#so now Beez just reminds me of those women who go ‘I’m soooo gayyyy and my relationship is sooo queer’ when talking about their boyfriend

[vintage-bentley]

I know I am repeating myself for the millionth time but I just idk any other blogs that are both GO and radfem 😭

I've recently learned that tumblr lets you filter search results by year and I've tried to look at my favourite demon's tag. And of course the 2024 fandom Beelzebub is so different from the 2019 fandom Beelzebub I could've thought they were from two different tv shows. Who is this long-haired, dress-wearing, bejewelled seductress and how did we get here from "look how gross and unsexualised our female demons are #progress" 🥲

I know a huge part of this change is the ship semblance of a plot she got in S2, but I can't help but wonder how much of it is because the fandom saw a brown actress with a less androgynous figure and immediately equaled it to "sexy seductress. sultry woman (sorry I mean they). wild and sensual temptress." I'm using the last epithet bc as someone who dabbles in IB fanfic I know the way that authors write Beelzebub has also changed from more reserved and dominant to... well... that. 🥴

Do not get me started on how much I hate what they did to Beelzebub lol

Now that you mention it, the difference in fandom response is very interesting! In 2019-2023 I remember Beelzebub being depicted as cool, mean, creepy, gross, etc. I don’t think it was very common to see her sexualised—in fact I remember people praising the show for not going that route with her, since “sexy demon overlord lady” is overdone.

2024 though? She’s pretty, she’s sweet, maybe a bit rough around the edges but she loves her Jakey so much. And as you said, she’s now depicted as a fancy seductress type.

Part of it is literally just that yeah, that’s what the show did to her. They completely changed her and made her unrecognisable, and I’m not just talking about the actor change. While I like Conn’s acting choices, I don’t like them for Beelzebub. It feels like she didn’t take any notes on the character from season 1, and just did her own thing. She really should’ve just been cast as a new demon like Shax, and that demon could’ve had the storyline with Gabriel. Beelzebub did not have to be part of the story—if they can throw in a comment about a face change, they could’ve just as easily thrown in a comment about how New Demon is a representative for Beelzebub who is too busy to be dealing with a missing Archangel (and who also doesn’t care). I think that would’ve been more fair to Conn, instead of having her do so poorly at playing somebody else’s character when she could’ve shone as her own.

But now I’m wondering if part of it is racism. Considering how women of colour tend to be over-sexualised, I can absolutely see this being the case. I can also see it being a case of performative fandomers wanting to prove how Not Racist they are, by going “look! I find this brown woman soooo hot! I want her to step on me! Look at me draw her half naked!” while being too stupid to realise that they’re contributing to the over-sexualisation problem. Maybe it’s a mix of both.

I’m sad to hear that she’s written that way in fan fiction. I haven’t read any post-season 2 fic, so I’ve been blissfully ignorant of how Beelzebub is being handled now.

Anyway. Beelzebub’s transformation from a cool and fed-up creepy gross woman to an edgy they/them who looks like she’s about to make a tik tok explaining how to do eyeliner in a nonbinary way, is a fucking tragedy. They should’ve left her alone.