![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
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.
no subject
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.)
no subject
(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!
no subject
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.
no subject
Yeah, that makes sense. At any rate, I'm glad you're happy with your current fandom life!
no subject
no subject