#vs. pointing out a perceived double standard/inconsistency

[birb-tangleblog]

I've always thought it was a little curious how fans unanimously overlook that the creators of 7 K saw a younger, teenaged character (giving them the benefit of a doubt that Var might've not had an official age in-house when the idea was developed; iirc him being 14 came from one of the junior novelizations and stuck) and wanted to create an AU/spinoff where they aged him up to 18, with the clear endgame of pairing him up with an adult original character that they aged down.

[burberrycanary]

Riverdale: Ethics & Archetypes

Cultural Signals and Actual Behaviors

@onceuponamirror has a fantastic meta that points out how Betty is held to such high standards as a character because she’s “literally several angelic tropes come to life, particularly in her appearance and demeanor.” And my brain went, Holy shit. That.

I’m fascinated by the intensity of some of the reactions to Betty blackmailing Cheryl in 2.02 and how, for some, this has fundamentally changed their view of Betty as a character.

I’ve said it before, but Betty’s behavior in 2.02 is in keeping with a long track record of similar actions, most memorably breaking into Ms. Grundy’s car to steal her gun and drugging then assaulting Chuck. She’s never been an Ideal Hero who always does the right thing for the right reason. From the start of the series, she’s been a pragmatist who, while generally well intentioned, is willing to do illegal or unethical things and prone to letting personal attachments drive her behavior.

I want to focus on two of Betty’s most problematic actions as examples: Betty drugging and assaulting Chuck in 1.03 and Betty blackmailing Cheryl in 2.02. In both cases Betty is acting to protect others and to right what she perceives to be a systemic injustice. And in both cases Betty’s actions have the primary intended effect of harming someone and forcing them act against their own interests. Both, too, are illegal.

So why such different reactions from the audience?

One simple answer for this difference is that many people like Cheryl and nobody likes Chuck.

(Sorry not sorry, Chuck.)

Or that the girls Chuck hurt were blameless while FP certainty isn’t that, whatever you think of the harsh 20-year sentence.

However, I think the way Betty is presented in these scenes is the key difference to understanding this gap in audience reaction. My take is that viewers react differently to Betty doing unethical actions that cause direct harm when her appearance and demeanor invoke that angelic, good girl archetype that @onceuponamirror identified as an important factor at play. How Betty looks and the cultural signals she’s projecting at the time she takes an action influence the standards that her behavior is held to.

The problem doesn’t seem to be Betty taking harmful, ethically problematic actions. The problem is that she looked like the angelic girl-next-door while she did it.

So let’s talk about Betty when she isn’t appearing so angelic.

Dark!Betty

I’ll just get this out there. I don’t like Dark!Betty: the black wig and pinup BDSM imagery that manages simultaneously to be lazy, shallow, confused and frankly a little offensive.  (A++ overachieving there, show.)

However, these visuals shape audience expectations and reactions in interesting ways. The Dark!Betty costume and “Betty couldn’t make it” line let people who identify with many of Betty’s genuine character traits like kindness and selflessness and self-destructive performative femininity disassociate Betty, the character they like, from repeatedly pushing a drugged person’s head under hot water.

With the Dark!Betty framework, viewers (like Betty herself) could posit her illegal and morally repugnant behavior to Chuck within a safely contained alter-ego. When Betty metaphorically pushed Chuck down onto the tracks (to borrow @onceuponamirror’s Trolley Problem framework) to protect Veronica and all the other girls Chuck had hurt and would’ve kept on hurting, the viewer could tell themselves that she wasn’t quite herself and therefore not as culpable for her actions. Oh don’t worry, this framework whispers, That was just a mild psychotic break. We will now return to your previously scheduled Betty.

During the confrontation with Chuck, Betty was projecting a huge number of bad girl visual and cultural signals to go along with her ethically compromised behavior. That concurrence is all very soothing to our internalized cultural norms. Bad girl does as bad girl looks. Of course someone who looks like that is going to do terrible things. Maybe she just needs to be punished, goes the cultural narrative. Or fucked all better. Or both. Culturally, we know what to do with Dark!Betty and what to expect.

Dark!Betty was trying for seedy, pulp fiction porn and her behavior is judged by her genre.

You’re Judged By Your Genre (Betty vs. Cheryl)

Betty is judged by certain standards because of the archetypes she outwardly resembles. And this goes for Cheryl, too. But the standards that Cheryl is judged by operate along a different set of dimensions. Because Cheryl is a collection of gothic horror tropes come to life. I mean, that hospital entrance though:

Cheryl embodies the visual and cultural archetypes of gothic horror while she performs cruel, unethical, sometimes even senseless actions. But Cheryl is judged by the standards of her genre. Who expects a character that looks like Cheryl and evokes these cultural patterns to act ethically? We, as the audience, understand the rules her character is playing by. You can like Cheryl or not like Cheryl, but you can’t be surprised when she bullies and blackmails.

Any genre that ultimately rolls up into Romanticism is going to center around the intensity and authenticity of an individual’s feelings. Anything Gothic doubles down on the inherently over-the-top aspects of the genre, tosses in a bunch of terrible suffering and proceeds to get hung up on death—and Cheryl delivers all of these things in spades. Ethical behavior is not a standard a character like Cheryl gets judged by.

Since Cheryl’s behavior and cultural signals are reassuringly in alignment, nobody gets that upset about her unethical behavior so long as it's ultimately an intense outpouring of her spectacularly Extra feelings. And, boy, does Cheryl have an abundance of constantly changing but consistently authentic feelings she wants to fashion into a pointy object and go stab somebody with.

I think this drives the inconsistency in many people’s responses to Betty and Cheryl taking similar actions. When Cheryl threatened and blackmailed someone, she didn’t violate her genre’s standards or the expectation for her archetype.

But, in 2.02, Betty did. Her behavior and her cultural signals didn’t line up. And this creates an uncomfortable dissonance.

That Angel Face and the Mirage of Perfection

Betty: the perfect girl-next-door with good grades and a good reputation who you can count on to always say yes.

That’s the archetype Betty is governed by, visually and culturally.

Except, however hard Betty tried and however much she hurt herself, she never could get her behavior to live up this cultural ideal of angelic (toxic) femininity.

Betty has a lot of genuine character traits that makes her resemble the perfect girl-next-door, as long as you ignore all the little things that don’t quite fit. She’s kind. She’s polite and soft-spoken and has those ironclad upper-middle class manners. She’s modest, pretty but not overtly sexual. She’s an underdog who doesn’t always get what she wants but accepts these disappointments more or less passively at least at the start of the series.

Betty has been trained to put other people and their needs ahead of her own—to put other people’s wants ahead of her own needs—while still being expected to excel at everything. She’s been told she has to be oh so perfect even if it kills her. And whatever Betty is, she’s no quitter. So she’s spent years tearing herself to pieces over this endlessly retreating mirage of perfection.

There Is No Dark!Betty

Betty’s good girl cultural framework is one ceaseless reminder to just shut up, nod and smile. You’re so much prettier when you smile and no one that’s interested in hearing about what you’re feeling or thinking anyway.

So what happens when Betty stops doing that?

Dark!Betty in 1.03 worked like a get out of jail free card, for Betty and for the audience, by providing a cultural framework for Betty doing horrible things while giving the audience a way for it somehow to not really count.

This leaves me in a somewhat contrarian position: I’m fine with Betty’s blackmail scene in 2.02 as an example of a female character I like having moral failings and uncomfortable complexities—Betty made a tough call in a bad situation and now she has to live with her choices. But I continue to despise the Dark!Betty scene in 1.03 and the whole Dark!Betty framework because it feels like a cheap, bizarre cop-out with a nasty kick of a whore-madonna complex lurking in the background.

What we’ve seen all along is just Betty, a character who can be sweet and dutiful, upper-middle class polite and wear pink, pink cardigans—and also drug and physically assault a bully into saying what she wants to hear because he hurt her friend. Or go on a date with a decent-enough seeming guy to pump him for information about Jason. Or encourage her best friend to accept dodgy favors so she can contact her sister. Or blackmail a person she doesn’t have much reason to like in order to save the father of one of the people she cares about most—as her boyfriend, as her childhood friend, as someone who’s really been there for her and who just can’t catch a single fair break in a world stacked against him.

What Betty did to Chuck is a hell of a lot worse than what she did to Cheryl by any reasonable ethical standard. And, regardless of which is worse, they are both morally objectionable actions.

But this time Betty didn’t bother to put on the black wig first, so nobody could kid themselves that this wasn’t 100% Betty Cooper, the not-so-perfect girl-next-door.

And you know what? I like Betty. I still like Betty. As long as Betty keeps on being the person who fights too hard, who draws a line in the sand and then holds that line no matter what the cost, who cares immoderately and obsessively about things most people want to ignore as too inconvenient, I’m probably going to keep on liking her even if her behavior continues to be morally compromised. This is the Betty I’ve liked all along, someone who can roll up to a booth in Pop’s and use how people see her, that angelic blonde naive good girl front, to manipulate a teenage boy into agreeing to do something that’s obviously dodgy and off by making him think with his dick—all while using the amazingly over-correct phrase of “only in so far as I want to be more like her.”

The world needs more problematic female protagonists who deconstruct and undermine the toxic cultural archetype of angelic, infinitely accommodating femininity. This is also why I don’t want to see Betty in a leather jacket. She doesn’t need one. She’s a dangerous, problematic badass in white keds and a pink cardigan. I love Betty looking like someone who should sweetly and passively accommodate everything life throws at her, just lie back and take it—but actually no. She doesn’t. She won’t.

She can fix this. She will fix this.

So, as V would put it: atta girl, Betty. Go out there and keep on making people uncomfortable.

[backonefish]

Double Standards

There are two parallel situations I’ve been thinking about for quite some time: the two babygates and solo Harry vs. solo Zayn. * ** 

Babygates 

*** I find it so interesting that the same people who ripped apart all the inconsistencies with bg 1 are those who look at bg 2 and are like, yep, sounds plausible to me.

Both babygates follow the exact same formula of either The Sun or Dailymail revealing the exclusive relationship, a way too early pregnancy announcement, a father that is seemingly detached from it, and none of the band members participating in it. 

The only difference is in one, you have a fame hungry family and a faked pregnancy. In the other, you have a fame hungry woman and a real pregnancy. In fact, the formula of a fake relationship between Cheryl and Liam was so obvious that everyone mocked it. No one believed it. But suddenly, the minute we figured out Cheryl was actually pregnant, people were like, oh, I guess that means Liam’s the father.

What??

What??

And this is where the double standards set in.

In Louis’ situation, I read numerous times how, “Louis is a 24 yr, famous artist, in the biggest band, just about to start his solo career. There would be no way that he’d risk all of that to have a kid.”

But, what? Liam would? Liam, who actually has solo music coming (at the time of bg 1, Louis didn’t have solo plans) is going to be promoting his music, touring, focusing on his career - he would risk all of that to have a kid? A kid he’s apparently very committed to, but at the same time won’t even be around given the promotion of his solo career.

Let’s also not forget that Liam and Cheryl had been ‘dating’ for a few months when the pregnancy rumours started swirling. Liam who had just gotten out of a ‘long term relationship’ just jumped into another with a woman multiple years older, and not be married, no actual commitment, but be like cool, yeah, let’s have a kid.

In fact, if you look at the situations, the story that Louis had a one night stand and got a random pregnant, is actually more plausible than Liam dating Cheryl for a few months and deciding to father her child and commit his life to her.

So, it begs the question, why does the fandom believe that Louis would be too smart to get himself in such a situation, but Liam wouldn’t?

(Also the fact that Briana clearly wasn’t pregnant, yet Cheryl clearly was – that doesn’t count as a reason to believe bg 2. Because IVF is a thing.)

 Solo Harry vs. Solo Zayn

This one has been irking me for a long time. In fact, ever since Harry outright said that he was the one who came up with the hiatus in 2014, yet for some random reason, Zayn was the one who left first?

I’ve seen a lot of people using solo Harry promo as evidence that look he LOVES One Direction. He dedicated an entire segment of his movie to the boys. He talks to his boys all the time. He’s a true 1D stan.

Yes, I’m aware that a lot of this is in retaliation to the perpetual rumours that Harry hated being in the band. But it’s interesting that the smallest examples of 1D love are raised as gospel.

Where as for Zayn:

A wall in his house:

So why the discrepancy?

(I know that the Twitter fight between Zouis and the #realmusic left a horrible taste in everyone’s mouth. I also know at that time (when I actually wasn’t privy to the I heart Zayn side of the fandom), I had laughed at all of it and been like, lawls, they expect us to believe this twitter fight? They expect us to believe that Zayn’s actually tweeting that shit?

Imagine my surprise when, oh hey, people actually believed it!

Isn’t it interesting that we shouldn’t believe everything that print Harry says? Isn’t it interesting that we shouldn’t believe everything that SM Louis says/ does? Isn’t it interesting that we should believe that the boys are in some ridiculous contract that would create a fake baby and fake relationships? That this contract is so ruthless that they wouldn’t let Niall take time off his knee surgery, didn’t care how they were working underage boys to the ground, all in hopes of some money.

But wait.

How come people do believe the shit that print Zayn says? How come people do believe the shit that Zayn tweets? How come people do think that this contract and big, bad, Simon Cowell suddenly grew a heart when he looked at Zayn and realised he was unhappy making music?

Like, oh poor Harry and Louis they want to be together, but if they do, my profits will go down so I will force them apart. Poor Niall, he needs some time to fix his knee, but if he does, that means cancelled shows, my profits will go down, so I won’t let him get the proper medical attention he needs. Poor boys, they’re so tired, they barely sleep, they’re constantly working, but if I allow them to rest, my profits will go down, so I’ll force them to keep going. Oh poor Zayn, this music is definitely not what he likes, I’ve already forced him into four albums, and if he leaves, he’s sure to take a chunk of the Asian market, so my profits will go down***, so I’ll force him to – oh actually, never mind. I’ll actually let him leave.

I’m sorry, what? Do people actually look at these situations and go, yeah that makes complete sense??)

I find this interesting because there are so many times when Zayn and Harry have said the exact same thing, how they are making music that is truly theirs, how they’re finally getting to the sound that they want to listen to. Yet one is praised for staying true to himself (despite some controversial songs) and the other is despised for making music he enjoys.

What was the point of this? To say that it doesn’t matter if one of the boys aren’t your faves. You don’t have to love Liam as much as you love Louis. You don’t have to love, heck, even tolerate Zayn as much as you tolerate Harry. But you should at least extend the same level of analysis and critical thinking to the band as a whole.

When you are quick to judge other people for believing a het!Harry narrative, or a Harry hates 1D narrative, or a het!dad!Louis narrative, and tell them to look at the facts, think critically, think logically, use your goddman brain, yet refuse to do the same for other members – I’m sorry but your double standards are showing.

*This is mainly the discrepancies in how people perceive each situation. I don’t know if it’s because some people either just don’t want to look into things enough, or if they genuinely believe one situation over the other. Or that people just don’t care enough about Liam and Zayn.

**This isn’t referring to people who believe everything 1DHQ says, hook, line, and sinker. At least they’re extending their beliefs equally across all boys. This is referring to those who pride themselves as being analytical and seeing the truth about certain situations, but refuse to apply that same level of thinking to others. It’s about those people who only look at certain situations and then believe 1DHQ narrative for others.

***I am intentionally ignoring the boys’ sexuality when discussing this, because I read multiple times that you don’t need to know Louis’ sexuality to dispel bg. So I’m going with that.

****A quick Google search shows that Four performed better than MITAM did.