Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win
Aug 09
sroloc--elbisivni asked: um hi feel free to tell me to take a hike but. i really like your blog and your writing and i may or may not have gone 480 pages back in it and seen "In which angels are a thing that happened around 1947 and just kind of never left; also everyone is LGBT because fuck you I do what I want" and now i'm really curious--would you be willing to elaborate?
BABE I will never tell you to take a hike about my original writing, I have real shit to get done and a bunch of older asks to answer, but I’m gonna do this instead, sorry. I have many novels started and that’s one of the ones that gets an actual place where I’ll find it to work on, I love it very much. Okay, so, *clears throat* let’s do this.
So. First off, some backstory: an insane percentage of my stories are rooted in an original conversation with someone, somewhere, that goes “But it’s so stupid that this book/TV show/movie did this, because it would be so much better if they’d done that” (see also: Falls the Shadow, product of a Supernatural rage quit, Emrys Ascendant, product of a Merlin rage quit, and Polaris, product of a “please God I just want a F/F couple that lives” tirade). This one was the product of a half-dozen episodes of Dominion in very short order (which I have yet to rage-quit, by the by, and love very much in its capacity as a ridiculous lovely garbage pile) and me turning to @twistedangelsays and going “But it would be so much better if there were two angelic factions openly, one that thought humanity was past redemption and one that believed that they were still duty-bound to love and protect us.” And then I did kind of this weird magician trick and pulled a fully-formed universe and plot with main characters and ships out of thin air.
Let’s talk about the battle in the Department of Mysteries for a sec. So after the group gets split up, Harry, Hermione and Neville go one way and Ron, Ginny and Luna the other. The next time we see the latter group Ginny’s ankle is busted and Ron’s brain is addled. Luna says that the Death Eaters blew up a planet in the planetarium and hit Ron with some sort of hex.
Let’s take a moment to examine that. If the curse that hit the planet had hit any of the kids, they’d be dead. So the Death Eater probably missed, hit the planet ahead of them, injuring Ginny. But here’s the important part: the one who actually gets hit by the hex? Ron.
Why is this important? Because Ron is consistently described throughout the series as tall. Like, every time Harry sees him after the beginning of summer he’s described as having shot up. Again. On the other hand Ginny is described as “the small one” by Bellatrix Lestrange. But Ron is behind her. I don’t know if you know this but tall people can run really fast. I am not particularly fit but I am tall. And I can pour on the speed when my adrenaline’s up, which I have no doubt was the case for everyone in the Department of Mysteries. But he’s behind her.
Because he did that deliberately. He kept his body between the Death Eaters and the girls. He shielded them from their spells. Because those he cares about are more important to him than his own life.
I don’t know, I just think about this a lot.
Ron is a strategist, and has already shown a willingness to take the hit for the team and be left behind. In any group, I think that’s just his default position; take the hit, buy more time for others to escape. He’s well aware that realistically, someone is going to be hurt. In this case, Luna is creative and smart enough to come up with something out of left field to throw the enemy off. Ginny is small, but she’s an athletic powerhouse who can throw strong hexes. If it comes down to a crunch, Ron knows that the two of them can fight their way out, and he can increase their odds by at least holding off the wave behind them.
Honestly, this is such an important point.
Consistently throughout the series, Ron can be seen being taken out of the action somehow. AND IT IS NEVER BECAUSE HE IS WEAK.
Rather, it’s because Ron is a STRATEGIST, who CARES.
In Philosopher’s Stone, for example. Ron allows himself to be “taken” by the queen, because he knows that he is standing with the Boy-Who-Lived and the Brightest-Witch-Of-Her-Age and Voldy must be stopped and it’s SIMPLE to him. Ron is a strategist, like has been said. It’s a strategic decision - who cares if it puts himself in harm’s way?
In Prisoner of Azkaban, Ron and Harry are faced with the Grim, and what does Ron do? He pushes Harry out of Sirius’ path, in the process allowing the dog to latch onto his outstretched arm and pull him away, breaking his leg as they enter the Willow. This decision is simple too - it’s because Harry Potter means the world to Ron Weasley, and Ron would not hesitate for a moment in putting himself between Harry and danger.
RON IS A STRATEGIST, AND RON CARES.
And when it comes down to it, he never hesitates.
And don’t forget DH:
“Wait,” said Bellatrix sharply. "All except… except for the Mudblood.“
Greyback gave a grunt of pleasure. “No!” shouted Ron. “You can have me, keep me!”
“Right,” said Ron, squaring his shoulders. “So you can’t go, that’s what he wants, what he’s expecting. You stay here and look after Hermione, and I’ll go and get it —”
Where do people who claim Ron is a coward who hides behind his friends get their bullshit from?
French Friend: well, the total cost of me going to Med school is about 406 a year -
American Friend: THOUSAND?
French Friend: Um, no. 406 Euro. It sounds a little high but it covers the cost of my textbooks, extra classes and most of my housing. How much is it for you?
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. :)
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
Okay but - imagine Bones calling Jaylah sweetheart.
He’d try to take it back instantly, because he still flinches whenever he remembers the one (and only) time he called Uhura that. And he doesn’t want to be condescending, not at all - he’s a southern gentleman, dammit, and these terms of endearment just slip out sometimes.
But Jaylah stops him mid-apology, and goes “explain to me this word, Leonard Bones.”
He does - and from then on, not only does she insist he calls her sweetheart - she calls him that as well.
That’s a very good question and thank you for asking so politely.
The word feminism was coined by Charles Fourier in 1837, a French philosopher who advocated for the emancipation of women because he believed society treated women as slaves. We weren’t allowed to vote, own anything, or work a real job. Women were ruled by their fathers/household patriarch until they married at which time they’d be under the rule of their husband. If a woman did not belong to male household she was shunned by society and had very little means to make money, most of them unsavory. You know the idiom “rule of thumb”? That comes from a running joke that started in the 1600s, and was still around in Fourier’s time, that said it was okay for a man to beat a woman with a stick as long as it wasn’t any thicker than his thumb.
The point of the word feminist, and the feminist movement, has never been to say that women are better than men. The point is that women and things associated with women have been given a lesser place in society and we want to bring those things up to a place of equality. The focus is on the feminine because that’s what’s being pushed down. However, focusing on the feminine does not mean we’re focusing only women. Men are belittled and called “less of a man” anytime they portray a trait that is associated with femininity. If women and the feminine were equal to men and masculinity then that wouldn’t happen. Feminism is about raising up things associated with females to have an equal place in society as the things associated with males. It’s called feminism, not equalism, because the focus is on raising up not tearing down. Equalism would suggest that male things need to come down to a lower level so that female things can meet it in the middle. That’s not the point. The point is to raise up the feminine so that it’s on the same playing field that the masculine is already on. We don’t want men to lower themselves, we just want them to make room for us.
This needs to be spread far and wide to everyone on tumblr.
just a quick note in case i have any gross terfs following me
any post i make about how much i love girls or how much respect i have for girls or anything at all to do with girls - it absolutely always includes trans girls. there’s no reason why it wouldn’t. i don’t want my posts on your disgusting blogs so if you see the word ‘girls’ and don’t assume trans girls fit into that term, please get the fuck away from me and the entire earth. thanks.
