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Fannish Friday: despised characters you love
Tell me about a character that fandom in general hates that you love! I'm not talking about polarizing characters, where half of fandom hates them and half loves them. I mean the ones where, like, 80% of the fandom just flat-out hates the character, where the "consensus" is that the character sucks, etc.
My most obvious answer to this is always Dawn Summers. I love that dorky, nerdy little teenage girl, and I suspect that the majority of hatred for her arises from a) people disliking a character introduced late in the show, even when there's a really good plot-reason to introduce her, and b) how much people absolutely hate teenage girls. They hate them so much! They might make an exception for a fictional teenage girl who also kicks physical ass and plays to the male gaze, but any time a teenage girl acts like an actual teenage girl, she will get hatred from the majority of society.
Another example is Bela on Supernatural (yes, I did watch the first few seasons of that show, we will speak of it no more) who I thought was delightful and who I gladly would have watched a spin-off about. And despite the way fandom treated her, Ruby was fine.
My most obvious answer to this is always Dawn Summers. I love that dorky, nerdy little teenage girl, and I suspect that the majority of hatred for her arises from a) people disliking a character introduced late in the show, even when there's a really good plot-reason to introduce her, and b) how much people absolutely hate teenage girls. They hate them so much! They might make an exception for a fictional teenage girl who also kicks physical ass and plays to the male gaze, but any time a teenage girl acts like an actual teenage girl, she will get hatred from the majority of society.
Another example is Bela on Supernatural (yes, I did watch the first few seasons of that show, we will speak of it no more) who I thought was delightful and who I gladly would have watched a spin-off about. And despite the way fandom treated her, Ruby was fine.
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But even in Little Women itself (if you ignore the weird Moralizing About Types Of Stories content that Alcott put in because this was a kid's book even though she anonymously wrote gothic thrillers herself) Bhaer is just a kind, odd, warmhearted fellow who's happy to be himself, and I love him.
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Btw, have you seen this?
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also no I had not seen that and ooh, a venue for bird content on dw, thank you!!
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You're welcome! :D
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Regarding Teen Wolf, my favourite character was Scott, and I liked his dopey teen romance with Allison, which was definitely not a popular choice. (I also had zero interest in the fandom juggernaut, either as a pairing or as individual characters.) I remember there was a fairly big meta aggregator comm on Dreamwidth at the time, and all the Teen Wolf posts were long-winded rants about how awful Scott was and how he shouldn't have been the protagonist of the show and so on. (I did only watch the first three series and bowed out because it got too stupid even for me.)
Regarding Sleepy Hollow, I am that one person who actually liked Katrina, at least in the first season (or I suppose I saw the potential in the character, and saw the writers squander it, as they squandered almost everything the show had going for it). I liked the two leads a lot as well, though! I shipped Ichabod/Abbie/Katrina! The whole thing was wildly unfun.
Looking back, those two fandoms (plus Inception) were probably solely responsible for why I completely lost interest in being involved in megafandoms (or even just big-by-Tumblr-standards fandoms like Sleepy Hollow). It was so lonely and unpleasant to like characters and ships that everyone else hated. (I mean obviously this is a really tiny problem in the scheme of things and I am very happy doing fandom the way I do it now, but your prompt caused me to look back and see connections between a lot of things that I hadn't really joined the dots between until now.)
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(I also had zero interest in the fandom juggernaut, either as a pairing or as individual characters.)
I will never, ever understand why that particular pairing took off.
(or I suppose I saw the potential in the character, and saw the writers squander it, as they squandered almost everything the show had going for it).
Yeah...
Ooof, yeah, I can see why that fandom would not be fun for you either.
Looking back, those two fandoms (plus Inception) were probably solely responsible for why I completely lost interest in being involved in megafandoms (or even just big-by-Tumblr-standards fandoms like Sleepy Hollow). It was so lonely and unpleasant to like characters and ships that everyone else hated.
This makes me sad. Not that it isn't great that you found a Better Way fandom-wise, but just that you felt like you had to get out of bigger fandoms. I would have wished for a different path for you.
But again: so glad you figured out a way to fan that makes you happy!
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I mean, I have my theories, but I try not to be sneery or dismissive of things that other people like, so I tend to keep quiet about this.
Not that it isn't great that you found a Better Way fandom-wise, but just that you felt like you had to get out of bigger fandoms. I would have wished for a different path for you.
To be honest, I think it was just a convergence of a bunch of different stuff — fandom on Tumblr making it hard to escape things you disliked unless you ruthlessly blocked a bunch of tags (that people weren't always consistent in using), those particular fandoms being really argumentative and vocal in character hate, and me being really thin-skinned at a particularly vulnerable time of my life. I think if I'd encountered those same fandoms, with exactly the same character/relationship preferences back in the LJ heyday, everything would have been a lot easier, because we would have stuck to our respective comms and ignored each other's existence for the most part.
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Yeah, that makes sense. At any rate, I'm glad you're happy with your current fandom life!
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Oh, Bhaer is a good answer, I second that one! I also love Amy, which, idk if that’s AS unpopular, but I do feel like more than 50 percent of fans hate her and lots of people have the default assumption that you’ll hate her too.
Here’s a real dorky one that I should keep to myself: I am really fond of Riley Finn! Not always the writing for him (yikes), but I always look forward to rewatching s4 because I think he and Buffy are sweet together in their courtin’ era. Cancel me now!!
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Awww, I like that you like Riley! I view him mostly as a necessary emotional beat that Buffy needed to have, but I care nothing about him as a character. Perhaps because of the actor? Maybe someone else could have made me like that character more.
But I certainly support you liking him!
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And I agree about Dawn, she was great!
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You know that character who comes along in the last two seasons to replace the hugely popular character? Chances are I will love that character more than the original. Some notable examples include Elizabeth Lochley on Babylon 5 and Doggett & Reyes on The X-Files.
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I kinda feel like my list would be long if I thought about it, since I absolutely adore mostly female characters, but I’ve always been good at following positive folks.
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I love hated female characters! I'm so glad you're surrounded by positive people! I am too these days and it's the greatest.
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Oh man, so I can count on one hand the number of people who actually like Maiko Maeda in Cyberpunk 2077. She's a minor antagonist and former-prostitute-turned-madam whose only real role is to cause problems for her ex-girlfriend, canon romance option Judy Alvarez. Here's what I had to say about her in one of my posts:
Like it's hard to understate how much people HATE Maiko, especially players who romance Judy. In the fic-writing side of fandom, 99% of the time, if she shows up at all in a fic, it's to be a two-dimensional mustache-twirling villain. In the non-fic side, it's even worse. There are a couple different ways to end the questline involving Maiko, and one of them lets you kill her. You can probably imagine how much of a downer it is to constantly hear people gleefully describe the ways they murder one of your favorite characters.
Sorry for the wall of text lol I just have so many feelings about her and so few opportunities to express them T_T
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Obviously Bela tops my list. Interestingly, plenty of people on Tumblr seem to love her these day, but I'm 100% positive that if Lauren Cohan ever returned in an SPN revival and expressed so much as a *whiff* of interest in Dean (which she did in, yanno, CANON, but current Tumblr fans seem to like to ignore that), everyone would hate her again.
I can't really think of other characters, but I think that's more to do with my stepping out of fandom (in part because of not wanting to deal with that kind of misogyny) than because I don't love unpopular characters. For example, I'd bet money that plenty of vile, N*gan obsessed Walking Dead fans hate Maggie (poor LC is done so dirty by fandoms), but I never really ventured into WD fandom.
One example I can think of from way back when is that Harry was [still is] legitimately my favorite character in HP (closely followed by Hermione ofc). I remember a lot of fans thought he was whiny/annoying, which always infuriated me because he was (a) a teenager; and (b) SUPER FUCKING TRAUMATIZED, OF COURSE HE HAD SOME EMOTIONAL MATURITY ISSUES. I loved [love] Harry, to the point where I really didn't like Ginny because I was straight-up jealous (which I recognized and acknowledged even as a sixteen-year-old lol).
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but I'm 100% positive that if Lauren Cohan ever returned in an SPN revival and expressed so much as a *whiff* of interest in Dean (which she did in, yanno, CANON, but current Tumblr fans seem to like to ignore that), everyone would hate her again.
I fear that you are correct.
I remember a lot of fans thought he was whiny/annoying, which always infuriated me because he was (a) a teenager; and (b) SUPER FUCKING TRAUMATIZED, OF COURSE HE HAD SOME EMOTIONAL MATURITY ISSUES.
Just like Dawnie!
to the point where I really didn't like Ginny because I was straight-up jealous (which I recognized and acknowledged even as a sixteen-year-old lol).
Awww, that's such a teenage girl reaction! :D
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Irvine from Final Fantasy 8, maybe? His big character moment is basically him screwing up, and he never really gets redeemed. So when I was messing around with the idea of writing post-game fic I wanted to write him a chance to show that the game events had helped him grow and become more competent (and pair him with Quistis, who was if anything overly invested in her own competence).
Also thirding the opinion that Riley/Marc Blucas deserved better, even leaving aside that we now know that everyone on that set deserved better.
Oh, now I remember! I think I was the only person watching Felicity who wanted Felicity to forget about Ben and Noel and continue things with the hot guy she randomly hooked up with in the art studio. (The actor is still hot, if you have a high tolerance for Thoughtful But Poorly Educated Guys Who Made Poor Choices While in Hollywood in the 1990s and Early 2000s.)
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I think I was the only person watching Felicity who wanted Felicity to forget about Ben and Noel and continue things with the hot guy she randomly hooked up with in the art studio.
Oh no! Truly the most niche favorite thing of all!
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And like, not even for """good""" reasons - 99% of the discourse was because she a) didn't "choose" between Jack and Sawyer, b) "chose" the one they didn't like, c) "stole" Claire's baby when Claire had disappeared into the jungle and then the island disappeared, d) existed as a threat to some other ship they liked.
YEARS OF MY LIFE! YEARS, I SAY!!!!
(And yes, people would use the fact that she killed her abusive stepfather as a condemnation of her character as if Sawyer's backstory didn't involve killing an innocent man and conning women out of their life savings; Sayid being a torturer; Jin working for the Korean mob, etc etc etc.)
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(I have lost the ability to be ~reasonable about this after the...literal years of these dumb and misogynistic arguments.)
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