#tagging for sterek because some of y'all need to read this today

[capricornsicle]

2-2 It’s not a secret that Teen Wolf Season 3B – the Stiles Stilinski centric season entirely focused on Stiles/Void Stiles and with star & breakout star of the show Dylan O’Brien as front and center – is the highest rated and most critically acclaimed season of the show and everyone’s favorite (including Tyler Posey’s.) Personally, I liked Season 4 too, especially the Scira scenes. Nothing against Scott/Malia being canon endgame and true love, but Scira was obviously better imo

I’m going to be burned at the stake for this, but season 4 was better. Seasons 1 and 2 were also better. 3a was meh but Motel California was the best episode of the whole damn show. Scira should have been endgame. Scalia was sloppy and mediocre at best.

If I’m to be executed for this post already, today’s hot take is that not all Stiles fans are racist and you don’t have to be racist to be a Stiles fan but so much of the racism in the fandom has to do with him that people should be careful what exactly they’re defending.

The character of Stiles is okay, I guess. Personally I much preferred Boyd, Erica, Isaac, other such characters, and struggled to like Stiles when he kept pestering them to do huge favors for him. I really didn’t like how the show painted Stiles as the complete good guy we can all relate to and all the characters who disagreed with him or didn’t want to be friends with him as annoying low-level villains and antagonists. If I were Danny or Boyd or Erica or Isaac or Lydia or wow this is a long list I wouldn’t want to be friends with him either. Kid’s kind of annoying. Asks giant favors and never tells anyone why he needs them, doesn’t actually come up with very great plans, does plenty to put himself and his friends into danger, and the amount he pined after Lydia long after it was cute and fun always bugged me. Might just be that I don’t ship them, but still. Stiles has plenty of good jokes and decent character traits, but he’s not the messiah, unlike some tumblr posts raving about how Stiles is literally perfect would have you believe.

I’m glad it’s not very popular to be anti-Scott, but I’m always a little annoyed by the sheer amount of content in this fandom that is Stiles and Derek and Stiles and Derek only. I’ve seen maybe four other blogs that consistently post original content about characters of color from the show and have something to say about the problematic parts of the fandom. Reblogging posts is fine and welcome, but the fact that I’m the only person I’ve seen posting gifs of Deaton or Mason or Boyd in the last month is troubling. Lots of people in this fandom create original content, be it artwork and fanfiction or gifs and textposts. That so many of them are Sterek or Stiles when there are so many other characters and ships on the show bugs me. I’ve read posts where people say that they stopped watching the show when Derek was written off for a season or however long it was. I’ve read posts from people who didn’t watch 6b because Stiles wasn’t main credits. I’ve read posts expressing so much anger that Sterek never became canon, that it was a slap in the face to queer fans or whatever. The amount of queerbaiting about them was, especially because of the very big age gap, the fact that one of them is underage, and the amount of attention that a ship between two white boys that was never canon got, especially in comparison to the complete lack of content about canon queer characters and ships. Caitlin and Emily. Mason and Corey. What’s the difference between Sterek and the canon ships? Sterek is two white male characters, and the others aren’t. Brett, an openly bisexual character with a not insignificant part who was killed off young and never got a romantic interest or exploration of his backstory, is largely forgotten by angry Sterek shippers.

The reason 3b is so popular is that Stiles is the main character of it. I related a lot to him that season, when previously I didn’t like him that much, and the scenes he had with Scott in the hospital and when he was un-possessed, and with a lot of other characters while he was possessed (calling Melissa “mom” hurt that cavern where my heart should be) were emotional and good. That he was possessed by the Japanese fox spirit that was the main villain when he is, in fact, white, not so much. A season that started by being about Kitsune and Japanese mythology ended up being a season about the white boy fans project onto much more than the non-white main character. Kira and the other actual Japanese characters fell by the wayside and the pretty white boy got the spotlight, again. He saved the day, just like he saved the day in the show’s finale, and in the finale before that. Stiles does a lot of day-saving. He’s like Wesley from Star Trek -- you can tell if you look closely that a director or exec. producer was self-inserting a little bit. Always right and always saving the day.

It’s not bad to like Stiles. He’s a fine character. He’s not my type, but I can acknowledge that Dylan O’Brien is attractive, even when they shaved his head and said he was just some loser nerd no one at the high school wanted to hang out with (yeah, sure). He has a lot of flaws, the constant asking for favors definitely one of them, but he grows a lot as a character and he does have redeeming qualities. And the “mom” scene. Oh my GOD. I’m a sucker for the “kids without 1+ parent in the picture calling someone mom or dad” trope. I’m such a sucker. But despite his good qualities, he’s not perfect. Characters who disagree with him are not inherently in the wrong. In fact, a lot of them aren’t in the wrong at all. Why the hell would Boyd trust him with anything? Why would Danny like the annoying kid in his economics class who asks him invasive questions? The racism in this fandom involving pitting Scott against Stiles and painting Boyd to be annoying and unhelpful and ignoring canonically queer ships for non-canon queer ships but white is not the fault of the actor or the character, it’s the fault of the writers who wrote those scenes and the fandom that just cannot get enough of the poor innocent white boy.

TL;DR is that it doesn’t matter who you ship or who you like or what your opinions are, it matters that you acknowledge racism and implicit biases in the narrative we were given, and make an attempt to do better than the show did. Instead of defending Stiles as the messiah and attacking Scott for being a bad friend for literally eight episodes of one long-ass and mediocre season, take criticisms of him and Sterek to heart, and diversify your content and your reblogs to include actual queer characters, characters of color, female characters, female characters of color, female queer characters, and queer characters of color. Teen Wolf has all of those. And if you don’t like one or two of them, that’s okay. But if you don’t like any of them, maybe you should re-evaluate. No one’s going to hold it against you. We’re all too starved for good character development.