lirazel: Buffy and Dawn in a waiting room with Dawn's head on Buffy's shoulder ([tv] there were never such devoted)
lirazel ([personal profile] lirazel) wrote2023-01-20 09:49 am

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.
shipperslist: nasa landsat image of a river looking like the letter S (Default)

[personal profile] shipperslist 2023-01-20 08:43 pm (UTC)(link)
Audience and showrunners alike. I'm still mad about Charlie's death and I hadn't even watched SPN for years when it happened.