hooloovoo1:thevalkyriedirective:aceofwands:babeltwo:ds9vgrconfessions:Follow | Confess | A
hooloovoo1: thevalkyriedirective: aceofwands: babeltwo: ds9vgrconfessions: Follow | Confess | Archive [I do not like Jadzia Dax. I wish I could, because it seems irrational of me not to, but I just find her immature in many respects and careless with her treatment of friends and loved ones. She has good moments but overall she’s just someone I wouldn’t want to know or be friends with and I can’t exactly say why.] I hate every fucking confession like this so much. I don’t even have anything to say anymore except stop. Just stop confessing that you don’t like female characters. It does not make you special or different. It makes you pretty normal in fandom and how fucked up is that. You know, I think it’s time for a limited edition one time only Valkyrie Directive response to this. Because my commentary got a little out of hand. What IS the deal with this in fandom? I don’t think I’ve ever heard people talk about hating any of the main male characters, and yet it seems like every other day someone’s complaining about Kira or Ezri or Jadzia (JADZIA! FFS HOW COULD ANYONE HATE JADZIA!) - or one of the other Trek ladies in the other fandoms. Kira’s a bitch. Ezri’s not as good as Jadzia. Jadzia’s immature. Keiko’s a nag. Lwaxana’s selfish and ‘oversexualised’. What even IS this stuff people are spouting? What do they WANT the female characters to act like, is what I want to know! People say they don’t show enough emotion. People say they show too much emotion. They’re never, EVER allowed to express any sort of negative emotion - especially not anger, anger is right out. If a male character gets angry he’s a badass or we understand and sympathise with him. If a female character gets angry she’s a bitch or a nag or selfish or whiny or any of the other innumerable negative terms we use to describe women (because it’s always women, when’s the last time you’ve heard someone describe a male character as a nag? Or selfish. Or whiny. That’s right, probably never.). It just seems like female characters are being scrutinised and judged for traits that people wouldn’t even think twice about if they belonged to male characters. I wonder if it’s the way the male characters react to these behaviours in female characters, that invites this scrutiny and judgement. Someone already mentioned that the OP’s complaints (because that is not a bloody confession) were pretty much word for word what Worf complained about in the awful Let He Who Is Without Sin. And I can’t help but wonder if some of the negative reactions people have to Kira is due in part to the way ‘Bajoran women’ are introduced and stereotyped by male characters (such as Miles warning Sisko about Kira in the very first episode). I just want to know why it is that male characters are allowed to express a range of emotions and remain relatively free of judgement, while female characters are freely disliked or hated. Or am I oversimplifying things? I’d love to hear your thoughts - do you have other examples of times you’ve felt people were complaining unfairly about a female Trek character (or multiple Trek characters!)? Or do you think there’s a flipside and that male characters are just as disliked? It’s interesting that you talk about anger, because one of my main complaints about Enterprise is how angry Archer is all the time. It drives me crazy, I really can’t stand him. What is he even angry about? On a less personal note, I think you’re on to something with the idea that female character hatred is at least encouraged by how the male characters talk about the female characters. Tripp and Archer spend so much time complaining about T’Pol, for example. Barclay, on the other hand, is super gross and creepy, especially in TNG, but the other characters really don’t seem that bothered. The only male characters I can think of that get criticized with any frequency in the text are the Doctor and Data, and that’s generally in the context of how they can/should be more human-like. I agree about Archer, I don’t think he was written very well as a character - especially in terms of the way he interacted with T'Pol/Vulcans, and his unnecessary anger. But I wonder if the way we/people in general look at his character is different to the way they’d look at another ‘angry’ character, like say Kira. I feel like, with Archer, we stop to go 'why IS Archer angry? this writing sure is poor in regards to his characterisation’. Yet most of the complaints I read about Kira are 'what a bitch/she’s always whining about Bajor’ and other things of that nature. I feel like I’d have to do some actual research to see whether this is just a perception on my part, or actually a reflection of how people talk/think about these characters. And I know what you mean about the way Barclay, and some of the other male characters on TNG (like Geordi) are written in regards to their interactions with female characters is very problematic. But I also find the way characters interact with him very odd, as someone who deals with anxiety herself, I found the Enterprise quite lacking in terms of any sort of understanding about his mental health issues … I just think the male characters are thought and talked about in different ways compared to the female characters, both in and out of the text. And I wonder if that has to do with this idea of an 'ideal’ female character, that each character is compared to and found lacking. -- source link