In The End All Customer Service Workers Are Like The Rose Bride

The thing about the wild replies to posts that go around talking about fandom misogyny is that, at least for me, I did have to make an active choice to care about female characters.

There's less of them and they are often written with a lot less to work with and it's easier to focus on dude characters. But I had to look at myself and wonder why I was willing to read pages and pages of meta and fic and headcanons for Julian Bashir when I wasn't interested in the same for Jadzia Dax when they have a similar amount of screentime. Why I wasn't interested in Captain Janeway when she's the lead of her show. Yes, writers are often sexist, but the writers were ableist and homophobic and so on with a million male characters, but I was willing to put the work in to love them. At some point, the viewer/reader/listener's own sexism plays a part in their willingness to engage with a character.

So I had to actively choose to seek out those meta and fic and headcanons for female characters. And it is significantly harder to find than it is for male characters, because most of fandom hadn't questioned their own sexism. But what little of it there is out there is often just as high quality and interesting as the stuff I was already looking at, if not more so because there's the added dimension of fighting against the writers' misogyny, which often requires even more engagement and creativity.

It was, for me, a process that I had to continually work on to care about women characters as much as I did guy ones. But it got easier the more effort I put in. And now those posts about how no one cares about female characters are very relatable to me.

But the way people respond to those posts, it's always "I can't change the fact that the writers are sexist! It's an immutable fact that female characters are less interesting! You're attacking me personally over something that I can't change! And actually, you're the sexist for not realizing how terrible these female characters are and how you're victimizing me asking me to care about them!"

Besties, I promise it is something you can change. You just have to put the work in

tags from tofixtheshadows: #I keep saying that fandoms will always flatten characters into shallow versions of themselves#because they will just sort of skim the surface of the media and let their expectations fill in the blanks#which are usually easy stereotypes#and this will inevitably hit marginalized characters harder; particularly people of color#and these stereotypes will more often be benevolent for the white characters#and more unfair towards the nonwhite ones

the problem of fandom reducing characters who are women and/or people of colour to sexist/racist stereotypes is definitely aggravated by the fact that a lot of fans simply do not pay very much attention to these characters in the first place then subconsciously paper over the gaps in their perception with things they’ve been culturally conditioned to believe are true about people in the same category as said character

i think this does get critiqued sometimes like I think we're supposed to see naruto's enduring loyalty to Sasuke as overall a noble/good thing but in the case of the uchiha massacre the uchiha's disloyalty to the village is used to justify their deaths and Itachi putting the village first is seen as a good thing i.e. loyalty to comrades is only good when they are loyal to the state which is deeply disturbing

I think it’s interesting how Shikamaru is basically saying that Sasuke is worth risking their lives for because he is a shinobi from the hidden leaf and therefore a comrade, instead of it being because he’s a kid who’s essentially being abducted by an incredibly dangerous enemy. He’s not a comrade in the sense of being someone he knows in a dangerous situation, but in the sense of being loyal to the hidden leaf, implying that once he fully cuts those ties to the village he will no longer be worthy of help/protection, which is exactly how he gets treated by Shikamaru and most of the Konoha 11 when he becomes a rogue ninja. Even the core ideas of loyalty and protecting one another are wrapped up in the nationalism of the show.

come on guys vodka beach party

*shoves all of my lux I aquired during last month of khux into your hands* Young Xehanort. The time travelling one, in organization coat. Please good sir, I'm starving.

Poor soul. I'll have pity on you

yall do realize just because something has been a target of misogynistic criticism, that doesn't make stanning it completely uncritically in response some kind of revolutionary feminist praxis. right.

OMFG THIS SHOW IS SO NOT CHILD APPROPRIATE WHAT THE HELL AT THIS GORE

one day the internet rly should talk abt how (white) fandom’s “anything goes” mentality enables a ridiculous amount of racism & racist harassment in fic/fandom spaces/etc, & how cries of “censorship” are often weaponized against fans of color (esp Black fans) who call this out

lack of accountability & moderation in online spaces (regardless of the nature of said space) will always, always lead to marginalized communities getting hurt. most especially people of color. if you hold some lofty ideals of pleasure & ~freedom of expression~ above the tangible safety of people of color then you seriously seriously need to reexamine your priorities. paradox of tolerance and all that. if you tolerate everything then you are not only leaving room for rampant harassment and racism to occur, but you are enabling it. when simple safety measures and moderation are absent, the first people to get hurt will always be communities of color. 

it is actually possible to have a world in which creative freedom is encouraged and also we are able to protect marginalized communities from harassment. white people just don’t have any imagination lmao

regularly getting tags like this on my posts about horrific abuses wrt detentions and deportations by the trump administration and just to be clear. you are all baby brained. do you think every single one of the thousands of jackbooted thugs in dhs and ice were hired in the last 3 months. do you think nothing the democrats did had anything to do with leading us here. the road to hell is paved with lesser evils

obama 2010

American Civil Liberties Union

Obama Administration Claims Unchecked Authority To Kill Americans Outside Combat Zones | American Civil Liberties Union

Federal Court Hears Arguments Today In ACLU And CCR Case Challenging Administration's Claimed Authority To Assassinate Americans It Designat

obama 2011

American Civil Liberties Union

President Obama Signs Indefinite Detention Bill Into Law | American Civil Liberties Union

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE...

obama 2012

Mother Jones

ACLU to Obama: You Can’t Just Vaporize Americans Without Judicial Process

Obama to ACLU: Yes we can.

obama 2014

American Civil Liberties Union

ACLU sues Obama administration for detaining asylum seekers as intimidation tactic | American Civil Liberties Union

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: 212-549-2666, media@aclu.org...

American Civil Liberties Union

Speed Over Fairness: Deportation Under the Obama Administration | ACLU

obama 2015

American Civil Liberties Union

President Obama Wants to Continue Imprisoning Immigrant Families | ACLU

2018 report on CBP under obama between 2009-2014

American Civil Liberties Union

ACLU Obtains Documents Showing Widespread Abuse of Child Immigrants in U.S. Custody | American Civil Liberties Union

New Report Is Based on Thousands of Government Documents Obtained Through the Freedom of Information Act That Detail Horrific Stories

obama 2016 before the first trump presidency

The Nation

The Deportation Machine Obama Built for President Trump

Before the end of his first term in office, the Obama administration expanded a small program by about 3,600 percent.

biden 2024

dropsitenews.com

"Hand Restraints and Black Out Goggles": Biden Administration Plans for Migrants Held at Guantanamo Bay Revealed

Documents show U.S. government has long used the controversial naval base to house and process refugees, contradicting public statements

report released in 2024 documenting louisiana ICE detention centers under biden 2022-2024, same ones currently being used to disappear migrants and pro-palestine political dissidents by the trump admin now:

everything in this post i made 8 months ago about biden & harris admin policies and harris's proposed policies during her campaign when she bragged that she would be tougher on the border than trump. of course you cannot beat trump at this but the fact is she tried to claim that she did as vp and would as president in order to court centrists and moderate republicans, like many democrats last cycle she ran by trying to outflank republicans on the right and in doing so moved the overton window so far that you had liberals happily cheering for border police on stage at the dnc. if you refuse to acknowledge that that is in any way connected to what is happening right now? that democrats also condemning student activists because of their defense of palestine and calling militarized police in to brutalize them for over a year was a direct line to this? that the fact of the palestine exception causing democratic leadership to fail abysmally to respond to early abductions by the trump admin bc they agreed with those disappearances ideologically just at most not in procedure is the very reason those activists were among the first most high profile targets? there's a reason fascists target those people first! because you will blink when it's time to defend them! it's in the fucking poem!! my god