Currently obsessed with: One-Punch Man, sports anime, role playing, and fantasizing about my ocs being in horrible situations for my own sick pleasure.
Brandilynn
(she/her) AroAce
Skype: lumpyspacetrash
yeah seriously tell us how wizardry’s done in the new world tell me how the wizards from france and spain and britain stamped out the brujos and the medicine men and set up their own schools tell me what the fuck the british raj did to fucking india because the patel twins are going to school in scotland and what are they told about their history, tell me about native american kids learning to say wingardium leviosa with hate in their hearts and tell me about wizarding rabbis bickering about whether you can use potions on the sabbath tell me about the slaves on their ships with their wands broken, mouthing curses in the dark tell me about the runaways that made it with garter snakes wrapped around their wrists that told them when they tasted dogs in the distance, tell me about the underground railroad and abolitionists with unbreakable vows and home-spun invisibility cloaks and disilusionments, using obliviate, using imperio, knowing that they served a higher justice, tell me about what happened to black wizards in the fifties, about what gates they were storming in the sixties tell me about queer wizards taking love potions every morning in their coffee to stay married to their husbands and their wives because what else could they do?
the world only begins and ends with straight white christians if you don’t bother looking any farther than that and too many people don’t and i am tired, tired, tired
i really am a “text me if you need something” person. like unless i have something specific to talk about, i don’t usually initiate a conversation. if you wanna talk just to talk then im all here but dont take me not hittin you up as me not caring.
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.
This is why you should have a cat y’all. Egyptians believed that cats repelled evil spirits.
Cats are evil spirits. They’re just the strongest so all others must bow to their greatness.
Actually according to legend, cats are guardians of the Underworld. So once you are dead if you try to sneak back into the land of the living they send you back where you came from. They protect the living from the dead.
If you ever wonder why a cat stares off into the wild blue yonder and then bolts off for “no reason…”
That cat even looks like it’s accusing him of something like wait a Fucking minute here are you dead did you really think you could slip that shit passed me
I don’t know where you get your sources but cats were not fucking “guardians of the underworld”; this movie is based on EGYPT, cats were common domestic pets by the time Egypt unified, and they were representations of the goddess Bastet, ex goddess of warfare (formerly asociated with a lioness ), post-unification protector goddess. Cats were guardians of houses because they embodied the representation of Bastet, the “EYE of Ra”, the one that tells ra whatever happens. If a cat saw an evil spirit, it would tell Ra, and Ra would smite down the fucker in an instant. Bastet was also feared by evil spirits because she was the only one to be able to harm the evil snake Apep and save Ra’s ass, so you bet someone that escaped Anubis’ judgement and Osiris’ preservation would do well to fear Bastet out of fear of being caught by said gods. They were seen as this as well because they disposed of rats and snakes (perhaps an egyptian once saw a cat killing a snake and went “OH BAST JUST KILLED APEP” and that’s how the mythos started), so they were useful animals to keep as pets, revered, adored, mourned when they died, and if you killed one you received death penalty.
The only animal seen as a “guardian of the underworld” were jackals, because they embodied Anubis and were seen near tombs, but that’s because they entered said tombs to try and eat the corpses and the egyptians based their entire Anubis lore on them.
So yeah, if you were an evil emperor that escaped the process of the gods you once worshipped, unleashed curses around the world disrespecting your own pantheon, and you came across an avatar of the goddess of Warfare that could also call upon Ra to pulverize you with sunlight, and have your soul sundered by Osiris and weighted by Anubis to go to your rightful place as someone who perished AGES ago, you would shit on your pants as well.
Underground is harrowing and compelling new 10 episode TV show centered on a group of slaves planning a daring all-or-nothing 600-mile escape from a Georgia plantation. It premieres on March 9th on WGN America.
The journey and escape of thousands of slaves to free states and Canada in the 19th century is one of the most fascinating and defiant parts of American history but one that has received little attention on television or in movies.
The relationships and the agendas of the series’ slave characters, the people who claim ownership and domain over them, the hunters who seek to snare them and the abolitionists who fight to help them find freedom form a complex and intriguing mosaic in this new TV epic.
Why this might actually work:
1. It was created, written and co-produced by a black woman
Misha Green is a writer and producer who has worked on shows including Sons of Anarchy and Heroes.
“One day my sister said to me, ‘You should do a show about the Underground Railroad.’ I liked the idea. I immediately knew the title would be the ‘Underground.’ I knew I wanted it to be epic and big. So I went to Joe Polaski, the co–creator of Underground. We had a great history.
We decided to see it from all perspectives: from the slaves running to those left behind on the plantation, to the slave catchers going after them to those helping along the way. The more we researched, we found truth is stranger than fiction. We knew it was the right time for a television series”
2. It’s not another tragic slave era story exploiting black pain for dramatic effect
Misha Green: “It’s not about the occupation; it’s about the revolution. This is a story that has not been told before. We have a little paragraph in some history books about this time period. But this is an inspiring story that shows what can be accomplished when we stick together. It shows how people traveled 600 miles with people hunting them every step to get to freedom. It shows the ingenuity they used.“
Aldis Hodge, the shows lead protagonist said “to be called a slave is to be called a thing. It’s like being cattle or a machine. We depicted it from the viewpoint that these people are enslaved Americans, and we celebrate their strengths.”
3. It gives a deeper look into the slave resistance than ever before
Unlike many slave dramas that have gone before, this is not a sepia-tinted period drama or a revisionist fantasy. Underground explores the social, moral, and political complexities of this period. It gives viewers a historically accurate glimpse of how the clandestine system of the Underground Railroad operated.
“The Underground Railroad is one sentence – one paragraph – in history books, and they sum it up to one person, the amazing legend of Harriet Tubman,” says Smollett-Bell who plays Rosalee, a shy but internally strong house slave. “But there were thousands of people who risked their lives and who were actively changing our nation.”
Actor Alano Miller who plays Cato said “At first, when it was pitched to me, it was ‘slave drama,’ and that made me cringe. But then I read the script and the humanity; it was about the revolution. The writing was just so excellent; it had so much depth to it and it wasn’t one-dimensional.”
4. It has a stellar cast
As well as being executive produced by John Legend, Underground stars
True Blood’s Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Straight Outta Compton’s Aldis Hodge, Jane The Virgin’s Alano Miller, Arrow’s Jessica de Gouw, Law & Order: SVU alum Christopher Meloni, Amirah Vann and Justified’s Mykelti Williamson, among others. Empire’s Jussie Smollett and Treme’s Renwick Scott also guest star.
5. The soundtrack’s gunna be great
John Legend is the show’s music producer, so you know it’s going to be good. The moody R&B and blues rock soundtrack to Underground “emphasizes the struggles of the South in this tumultuous time.“
Underground premieres on March 9th on WGN America.
