ugh

[anghraine]

I've gone to some effort to cut "why is YOUR FAVE popular when MINE isn't, what is wrong with people, and you could be writing/drawing/analyzing mine but you're NOT" out of my life.

Yet all the blocking in the world can't get rid of it!

I mean, sure, smallest violin for being a fan of fandom bicycle OTCs and at least moderately popular ships, but it's so profoundly annoying. That absurd Beatles argument, fandom edition.

In fact, the fandom edition is slightly worse, because it almost invariably comes with "if you'll put in effort for your fave, why not mine?" Or even worse, "if you like your fave, why don't you like mine?" Because...they're polar opposites in every conceivable way...? Why on earth would it follow that my fondness for tormented villains with some level of principle/feeling + harsh and/or dangerously temperamental heroes would translate into a fondness for wisecracking heart-of-gold companions?

I mean, I usually like them well enough, and want them to succeed and be happy insofar as I care at all, but that's—not much. I don't dislike Ron or Sokka or whomever, but I'm not really interested either. 

And while individual maps of favoured tropes vary, I think it's safe to say that "you care about X, why don't you also care about someone completely different?" is never going to be anything but irritating.

Comments

[alatefeline]

Okay, that's clear. I think I'm a perfect example of what bothers you, sometimes, but I'll try not to do it at you.

[dreamsofghostsandstars]

The problem you're describing is a lot of why I've mostly ditched the TFA fandom. (However, nothing, I repeat nothing, including the things that I admit are terrible in the actual canon, will drive me away from my beloved prequel trilogy.) If you look at the TFA search results on Tumblr, it feels like half of everything that isn't a second-rate romance story is screaming over either a) whether or not Finn gets enough love and b) whether or not Kylo gets too much love. NEITHER OF WHICH INTERESTS ME, I JUST WANT TO READ BIZARRE THEORIES ABOUT WHERE THE FIRST ORDER COMES FROM AND HOPE FOR MORE COSTUME PORN IN EPISODE VIII.

OTOH, I do think a subset of fans have a legitimate gripe with their fellows, not on the grounds that they don't pay a given character enough attention, but that they stretch the canon and ignore all in-universe facts in order to make said character look worse. As an example, while I'm on the fence about Kylo's qualities as a character, I find it incredibly annoying that people cite his being a pasty-skinned white male as a reason he's awful (instead of that whole "following a dictator who kills millions of people" thing), despite the fact that, at no point, do we see any evidence that even the bad guys in TFA play favorites on the basis of color or sex. The same sort of thing happens all the time, with different characters, in other fandoms I'm involved in, and it's never good for anybody. I tend to treat out-of-universe explanations for why a character might (or might not) be problematic as separate from their in-universe characteristics, especially in secondary-world fiction like SW, and attempts to conflate them irritate me to the degree that I can't really enjoy myself while plowing through them.

[sathari]

This comment is beautiful and I want to draw stars and hearts and flowers around it. Thank you. THANK YOU. (Circa several dozen words omitted of RANT about the fact that if you are invested in the aspect of Star Wars that's the Skywalker Family Saga, the corollaries to that tend to mean that you will in fact care about at least one white character in the current generation, regardless of what's done with that character.)

[sathari]

I love everything about this post, but especially this:

Why on earth would it follow that my fondness for tormented villains with some level of principle/feeling + harsh and/or dangerously temperamental heroes would translate into a fondness for wisecracking heart-of-gold companions?

Because THIS. (Seriously, Reylo just happens to hit the bullseye of the trope that I ship in everything ever. Whereas the PTB's decision to make Finn a guy who ran after his first battle because they didn't think it would be okay to have a hero who'd had any blood on his hands at all actually backfired for me, because I would like him as a battle-hardened-for-his-age type who does finally hit a moral event horizon, or better still for my taste gets hit over the head with it by Rey--- maybe he's the expert scout-trooper who gets sent to hunt for BB-8 and then Rey fights him and wins and he's damned impressed and even tries to recruit her but she ends up "recruiting" him instead as they talk and he gets a better picture of the world!) (Oh. Apparently I have a Finnrey plotbunny now. Besides the one where Rey has become Kylo's apprentice before the events of the movie and is also friends with Finn and talks him out of defecting after Tuanul, but that one's more like FinnReylo or possibly FinnReyKylasma). Who knew?)

[alias_sqbr]

This started as a reply to this comment but went off on a tangent.

I think it's important to separate, say:

a)Kylo Ren is not shown in canon to be especially sexist
b)Kylo Ren did nothing wrong
c)Kylo Ren is unfairly ignored by fandom

a) is a totally legitimate defense of the character. (b) is not. And (c) is blatantly false, he's very popular! He's not popular with everyone, but nobody is.

I find it annoying that I can't say (a) without being accused of saying (b) or (c). But I also find it annoying when someone starts with (a) then smoothly segues to (b) and (c) as if they automatically follow.

I'm not heavily into TFA fandom, and my faves are pretty popular. But I've had a few situations in other fandoms where I've been a fan of a genuinely unpopular character who gets blamed for lots of things they didn't do. I'll defend my fave against unfair criticism but accept that not everyone will love them. Taste varies! But I get grumpy when I see fans of a Kylo Ren equivalent acting like it's an outrage that their moderately popular fave isn't universally popular and gets blamed for things they did do.

It gets annoying with ships, too. Fandom doesn't love your fave canon het ship quite as much as the juggernaut canon het ship because they lack your ORIGINALITY and DEPTH. I see. Meanwhile I ship the juggernaut het ship AND some genuinely unpopular non canon femslash etc and none of them say anything about my value as a person, they're just what I happen to like.

[sathari]

Yes, this! I am a Kylo fan but dayum, fandom, if you want to hate the guy, I will happily make a list of awful shit he actually did--- like ordering a massacre of disarmed prisoners and killing his father and apparently a lot of his uncle's students, to name some of the big ones--- but dear heavens, if I never see the MRA thing again it will be too long. (See also my herd of blue bambis in another comment on anghraine's journal about why him offering to teach her is the opposite of sexist, which I will find and link if you care.)

[alias_sqbr]

Meanwhile I'm not really a Kylo fan (I can see the appeal but he didn't grab me) and both kinds of oversimplifation still bug me. And it's cool, him offering to teach her seemed pretty straightforward to me. If nothing else, her only other possible teachers are Snoke and Luke, who I can't see him reccomending!