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This whole Grant Ward argument reminds me of Connor on AtS. You know, the guy who got abducted as a baby and was brainwashed by his father’s arch-enemy. He never stood a chance, but the fandom positively loathed him. It was no fun being a Connor fan back in the day. But at least back then the fandom was on Livejournal so the hate was much easier to avoid than on tumblr where the haters are going out of their way to shove it in our faces.
I still remember how after ‘Origin’ suddenly everyone discovered their love for the character and all I could think was “fuck off, you don’t deserve him.”
I still remember how after ‘Origin’ suddenly everyone discovered their love for the character and all I could think was “fuck off, you don’t deserve him.”
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Still... there are times I just want to bash my head against the keyboard. Two days ago or so I started bookmarking the most idiotic anti-ward posts. Apart from the whole nazi-apologist accusations and similar stuff, there are a few gems. Like today I saw this:
and this
and the other day someone said if she saw someone compare Ward to Bucky she'll "nail their foot to the floor". (I sure as hell want to see her come here and try.) Those are the kind of people who claim the moral high ground. Thank god tumblr comes with a built-in ignore feature, at least. I had over 70 people blocked in the past month.
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Of course due to sheer size *anything* has a following in HP and its opposite too.
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You know what the best thing is? One of the major things they hate about Ward is that he's a white guy, right? So, sometimes I click on the tumblrs of these people before I add them to my ignore list and, well, there's a really good chance the blog is gonna be filled with their favorite white guy. I saw several Loki fans. I saw one Spike fan; her icon was even of Spike.
I dunno how their brains don't implode. cognitive dissonance? My theory is that there's some overcompensating going on.
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It seems really pointless to get outraged over what pairing or character does things for people. I mean, obviously popularity of pairings and characters has a political dimension as society is sexist, racist, etc. etc. but you can't argue with what gets people off (and I'd include the gen id-fic and even narrative comfort food type of storytelling that is much of all fanfic in that category) on ideological grounds.
I have actually tried this as self-improvement project on myself as an outraged baby-feminist from my mid-to-late teens to early twenties, i.e. to limit myself in my voluntary fictional reading to books written by women with female protagonists, because I was appalled how much more I seemed to like and identify with male characters, and I wanted to retrain my preferences. It didn't stick. Actually finding fanfic was the death knell to that project. I read a lot of cool lesbian and feminist genre fiction those years (and I still like it especially for original SF), and it certainly made me far more aware of all the ways fiction can be problematic, but my favorite genre characters skew still overwhelmingly male, and in porn I still get most reliably off on things that are appalling ideologically...
It is kind of a hen-egg problem, that people in a patriarchy will have narrative and sexual kinks (like the ideas of what constitutes heroism or romance) that reinforce patriarchy, same for racist ideologies. I've basically reconciled myself to a position that I try to be aware of how problematic some of my preferences are (rather than get stuck in defensive denial mode), and try to be positive towards fiction that is progressive (like more diverse or not blindly fetishizing militaristic warrior culture or whatever), but that I'm not going to beat myself up for enjoying what I enjoy unless it hurts someone in a more direct way than that it is part of the systemic perpetuation of oppressive ideology or such.
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...I’ve in the past spoken up against the denigration of female characters. Actually I’ve lost a good chunk of my LJ friends list over that issue, and I stand behind every word I said. But I don’t think that denigrating male characters is the answer to that problem. In my opinion, the answer lies in promoting fanworks about female characters. Writing fic. Drawing fanart. Reccing those works. Commenting. Exchanges. In calling out unfair character bashing. But I’m not going to choose between fangirling female characters and fangirling male ones. I want both.
Of course I believe that many of those fans don't actualy want to change things; they want to feel superior. That's what this is about, imho.
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