Ranty McRant
Aug. 24th, 2012 12:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ericadawn16Yes, John Watson will probably get married. He was married in the Doyle canon NUMEROUS times! He was married in the RDJ sequel and did that sequel have any less homoeroticness than the first?
IT HAD WAY MORE!
But no, everyone is acting like it's the end of the world and I'm kind of pissed because..
Haven't we established that if you don't like canon, you should just ignore it and do your own thing? Like all the fic where Ianto, Phil, Wesley, Wash and other are happily alive and well?
Now, if John were marrying a man, would this get this much backlash?
Yes, it probably would but why do we ignore canon m/f relationships?
We get good, well-written women like Pepper and we still ship Tony with Steve. Thor gets a rocket science girlfriend who's too smart for Nick Fury to trust with Phase 2 so what do we do? We ship him with his brother.
Why are we marginalizing women when in the same breath, we complain how there aren't enough of them?
It's kind of self-defeating and infantile, isn't it?
(sighs)
IT HAD WAY MORE!
But no, everyone is acting like it's the end of the world and I'm kind of pissed because..
Haven't we established that if you don't like canon, you should just ignore it and do your own thing? Like all the fic where Ianto, Phil, Wesley, Wash and other are happily alive and well?
Now, if John were marrying a man, would this get this much backlash?
Yes, it probably would but why do we ignore canon m/f relationships?
We get good, well-written women like Pepper and we still ship Tony with Steve. Thor gets a rocket science girlfriend who's too smart for Nick Fury to trust with Phase 2 so what do we do? We ship him with his brother.
Why are we marginalizing women when in the same breath, we complain how there aren't enough of them?
It's kind of self-defeating and infantile, isn't it?
(sighs)
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Date: 2012-08-24 04:55 pm (UTC)Sherlock fandom, however, is batshit insane. All bets are off there. The Ritchie films I think are even more homoerotic because Mary is there to throw into relief just how much more Watson is dependent on and caring of Holmes than he is his wife.
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Date: 2012-08-24 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-24 06:38 pm (UTC)The motivation for a woman (wherever she may sit on the sexuality spectrum) to ship m/m have always intrigued me, just because I don't relate with it at all.
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Date: 2012-08-25 12:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 05:23 am (UTC)However, I am still very picky. I don't do slash just for the sake of slash. I'm not going to read pairings that don't make sense and/or make me cringe like Harry/Draco or Emma/Mary Margaret or Thor/Loki.
F/F has been a bit trickier. Almost none of my fandoms have canon f/f relationships and when they do, there aren't a lot of stories for them. I'll read anything if it's well-written and that can be very hard to find. There have been a few in the Avengers fandom with Natasha and Pepper which I found because I love both characters a lot.
I had one friend admit to me that they can ONLY read m/m slash and find anything else boring. I can't process that at all. I'm not sure what you have come across. Most of my friends who enjoy f/f slash seem to want stories where the men are either sidelined, ignored or made into villains. Sometimes, it appears to be a cathartic way of dealing with the crap in their own lives.
What have you found or your thoughts?
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Date: 2012-10-07 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-24 06:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-25 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-24 07:06 pm (UTC)But yeah, fandom needs to chill the f* out. So John Watson gets married and then she dies. And then he gets married some more (we think... not too sure about this... he could have been living in sin with some of these "wives"), but maybe Moffat and Gatiss decide to just make him a serial dater. Either way, I'm not going to sweat the small stuff. Even married, Watson was still attached to Sherlock's hip, so nothing much will change.
As for Tony/Steve, Thor/Loki, I don't know. I've only seen the movies and I honesty didn't care for Jane. It could been the actress or simply the characterization, either way... not a fan. Loved Darcy though. And Pepper... I like the idea of her more as Tony's friend, pseudo-sister than a romantic interest. Because she is a strong woman, and she doesn't need a man, especially not one like Tony Stark, maybe Happy. I ship her with Happy.
EDIT: I saw the twit from Moffat. I now understand. But aren't there a couple of stories dealing with clients and marriage/weddings. Though Ritchie did give us Watson and Mary's, Doyle never wrote the wedding of John Watson. So it could be the hint be for a client and not John Watson?
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Date: 2012-08-24 09:20 pm (UTC)But does 'needing a man' have to have anything to do with (lack of) strength? Can't a strong, straight woman can still 'need' a man for love and sex? Being strong means she can have a relationship without being a doormat -- and 'not being a doormat' doesn't mean she has to pull the plug the moment she doesn't get what she wants, it means she has the balls (Freudian slip intended) to negotiate...
At least, that's how women behave in my stories, LOL!
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Date: 2012-08-24 09:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-24 09:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-24 10:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 05:46 am (UTC)No, she did her job, she did it well and she worked around his faults like a mature actual person.
She also didn't wait for him, She had dates, friends and other people. Then, in the end, he finally realized how awesome she truly was so it all worked out.
It's a little annoying that strong women are somehow supposed to settle for men who aren't their equals. I know Pepper originally ended up with Happy in the comics but I always thought that was stupid and old fashioned.
So yes, I totally agree with your statement.
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Date: 2012-08-24 08:25 pm (UTC)I'm not for marginalizing women but, negl, I do not read or ship het in fandom. I may accept certain pairing as canon but I don't ship them. In fact, I dislike het with a passion. If there's another male, I will slash the hell out of any possible male/male pairing even if it require incredible feats of (ill)logic to do so. lol
That's just how my mind works. I watched Avengers and automatically slashed Tony/Loki, despite the fact that I love Pepper (although dislike Gwynyth Paltrow in general).
That said, I dislike Jane because she is boring as hell, tbh. I think Natalie Portman was the wrong casting choice and I wish the role had been recast for Thor 2 but I've no problem at all with the character and Thor as a couple, in theory. I ship Frostiron anyway, not Thorki.
I'm sort of off-topic but there are many reasons why some of us reject m/f ships and it's not just because we dislike the female characters on principle.
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Date: 2012-08-24 08:32 pm (UTC)Is it because I'm afraid she'll take away the slashiness? Not hardly, all long-time slashers have been working around that for ages.
I just don't want it to become the Sherlock, John and Mary show. If she's there in the background, fine, but shows have this annoying habit of thinking the SO needs to be included in everything, or they need to be constantly in peril or some other crap like that.
I also don't feel you HAVE to have x number of women in a show that is supposed to be centered on the friendship between 2 men. We already have Mrs. Hudson, Molly and Sally that's more than enough to fill any mythical quota.
I'll reserve judgement until I see the finished product, but it definitely is a concern - one which I hope will turn out to be unnecessary.
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Date: 2012-08-25 05:37 am (UTC)*Raises hand.* I also admit to dreading the addition of Mary to the series.
Is it because I'm afraid she'll take away the slashiness? Not hardly, all long-time slashers have been working around that for ages.
Exactly. While I understand people getting offended by the segment of fandom who's reaction is, "Oh noes!!1! It'll get in da way of ma slash," it is possible to react negatively to the idea of them bringing Mary in at this point in the series without being a slasher worried about it negatively affecting how the relationship between John and Sherlock is written.
I just don't want it to become the Sherlock, John and Mary show.
One of my concerns is that they will just use Mary as a way to add stress to the relationship between John and Sherlock. I think they've already shown with Sarah, and the other women they've had John date how prone they are to having a woman between John and Sherlock be nothing more than a minor annoyance.
Another concern of mine is that they have already clearly handled Irene Adler badly. They couldn't actually let her beat Sherlock the way she should if they were actually being "true" to the ACD canon. They had to ultimately let Sherlock ride to Irene's rescue. If they couldn't make Irene Adler as strong of a character as she should've been what reason do I have to expect them to treat Mary any better? Not to mention that for all their talk about being "canon faithful" apart from having "modernized" the stories, bringing Mary in after they've already done the fall is hardly "canon faithful."
I'll reserve judgement until I see the finished product, but it definitely is a concern - one which I hope will turn out to be unnecessary.
*Nods.* Seconded. I'm reserving judgement, but they've stretched my patience with how much use they've made of Moriarty, and disappointed me with how they treated Irene Adler. I'm not going to blindly trust them.
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Date: 2012-08-24 08:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-24 09:22 pm (UTC)RE: strong females, I agree on Pepper, but I really dislike Jane. However I think that's mostly to do with Natalie Portman and not with her character. I personally ship Thor/Sif because it's comic canon and he has soooo much more chemistry with Sif than with Jane.
Haven't we established that if you don't like canon, you should just ignore it and do your own thing?
Anyone who doesn't know how to ignore canon obviously has never been in the POTC fandom. Specifically the Norrington sub-fandom. ;)
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Date: 2012-08-24 09:36 pm (UTC)It's also curious how some female characters strike a chord with fans. There's still hard-core Torchwood fans who insist on shipping Gwen with Jack. I'm a hard-core Janto shipper, but I've no problem with anyone on the Gwack ship. (In terms of het ships for Jack, I like him with Rose or Esther.)
I like Thor and Jane just fine. I think they're really cute, and I'm looking forward to seeing more if them in Thor 2: The Dark World. I don't get Thorki, in fact I find incest shipping in general squicky (i.e. Wincest in Supernatural fic), but hey, to each their own.
I hear you on Tony; I've always liked him with Pepper, and I loved their scenes in the Avengers, but at the same time I ship him with Steve hard-core. The great thing about fic is that anything is possible. Heck, there's fic out there where they're a threesome! I ship Pepper with others as well, mainly Natasha and Phil. I'm shipping practically everybody in The Avengers these days; Clint/Phil, Steve/Phil, Clint/Steve/Phil, Clint/Natasha, Clint/Natasha/Phil, Natasha/Bruce, Natasha/Bucky. My headcanon is one big clusterf**k on the helicarrier! LOL
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Date: 2012-08-25 11:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-26 05:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-24 09:50 pm (UTC)I love Jane in Thor and at the same time, they could have done so much more from her. She basically spends all her time running Thor over.
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Date: 2012-08-25 12:40 am (UTC)It's partly the fact that the women tend to written as 'love interest' characters. I mean in the Avengers universe, Jane on paper was pretty fun and smart, but she was there for Thor to meet and to 'make him a better person' though the charm of her intelligence or something. Pepper is lovely and from what we've seen, cool, very competent, brave, and not any sort of push over. But other than the fact that she worked for Tony from before IM started, we know absolutely nothing about her from the movie-canon. A lot, if not most, female leads in superhero movies are pretty much there to end up with or support the much more developed male hero (or deal with the male villain who, in this day and age, is probably as equally developed as the hero), while having just enough of a personality to not be a cardboard cutout. If you ship based on personality types and character history, and explorations on how they can clash/fit together, there usually is much more material for wiring slash than het because the characterizations of the women are so shallow.
Plus, there are pretty much always going to be more male characters. If you don't buy into the chemistry between the hetero-main couple of a story/movie, or you don't believe the pairing would work out in the long term, and of course the man is going to be the main character and the more interesting character, slashing's probably the only way to write stories with pairings. (I don't ship Steve/Tony because I hated Steve in The Avengers for a variety of reasons, and Thor/Loki is socialized incest and I seriously have to question why it's so popular. But I will ship Tony/Loki for personality purposes that doesn't take away my love for Tony/Pepper in the movies.)
On the topic of Sherlock, I think it's stupid for fangirls to be whining about the possibility of Mary because it 'gets in the way of the ship'.
I think some people could have the (more) legitimate problem with media always running to heterosexual pairings as a default, and considering the decades of people and essayists shipping Sherlock/John even back when it was just the stories, want at least one version of a popular Sherlock takeoff to explore the gay issue. But since Moffat has pretty much said no to that, Mary is something of a sore spot.
Other people could have issues with it for what it could do to the dynamic between the two lead characters. It isn't book-canon where ACD wrote in Mary as a lead up to killing Sherlock off, then conveniently getting rid of her when fans convinced him to write more stories. (Then later having Watson married again, but her pretty much never existing in any of the stories- she's never even named) It's not RDJ-movie verse where in the 1st movie, she exists for the sole purpose of having Sherlock act jealous, then in the 2nd movie, doing pretty much nothing. Since BBC Sherlock is set in the modern day, if a man gets married, he's probably going to move out of his flatshare-even if it was with his best friend- and spend more time with his wife and less with said best friend. The dynamic between John and Sherlock would change on the show itself, which people could legit not want.
Though, I doubt a lot of young fangirls are thinking of it past going 'ugh, women' which is just not cool. Internalized misogyny is partially the fault of media and society, but still.
On that note, the Wedding could refer to half a dozen cases involving weddings, and doesn't mean Mary is actually going to shop up.
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Date: 2012-08-25 05:55 am (UTC)Thank you. One of my concerns is how bringing Mary in could be used to manipulate the dynamic between John and Sherlock, and the other is that I don't trust Moff and Gatiss to make Mary anything more than a tool for changing the dynamic. Neither is an, "Ugh women," reaction.
On that note, the Wedding could refer to half a dozen cases involving weddings, and doesn't mean Mary is actually going to shop up.
Thank you, again. I don't pay much attention to what Moff and Gatiss tweet, but I have heard they do like to say things that they know are just going to stir up the fans.
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Date: 2012-08-25 12:49 am (UTC)To each his/her/its own
Date: 2012-08-25 01:53 am (UTC)As one Avengers fan put it (maybe it was you!), "Threesomes solve EVERYTHING!"
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Date: 2012-08-25 05:33 pm (UTC)We get good, well-written women like Pepper and we still ship Tony with Steve. Thor gets a rocket science girlfriend who's too smart for Nick Fury to trust with Phase 2 so what do we do? We ship him with his brother.
Why are we marginalizing women
THIS. I've been complaining about this forever. Misogynist thinking is so powerful that a whole world of fans would be much happier is female characters were written out completely. However, while they ship m/m pairings, they ship openly heterosexual men together based on "subtext" instead of encouraging the media to show us homosexual characters and homosexual relationships.
It all drives me crazy.
Why are we marginalizing women when in the same breath, we complain how there aren't enough of them?
I don't know if I agree that the same people who are participating in the first thing are participating in the other. I only ever see one or the other, I suppose. I complain a lot about there not being enough female characters on shows. I recently posted this on my tumblr:
http://exsixtwosix.tumblr.com/post/29797686321/the-correct-gender-ratio-that-should-exist-on-all
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Date: 2012-08-26 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-27 09:16 pm (UTC)Those are of course, places I avoid.
As you've probably noticed though, if you've ever even glanced at the terribly our of date recs post on my lj, that I'm happy reading m/f and m/m and in almost all cases it's actually the same male character, lol, although when I write, which is pretty rare these days, I tend towards m,/f
with my own fandom though, the main male is a centuries old alien, so I think in part many people, myself included, find it easier to ship him with pretty much anyone, since "human" attitudes to relationships can be ignored.
I do however know a few people who are, for want of a better word, "rabid" as regards who they wont ship him with, and in almost every case it's down to either a strong dislike of the character concerned, regardless of their gender, or a fierce preference for another character, again regardless of gender.
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Date: 2012-08-28 02:21 am (UTC)