Fandom Gripes Thread

yeah, me and temple were both keeping that on downlow. 'cause temple isn't the type to broadcast his villainy (or anything else, for that matter) openly to spr-type strangers, and me 'cause i wanted people to judge my temple just based on what he did and said in the rave, see what would happen when i showed temple to people that had never heard of him before and didn't know what he was.

and being a temple fan has lead me to understand a lot of your ford gripes a lot better. it's different 'cause temple's a villain and ford isn't, but there are some similar "let's make him more awful than he is" stuff in the fandom for both. like, people saying temple was lying about his backstory or that he's a sociopath/psychopath.

with norm the genie, the worst i've ever got is a few people they hate him, people exaggerating the "destroy canada" joke, and just a generally small fandom for him.

with temple, however... it's preeetty bad.

 

AHAHAH now we are on the topic of my Jim Profit gripes.

• The writers of Profit think Jim Profit is a sociopath, but he clearly has a moral code of some sort and I'm pretty sure he feels something like empathy when he feels anything at all; however, he has bottled his emotions securely because he needed to in order to survive his childhood. Also, no matter what awful thing he does in the episode to take down someone who's incredibly awful themselves, the universe his show is set in is always a better place when he's done. Sad but true. It's a very satirical black comedy but it gets me where I live and I love Jim.
• Profit fans who write Jim Profit as a sexual abuser/rapist piss me off. He is a survivor. His stepmother abused him as a child and blackmails him into restarting the relationship as an adult. Also, every time a character who has been a sexual harasser or rapist or child molester or wife-beater appears on the show, that person ends up dead or worse.
• Profit fans who ship him with his stepmother and aren't writing it as a horrible abusive relationship...you do you, boo, but put a label on it so I don't have to read it and wash your hands afterwards.

 

Also, of course Temple isn't going to say he's a villain. Who does that?

 

yeah, 'cause it's like, temple and profit both do bad things but they have reasons for doing those bad things and they aren't as bad people as they are often portrayed as/thought of and there are bad things that they just won't do. ("temple shot biff" is/was a very popular fan theory, even though canonically, Shooting Biff [And Grif, who's not biff but is similar enough to him] is the One Thing Temple Can't Do. even when biff himself is telling temple to shoot him.)

yep! :D

he believes he's in the right, and even though joe nicolosi (the showrunner of red vs blue season 15) has temple himself knowingly invoke villain tropes ('cause joe nicolosi is a sucker for villain tropes and b-movies and all that stuff, even when it gets in the way of emotion and character arcs), i see that as temple being like, "i'm not a villain, but if you're gonna call me a villain, i'll be the best damn villain you've ever seen!"

joe nicolosi is a bit of an idiot sometimes. he can deliver really well on emotional moments and character arcs and stuff when he wants to, but he often lets his love for stuff like villain tropes and b-movies get in the way of the characterization. like, dude, can you please stop weakening temple's whole tragic, well-intentioned villain thing to make him a cheesy b-movie villain?

 

ahahaha bitching about creators are we? David Greenwalt did a shit job of writing Profit as a sociopath. Alex Hirsch hates on Ford kind of a lot and it pisses me off. Don't even get me started on JKR because I'll be up all night with my salt shaker.

But what really helps me about knowing that Temple is a villain is that it suddenly makes more sense why his brain is so resistant to being told things that are true sometimes. *g*

bonus jim profit content:


protip: the real self insert in WT is probably actually Fairlight.

 

yep. i was really annoyed when nicolosi said, in an ama, that his favourite thing about temple was how much andrew matthews had with the villainous part of the role. 'cause, like, yeah, on one hand, that explains a lot but... it's also really disappointing. that i'm seeing and valuing the depth he put in temple's backstory and motivations, but nicolosi, though he sees it and sorta values it, likes temple being an over-the-top b-movie villain more.

and when nicolosi said temple wasn't gay, i was like... uh, his whole thing with biff: super duper gay! the way he talks to tucker in s15ep9: super duper gay!

and like, i literally can't imagine temple ever being interested in a woman. nothing about his interactions with women suggests that he'd want to romance or sleep with them.

:D

 

I write Jim Profit as someone who probably could've been bisexual if he hadn't been so badly sexually abused by a woman. The only time we ever see him in a relationship with a woman in canon that he's actually enthusiastic about--it's pitch as fuck. But also very consensual. I kinda think for him to fall in love, it would have to be with a guy. Obviously that's not canonical at all. Canonically they imply that he can't fall in love. But he's capable of immense devotion. (If he weren't, Bobbi would be so fucking dead by now. Because he hates her but there's still a part of him that loves her.)

So...I married him to a dude. :p

 

I wonder (not knowing the canon at all, but you've never mentioned him showing an interest in any woman) if Nicolosi thinks he's actually ace, and doesn't care about anything except his villainous cause.

Also I think it's weird that there is a character in this series named Church and another named Temple. Is there also a Synagogue? :p

 

the only intense emotion temple has ever felt for a woman, so far, in canon, is hatred. and not the pitch type, either. :P the type where her dying is his goal, there is nothing sexual, and she doesn't remotely like him.

joe nicolosi actually thinks he is subverting/averting the Gay Villain cliche by having temple not be gay. even though i'm pretty sure the cliche he is referring to is the one with villains who act fancy and do stereotypically gay things but don't kiss boys. villains like scar from disney's lion king. campy villains. but... guess what, nicolosi?

temple is a campy villain who doesn't kiss any boys in canon, but seems, subtextually, to want to kiss boys!

... and that's not a subversion/aversion of the cliche at all, no matter what nicolosi says!

temple is church's counterpart, thus the name thing.

 

writers often do hilarious shit like that. "omg he's not gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy stahp"

"ok but why has he got some dude's name tattooed on his heart?"

 

and the funny thing is that joe nicolosi actually thought he was being progressive there.

which basically explains what happens with grif/simmons this season, and why i forgive him for kinda queerbaiting it. 'cause, like, grif/simmons got lots of shippy hints (being trapped in a closet together when the temple of procreation was activated, grif talking about how he wanted to confess something to simmons, simmons comparing him and grif to opposites attract... etc.) this season, but it was never overtly said that they were actually together. when asked about it when the season finished, nicolosi said "i thought i did a good job with grimmons in episode 20." when all that is put together with what he said about temple, it seems like joe nicolosi is a well-intentioned guy who has no idea what the queer sides and the shippy sides of fandom actually want, who is trying his best to do what he thinks is good for queer people but not doing well at it.

 

Spoiler: spoilers for rvb and the reason I hate temple

the reason why people hate temple is because he had a murder room, full of rotting corpses, of people who didn't actually have anything to do with what happened to him.
And he tried to add two beloved characters to said murder room.

by freezing them in their armor
And leaving them there
so that they could die.

so that's why people doubt his backstory.
I don't, but it's not reason enough for me to forgive that

 

one: i am well aware that temple is a villain, and did bad things, and that's why people hate him.

two: i never said people couldn't hate him. i said that i don't like it when people assume that his backstory was a lie, and i don't like when people have him do stuff that he really wouldn't do, and that it's frustrating being the fan of a character that the fandom mostly hates, but i never said people couldn't hate him. it bothers me, but people can feel however the fuck they want to feel about temple. and i am allowed to feel upset about it.

 

...I can do that... @_@;;;

But not always.

 

According to my friend's class, people with ASPD have good cognitive empathy but poor (or no) emotional empathy.

 

I don't know how to gauge that one because I'm sperg and I have trouble reading people sometimes (although I never had a diagnosis because when I was a kid, you weren't autistic unless you were beating your head against the wall and refusing to speak to people), and I never "just know" or "just understand" things "everyone" is supposed to, but at the same time, when I did acting in college, I was very good at conveying emotion, so I must be reading something right. I know that when I think about how someone would feel if something happened, I can figure it out easily.

But I thought everyone could turn off empathy. Literally everyone, except maybe some people whose brainweirds won't let them. I see other people walking past homeless people every day without even looking at them. I try not to be one of the ones who won't even look. People who are not ASPD do horrible things all the fucking time and if they had their empathy turned on, wouldn't they not?

How do cops and doctors and lawyers and social workers SURVIVE?

(The question of whether or not I am a sociopath doesn't really belong in this thread, so if you're over 18, not going to be mean and understand that I might not be able to think or talk deeply about this until I get home from work tonight or perhaps this weekend, respond in my vent thread maybe? idk. I identify hard with Jim Profit even though I don't kill people--which he tries to avoid, anyway--and I try not to be manipulative like he is, but I also don't get myself in situations where I have to, because why. No. Not just mean, too much work.)

 

I do remember hearing about studies that found that surgeons as a profession are much more likely to have low empathy levels than the general populace. Turns out being able to not go "oh god I'm cutting into a person" is a useful trait when cutting into people is your job.

 

people with empathy often get it accidentally turned off when they encounter the Other and/or people they hate/are mad at. it's really easy, actually, and really tempting for humans to stop seeing other people as people.

 

I didn't know that was a thing for the longest time. I've got inappropriate empathy.