LEAVE BRITTANY ALOOOONE (or: Defensiveness of Fictional Characters)

i don't fight people over my faves, i just quietly implode and feel terrible and begin questioning all my life choices

i feel defensive but i also feel unable to defend. i think that's why bad stuff stuff about my faves makes me so upset? because i automatically think the other person is right, and therefore my faves are BadWrong and so am i for liking them

eta: like it's not "im upset because you're wrong" it's "im upset because i'm wrong"

 

...I think we all know what my issues are.

A lot of my Ford issues though, do come from the fact that I'm estranged from a lot of my family of origin and I honestly am so tired of people telling me that he is a terrible person for not indulging his brother's co-dependency and deciding he wanted to strike out on his own and do what he wanted to do as an adult, instead of fulfilling a promise and a life plan he made when he was 12 and in an environment where there was at the very least emotional abuse at home with constant bullying at school, which was also my life at that age.

I still will not let my brother into my apartment.

Granted, Stan's not a malignant sociopath, but I've also managed not to end up with my brother's criminal record appended to the one I don't actually have.

 

hahahahahahaha don't ask me about some of the stuff in Journal 3.

 

You: Supergirl::Me: Twilight

With a side of: that's moral panic not feminism, dumbass.

 

@cryptoThelematrix, I haven't personally read Twilight, but one of my smartest, most successfully adult friends absolutely loved it. I'd pity the fool who tried to get in her face and suggest she's doing this whole woman thing wrong. I mean, they'd just look totally ridiculous.

 

The thing is, Bella is written as a POV character, so obviously anyone who enjoys the books does identify with her. But the whole thing about her being a cipher? Not so much.

Bella likes trucks, she likes fixing motorcycles, she likes researching things, she's an adrenaline junkie. Edward does some fucked up shit and she calls him on it and he has a learning curve. He has a lot of failing to do in a relationship with a modern girl because the last time he dated or courted anyone was in 1918 and his brain has been marinating in late teenage hormones--vampires don't age, which means they don't get any more physically mature, even if they have life experience that makes them more emotionally mature--but he manages to fail differently each time, and the 50 Shades thing cracks me up because I actually see Edward as having a submissive nature deep down that he's fighting with. (Jacob is a douche who needs quadrant theory so he can understand that you can't turn your moirail into a matesprit, but whatevs.) There's this great plot about vampires of different races and cultural backgrounds getting together from all over the world because the rich white douchebag vampires from Italy are oppressing everyone.

There's also Native American racefail, and if you (the reader, not you personally) don't want to read a story about a woman who has to force a man to get over his internalised sexism because she wants him that much, it's understandable that you wouldn't like it.

But it's a story about two people who are very fucked up who come together and make each other better, and then go to town on the assholes who are making everyone else's lives shit. I really like that sort of thing.

Plus I want a fifth book in which Bella and Alice and Nessie hand the Volturi's asses to them for real, because the ending of the series strikes me as very much being settled "for now" and I'd love it if now that we've got the romance stuff sorted we could deal with the actual stuff that needs to happen to fix the injustice in that universe.

 

Spoiler: 2.8 spoilers

I just watched this and holy fucking how could someone say he wasn't a manipulative abusive fuckwad

 

Spoiler: same

I don't even fucking know??? All I can possibly think is that they're lucky enough to have not, you know, HAD any experience with abuse. They did thankfully shut up when I played the Survivor Cred card and broke down specifics of why what he was doing was abusive (specifically on Gula and Invi since they were willing to give me Aced) but holy shit.

 

I usually only get defensive when something hits my "someone is wrong on the internet" button, i.e. when I feel like the person complaining missed something important and obvious. For example, people complaining about Kaladin in Words of Radiance being "OOC" when actually what's going on is that he still has untreated depression and PTSD and they didn't magically vanish just because his life sucks less.

 

I have pretty much stopped indulging in fandoms except with close friends because as soon as something speaks to me on any level I become a walking open wound about everything
Most recently this has been DA2. I know i'm about a million years late to liking it, which only makes it worse because everything I could do has been done better before.

 

Like, I'm in the camp where it goes:
Someone else: I don't like [character]!
Me: Okay.
Someone else: I don't like [work]!
Me: Okay.
Someone else: [character/work] bothers me because [whatever]!
Me: Okay.
Someone else: [character/work] is bad because [wrong]!
Me: *HIIISSSSSS*

I had a friend for a while who I don't really talk to anymore who set this off all the time because she'd call anything she didn't like "bad writing," and this included "being asked to sympathize with a character she looked down on" and "her snap judgement of a character being wrong." (Worst was when she decided to play Tales of the Abyss after seeing my positive gameblogging and I kept telling her she wasn't going to enjoy it and she kept coming back to complain about how it was "badly written" and I kept going into defensive rant mode.)

 

Ok I take back what I said about nothing bothering me, this will get my hackles up. Just because you don't like something doesn't make it a bad something. Reminds me of ppl who are like... For instance, They don't enjoy Nirvana's music, therefore Nirvana was a shit band.

Um, no.

 

Yeah. For me the worst is when it's a combination of personal preference as objective standard of quality and some sort of blatant misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the thing they're talking about (or at least, something my brain parses that way).

Example from aforementioned friend and TotA: She hates any sort of romantic or sexual subtext of any sort in anything. She latched onto Natalia when she joined the party for reasons I was never entirely clear on. Then when she got to the bit where

Spoiler

Asch was in the party

she got all mad about the game "taking Natalia away from me" because she somehow never noticed the clearly and repeatedly stated stuff that indicated Natalia was a huge romantic who was hung up on a childhood crush that she thought was going to pick up again any day now.

 

@LadyNighteyes please never let me meet this person into my orbit I will actually come down with the fires of hell.

 

She stopped playing around then (after I'd been telling her for weeks that if she hated everyone this much she wasn't going to like the rest of the game and she'd be better off spending her time on something she enjoyed more), so you're safe.

But yeah, like, I told her coming in that I didn't think she was going to enjoy it, because she dislikes naive characters, she dislikes child characters, she dislikes when the plot is driven by characters making giant stupid mistakes, she dislikes being expected to sympathize with characters she looks down on, and she does a lot of judging characters based on initial impressions and doesn't like revising them. And, you know. Tales of the Abyss.

 

Look we're talking about Tales of the Abyss in the thread about getting fighty over fictional characters. I am extremely fighty over Tales of the Abyss.

But also I hope it's not shallow of me to go "what an incredibly boring person," as someone who finds characters not being exactly their tropes in general and redemption arcs in particular to be incredibly important to me.

 

I'm pretty sure there were some personal brain hangups behind a lot of the stuff she disliked, from the way she talked about it, but holy hell it got frustrating.

The first time she said she was going to stop playing TotA, I spoiled why Luke was the way he was because I wanted to explain why it wasn't bad writing and she said she wasn't going to play anymore, and she was like "oooh" and said, "Why didn't they say that in the first place?" and I was like

...aaand then that accidentally triggered her to pick it back up again and I got weeks more of "BAD WRITING" "you know you can just stop playing, you're not going to like it any better if you still unequivocally hate everyone."

 

HAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHA

did you mean: exfriend who picked up the Dragon Age series, got told halfway through "if you don't like the characters, you won't like Bioware games" and continued to play it despite every friend they had telling them to just drop it, and then pirated DA:I and complained about gamebreaking bugs that only existed in pirated versions

Extra salt on the saltheap came from them smugly sneering about how ~Bethesda has much better story telling~ and ~Bioware can't make a game for shit~ and ~anyone who likes Fenris is a filthy neurotypical~ and you can see why so many of their friends left them all at once over it.

 

Eeeeugh. I love Bethesda games as much as the next Dovahkiin, but Bioware made Jade Empire, which is some of my favorite storytelling in a game ever. It was so good.

 

Yeah, that was pretty much the dynamic here. Though I'm pretty sure I made it worse because she'd complain about the "bad writing" and it would set off my "SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET" button and I'd talk about how and why I thought it was well-handled and made its point effectively because all these things she declared to be bad writing had excellent narrative reasons for being there and it bugged me, and then my talking about how I thought it was awesome made her go "well okay then I'll give it another shot" and the cycle would repeat. (Also I think she might have been misinterpreting my "seriously, you're not going to like this any better, you don't need to keep playing if you're not enjoying it" as snippy Don't Like Don't Read dismissals or something? I'm not sure.)