#fandom sexism

[somepunaboutspace]

Genuinely insane to me how male characters still seem to dominate fandom favouritism (yes yes, I know, it's the ✨ misogyny ✨), like I'm sorry but my first course of action in any piece of media is to find another fictional girlfailure to add to my traumatized female character posse. If I'm not psychotically obsessed over a fucked up woman from my screen then what's even the point, might as well wither away smh

[silvermoon424]

Can we all please start using the phrase "fandom husbandry" from now on, thanks

[theflashjaygarrick]

After thinking about the comic fandom's prioritisation of white male characters I feel like it's a self fulfilling cycle.

Mainstream discourse around superhero comics is all about how white male centric the genre is. The general consensus in fandom is that women don't like female characters because they are badly written and 2-dimensional in most nerd franchises.

And if you go in with that mindset you'll fairly assume that the characters who have the best runs and most interesting stories are the white men. And if you look at fandom spaces and people are waxing poetic about characters like Jason Todd and Tim Drake and acknowledging that characters like Babs, Steph and Cass exist this only will reinforce this perception. So the person getting into batfam go and ask for the best stories about the Batboys or read summaries about their arcs, only seeing these women as background characters in male characters stories.

But the thing is that isn't strictly. I mean I 100% agree that comics are sexist and racist but that doesn't mean that there aren't phenomenal and iconic runs starring and entering female characters (including queer women, disabled women, and WOC). Cassandra Cain and Kate Kane probably have two of the best character bibles out of the entire batfamily in the form of Batgirl 2000 and Batwoman: Elegy. Selina and Babs both have more well received story lines/runs than Jason Todd does.

Great stories with nuanced female characters exist but the assumption they don't means that people don't look for them. So instead they draw upon stories with the Batboys (minus Luke Fox, JPV and often Duke) in their fan art and fan fiction and discussions and accidentally obscure the stories of female characters in the batman mythos even more.

And the cycle continues.

[venux777]

‘annabeth chase bashing’ ‘matchmaker piper mclean’ ‘cinnamon roll hazel levesque’

[foulfirerebel]

Had a whole rant planned about Gravity Falls and the fandom having horrible double standards, but wanted to express it in brief. So here goes.

"We want more women and girl characters who make mistakes!"

You guys couldn't even handle Mabel Pines.

[divorce-quartet-memes]

pov i'm trying to read mcyt fanfiction

[velvette-hussle]

*Male Character does something wrong*

The Fandom™ (& even sometimes the canon narrative itself): Quick! Where's the nearest woman we can blame?!

This is purely fueled by YouTube comments, I’m sorry y’all.

[odetteandfriends]

I have a question to all ninjago fans: why do y'all hate the female characters so damn much?

[rusty-lustful-fireflies]

Hello Gorillaz fandom i have a take

just to make things clear, I'm not saying there's anything morally wrong with staning Murdoc, he's a fictional character after all (one that I like to analyze myself) I'm saying those of yall who vilianize Paula have double standards fr

[elenorasweet]

Fanfic about "The Batfamily" that leaves out Cass, who has been legally Bruce's daughter longer than Damian has existed: oops i forgot i guess i just don't know much about her

Drawing of "The Robins" that doesn't include Stephanie, who WAS a Robin: lol okay but you don't count as a Robin if you didn't spend long enough in the role obviously

Fanart featuring "90s Young Justice" that leaves out Cassie, Greta or Cissie: yeah but like they were never as close as the others plus they're boring to me

I fucking see you and I see what all of these things have in common.

[yourhighness6]

It's funny to me when people insist that "ATLA was really feminist" as if there wasn't really only one feminist message which was the very generic "girls can fight too" spiel that every 2000s show had going on whenever they briefly tried to jump on the feminism bandwagon or whatever

[torchwood-99]

"Work, skills and traits that have traditionally been seen as characteristics of and appropriate for women shouldn't be derided or minimised in favour of skills and traits associated with men, and should be respected"

is a valid point, but so is;

"women shouldn't be forced to stick to work, skills and traits that are traditionally seen as womanly, even if they are valuable and important to society, and they have every right to resent and dislike a societal role and code of behaviour that has been inflicted on them regardless of ability, interest or inclination, because of something as arbitrary as gender".

Period heroines complaining about needlework and housekeeping, and fantasy heroines dreaming of sword fighting and adventures, are not a problem, and actually do give voice to the many women in the world who didn't and still don't fit into what society has decided women should be.

[logansgaar]

Joseph Quinn wants his Johnny to meet Tom Holland's Peter

oh god, brace yourselves for the wave of ship fics that use insufferably inaccurate caricatures of their characters... I know they're close in the comics and I ship it, it's cute af, but I cannot deal with a VERY specific section of fandom doing it again. It'll be s/tr/k/r and it'll be ST s4 all over again. We do not need more men from crossovers or as minor characters overshadowing the leading women and their relationships, romantic or familial, with the leading man

nothing against the man but if another of his characters overshadows main female love interests of a male protag one more time-

("x character has two hands" only works if fans have mutual respect for both the love interests holding x character's hands, and 99% of the time the woman is the one who gets treated like crap)

[femmesourdough]

You know, in a similar vein to what I said earlier, I was thinking...the Sandman fandom which I used to be more active in before I started to move on to vampires and also the Everything Horrible About the Author came out...it ironically makes an excellent case study for dismantling a lot of the really obvious excuses people come up with to argue that fandom sexism or racism totally isn't a thing anymore.

Because yeah the main character was male but this series? Chock full of women. Older women, younger women, women of all races who played various roles. You had your PICK and they weren't all written with the same level of depth but there were several characters with extremely interesting stories either present or implied in the past. Just in one family alone there was enough fuel for a thousand tragic fics and meta involving two of the lady characters who played a huge role in the plot (and Miranda may not have been onscreen long but cmon. The POTENTIAL.) And a lot of them weren't automatically attracted to the main guy, so they very much weren't reduced to love interests! It's everything fans claim they want...

And would you guess where all the attention both in terms of shipping but just *Any attention and time at all* for 98 percent of the (show) fandom went???

Oh you fucking know. Not to the male main character even, that's to be expected, but to a guy* who appeared in half of ONE episode, utterly disconnected from anything about the rest of the show minus his friendship with our main Sadboy.

Like it's actually kind of one another level, how hard all the women who played huge roles in this story were ignored, not just in fucking *shipping* because that doesn't rule everything, but in metas, in any posts at all. The entire fandom became basically the Dream-and-Hob, especially Hob fandom, more than anything else. And, it got to a level that meant it was literally impossible to avoid. Even if you didn't go into the main tags (which were all completely overrun EVEN OTHER CHARACTERS' TAGS. LIKE LUCIENNE AND ROSE which. Felt particularly galling) if you followed any fellow Sandman fans eventually your dash would be full of it. Unless you followed only the like. 10/15 people it seemed who actively didn't like this ship or Hob which. Is what I ended up doing. I had to blacklist so many tags, never go into the main fandom tags, and only follow a few people before I wasn't getting bombarded by nonstop posting about a character who appeared again, for maybe 20-25 minutes tops in ONE episode of a multi-episode series.

Meanwhile, the women who were in the rest, who made up the MAIN PLOT of the show? Most of the fandom had them as side characters for this pair or to be adopted by this pair. If they were lucky. They'd get passing mentions sometimes. Star in a few meme text posts. That was all.

You honestly can't make any of the usual excuses "female characters/nonwhite characters are just more poorly written" here because even disregarding the fact that poor writing literally NEVER stops fans from fleshing out some dude's backstory...well, that's just transparently not true in this show. Rose, Unity, Lucienne, Calliope??? Johanna Constantine Look me in the face and tell me all of them, every single one, was more poorly written than the male ones????

Nobody even pretended that this time, actually, as I recall. They just. Kind of carried on doing what they were doing.

*(OH and this guy literally participated in the slave trade in canon. No, I'm not letting that go. Most of the fandom did. They literally acted as if that never happened to the point I started to feel like I had imagined it. Like was that just in the comics and I'd projected that onto show!Hob and they'd taken that part out and I'd forgotten??? I had to go back and rewatch just to check that no, I wasn't imagining it, because there wasn't even discourse about that, there was NOTHING. Just everyone stepping over all the mainly *black women* in the show to love on him and make him their - I mean, Morpheus' dream boyfriend. Fandoms truly have not changed have they.)

[matt0044]

No, Arcane is not "how to do female characters" or "strong female characters."

This might come as a surprise to you so you might wanna brace yourself when you hear that *leans in to whisper in your ear* there is no one right way to write female characters any more than there's a right way to be a woman.

Arcane is a modern day Alien where chuds can point at it and say, "Hey, I'm not sexist because I like this and it has girls."

Because sexism is always that simple, amirite?

[kittydoremi]

Still crazy to me how people blame the "tarnishing of the Sonic franchise" and all of 06's flaws on Princess Elise. Really?

The character who did nothing wrong. Who went through alot of grief and trauma. is selfless and kind. Who has a character arc shown throughout the story and had a sweet bond with Sonic. She gets the blame for all of 06's flaws and the downfall of Sonic dogpiled onto her.

At most you could say her role in 06's story could've been handled better. But to use her as a scapegoat for all of 06's flaws and the sole reason for the downfall of the franchise is ridiculous.

Tbh alot of Princess Elise hate from the Sonic fandom seems to be driven by sexism imo, with people saying she's useless and blaming her for being kidnapped, calling her a selfish bitch, and calling her a zoophile and necrophiliac for a fairytale kiss :/