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bookshop on "Why can't a woman be more like a man?":
There are any number of people who defend their love of female-with-anyone-but-male. Which is fine...except that this happens a lot. And it almost always happens that the characters involved are the primary female and the main male. TPTB get them together, or show them attracted to each other, and all hell breaks loose in fandom.
So here's my question: Why is it that the primary female character(s) in any canon are never good enough for the main male character?
The female character is permitted, allowed, acceptable, so long as she doesn't fall for the main male character (whom fans have generally shipped with the secondary - read, geeky - male character).
Teyla is a lovely character and people love her...unless she's paired with John Sheppard. Then it's just bad writing, uninteresting, the dynamic just doesn't work.
Sam is a great, kickass career woman...as long as she's not 'chasing after' Jack O'Neill. The instant she shows any care about him, the character is a betrayal of everything she stands for.
Gwen is a sweetheart, a compass of the heart for Merlin and Arthur both, and an anchor for Morgana. But when she falls for Arthur (and more importantly, Arthur falls for her), she's a slag, a slut, a whore, a stupid bitch who doesn't know her place (or her mind).
Uhura? Is fantastic, an intelligent woman of colour in a world without race or gender biases (allegedly). But the instant she kisses Spock, she becomes reviled, abhorrent, discomforting.
Maybe you really don't like the dynamics between John/Teyla, Sam/Jack, Arthur/Gwen, Uhura/Spock and prefer John/Rodney, Jack/Daniel, Arthur/Merlin, and Kirk/Spock. But if preferring two main, white, male characters in a homosexual pairing always comes at the expense of the canonical male/female het pairing, then isn't that an issue? Doesn't that become a kind of erasure of female characters from the relevance of the story - all the story, both the personal and character-driven arcs of relationships, friendships, and romance, as well as the customary functional elimination of a female character in these shows?
This is a pattern for us (fandom 'us') - go to any fandom and take a look at the fanfic.
Perhaps we should start asking ourselves why - without the excuses and the "but I do like Teyla/Sam/Gwen/Uhura, just not with..."
It's not the individual examples that discomfort me - well, they do, but that's because I love these pairings and I want others to love them, too - it's the fact that these are patterns that get repeated in fandom after fandom, show after show. It's the fact that fandom doesn't do this once, they do it again, and again, and again, and again. And each time, the same excuses get recycled:
"She's just not strong enough to be paired with the male lead."
"She's just not interesting enough for me to care about her."
"She's just doesn't have chemistry with the male lead."
Maybe the individual character of this show isn't your type. Maybe the dynamic just isn't your thing. Maybe it's innocuous, innocent, and entirely unintended. Hooray! No need for this feminist guilt claptrap, break out the beer and lets go sit on the pier with our best buds and be manly men in a subtextual way (except for the part where 99% of us are women)!
Still. There's a pattern in fan behaviour that says a woman is good enough to be paired with anyone 'secondary', but only a male will do for the main male character.
And isn't that sexist?
eta: This post was initially focused on looking at fannish reactions to canonical male/female pairings, and then how that translates into fannish behaviour and attitudes. Also, if your OTP or preferred pairing isn't one of these, it's not a criticism of your pairing preferences, it's a look at why fandoms react in such a viciously negative manner to these specific types of m/f pairings.
bookshop on "Why can't a woman be more like a man?":Oh, and let us not leave out Gwen/Arthur, and Gwen/Morgana. Everyone loves Gwen/Morgana. I love Gwen/Morgana. But if we love Gwen so much, why aren't we happy to see her and Arthur so happy together in S2? Don't we love Gwen enough to enjoy her stepping into her role as main character? Or do we only love her enough to shunt her off to the side to be happy with Morgana, so we can all enjoy the lovely Merlin/Arthur slash.I want to address the main-male, main-female, secondary-male "triangle" that tends to form a pattern in fandoms.
There are any number of people who defend their love of female-with-anyone-but-male. Which is fine...except that this happens a lot. And it almost always happens that the characters involved are the primary female and the main male. TPTB get them together, or show them attracted to each other, and all hell breaks loose in fandom.
So here's my question: Why is it that the primary female character(s) in any canon are never good enough for the main male character?
The female character is permitted, allowed, acceptable, so long as she doesn't fall for the main male character (whom fans have generally shipped with the secondary - read, geeky - male character).
Teyla is a lovely character and people love her...unless she's paired with John Sheppard. Then it's just bad writing, uninteresting, the dynamic just doesn't work.
Sam is a great, kickass career woman...as long as she's not 'chasing after' Jack O'Neill. The instant she shows any care about him, the character is a betrayal of everything she stands for.
Gwen is a sweetheart, a compass of the heart for Merlin and Arthur both, and an anchor for Morgana. But when she falls for Arthur (and more importantly, Arthur falls for her), she's a slag, a slut, a whore, a stupid bitch who doesn't know her place (or her mind).
Uhura? Is fantastic, an intelligent woman of colour in a world without race or gender biases (allegedly). But the instant she kisses Spock, she becomes reviled, abhorrent, discomforting.
Maybe you really don't like the dynamics between John/Teyla, Sam/Jack, Arthur/Gwen, Uhura/Spock and prefer John/Rodney, Jack/Daniel, Arthur/Merlin, and Kirk/Spock. But if preferring two main, white, male characters in a homosexual pairing always comes at the expense of the canonical male/female het pairing, then isn't that an issue? Doesn't that become a kind of erasure of female characters from the relevance of the story - all the story, both the personal and character-driven arcs of relationships, friendships, and romance, as well as the customary functional elimination of a female character in these shows?
This is a pattern for us (fandom 'us') - go to any fandom and take a look at the fanfic.
Perhaps we should start asking ourselves why - without the excuses and the "but I do like Teyla/Sam/Gwen/Uhura, just not with..."
It's not the individual examples that discomfort me - well, they do, but that's because I love these pairings and I want others to love them, too - it's the fact that these are patterns that get repeated in fandom after fandom, show after show. It's the fact that fandom doesn't do this once, they do it again, and again, and again, and again. And each time, the same excuses get recycled:
"She's just not strong enough to be paired with the male lead."
"She's just not interesting enough for me to care about her."
"She's just doesn't have chemistry with the male lead."
Maybe the individual character of this show isn't your type. Maybe the dynamic just isn't your thing. Maybe it's innocuous, innocent, and entirely unintended. Hooray! No need for this feminist guilt claptrap, break out the beer and lets go sit on the pier with our best buds and be manly men in a subtextual way (except for the part where 99% of us are women)!
Still. There's a pattern in fan behaviour that says a woman is good enough to be paired with anyone 'secondary', but only a male will do for the main male character.
And isn't that sexist?
eta: This post was initially focused on looking at fannish reactions to canonical male/female pairings, and then how that translates into fannish behaviour and attitudes. Also, if your OTP or preferred pairing isn't one of these, it's not a criticism of your pairing preferences, it's a look at why fandoms react in such a viciously negative manner to these specific types of m/f pairings.
no subject
well, where are we supposed to get the inspiration? Is her femaleness supposed to be enough? Should we write her out of pity?
*laughs* I don't write characters out of pity. I write them because I like them. One is not obligated to write about characters you don't like, male, or female. I think that one should respect them, treat them as people and involve them in the narrative, even if their view is not yours, they don't connect with you. They're characters, they're female, and I, personally, wouldn't want to be responsible for the kind of female-bashing that I abhor - whether I like the character or not.
Underneath my post is the point that if one doesn't like or write any female characters, then maybe one needs to start asking why femaleness is always the dealbreaker.
no subject
What
Not everybody comes up short, though. Femaleness is not the dealbreaker, that's what I was trying to say, the dealbreaker is the way femaleness is portrayed in TV. Back to Leverage, I don't like Sophie and I really really dislike Nate (one of my main reasons for not liking Sophie is that she puts up with him) and I would argue that the five of them are the main characters and not just Nate, Leverage isn't House M.D. So I think Parker does in fact count, because Eliot/Alec is a popular pairing in Leverage (19 fics in AO3) but Alec/Parker is only slightly behind (14 in AO3) and most people, when given the choice, seem to go for them all together (24) and not for leaving Parker out so the boys can have their happily ever after soulmate bond. As an individual character she's also more popular than everybody except Alec (he has Geek points, but Parker's girl and weird points aren't for nothing).
Alec Hardison (81) > Parker (Leverage) (79) > Eliot Spencer (76) > Sophie Devereaux (28) > Nathan Ford (22)
In Veronica Mars the girl gets (118 fics), followed not closely at all by Logan Echolls (73) and Duncan Kane (49) and features in most of the pairings.
When there's a girl that rocks, fandom is perfectly willing to love her and give her the prefered male character of turn as a prize (or more than one, as the case might be).
I don't think female characters i don't like should be demonized, by any means, but erasure seems to me a way bigger problem than evil!girlfriends and it happens to secondary male characters that aren't well-loved as wel. So I have to conclude the problem is with the original, not an unfair bias where in a tv show having a cock gives you automatic fannish popularity.
What Sophie, and Teyla and many others would need for me to like them enough to write them is a personality transplant, same that happens with tons of male characters (Becket, Nate) which I don't have to feel guilty for ignoring because they are portrayed in ways i find boring.
Awareness is good but positive discrimination when it comes to a hobby would be going to far in the other direction. If something isn't good for you that doesn't mean you're discriminating, making an extra effort to like female characters makes me feel as if *I* need special treatment, as if I were to be judged by the same standards as men I woulnd't pass. And this isn't true, so I'm not going to go extra easy on the girls either, they don't need it, although lots of them could use new TPTB.
no subject
As to portrayals, there are plenty of things are portrayed on TV in questionable and derogatory ways - queerness, bisexuality, and disability are ones that roll off the tongue. And for the most part, fans are willing to expand upon them - to become the new PTB, so to speak, for these aspects. Yet it's so much harder to find fans who'll expand on the unexplored aspects of female characters.
Interestingly, your comments reflect something I've noticed in fandom lately: anything less than sassy, outspoken, and spirited is 'personality-less'. If a character doesn't snark, snap, or riposte with witty repartee, they're considered boring. Teyla, Sam, Ronon, Gwen...they're all characters for whom still waters run deep. Their reserve isn't because they don't have personality, it's because they don't wear their hearts (or their emotions or tempers) on their sleeve. That makes them an enigma - a chameleon based on the situation - and I love an enigma!