#'brittas just a character to make fun of activists and feminists'

[doyoueverstopandthink]

brb gonna go write an essay about how my roommate is misinterpreting every single character on community

[meanautisticenbian]

Heeeeeyyyyyy new OCs alert

Other info

Nefertiti:

- Actually a pretty famous comedian with a Joan Rivers style. She’s on tour a lot and doesn’t get to visit Hat or her wife very often

- polytheistic

- voiceclaim is Wendie Malick (I’d actually rather have an Egyptian woman play her but these are characters I’ve made for fun that’ll never become canon so I’m just working with what I have)

Rosa:

- her whole personality is literally just copy pasted from Britta Perry but with more anger issues

- despite being cloned from an anti war activist, Rosa wakes up every morning and chooses violence

- fits into the “not like other girls/one of the boys” archetype but she’s a feminist like her mom so if you call her either of those things she WILL kill you

- her blue eyes are a genetic mutation

- Voiceclaim is Gillian Jacobs

Mark:

- I mostly made him disabled bc I wanted a VISIBILITY physically disabled character but i like to think he just has his disability bc of how his clone mom died

- Dating Rosa (Anne is cool with it but Rosa’s on thin ice)

- when I say he doesn’t mind being called his mom’s name, I mean he doesn’t like it at all but he doesn’t really care at all

- Anne is extremely protective of him

- voiceclaim is Zach Barack

Guy:

- I literally just made him as a joke I’m not kidding

- friends with William Wallace bc us failed revolutionary clones gotta stick together

- idolizes his clone dad so much he dresses like him all the time. Hand yes he is aggressively catholic

- voiceclaim is Alfred Coleman. Yes, Eggman from Snapcube’s sonic real-time fandubs, the guy that did the “I’ve come to make an announcement shadow the hedgehog’s a bitch ass motherfucker” speech, THAT Alfred Coleman

- btw he’s definitely done the Eggman speech but “shadow the hedgehog” is replaced with Che Guevara

[barsandkaines]

Britta Was Never Ruined, Actually

Unpopular opinion, apparently: Season 1 Britta, particularly the Pilot and the front 13 episodes Britta, was dreadfully boring and a sore thumb in the cast. Where everyone had a neurosis or flaw to the point of comedy, Britta was a boring straight man with no funny bone to pick on. Jeff was a borderline villain who needs to be taught that his lawyer crap won’t fly in Greendale; Annie was hyper antagonistic and insecure; Abed has trouble relating to people outside of media; Shirley had intense anger issues; Pierce was a perverted bigoted old man; Troy was a hyper-masculine jock; and Britta... smoked, I guess. 

I shake my head every time people state that Britta was ruined specifically because the perfect, boring persona she had in the beginning wasn’t genuine.  Especially silly when people blame it on Harmon hating women (there are things to criticize about Community’s female characters but “them being funny” is not one of them) when Britta’s own actress Gillian Jacobs suggested that she gets more silly and goofy since that’s actually funny and also works to the actress’ talents. It’s exactly like Sweet Dee in *It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia*. Boring as sin in Season 1 until the actress told the writers to let her be as awful as the rest of the cast. A comedy about non-functional at best, awful at worst people and you want a character who is just unironically better than everyone?  

We wouldn’t have her speech in “The Science of Illusion” or her moments in episodes like “Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking” if she was the same character she was in the pilot. And as much as people criticize the latter seasons for her “decline”, it was evident as early as Season 1. Why would Pilot episode “I have douche-vision” Britta announce to the campus that she loves Jeff Winger, and then subsequently use her newfound status as the People’s Champion to get some positive female attention in her life, then get into a spat with Jeff that eventually evolves into a friends-with-benefits situation? 

In an esoteric comedy like Community, Britta’s pilot personality did not work in the slightest and it’s not surprising that she was changed. Granted, yes, there were times where they did absolutely shit on her character entirely (remember when she shit herself?) and finding the best version of Britta is less pinning down a season and more finding the odd spikes where the writers gave a damn. For all the shit Season 4 rightfully gets, I think “Herstory of Dance” is perfect Britta: genuine interest and desire to help people, but a fundamental inability to do it right. She tries, and fails, but she *tries*. She makes a really stupid mistake but it’s out of genuine interest. The episode even explicitly calls out Jeff for using her name as an insult. We get goofy Britta humor but also character development and a sense that *despite her flaws*, the group loves her, and that’s more rewarding than if she never at a point to be disliked ever.

Judging by how this site criticizes the show, the “ideal” Britta apparently would be a woman who is always smart and right, never fails when it matters, and is beloved by everyone. Unless you are really eager for a role-model to attach to, this isn’t actually a good character. No character in the show is like this.

And I’ll be honest, it seems that people project onto the fact that Britta is characterized as a white feminist and, despite the fact that 95% of the time, when Community makes fun of her feminist values it’s not because “haha feminism”, but “haha Britta’s a hypocrite and ineffectual”, they seem to take making fun of Britta as Dan Harmon’s personal hatred towards women and feminism. 

In “Spanish 101″, the show never made fun of the idea of a protest and even defended Annie and Shirley’s idea of protesting. Britta says shit like “I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at animal cruelty.” In “Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality”, her activist former friends are portrayed as both right in that they are doing more than Britta ever did but also colossal assholes and belitting her and making her feel like shit for her lot in life. The joke’s not on feminism, it’s on Britta, who is a bad feminist but still a feminist. If the show was made today, exactly the same, it would most definitely be seen as a critique towards white feminism.

Community later introduced a “straight-man” character who actually does fit with the show; and now I’ll talk about how perfect Frankie is in every way, without being perfect in the slightest. She’s a straight man in a way that works; her grounded personality isn’t her being a buzzkill but a new way to navigate Greendale’s insanity. She wants to make money for the school so she wheels in prisoners on tablets and fawns over a murderer. Even when she’s actively against the group’s interest to be silly, they sacrifice potential comedy for actual character development, like in “Modern Espionage” where her desire to stop paintball absolutely makes sense and the characters come to realize that. Also, her making the Committee dress like toddlers to prove a point is one of the best tags. She knows how the characters tic and play off them but it’s not to shut them down, it’s to make the best of them, and in turn her.

None of that is what Britta offered in Season 1. She *was* a buzzkill. She *was* boring. And she got better. Did the writers go too far at times? Yeah. Was it overall a net positive? Absolutely? Britta is one of my favorite 

[cavehags]

it’s funny because even tho i’m a gay woman i identified with / loved britta when i first watched the show (back when i thought i was straight) and just always felt attached to her and ultimately very disappointed with where her character ended up. i feel like they could have really made her grow and learn and they didn’t. i don’t know. maybe i just had a crush on gillian jacobs

no i can understand that! i think it’s easy to misread britta as a stock character of an embarrassingly earnest feminist who the series lampoons for her beliefs. it is, after all, extremely common in sitcoms to have a bunch of jokes about the hysterical activist woman who sees bigotry when there really isn’t any and is therefore stupid. plus, watching the show especially in its earliest seasons, it’s clear that dan harmon and many of his writers have no particular lost love for women in general. i completely understand watching the show and thinking britta is a carelessly written character who is depicted as increasingly ignorant and overly excitable as the series goes on in an effort to undercut feminism as a whole. if that’s your interpretation of britta, i think it’s understandable that that would lead to disappointment. 

but i think the show is more sophisticated than that and has a real arc in mind for her! in the pilot, the series fucks up when it characterizes britta as almost... perfect. she is hot, she is measured, she is aloof, she is resistant to sleeping with jeff (the series has no respect at all for people who sleep with jeff except for abed), she is someone who tries to do the right thing all the time. everyone else in that study room is a mess except for her. the stock figure of the woman who the man wants to hook up with but can’t because she is morally discerning and he can never meet her standards is a sexist one. and, you know, just boring! i am certain britta’s pilot era characterization was a bid to make the pilot salable to the network but she had to get out of that pit quickly. written that way, britta could never have been a comedic character or a narratively interesting one and gillian’s skills would have been wasted. so, moving away from the pilot, the only way the series could make her character interesting is by putting her on a downward trajectory where her insecurity and cynicism become revealed over time.

i don’t love every character beat of britta’s but i like the version of britta who is funny a lot more than i would have liked the version of britta who is shaking her head at jeff all the time. megan ganz, who wrote some of the series’ best episodes, talks about that trope a little bit in an interview. describing the character of poppy from mythic quest, she says: “we didn’t want her to be that person who’s just always walking in and telling him not to have fun.” though she is not talking about britta, she might as well have been. the season one version of britta really risked veering into that territory and it would not have been fun to watch. instead, they found a way to write that character where she’s still at odds with jeff in many episodes, but not in a way where he gets to be fun and wrong and she has to be boring and right. the episode “mixology certification” is a fantastic depiction of both jeff and britta at their lowest. it shows that they are pretty much The Same, and finds comedy in the two of them picking fights with each other because they don’t know how The Same they are. but even the series’ real moral center, troy, can see what they can’t.