#she's not appreciated enough in this fandom

[angellwingss]

Wasn’t going to go on a big rant but you know what since that other post is gaining traction yeah I think I will. So big long rant under the cut. Lolll

I feel like. A lot of people might tell me ‘it’s not that deep’ but to me it is that deep.

I don’t have a problem with JayVik or it’s shippers like. At all. I just think some of them are à really good demonstration of like. Every bad thing when it comes to fandom ever LMAO.

Once again I am (supposed to be) writing a whole big long essay about this already so I will try and keep this kind of short and sweet and it might be a bit lacking but wtvr.

I think a lot of JayVik fans tend to be white queer people. Someone left a tag on my OG post that said basically ‘my take is I’m a faggot and I don’t have to care about a character if I don’t want to’ and no hate to that person cuz you’re right, but this is exactly the kind of stuff that made me make that first post.

I feel like a lot of white queer people have an issue with seeing outside their own identity? If that makes sense? This is seen time and time again with the way some of them behave when big movements happen online, some have a tendency to centre themselves and whatnot so i think it’s kind of the same thing.

It makes total sense that a queer person would prefer queer ships and would prefer JayVik over MelJay, that is not a crime. But I do think part of that is because they can’t relate/identify with Mel or see themselves in her like they can with Jayce or Viktor.

I hate to also make it about feminism but i think a lot of you guys are super like. Male centred, like just in your attraction which once again, not the issue not a crime. But i think it’s also why CaitVi, which is a canon queer ship, although popular is still not quite as popular as JayVik despite being canon. Women fetishizing gay men in fandom is not something new, which I think might play a small part in it- I’ve seen a lot of people especially back in s1 infantilizing Viktor and acting like he had no agency or independence and that he NEEDS Jayce to take care of him (that’s another thing. Ableism(looks at you with my eyes)) and they also do the same thing with Jayce where they act like he had 0 agency with any decisions he makes and that he’s like a big dumb baby who doesn’t know anything politics. Hey, guys. That’s a grown man.

My main issue isn’t that people prefer JayVik over MelJay it’s just that some shippers demonize Mel to an insane degree, blame her for getting in the way of their ship (this is also happening right now with Maddie- there’s a leak going around saying that she gets with Caitlyn and people are so upset that this character is getting some INSANE hate and I feel like that’s the same thing going on.)

they blame her for ‘stealing’ Jayce etc etc like. Idk. You don’t have to ship MelJay but I wish more people would appreciate Mel just as a character- imo she is super interesting and has a great story but she’s only ever seen and ‘the other woman’. I’ve seen people say she isn’t like, well characterized and that her story entirely revolves around Jayce which. Yeah she’s definitely heavily involved with him in s1 but she’s clearly got a lot more going on than just that and you would know that if you GAF 🗣️🗣️

for just being. Who she is. I think Mel deserves more attention just in the fandom and it’s just frustrating. People making memes about Jayce going insane over Viktor leaving but like. Mel also just got fucking kidnapped guys. His lover has just vanished without a trace why is nobody also talking about that !!!! Why can’t he care about both these people at the same time !!!!!!!

Anyway I’m not nearly well equipped enough to talk more in-depth about like. Any of this but I do think the demonization of Mel and refusal to see her relationship with Jayce as it is can often times be boiled down to racism like straight up. And also things like the fetishization of gay men in fandom and just things like that are sometimes what can lead to female characters- even the well written ones to be shelved and pushed aside in favour of their male counterparts.

Obligatory ‘not all JayVik fans’ obviously a lot of you are awesome, shouldn’t have to say this. If I’m not aiming for you, you shouldn’t be getting shot.

[irisbellemoon]

thinking about madoka kaname......

[cinsketches]

Excuse me as I go off about Meryl because I don’t know if people have truly grasped just how important of a character she is to the story—especially in Trigun Stampede.

Aside from being a stand-in for the audience to learn more about the world, I also have to point out that Meryl is the one driving the story forward —both metaphorically and literally.

Second, this story wouldn’t have happened without her.

- If she hadn’t untied Vash, her and Roberto would have been wandering around for who knows how long trying to find a town for help.

- If she hadn’t insisted on helping Vash during the duel, things likely would have happened very differently (assuming Vash didn’t have some sort of plan, but I digress-).

- While the sand steamer was a group effort, it wouldn’t have worked if Meryl followed after Roberto and ran. Her insistence on staying behind to help prevented Hopeland from being obliterated (and indirectly saved Wolfwood from losing the one thing he’d been fighting for all this time).

- And the most important part of all, Meryl’s choice to go back for Vash.

Her mentor had just been killed, and the people she’s about to go up against are far bigger and much more powerful than she could ever hope to be. Her only weapon is the little derringer Roberto handed over that can shoot two bullets.

Yet she steels up, presses the button, and goes back.

She witnesses Vash be used against his will and is practically powerless in stopping Knives from using his brother’s power to destroy the world. All she can do is run up to the glass and scream for Vash to wake up. With how tiny and insignificant she is, you’d think her efforts are fruitless, right?

But Vash hears her. He hears Rem. It wakes him up from the memory hell his brother trapped him in, and he runs towards Rem’s voice. Her voice.

And she breaks him out.

An entire planet was saved by one little reporter with a gun. An entire planned genocide of the human race 150 years in the making was just foiled by Meryl goddamn Stryfe.

Trigun may be a story about Vash the Stampede, but who’s really the protagonist here?

[jennycalendar]

yeah yknow what i wrote this today. i will put it here only :) i don't know WHO the target audience is (3 ppl?) but. sometimes a girl wants to put her girl places

Buffy noticed the girl first. Her hair was red and frizzy in a way that was basically asking for a Cordelia Chase dressing-down, and she wasn’t exactly thin, but she was surprisingly pretty even with all that happening. She was dressed like a grown-up, which…honestly, probably wouldn’t stop Cordy from saying something anyway, though it minimized the possibility that the blow would be cutting enough to take the girl out at the knees. Lady. She held herself like a girl, though, and she was about as tall as Buffy and Willow, which was probably what had thrown Buffy off in the first place. That, and the fact that she was sitting like Willow while Giles yelled at someone on the phone.

“—no, Thea, I am not being unreasonable, you’re being unreasonable!” Giles was saying. “To me? To a Hellmouth? Do you not have any other friends you can call upon?” A brief silence, presumably while the other person answered, and then Giles said, “Oh, I’m sorry, yes, of course your other friends are conveniently either indisposed or in England. Really, Thea, how terrible is—well, that’s hardly—she’s twenty-three, that is certainly old enough to make her own choices!” Another pause, during which Giles’s face reddened, and he said, “That is beside the point!”

“You can always send me back!” said the girl, raising her hand. British-y, Buffy observed, but not necessarily Watcher-y; the Watchers she’d met all felt a little more seasoned than this girl, and Giles probably wouldn’t be half so upset about another Watcher on the Hellmouth.

“Oh, I can, and I will, and as soon as I get this sorted with your mum, you are going back,” Giles snapped. Something on the other end of the phone caught his attention. “Yes, Thea, she is going back, because I hardly think that her falling in love with—what did you call him, a failed wizard? How is that even possible? No, don’t tell me—”

“He’s already buying a plane ticket,” said the girl helpfully.

“Marigold,” said Giles, “for the love of God, please let me manage this on my own.”

“Can I have the phone?” asked Marigold.

“Christ!” said Giles, shoved the phone at Marigold, and stalked into his office.

It was at this point that Marigold finally noticed the other person in the room. “Oh, hello, Buffy!” she said, as though they’d been friends for quite some time—which, yeah, sure, maybe everyone in England knew about Buffy, or at least everyone in England who knew Giles, so Buffy decided to just sit down and watch this. Way more fun than trying to do early-morning trig homework.

Marigold shifted the phone to her ear. “Hi, mumma!” she sang out. “You know he’s not going to change his mind. Mhm. Well, you know I’m not going to change my mind, and neither is my sweetheart. Hm. Yes. Yes. So is your plan to just send me to get killed on the Hellmouth, then? Because you know I’m very accident-prone and have a tendency for—well, yes, Mr. Giles is here, but there’s really only so much Mr. Giles can do, given the circumstances, and especially if he’s watching over a Slayer of his own, and I’d hardly call protecting me a Slayer’s top priority when really what she’s doing is—no, I am not being difficult. You’re the one who sent her daughter to a Hellmouth rather than accepting that she is getting married, never mind what you have to say about it.”

Oh, this was definitely going to be the topic of lunchtime conversation. Buffy pulled out a bag of popcorn.

The rustle of the bag opening caught Marigold’s attention. She glanced half over her shoulder, grinned a bit, and said, “By the by, mumma, Mr. Giles’s Slayer is positively adorable! So I hardly intend to put her out, asking her to protect me—yes, well, if you think I’m making unwise choices, perhaps you shouldn’t have sent me mostly unsupervised to a foreign country! Why, who knows what sort of wizards I might meet here? In point of fact, I believe Mr. Giles mentioned an Ethan Rayne surfaced here more than once—”

The dial tone rang out. Marigold dropped the phone delightedly and called, “Mr. Giles, she hung up on me!”

Giles poked his head out of his office and said, “And why did she do that?”

“I like to believe I was so desperately insufferable that she’s on the next plane over to Sunnydale,” said Marigold, “and then she’ll take me back home, and I can do what I like without her deciding on my behalf to send me here. Which, of course, I don’t mind overly, I just think she isn’t thinking very critically—”

“Nor are you,” said Giles. “Marigold, how old is this man?”

“Oh, wow, Giles,” said Buffy, unable to keep herself out of this part of the conversation. “So I date a guy two hundred years older than me and you don’t bat an eye, but this totally British grown-up is dating some wizard guy who’s probably totally human, probably way younger than Angel, and that’s a problem?”

Giles didn’t seem to know what to say to that.

“Buffy!!!” said Marigold exuberantly, as if they’d been besties forever, which, actually, Buffy kind of liked. Besties in dating older guys, apparently. “Come sit next to me and tell me all about your paramour. Mr. Giles didn’t say anything about that!”

“Thea is going to kill me,” said Giles to the ceiling. “Thea is going to fly here, see this conversation happening, and kill me.”

“Entirely your fault for negotiating with Thea,” said Marigold primly.

“I didn’t—you showed up at my house—she told me after the fact!” said Giles, who seemed too outraged to string a full sentence together without a few others tagging along.

Marigold took the phone and began dialing another number. Giles sat down heavily in the chair next to Buffy and buried his face in his hands. “Hello, sugarplum!” she sang. “Oh, of course it’s me! Don’t worry about that; this phone’s a Council phone, so it can make international calls magically and free of charge—”

“Are you calling him?!” said Giles, and made a mad dash for the phone.

Marigold yanked the phone out of the wall and danced back. Normally that usually ended a call, but the phone crackled with a funny, fizzy sparkle that tickled Buffy’s nose delightfully. “I just wanted to make sure you know that I’m having a lovely time and there really isn’t any need to come down and collect me!” she continued, scrambling back and away from Giles as he tried to grab the phone away from her. “I’m personally looking at this as an all-expenses-paid vacation while mumma gets her head on straight about this marriage, which absolutely is happening, so don’t worry about that either.” She listened. “Yes. Well, I am with a Watcher and his Slayer, so I’m surely going to be completely fine and there’s no need for you to come down and—sugarplum? Sweetheart?”

She frowned at the phone, shaking the receiver. After it became clear that either the other person had hung up or the weird magic connection had cut, she tossed it back absently towards Giles, who hadn’t been prepared for this and caught it directly to the face. He crumpled.

“Oh,” said Marigold, “fuck!”

“Eh,” said Buffy. “This is just Tuesday for him.”

[the-lark-ascending69]

If Robin were a boy she'd be everyone's favorite character but since she's a girl she only gets to be Steve's gay best friend.

[iwannarunawayandbeapirate]

21,398 torchwood fanfics on ao3 and only 3 of them are about toshiko sato as a trans woman? i am disappointed

[an-theduckin]

Wait shit people might actually care about me

[shannonallaround]

Watched Mickey, Donald and Goofy: The Three Musketeers with my siblings tonight and all at once remembered gloriously why I love Mickey so dang much

[infinitelystrangemachinex]

Mel for the unhinged character bingo!

yessss YEEEESSSSSSSSS

[calicoclovers]

good evening nona nation. she is here to bless your feed

[xannerz]

always fascinating to me to see people acknowledge that bad direction and/or writing affected TTS’ story, pacing, and characters, but somehow manage to viscerally hate cass like it’s still all her fault

[epickiya722]

Actually it's so funny that Yuichi Nakamura voices two characters in two of the (big) animangas I like that I wouldn't say are the coolest characters to me.

Like, while I do think said characters are cool, my face goes like this 😶 whenever I see them get high in popularity polls or show up or something.

[merry-the-cookie]

GUYS!!!! GUYS!!!!!!!!!!! i commissioned the incredibly talented insanely cool and radical jay @tacogrande​ to draw my favorite dudes and im so happy loOK AT THEM........ ashtons lil smile 😭 michaels sleepy eyes 🥺 all of it so gorgeous

pls go give her a follow and check out all her socials and if you can commission her i cannot recommend it enough, i mean look at this dreamy lil portrait 🥺🥰💖💖💖

alt version under the cut cus yea i got tWO VERSIONSSS

jay has been an inspiration to me for so many years since i was a wee little teenager and ive learned soooo much from them and to commission her again after so long whilst still being a huge fan of their art felt like a full circle moment hehe will definitely do again <3 maybe complete the 5sos set dfhjGHFD

[margaetyrell]

hi. just came to say i’m alive and well (mostly) if anyone cares. i simply broke down due to emotional stress so i had to delete the app and cut it all out. idk how long it will take, but i’ll be back and catch up on blogs/tags/messages by then! hope you’re doing great, i’m sending you all my love and a special shoutout to @itsniceto, @mycastlescrumblingdown, @jdschecter, @intomymelancholia and @mayangelsleadyouin for being such a ray of sunshine. miss you and love you all soooo so much 💜

[faebriel]

i’m in the midst of death note brainrot (again) and would love to hear your thoughts on misa’s character

I WAS LITERALLY SAYING THE OTHER DAY TO MY PARTNER THAT I CAN FEEL AN AUTUMN DEATH NOTE REWATCH COMING ON..... maybe maybe maybe

misa is so freaking fascinating to me!! maybe next death note rewatch will be an extra special misa focus edition 🔍 she's just so fucked up in such a fun way that tbh i kind of feel is a missed opportunity, especially in the latter half of the story (the anime at least - haven't read the manga). she's so self-centred and i love that for her. her motivation to be kira pours from her own heart. while light has never personally suffered at the hands of crime afaik, misa very much has - both her family's deaths and her own being attached. her devotion to the cause is not just for the sake of saving the world but for saving herself, back on that night. it's like this vicarious way she can get back at "criminals" because she couldn't prevent her own family dying. it's ground into her!! that is the kind of experience you can't just shake out of her!! you can set misa on any path away from kira and i truly think she would barrel right onto it because the existence of kira gives her those warm and fuzzy feelings of retribution or maybe even safety that just like, filters right into her obsessive love for light

i like that even though she's clearly devoted to light, she's still an independent operator (well as much as the writing allows at certain times. eyeroll). i think light's whole attitude around "managing" her approach to being kira is so fkn illustrative of the derision with which he views a lot of people lol. there's something so interesting about how he views misa as impulsive and emotionally driven, so she's deranged, but obviously he is different even though their core beliefs are the same. like you might be using strategy but your goal is the same. idk

YOTSUBA ARC MISA AND POST TIMESKIP MISA ARE SO SPECIAL TO ME PERSONALLY. yotsuba arc because i'm like. oh my god the fact that she is not given ANY narrative space to either literally or metaphorically beat L's ass is a fucking choice BUT the fact that her dislike of him seems to come out as purely petty spats while he and light are chained together is so fucking funny. hater arc, but also, you could write a 9k character study unpacking all of this. it all kind of loops around to this iron-clad optimism that everything is somehow gonna turn out alright... and at that point in time, she doesn't even know how much shit she's gotten herself into. i do really really love that moment in this arc where misa gets her memories back after visiting the tower (when matsuda falls off a balcony. you know the one) but light doesn't have his and L is not even clued into what's happened. and light so so so wants to catch kira and clear his name and misa's sitting there like :)) like, i know she's gonna conspire to give light his memories back ASAP because that's The Plan but come on that brief glimpse in time is so fun and for misa her access to the death note & shinigami is such an important and consistent bargaining tool in her own survival. it was cool to see her have a monopoly on it, no matter how brief

they're so fucking worsties

there's definitely something to say here about her relationship with rem too but honestly i'm gonna have to go back to sources on this one. for me i've always kind of felt some parts of the fandom try to bend rem and misa into the "cute background lesbian couple" template that so many fandoms run on and i'm like. mate. you're not selling me. rem loves misa but misa is just too awful and/or deranged for all of that. i've always kind of felt their relationship was tragic in part because misa didn't fully understand the depth of rem's love for her / took it for granted until rem died. but again, i need to go back to sources

OH and this is getting long but i have the softest spot of all for post-timeskip misa. she is so me and my husband by mitski core. her life is falling to shit around her. her lifespan has been quartered. and she gives up her memories!! her knowledge of the death note has always been her key to survival and light sweet talks her into giving it up and this is the bit where i start hollering and screaming. and from then on, she doesn't even realise how much shit she's in. it's not just that she's in a failing engagement. it's that her fiance has wrung her for everything she had to give and she is being left to the wayside. her suspicion that light is having an affair is almost framed as comical but it's all she fucking has!!! she loves him because it's all she has. she has to choose between light and kira like this is some cosmic fucking joke and she cheers on light apparently trying to catch kira because she loves him. because what else exists in her memory from the last five years of her life???? FUCK

post-timeskip misa is genuinely fucking tragic to me because like. through the sheer power of sweet talking light manages to entirely defang her. she's lost rem. she has a book, she has the eyes, but she uses them solely under light's discretion. and then she gives up her memories because light asks. and like she is 100% a terrible person with the whole mass murdering thing but that kind of adds to it in a way. you get me