The thing about this is that sculptures like these in art history were for the male gaze. Photoshop a phone to it and suddenly she’s seen as vain and conceited. That’s why I’m 100% for selfie culture because apparently men can gawk at women but when we realize how beautiful we are we’re suddenly full of ourselves…
“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.” ― John Berger, Ways of Seeing
I know I’ve reblogged this before but it’s so important.
Could this be an allegory for where each skater is at in their career? Otabek is just getting going, Phichit is on the rise, Yurio is almost at his peak, Yuuri is 🔥🔥, JJ is down from the top a bit having flopped at the GPF, Chris is an older skater and maybe feels like he is past his prime, and Viktor is coming back after the whole up and down.
i love the fact that everyone on deep space nine drinks raktajino. for me it’s a nice nod to that specific feel of growing up in a really multicultural city and eating food from everyone else’s culture and sharing your own food culture with your friends who have different ones until it all just becomes What You Do, so when you go someplace less diverse you miss it. in all the other treks you only hear about either starfleet officers’ generic american/western european food choices or [insert alien species name here] versions of american/western european food items. it’s cool that on ds9 the writers went to the effort of having characters casually name-check foods from the various cultures on the station; it adds to the sense of cultural exchange that the show’s premise sets up.
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise – female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship – and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios – this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming – again, for the sake of simplicity – that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom – and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women – for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. 🙂
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.
When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.
Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.
If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…
If the media is about a man, then the most important relationship(s) the protagonist has will be with a man.
If the media is about a women, then the most important relationship the protagonist will have will also be with a man.
That’s why the only time you get very well developed romance tends to be in media with female protagonists. Otherwise, the most developed relationship will be the bond between the male hero and his male best friend (or friends), with a woman there for the hero to kiss (even if his relationship with this woman as little or no development or isn’t even romantic) just to reassure the audience that our male hero isn’t gay and still ‘gets the girl’, as if kissing a girl is some sort of check mark.
With so few works even passing the Bechdel Test (i.e. is there more than one woman and do they talk to each other about something other than a man), it’s no wonder that F/F pairings are rare. There’s hardly any female characters who speak to each other around too ship and often shipping is inspired by canon character interaction of development.
An interesting thing about Garak’s speech that I’ve observed-
Andrew Robinson has said that he played Garak’s speech pattern as though he had very recently learned to speak Federation Standard (maybe about a month before the show starts, while the Federation was on Terok Nor making the withdrawal negotiations).
Now, for the most part, Andrew uses close to his own natural American accent. But sometimes, Garak pronounces words like Julian does, as in with an English accent.
Since Julian is the person Garak talks with the most, and he very recently started learning Fed Standard when they meet, Garak is picking up some of Julian’s speech patterns.
I find this a subtle and interesting connection between them.
(While on the topic, Julian and Garak pronounce each other’s names differently from how everyone else seems to).
i actually have a lot of feelings about these parallels
the rogue one!trio are basically the broken versions of the tfa!trio
bodhi and finn: breaking through the banality of evil to do good (with the help of a friend!), but bodhi never had any type of training and was actually *tortured* for his deeds, so his mind’s durability is compromised
cassian & poe: believing whole-heartedly in their cause and act as spies, but poe got to grow up in peacetime with his family, while cassian grew up in war with none. poe’s superior sends him on dangerous missions, but (most likely) actually cares for his health. cassian’s superior thinks only of winning, of getting ahead. (headcanon: if cassian had survived, he’d be absolutely against poe being a spy. not only because he knew Poe’s parents, but because he believes the work would break Poe’s spirit).
jyn & rey: both abandoned by family, but rey is able to hold onto her hope, while jyn completely loses hers.
the tfa!trio are what the ro!trio could have been, in a kinder universe. if we were to go meta, maybe the brief period of balance in the Force post-OT tilted the tfa!trio to a better life (if still tainted), whereas the imbalance in the ro!trio twisted theirs.
also, the ro!trio all died, so, y’know, can’t be more broken than that
when you make a gifset because you can’t fomr the words properly but someone else does and they write them under that gifset – thank you so much 🙂
this is just a tiny little detail but I really love how they made Viktor tell Yuuri his wants and desires during the course of the show because it shows a lot of character (and really displays the utmost care his VA put into Viktor’s voice)
it’s SO CASUAL
He says this as if it’s the easiest thing in the world, no big deal, almost a throwaway comment, but knowing how Viktor feels about Yuuri it’s OBVIOUS that this carries a lot more meaning than he lets on
it’s a very natural thing to do because you want to guard the depth of your emotions and fear rejection so you present what you actually want in a way that makes it seem not that important to you, to shield yourself from the eventual rejection and embarrassment that might follow in its wake
he does this again in episode 7
he says this WAY TOO CASUALLY, as if it’s just a random solution that popped into his head (and this is also a sign of how Viktor deals with issues through actions as opposed to words), but once again he just reveals his emotions in a way that puts him out of harm’s way if he’s rejected. VIKTOR’S LIKE “Yuuri you’re crying??? Ah okay I can kiss it better if you want no big deal just doing my job as coach hahaah right Yuuri”
like
Viktor
your gay is showing
and the fact that he actually kisses Yuuri in the end of the episode just shows that he was entirely serious the whole time on a much deeper level than he lets on (it makes me both laugh and cry that he probably waited for this moment for MONTHS……the poor man, he’s so patient)
episode 9, same thing again
presented in a very lighthearted tone this time. During the first times he talks as if it’s of little importance to him, but now his words are more sincere but with this tone instead. Once again, no grand words, no outpouring emotions, just Viktor casually expressing the depth of what he feels for Yuuri and how he desires for their relationship to progress. At this point he has his boyfriend and he has his kisses, so now he just moves on to the next stage because well, Viktor Nikiforov is madly in love with Yuuri and wants the whole world to know
HE DOES THIS SO MANY TIMES
I’m just……so in love with the thought of Viktor, while brave enough to express his wishes, still not being able to do this in a way that would perhaps put him in an awkward spot. He’s obviously very pushy right at the beginning and as we know he cries himself to sleep in episode 2 after Yuuri rejects him
He always appears very confident and overall sure of himself so these things are so interesting to me because, while subtle, it reveals his insecurities and how much he longs for Yuuri but fears being turned down at the same time. Viktor is, until Yuuri comes into his life, ultimately a very lonely character and it makes sense that he would grasp for Yuuri and at the same time feel uncomfortable revealing just HOW MUCH he wants these things.
These subtle choices in dialogue and expressions and voice acting reveals so much to us and I love this kind of storytelling.
VIKTOR IS SUCH A FASCINATING CHARACTER!! I love him I’m so glad he found love and happiness and a future for himself with Yuuri by his side
The kind of literature that fan fiction is did not spring fully formed into being in the 1960s and 70s, though some journalists still seem to think so. Throughout this book I have been stressing the link, in literary terms, between fan fiction and any other fiction based on a shared canon […]. It is clear from the comments of fan fiction writers like Ika and Belatrix Carter that one major attraction of this genre for writers is the sense of a complicit audience who already share much information with the writer and can be relied on to pick up ironies or allusions without having them spelled out. Writing based on the canons of myth and folklore can do this too, though as Belatrix Carter pointed out in chapter 7, these canons have been so extensively used for so long it is becoming harder to do anything with them that feels original.
But there is another point, implied in Ika’s remark in chapter 2 – “What I like about fan fiction is that you can still get that very highly trained audience that can understand very, very complex and allusive things.” The use of “still” alludes to the undoubted fact that for the traditional canons of myth, Bible, history, and folklore, this “very highly trained” audience is not as reliable as it once was, because the canon information is not as widely shared as it used to be. […] a writer can no longer allude to Lazarus, Circe or Alexander and be reasonably sure that most of his readers have in their heads the thoughts, stories or images for which he was aiming. The human need for heroes and archetypes does not go away, but their faces change with time, and one avatar takes the place of another. Ika’s point is a shrewd one: in an age of fragmented rather than shared cultures the fan fiction audience is unusual in having as thorough a knowledge of its particularly shared canon as a Bible-reading or classically educated audience once did.
Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context, p. 219 (via nihilistelektra)
i know that generally when it comes to scarecrow’s fear toxin/gas/whatever the favored interpretation is scary hallucinogen/really bad trip with a lot of “oh no everything is monsters” BUT LIKE personally i think it would be interesting if he just bypasses all of that and skips right to triggering the physiological mechanisms of fear. like if he’s isolated the part of irukandji syndrome that causes feelings of impending doom, or found a drug that kicks the
amygdala
into high gear to trigger panic attacks (i know that i am oversimplifying this but it’s comic book logic so whatever). so instead of
EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE MONSTERS TRYING TO KILL ME AND THAT’S TERRIFYING
it’s
I DON’T KNOW WHY I’M SO SURE YOU’RE ALL TRYING TO KILL ME BUT THE WORST PART IS THE ANTICIPATION, MY WHOLE WORLD IS JUMPSCARES NOW
but tbh my reasons are mostly self-indulgent because i would find it hilarious if batman got gassed and then kicked crane’s ass anyway, leaving crane under the impression that batman is immune to fear, but actually batman is just already hypervigilant and prone to catastrophic thinking and has a lot of practice dealing with panic attacks
“Batman doesn’t notice he got fear gassed because he just assumed he was having an episode and ignored it” is my whole Batman aesthetic tbh
blackash26 