyone who isn't reading the canon as that kind of romance.)

--Er, apologies for going off on this, I just find it fascinating...I love trying to figure fandom out!

I know what you mean, I find it fascinating, too. I've been reading through a bunch of pro romance novels in the past few weeks and it's been a delight to find so many fanfiction practices at home there. Amnesia! Genderswap! Soul bonding! Mary Sue! Though to be honest, in a pro romance, Mary Sue is the rightful heroine.

(Ironically, in the romance novels you mention, the female villain char is *supposed* to be hated; if you like her, you're reading the text subversively.

I love the stories that subvert her villainy. Oh so sad that there aren't that many.

I've come to strongly prefer stories that have good female friends in them. Harpy novels get nixed.

Erm, hope you don't mind, I just wrote up a post on this in which I quoted you - please let know if you'd rather I didn't ^^; I just love the discussionary possibilities!

To be honest, I don't have much patience for romance novels (I'm one of those slashers who tends to skim the sex scenes in favor of the actual, sci-fi action ^^;) but I find the cross-genre tropes incredibly amusing. (it terrifically amuses me that the female side of Japanese anime fandom has all the same tropes, too...!)

And girl-girl friendship has become a huge kink of mine of late...there's just not enough of it! *really needs to watch Xena*

Yeah, I saw your comment while it was still up. Thanks for that.

Now your comment is gone while her entry is still up, just like I expected.

If I were to say what's on my mind without bothering with politeness, it would include things like 'clueless moron.' What a wanker.

There are romances with genderswap? Really? The only professionally published novel with genderswap I've ever managed to find (other than Orlando) is Eric Van Lustbader's fantasy series, where the heroine is a male hero transplanted into a woman's body.

From http://x-varda-x.livejournal.com/

Yes, I only joined LJ in May this year. I think I would've been scared away if it really was once as bad as you say.

It seems that SGA fandom is 99% slash (mostly McShep) and that nice canon (or just any) het stuff falls by the wayside :(

For het, have you tried

lostcityfound? There's a pretty active Sheppard/Weir fandom; that's the only one of their hubs that I know of because I'm not really into that side of the fandom (it has other stuff too, not just Sheppard/Weir) but if you follow links to the authors' LJs, you can probably find other communities as well.

stargateficrec also has bunches of recs for different pairings.

Edited 2009-10-13 18:49 (UTC)

Nah, my main gripe with Keller is that SGA's writers frankly suck at handling female characters in general. In the last season they couldn't seem to reconcile Teyla's badassery with her motherhood and made her into a limp noodle. (She was beyond ineffective in that final episode with Michael.) Then it seemed that the writers wanted Keller on the "team" but didn't know how to accomplish doing it other than to give her Teyla's role.

So suddenly the doctor is the one stick-fighting Wraith, but when the warrior's child is threatened, she doesn't put down the freaking kid and fight, she just stands there and watches her teammate get pummeled by her worst enemy.

Keller bashing started before she even appeared on the show... hard to justify that with 'bad writing'. If memory serves me right, the Kill Keller comm saw the light of day pretty soon after the cast change was announced. This fandom was dead set on hating Jennifer Keller, many fans never gave her a chance to proof herself. And then, once she got written between fandom's main OTP, she was doomed and the most brilliant writing couldn't have changed that.

(copypasting from elsewhere to save time:) She's not always written consistently, true. I guess the result of several writers with different approaches. The difference is that with a male character, inconsistencies and flaws get lovingly fanwanked away or ignored, while with her character, they got immediately pounced upon and highlighted with neon marker, in lengthy meta, in a near evangelistic manner. And all the good aspects, everything they got right, they get completely ignored.(/snip)

And it's not just Keller; major bashing of female character can be found in nearly every fandom. And the standard argument is "the writers just can't write women". That's a weak, overly generalized statement, and if you see that in 20 different discussion in 20 different fandoms, it doesn't sound convincing. I would argue that oftentimes viewers are just more willing to focus on a female character's flaws while ignoring their strong points. (snip:) There's a general tendency to examine female characters immediately for weaknesses, latch onto any flaw in the writing (real or perceived), come to the inevitable conclusion that they make insufficient feminist role models, discard them, declare them free-for-all bashing fodder, and go back to squeeing over the pretty boys (who tend to get loved for the very same flaws and characteristics the girls get hated for). For example people picked apart Uhura in Trek XI soon as the movie ended, and decided she wasn't awesome enough (which in many cases I translated to "she's getting between Kirk/Spock"), all under the banner of "feminism". (/snip)

Instead of taking on the task of writing these characters in fanfic in a way that satisfies them, these women get at best ignored, at worst bashed. It's funny how some fans will argue that the female characters aren't well-written or fleshed out enough to be worthy of fic, only to go back to lovingly fleshing out the backstory for Parrish, a minor male character who was in one or two eps but has his own body of fic dedicated to him. The trend is that male characters get fleshed out while female characters get bashed.

I don't care if a ficcer only ever writes about two guys... until they start to justify and rationalize it by dissing all the other characters.

So suddenly the doctor is the one stick-fighting Wraith,

Yep, this would be the moment when I gave up on the fandom ever treating Keller fairly. For a year people had been griping how weak and useless in the field she was in Missing (nevermind the ending when she gets her act together). But when it turns out that she she realized that as well, and did the right thing by taking that lesson to heart and learing some basic fighting skills, people don't say, "Yay, character development, go Keller!" they say "booo, Mary Sue Keller!" What BS! She wasn't a whiz with the sticks, she was barely holding her ground, similar to Rodney who was also barely holding his ground with the handgun. Together they fought them off just long enough which seemed realistic enough to me.

When Rodney improves his fighting skills, the fandom is abrim with love and squee, when Keller does it... Ugh, I don't even know. I'm getting so sick of this double standard.

If you think Teyla as mother was turned into a limp noodle, we'll just have to agree to disagree. This thought is so completely opposite of my own opinion of Teyla's storyline, we're not gonna see eye to eye here, ever. I thought the writers handled Teyla's pregnancy and role as single working mother with stay-at-home husband better than I dared hope. The only complaint I have there was that she didn't get enough screentime. YMMV.

Granted, I wasn't in the fandom at the time, but I gather the original bashing, before Keller was ever in the show, was pure backlash. IIRC, some publicity was let loose early that Jewel Staite would be appearing as a doctor and a major addition to the cast. Fans put two and two together and came up with Carson being replaced.

I think fans would have been more willing to give her character a chance if the whole Carson thing had been handled better. His death didn't serve to forward the story. Instead, the writers were simply copying what they'd done on SG-1, because they wanted some cheap emotional impact but didn't have the guts to touch one of the "main" characters. So they offed the sympathetic doctor and replaced them with a younger, prettier model. And again, just like SG-1, they added a former Firefly actor to the cast in a blatant attempt to cash in on that series' popularity.

So the character was starting at a deficit, and the writing just wasn't there to support her overcoming it. Unlike when Mitchell replaced O'Neill, which could have gone just as poorly given O'Neill's popularity. But there was more done to flesh out Mitchell's character and back story in one episode than Keller's character received her entire first year.

When Rodney improves his fighting skills, the fandom is abrim with love and squee, when Keller does it... Ugh, I don't even know. I'm getting so sick of this double standard.

I have two thoughts on this topic. One, the inconsistent writing again. You can pretty much tell who wrote an episode judging by Rodney's wildly fluctuating proficiency with firearms. He goes from inept to moderately competent to laughably pathetic so rapidly that I just want to bang my head against the wall.

Two, I assume that as a long-standing member of Atlantis' premiere offworld team, Rodney has had extensive training and experience in combat situations. He should be more competent than he's often portrayed, and when he is portrayed as competent, fans cheer that it's about freaking time. Keller's leap in proficiency, in comparison, is disproportionately large given the time frame and her relatively limited field experience. There is a double standard at play, but not one entirely created by fans.

I thought the writers handled Teyla's pregnancy and role as single working mother with stay-at-home husband better than I dared hope.

I had no issues with that portion of her storyline. The thing that really bothered me (aside from her extreme under-utilization, where much of the cool "action" Teyla's character would have previously performed was handed off to Keller) was her bizarre inability to stand and fight. When I picture Teyla protecting Torren, I picture... I dunno, an enraged mother grizzly bear. I kept waiting for her to rip Michael's arms off and beat him senseless with them, or something. But she stood around that last episode of the arc and did a whole lot of nothing, while everyone else fought for her. It struck me as wildly out of character for her to let her fear rule her like that.