Oh, yeah, this exists

[gryphonsegg]

I really need to get back into posting regularly. The past couple of weeks have been extremely hectic, but I find that I really do feel better when I make time to communicate with people beyond my immediate environment. I know the stereotypical thing is "You spend too much time on the internet and need to interact face to face more often," but for me . . . well, it's not the opposite of that. It's just that some things are easier to discuss when we NOT face to face. I'm not sure how much of that is my own awkwardness and how much of it is the fact that it's much easier to identify people online as the kind of people who might be interested having a conversation about the things I need to talk about. I know a lot of people in the department well enough to strike up a conversation about the things we study, but the thing I really want to talk about right now is so far down the fandom rabbit hole I wouldn't dare mention it to any of them because it's kind of inappropriate for work and it would make me look crazy. I mean, I can't go up to someone I work with and say, "I'm in this fandom where I didn't really ship anything at first, but the haters of this one pairing are getting so ridiculous and so self-righteous that I'm developing a huge defensive complex about that pairing. But at the same time I'm afraid that I'll have to give up the fandom entirely because their preferred alternative ship brings up so many of my old issues that I thought I'd dealt with, but if I tell people I dislike that pairing, they'll pigeonhole me "hating feminine women" because that's the new thing to do on Tumblr." They would think I was high.

Comments

[surrealistdreamer]

It's okay friend. I don't like talking about fandom things with people I don't know very well either. I don't want to attract the wrong kind of person.

But anyway TELL ME ALL ABOUT IT!

[gryphonsegg]

First of all, Travis Beacham got handed another bag of ally cookies last night because he said (on effin' Twitter, after being asked very specifically) that there have been Jaegers piloted by same sex couples before. Just, you know, not any of the ones he bothered to mention in the book. Seriously, it would not have been hard to throw in something like this:

"Oh, just like the pilots of Horizon Brave!"

"Wait, what? They weren't a married couple."

"Only because their country didn't have gay marriage yet."

Or something like this:

"Scunner . . . it was the McClellan sisters who got Scunner, wasn't it?"

"No, it was a married couple named Janice and Sarah Miller-Chen who took out Scunner. The McClellan sisters got Swordfish."

But no, that's way too much to ask of a dude. Meanwhile, anger at JK Rowling for waiting until after a children's series was ended to reveal that a major character was gay continues unabated.


But what's really ticking me off right now is that anybody who writes Dr. Gottlieb without also writing Mrs. Gottlieb supposedly "just hates women." Everybody except Travis Beacham, of course. He didn't write her, but he did decide that a Mrs. Gottlieb exists, which means he's done a great favor for female representation in, um . . . well, not movies, since she wasn't even mentioned in the movie . . . and not books either, since she didn't even get a name of her own in the book . . . maybe on Twitter. Yeah, that's it, Beacham is enhancing female representation in Twitter conversations-- and also women of color representation, since he described her as "mixed race." And that's the extent of her physical description. No hair color, skin color, height, distinguishing features, or even specificity about which races. Oh, wait, we do know that she's a supermodel, so that narrows down the possible range of heights, weights, and body types a great deal! Well, she was a supermodel-- apparently, she's pregnant now. In the book, she already had three children, but then Beacham did the math and realized that she couldn't have three children and still be as young as he wanted, so then he decided to retcon it on Twitter so that she's currently pregnant for the first time, just like Alison Choi, who is a totally different character who also forwards female representation by being the off-screen wife of a major male character!

And some people who were previously eating up all that glorious female representation with a spoon are now dissatisfied because they're not comfortable with Vanessa Gottlieb being a model and implicitly much younger than Hermann because it makes them concerned that Beacham is just giving a character he likes a trophy wife instead of writing a complex female character and then not publishing anything about her because REASONS. Other people are getting super-defensive about it, and now people are honestly arguing that women who are scientists, teachers, or artists are NOT AS MUCH WOMEN than women who are models and feminism is supposed to empower REAL WOMEN and FEMININE PEOPLE, so positive representation of women who are models is more important to feminism than representation of women who are scientists, and saying that you'd rather see a female character who is a doctor or a math professor than one who is a model (with a significantly older husband) is misogynistic! *backflips into space, taking inherently unfeminine mind & body that could never have been accepted as model-worthy but also can't be accepted as masculine or androgynous off this stupid planet*

[surrealistdreamer]

-pats you- I understand. I'll make more stupid noncomics about Gottlieb being the most awkward homosexual genius in the world who has a disability that impairs his motor skills to some degree.

[gryphonsegg]

Yay! <3

Your noncomics make everything better.

[surrealistdreamer]

I am glad!