Current mood:	thoughtful
Entry tags:	my lady business and yours

In Which I Ramble And Never Really Arrive At A Point Or Conclusion
So, there's this meme going around called "Fuck You, She's Awesome." Its basic premise/background is that some person I don't know was at some point adding new things to their interests and among those things happened to be some ladies. As they did this the person felt themself getting defensive already because this is fandom and so clearly there was someone somewhere judging her and hating these chicks she was loving on. So, in response to this she decided to compile a list of ten (though some people have done 25 that I have seen) female characters that make her go: FUCK YOU, SHE'S AWESOME.

I was pretty delighted by this meme's appearance on my flist, which, anyone who knows me should not find at all surprising. And in the course of immediately beginning to mentally compile my own extensive, extensive list I also left a few comments noting with joy that an LJ interest of mine (originally stolen from memlu and a_white_rain because it SPOKE TO THE VERY CORE OF ME) was basically the catch-all summation of the spirit of the meme. Said interest being: "all the fictional women you hate."

And in the course of thinking about that interest and the meme, I got lost in a long contemplation of how much it and various related sentiments and afflictions not just inform...but completely shape the way that I approach fiction and fandom pretty much at all times.

When I look back on my childhood and all the made up things I've ever loved and many of the values that make up who I am as a person...I think it's all the fault of video games.

Or very specifically: Samus Aran. I've mentioned her in passing on more than one occasion, most notably for me waaaay back a long time ago when I did the Five Things Meme (that is currently making its second go around) and she showed up, probably quite bafflingly to many, on the list of favourite female characters. Samus Aran was a MASSIVELY, MASSIVELY iconic figure to me in my childhood. I don't know if I can even properly describe to you how much so. All I can really say is that I grew up with three older brothers and I don't have a single memory of anyone in my family ever trying to shape or guide my interests based on traditional gender roles. In addition to many other things, I liked comic books and video games and everyone was pretty much fine with that. I don't remember the exact day or moment that I sat down to play Super Metroid and read the game booklet that revealed that the hi-tech combat suit-wearing, giant arm-cannon-firing, bad ass, Don't You Dare Fuck With Me bounty hunter (IN SPACE) was a girl. But I do remember that she was my hero. And that feeling of pride and awe and vindication at the unmitigated bad assery of girls was something that I basically ended up chasing for the rest of my life.

Fast forward over a decade later and I haven't changed much at all.

sainfoin_fields has coined terms for two afflictions from which I currently suffer (she too has these issues): Fictional Lesbianism and Anyanka Syndrome.

Fictional Lesbianism is pretty simple. The vast majority of the time, I will care about, invest in, identify with, empathize with, and feel the pathos of female characters exponentially more than male ones. It's not that I don't love many a dude; I am, in fact, very, very fond of boys and I like imaginary ones best of all. But most of the time, there needs to be a strong female presence for me to muster up some caring, in general, and I will usually love my favourite girl characters more than my favourite males ones.

The second affliction is more complicated and troublesome than the first. Anyanka Syndrome is quite simply the INSANELY INCONVENIENT compulsion to be completely obsessed with any mistreated female character, be the source of her mistreatment canon, fandom, or some mixture of both. My list of Leftover Ladies of Fiction is long and frustrating and emotionally draining.

And these two things...they pretty much completely control everything I ever do in fandom.

And it's not even just the obvious things like not being able to countenance the various fandoms of my acquaintance that spend huge amounts of time calling the main female character a bitch and a cunt, yet never being at all deterred from aggressively trying to hand her over as a prize to their woobie of choice. Or my inability to ever care about m/m slash almost ever, ever, ever, at all, ever. Or my inability to exist in a slash or yaoi fandom even on the rare occasion when I DO care about a m/m pairing because I just can't take the casual misogyny that runs so rampant in slash culture. Or my having ZERO patience for the endless bileful hating on anything with a vagina that threatens to upset people's carefully constructed shipping plans or, you know, just has the temerity to exist and have any kind of will, flaws, independence, or self-directedness and not be an aggressively inoffensive, malleable, cardboard cutout. Or my not being able to watch Supernatural.

It makes itself known in ways that are sometimes less reasonable.

Like how I am completely incapable of existing in Doctor Who fandom not because it has the most bizarre and excessive case of You Must Be A Fan This Specific Way Or You're Doing It Wrong that I've ever seen (though it does), but because people hate Rose. I've had issues with Rose myself on more than one occasion, but I still can't stand to see people hating her.

Or like how I just could NOT watch the third season of Doctor Who, not just because my heart was completely trampled upon by the previous two seasons or because I'd had serious issues with the second one, but because by the time I'd finally finished season two, season three was well on its way and I knew, I KNEW, immediately and instinctively that I would love Martha Jones to death. And I just couldn't deal. I just didn't have the emotional energy left for another Leftover Lady, for another woman to be beautiful and badass and awesome and unappreciated and dismissed and ill-used. Tris referred to it as an Anyanka Syndrome saturation point, where you just don't have anything left. And even not having anything left some part of me still desperately calls out to Martha Jones, wanting to knoooow her, to looooove her, but I just can't deal.

Like how after two fucking years in Avatar fandom of never being able to discuss the show that was actually on the screen but instead being compelled to argue endlessly about one that seemed STRANGE AND WHOLLY DIFFERENT and generally being regarded as a crazy person and having people "secretly" talk shit about me for thinking that the canon of the show is not actually that hard to figure out and being frustrated that everyone else liked to pretend that it was, the thing that finally made me up and leave and not look back was the comparatively tame occurrence of people watching The Beach and dismissing the fact that Mai has valid emotional issues and blaming HER because her boyfriend is a crazy jealous freak. Comparatively tame to things like people seeing a shot of Mai and Zuko kissing in a season three trailer and hoping that RAPE was involved rather than Mai and Zuko kissing of their own free will or multiple unironic discussions of how Mai would be an okay character if only she were a guy since she is already so masculine anyway in her emotional repression she might as well be one.

It's like sometimes I'll just hit this WALL where something just goes snap inside of me and the very thought of continuing to exist in remotely the same space in which these things are going on just gives me hives. And I can't control it and I can't make it be on all the time and thus assist me in avoiding many things that piss me off.

So, getting back to the meme, I sat there, thinking on all of these things and thinking about writing a post like this and wondering if I should wonder in the course of it why it is that fandom, made up primarily of women, hates women so much and what this says about culture and gender roles and how people react to them. But really, it's nothing I don't already know and haven't already thought about and discussed extensively.

And so I ran into the problem, instead, of actually making my list of women who make me go Fuck You, She's Awesome. Which turned into a huge problem because I sort of couldn't. Because, twee and ridiculous as it sounds, 90% all female characters make me go that in some way, at some point, and I couldn't really choose. Being inordinately interested in "all the fictional women you hate" really does sum up my feelings on it all.

And then I had an image in my mind of the scene from BSG, in Scar, when Kara starts to name all the dead pilots one by one and then she begins to forget and Lee fills in for her: "To all of them." So, if you will, imagine a wee adorable pilot going TO ALL OF THEM when this accounting peters off.*

Buffy Summers and Faith Lehane and Fred Burkle. Tara Maclay. Anyanka, Patron Saint of Scorned Women. Karen Filippelli. Shannon Rutherford. Anastasia Dualla, who was inexplicably character assassinated by her own cracked out creator. Rose Tyler. Harriet Jones. Angela Martin and Pam Beesly. Dr. Addison Montgomery. Dr. Miranda Bailey. Dr. Cristina Yang. Dr. Martha Jones. Dr. Diane Hughes. Dr. Lisa Cuddy. Jan Levinson-Gould. Susan Pevensie (Fuck you, C.S. Lewis). Mai, Katara, Jin, Yue, Suki, and Azula. Claudia Jean Cregg. Rogue, Ororo Munroe, Jean Grey, Emma Frost, and Kitty Pryde. Mary Jane Fucking Watson-Parker (Dear Joe Quesada: die in a fire). Laura Roslin. Kara Thrace. Cally Tyrol. Cho Chang. Beatrix Kiddo. Elle Driver. Vernita Green. O-Ren Ishii. Veronica Mars (see: Anastasia Dualla). Cindy Mackenzie. Lindsay Bluth-Funkë and Liz Lemon. Kaylee Frye, Inara Serra, Zoe Alleyne. YoSaffBridge. River Tam. Sarah Connor. Summerbot Cameron. ~*~Chloe Sullivan~*~. Barb, Margene, and Sarah Henrickson. Heather Tuttle. Hermione Granger. Princess Zelda of Hyrule. Haruhi Suzumiya. Sakura Kinimoto. Tomoyo Daidouji. Meiling Li. Yuuko. Deputy Director Lou Beckett. Paige Michalchuk. Deb Morgan. Lt. Maria LaGuerta. Rita Bennett. Arwen and Eowyn. Betty and Hilda Suarez. Christina McKinney. Amanda Tanen-Sommers. Wilhelmina Slater. Alexis Meade?! Lois Lane. Aeryn Sun. Kelly Kapoor! Phyllis Vance. Captain Elizabeth Turner, King of Pirates. Harriet M. Welsch. Sam Manson. Cindy Vortex. Tracey and Edna Turnblad. Claire Bennet-Petrelli. Elle Bishop. Ariel, Jasmine, Anya, Megara, Belle, and Mulan Fa. (Maleficent and Ursula, The Sea Witch.) Chihiro. Wendy Darling. Trinity. Regina George. Arya Stark. Samus Aran, hobvs.

So. Yeah. Fuck you, fandom. They're awesome.



*For all of BSG fandom's many weirdnesses one I always found fascinating is that PERHAPS IN LINE WITH THE GENDERFUCK OF THE SHOW ITSELF (one of the ways it first recommended itself to me) Kara is the fandom woobie and Lee is like the inexpicably hated girl. It's...not really any less annoying.