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.
elperian: un: appleindecay [lj] (lost kate on the run)

[personal profile] elperian 2023-01-25 08:43 pm (UTC)(link)
It's the years of having people come out of the woodwork to yell at Kate-fans in their own spaces on the internet! Oh, and just having it come up as "and Kate was just the worst" in even mainstream media summaries of the show. Shut up! Y'all can shut up! /normal>

(I have lost the ability to be ~reasonable about this after the...literal years of these dumb and misogynistic arguments.)
elperian: un: blue_sweet_tea [lj] (sw han leia you do have your moments)

[personal profile] elperian 2023-01-26 03:33 am (UTC)(link)
Fortunately my formative fandom was Star Wars, and specifically the Han/Leia ficcers on Yahoo Groups! So not all tragic <3