it's a can of peaches, sir

@thesunwillshineclearer / thesunwillshineclearer.tumblr.com

ryn / she/her / 26 / multi-fandom / art blog
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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

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villainelle

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