#i just think their gaslight gatekeep girlboss energy is impressive

[iwoszareba]

actually i would enjoy Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ending where these two start an evil cult together

[gaslightgatekeepgirlbosscombat]

Group C, Round 2, Poll 3:

Propaganda under the cut

Queen Sectonia

she is THE definition of gaslight gatekeep girlboss… girlie literally zapped her husband away because he was silly and brought the wrong hero to her. She also thinks herself to be a god… doesnt get more girlboss than that shes also described in the pause descriptions as being a parasitic species that has leeched off of many different hosts so uh you go girl!! literally just look at the kirby wiki in the personality section and you will see how perfect she is for this…

Well to start off just look at her, incredible stance, shows off that pure girlboss energy. Secondly, she's a trained sword fighter who uses 2 rapiers that she can trade out for 2 staffs like overkill as hell. Also she plans ahead, when she gets word that kirby is coming she takes precautions! Also known as telling her closest colleague (who is pretty infatuated with her by the way) to go kidnap him to presumably kill him. She also just puts people who disagree with her reign in cages all alone in a part of her palace that is literally made of CRYSTALS and MAGIC. Also she just has the best monologue ever like ""you would stand against me, ruler of the heavens?"" LIKE GIRL!!! She is also like canonically one of the most beautiful people in kirby which is pretty slay tbh. Also when she fights she cackles, like she's having fun teleporting around everywhere and trying to kill you. Also when she gets defeated she doesn't just back down oh no. SHE LITERALLY POSSESSES THE MAIN PLOT DEVICE OF THE GAME!!! She also gets a new form with this which is the most incredible thing ever and then when you beat her down, just when you think shes done. SHE ALMOST KILLS YOU. like if it wasn't for kirbys friends dude would be so dead. Also she gets a soul form which if you are not familiar with kirby lore is like a secret version of the final boss where they refuse to die and basically use the last of their power to destroy kirby. She gets 2 phases here, one of which SHE BASICALLY DECAPITATES HERSELF TO BECOME THIS VENGEFUL FLYING GHOUL OF A HEAD!!!! Also I didn't mention the fact that shes able to just parasitise people and steal their bodies and just go on still as queen. like she just canonically does this. epic slay queen.

Heather Chandler

heather--the chaotic evil of all movie mean girls--managed to become the dictator of high school in ohio. OHIO. if that isn't impressive idk what is. furthermore, not only did she girlboss to the grave, she girlbossed from beyond it.

[jamlavender]

Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss: Mrs Coulter, misogyny and the His Dark Materials TV show

The show went hard on misogyny as a vital part of Mrs Coulter’s backstory, and I want to talk about how they did it, and why, and how it might have been done better. This is quite long (when is anything I write not, let’s be real) so it’s under the cut. Read on for thoughts on women, power and fictional villainy.

As a quick disclaimer, though: I’ve enjoyed the show a lot! I’m so glad they made it! Ruth Wilson is mesmerising as Mrs Coulter! There’s so much to appreciate about the show overall, including many aspects of Mrs Coulter’s portrayal. But the HDM team have also made gender politics and misogyny very explicit themes of the show – particularly season two, particularly season two, episode five – and I think it’s fair to critique that.

Let’s be clear: Mrs Coulter is a villain. She murders kids by tearing out their souls. She kills and tortures friends and foes alike without a second thought. She abuses her daughter. She upholds and advances a totalitarian regime. She’s a Bad Person, as confirmed by God himself with the unforgettable line: “You are a cesspit of moral filth.” She’s fucking terrible, but, in life as in art, many of us are fascinated by how such awful people are made. What drives someone to commit atrocities? I am keen to see such questions examined in fiction, because I don’t think exploring a character necessarily means excusing their actions, and because it’s interesting (I mean, of course I find her fascinating, I’ve written a novel’s worth of fic about her). However, after a few snarky comments (“What sort of woman raised Father Graves, do you think?”) and some subtler commentary on sexuality, gender and power (her unsettling MacPhail with the key in the bra in S1E2), S2E5 drew a weird line between sexism in Mrs Coulter’s professional and academic life and her vast and senseless institutionalised child murder, and the longer I’ve sat with that the more I’m like: what the fuck?

Look, Mrs Coulter doesn’t tear apart children to search for sin inside them and poison Boreal and break a witch’s fingers because she’s experienced sexism in the workplace and in her education. That’s… a very odd thing to imply. We have to remember that there are lots of women in Lyra’s world, all of whom will also have experienced sexism, misogyny and other forms of marginalisation (many in more expansive and pernicious ways than Mrs Coulter, who’s a woman, yes, but also white, wealthy, highly educated and very thin and beautiful), and none of them are running arctic torture stations. She will have experienced misogyny, absolutely, and that will have affected her in various ways that inform how she approaches her work, but to imply that being denied a doctorate is the reason she became a sadistic killer is frankly bizarre. Here are a few of the lines from that episode with my commentary:

“Do you know who I could have been in this world?” What does this mean? If she’d been roughly the same person in our world, the answer is: Margaret Thatcher, which is probably a step down for Marisa, all things considered, because the Magisterium is far more autocratic than any recent Tory government and would be a much easier institutional environment in which to enact her cruelty. What we’re supposed to think, clearly, is that she’d have been a different person: a scientist and a mother, and she’s had this realisation because she saw a woman with a baby and a laptop and had a three-minute conversation with Mary. This doesn’t make sense. We live in our world! It’s less repressive than Lyra’s world but it’s hardly a gender utopia. If Mrs Coulter had chosen the scientist-and-mother life (which, as I’ll revisit later, she could have done in her world but chose not to because of her megalomaniac tendencies), she’d still have been affected by misogyny here too. Our world is not kind to young mothers, nor young women embroiled in scandals, nor is the world teeming with female physicists. It might be a little better, sure, but it’s hardly as if those gendered challenges would have been solved.  

“What do you mean she runs a department?” This is just the show forgetting its own canon. Marisa, you ran a massive government organisation (the GOB), including a huge murder science research initiative in the Arctic. That’s a much bigger undertaking and much more impressive than running a university department in our world. Pull yourself together.

“But because I was a woman, I was denied a doctorate by the Magisterium.” This is the show flagrantly ignoring the source material to make a clumsy political point. In the books, there are women with doctorates (notably Hannah Relf, also a major player in the new Book of Dust trilogy) and at least one women’s college full of female scholars. Now, would that women’s college likely be underfunded and disrespected compared to the men’s colleges? Almost certainly. But saying that is different than saying “I couldn’t get my doctorate!” when women in Lyra’s world can. The show knew what point they wanted to make, and were willing to ignore canon to do so, which is frustrating. Also, given that there are female academics and scientists in Lyra’s world, and that Mrs Coulter is a member of St Sophia’s college, it’s clear that she could have lived that life if she so desired. But she didn’t want that, because being a scientist and academic at St Sophia’s imbues her with no real power, and that’s what she craves.

I’m not opposed, in theory, to exploring Mrs Coulter and misogyny in more depth, but I think doing so through an examination of the sexual politics of her life would have made a lot more narrative sense and been much more powerful. It’s better evidenced in the text – her using her sexuality to manipulate people and taking lovers for political sway is entirely canon, as is her backstory where genuine love and lust blew up her life – and it links much more closely with the most shocking of her villainy, which involves cutting out children’s dæmons to stop them developing “troublesome thoughts and feelings,” referencing sexual and romantic desire (and what Lyra and Will do to save Dust is clearly a big ‘fuck you’ to those aims). She even says this to MacPhail in TAS, “If you thought for one moment that I would release my daughter into the care - the care! - of a body of men with a feverish obsession with sexuality, men with dirty fingernails, reeking of ancient sweat, men whose furtive imaginations would crawl over her body like cockroaches - if you thought I would expose my child to that, my Lord President, you are more stupid than you take me for.” Don’t get me wrong, she’d have been a villain regardless, but I do believe that there’s a much stronger link between her sexual and romantic experiences and her murder work than between professional and academic stifling and child murder. It would have been a lot more interesting and a lot less tenuous.

However, the show is trying to be family-friendly, and digging into why this terrible, cruel woman might want to cut the ability for desire and love (and other non-sexual adult feelings, I’m sure) out of people could get dark. We know that the show doesn’t want to go there, because they’ve actively toned down her weaponising her sexuality: in the books, she has an established sexual relationship with Boreal, whereas the show made it seem like she’s been stringing him along all this time, and made it about potentially ‘sharing a life’ together rather than fucking, which was clearly the arrangement in the books. Also, I think Ruth Wilson said she and Ariyon Bakare filmed a “steamy scene” together, and given that only a single chaste kiss between them aired it must have been cut. I think they deliberately minimised the sexual elements of the text, particularly regarding Mrs Coulter (the mountain scene with Asriel, which I did still love, was also a lot less horny than in the book) and replaced that with another gender issue, that of professional sexism, as if the two are interchangeable, which they are not. This is a shame, both for Mrs Coulter’s character and also for the story as a whole, because the characters’ relationships with sex and desire are an important part of the books! (If this minimised sexuality approach means that they don’t use the TAS scene where Asriel threatens to gag her and she tries to goad him into doing it, I’ll scream). Overall, I think they missed the mark here, which is a shame because I also think it could have been done well, if they’d been bolder and darker and more thoughtful.

Why might this happen? Why might the show take this approach? Why might it be latched onto by viewers? Personally, I think the conversations we have about women and power are very simplistic, which leaves us in a tight spot when we see women seizing power for themselves (even in fiction) and weaponising that against others, not just other women but people of all genders, because we struggle to move past ‘women have overall been denied power, so them taking it ‘back’ is good,’ even if that immediately becomes a hot mess of white, corporate feminism and results in the ongoing oppression of many people. I think we are so hungry for representations of powerful women that we – producers and viewers alike – struggle to see them as bad, because it’s uncomfortable to be so intoxicated by Mrs Coulter effortlessly dominating the men around her, subverting systems designed to marginalise her for her own benefit, and generally being aggressive and intelligent and ruthless, and then realise that you are entranced by someone who is, objectively, a terrible, terrible person. It can be hard to realise that if you channelled the energy of someone who mesmerises you, you’d be the villain. So instead of sitting with that (more on this below), a lot of legwork goes into reworking her villainy into, somehow, a just act, a result of oppression, as her taking back power that has been denied to her, rather than grappling with the fact that for anyone to desire power in such a merciless way, even if they have to overcome marginalisation to get it, is really, really dangerous.

The joy, of course, is that Mrs Coulter is not real! She’s not real! Adoring fictional characters does not mean condoning their (imaginary) decisions, nor do stories exist for each person in them to fit neatly into a good or bad box so you know who you’re allowed to love. Furthermore, fiction can be a fabulous tool for exploring and interrogating the parts of yourself that, if left to bloom unexamined, might perpetuate beliefs or behaviour that cause harm to others. Mrs Coulter doesn’t need to be a feminist or taking down the patriarchy or a righteous powerful woman to illuminate things about gender, power and feminism for those reading and watching. In fact, it’s important that we explore what happens when women (most commonly white, wealthy women, as she is) continue to perpetuate brutal systems under the guise of sticking it to ‘men,’ because it happens all the time in the real world, and it’s a serious issue. Finding characters like Mrs Coulter so cool and compelling doesn’t make you a bad person, but it might tell you something about yourself – not that you want to be a villain or kill kids or whatever, but something about how you relate to your gender or women or men or power – and that knowledge can be useful! We all have better and worse impulses, and finding art that helps us make sense of ourselves, both the good and bad parts, is a gift that we should relish.

Anyway, tl;dr, Mrs Coulter doesn’t need to be sympathetic or understandable or redeemable to be brilliant – but you wouldn’t know that from how she’s been portrayed in the new adaptation.

[ceasarslegion]

Hey, with your post about fandom discourse, you are 100% entitled to that opinion and those beliefs, a lot of it is about pedophilia. As a CSA survivor, it doesn't really feel like your blog is safe for me anymore, so I unfollowed, even though I like most of your content. Sorry.

Okay, I think this is a teachable moment.

I'm truly sorry you went through that and it shouldn't have happened to you, but I think it would do you well to ask why you felt the need to send this ask

Just so that this ask doesn't get taken completely out of context by this hellsite, this is the post anon is referring to:

This really isn't meant to come off as confrontational or defensive, but I'm genuinely confused about how you took "I don't have the mental energy to engage in fandom discourse because I have a life outside of fandom to worry about" and turned it into "this person's blog isn't safe for CSA survivors." I never actually mentioned pedophilia in my post, and I honestly was referring to petty fandom discourse, so to be honest, this could really feel like putting words in someone's mouth if they didn't give you the benefit of the doubt.

I'm not going to assume you were being confrontational either, but let me elaborate on this.

I am not your friend. As far as you're concerned, I'm just a semi-popular tumblr blog that you used to follow for shitposts and fandom content. Yes, it's run by a 3-dimensional person with an entire lifetime of experiences and aspirations and motivations, but you don't know me. The content I post here is a decimal point of a percentile of the person who runs this. The Damien behind the "shut up dames" tag is a complete stranger to you, and you are a complete stranger to him. We are two different people, differences can breed conflict.

If something about what I post upsets you in some way and you have to unfollow because my URL doesn't sit right with you anymore, go for it. Your feelings are valid, I encourage anyone who just doesn't vibe with me to unfollow, but you don't have to announce to me that you're unfollowing and give me the reason why.

Because at the end of the day, I run a shitpost and fandom blog that happened to get semi-popular on tumblr. That's all I am to y'all, and it's all I should be to y'all.

But an ask like this, while I definitely don't think was meant to be confrontational, can definitely come off as such if I was, say, having a really shitty day, or in a bad mood for any reason. It also gives me the impression that at least on a subconscious level, you read my joke post and perceived it to be a complete picture of my personal beliefs in that ares. It feels like you jumped to conclusions about my stance on a really serious issue.

Asks like this also feel rather guilt-trippy. While you shouldn't have gone through that, and I'm extremely sorry you did and it's completely unfair that you have to live with the trauma of that, it is not my responsibility to proof my own content against all possible perceptions of it and how it might affect people. There are topics that also upset me, but it's not the responsibility of other blogs I follow to screen their content for me, nor does it mean that their blog isn't a safe place for emotional abuse victims if they post a lot of "gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss" memes.

People are always welcome to unfollow or block me for any reason, but you don't need to announce it for the reasons i outlined here. Again, I'm not accusing you of anything, I'm telling you how something like this comes off.

[embersoftheforest]

For the character asks if you’re still doing them- leopardfur/star?

We'll happily always do character asks! Even if we posted them a while back, you're always welcome to ask us to do them (just let us know which one it is if it isn't clear)!

What I love about them: girlboss. gatekeep. gaslight. I love that Leopardfur isn't a perfect leader, or even a perfect character. She has so many flaws and I love exploring them!

What I hate about them: I find it really difficult to get into her mindset sometimes because of how rigid she is. She hides her emotions from others a lot and it makes it difficult to figure out how to play her in some scenes because of that.

Favorite Moment/Quote: There's a chapter a few batches away where Leopardfur leads a patrol to the WindClan border, and I think that's going to be my favourite moment from her for a bit because it really gets to explore her as a leader and how she interacts with her Clanmates.

What I would like to see more focus on: I'm really excited to explore her pre-leadership and how she interacts with the rest of the Clan before she has power over them and conspires with a dictator. I think she has a lot of layers that some of the protagonists will pick up on, and some that they won't.

What I would like to see less focus on: I think a lot of people still misinterpret Leopardfur's actions against the half-Clan cats as her own bigotry or cowardice. She's a cat with kittypet blood. She's a strong leader. But she can be misguided, and I don't want to give the impression that agreeing with Tigerstar was in any way easy or simple for her.

Favorite pairing with: Stonefur <3 Stonefur and Leopardfur have this intense friendship that will transform into a queer-platonic relationship. She really has a deep respect for his strength and how even though he isn't regarded as a traditional RiverClan warrior (much like herself), he takes it in his stride.

Favorite friendship: Skyheart, Blackclaw, and Leopardfur are SO close and so wonderful. They have their arguments (mostly caused by Blackclaw ngl) but I love how much they care for each other and stand by one another. They're kind of two sides of her - Blackclaw feeds that intense, loyal, and proud side of Leopardfur, and Skyheart is the soft, caring, and understanding side of Leopardfur. We have a one-shot featuring these three I'm excited to post this week, so keep an eye out for that!

NOTP: Leopardfur/Whiteclaw. I'm not against it per say as much as I just can't see her in this rewrite seeing him as anything more than her kit (he isn't - but she mentored him, she loves him like her own, especially because his father is useless).

Favorite headcanon: Leopardfur doesn't seek out a mate because she doesn't want to have kits thanks to an omen told to her by Mudfur (which will be shown in a future one-shot). While she does become mates with Stonefur, she takes precautions not to become pregnant, and puts all of her energy into serving her Clan to strengthen them.