redwoodalchan

So a short time ago I was reading this article about something completely unrelated, but one of the things the writer commented on in passing was that Twilight comes under fire a lot simply for being a book for girls. One of the people in the comments put in, quite sensibly, that a lot of people who don't like Twilight are offended by its undeniably offensive messages, to which the original poster replied that although there is, in fact, quite a lot to dislike about Twilight, in practice not everyone who's willing to talk about how much they hate it even brings that up, with many instead commenting on how it's a "stupid sparkly vampire series for stupid girls" (probably not in so many words, but you get the point). I even think this line of thought might be the origin of Mervin's "Hate it for the right reasons" video series (though there's no confirmation there).

I will say this makes the almost-obscene amount of time anti-Twilighters in certain sections of the internet spend comparing Twilight unfavorably to "Hellsing" all the more suspicious, because while "Hellsing" is popular with women and in some respects quite feminist, it's still technically written by a man, for an audience consisting primarily of men, and it shows.

 I've decided never to spork stories featuring classic female Mary Sues--unless they overlap with my preferred targets, like Lifetime!fic and those which feature obnoxious male Mary Sues.

There's a couple reasons for this. One is that the moment a fic like this gets discovered you see dozens if not hundreds of snarkers lining up to bash the hell out of it. I feel like there's often a sexist dimension to it as well, since a lot of the time it seems like people don't comment on the very real problems found in stories like this, such as the fact that they often contain sexism, racism, homophobia, callous disregard for the well-being of anyone who isn't Mary Sue or her slobbering sex slave du jour, or some combination of the four; but rather their commentary often falls along the lines of "LOL STUPID LITTLE GIRLS WITH THEIR STUPID MARY SUES CORRUPTING POOR INNOCENT STUD-SAMA BY FORCING HIM OUT OF CHARACTER!"

So instead I'm sticking with problems which it seems like snarkers rarely talk about--including Lifetime!fics which receive a distressingly low level of criticism for their blatant misogyny, and (perhaps, as is the way of these things, ESPECIALLY) male Mary Sues, who often don't get any attention or criticism whatsoever from the fandom despite being every bit as bad as their sisters.

I've also considered sharpening my Ron the Death Eater snarking skills, and spending less time snarking at DILP in so many words, because again, it seems to me that Draco in Leather Pants is condemned as the worst and most poisonous thing ever!!!! that a fan can do, while RTDE gets a free pass (unless said Death Eater is a character you personally like, that is...).

What I'm really hoping is that I'll eventually tackle bad snark. It seems to me that there's an unspoken belief in fandom that snarkers get a free pass to say whatever they want just because they're tearing apart "bad" works, when really, there's a way to do snark well and a way to do it poorly.

 This article is something I came up with as a prelude to my next sporking job, which should be going up in due course.

( Cut for mentions of rape/sexual abuse, as well as spoilers for  )Plus, this kind of behavior gives people who just want to enjoy the bad guys and the bits of them that make them more sympathetic and fleshed-out a bad name.

 So to help me with my Sue-sporking I've revisited a couple of the videos in Shmeiliarockie's "You Are Bella" series.

( This got long... )

 Don't get me wrong--I still think they're the scourge of the Pokemon fandom. But they have a point when they note that the mechanics that worked perfectly well in the Kanto and Johto games do not necessarily work as well in the games that came after.

The basic mechanic of the Pokemon games in the main series is and always has been fairly straightforward: you catch pokemon, and then you use them to fight other pokemon, be they wild pokemon or pokemon with trainers attached to them. And in the first- and second-generation games that worked just fine because those games had no real storyline--the entire objective of them was to simply defeat all the increasingly powerful trainers in the game and prove you were the best. But starting with the Hoenn games, they started to introduce something resembling a coherent storyline, and while in a lot of ways that was pretty cool, it created problems. Because the mechanics of the games didn't change, they now had all these complex plots, every one of which had to be resolved by having a pokemon battle, regardless of what the most appropriate course of action would realistically be in that situation (to cite a favorite example, if N thinks it's so wrong to make pokemon fight, why does he keep challenging you to battles?).

So while I'm never going to think that the first- and second-generation games are superior to the ones that came after, I will say that it does seem as though the games have "outgrown" their original mechanics, as it were, at least by the time Generation V rolled around. Of course, Generation V also introduced some significant changes to the gameplay (such as ending the game after the big bad has been defeated, thus ending the main storyline, rather than after you become champion), so it may be that they're aware of this and working on it for the next gen.

 First of all...anyone who implies that Draco in Leather Pants is something that only women do, or that only applies to male characters, needs a good kick in the face. In fact, one of the fics I plan to spork down the road is an absolutely obnoxious DILP work--with a male Mary Sue and a female DILP (and the fic was written by a man too). So yeah, they exist and they're every bit as obnoxious as the more common (or at least more commonly-cited) version with a female Mary Sue and male DILP.

Oh, and here's another thing: I strongly suspect (though have no evidence to prove, admittedly) that if you were to take the sum total of all instances of Draco in Leather Pants and Ron the Death Eater across all fandoms, you'd end up with fairly comparable numbers of each (based on my own experience, RTDE is WAY more common in the Pokemon fandom than DILP, to cite one example--granted, Cori Falls and her ilk notwithstanding). Yet DILP receives almost all the attention and condemnation from wankier fans. What's even more annoying is that a lot of these wankier fans think ANY interpretation of the character that doesn't make him out to be pure evil is DILP, no matter how well-thought out. Apparently you can make N, or Grimsley, or Dawn (yes, THAT Dawn--I once saw a fic of her as a psycho murderer) a mustache-twirlingly evil bastard and everyone's okay with it, but the moment you try to argue that Voldemort might have been a victim in his childhood at one point rather than being an innately evil monster, well, you're just a stupid brainless fangirl who is obviously too besotted with Voldiecakes to understand how evil he is.

And before anyone says, "But DILP is so HARMFUL because it glorifies the villains' antisocial behavior," well, RTDE has the potential to be every bit as harmful, because its logical extreme is character bashing. Which part of Cori Falls's work was more obnoxious, her declaration that Jessie and James were the real heroes or her insistence that Ash was pure evil and deserved to be abused both verbally and physically just for not liking Jessie and James? Both DILP and RTDE have the potential to glorify antisocial behavior if they go too far--it's all to do with context.

 ...that male Mary Sues are twice as annoying as female Mary Sues?

I mean, they're less common, but it seems like they make up for it by being more insufferable, more assholish, more selfish, and more sexist/racist/homophobic than all but the worst female Mary Sues. If you think about it, who's more obnoxious: Anabella or Christian Grey? Or, while we're at it, Bella Swan and Christian Grey (or Edward Cullen, as the case may be)?

This just occurred to me because as I plan out my sporkings one thing I notice is that while I certainly get annoyed by female Mary Sues, it's the male Mary Sues (or, in some cases, the male associates of female Mary Sues) that really get most of my ire. Case in point: I'm currently writing up a sporking of a Lifetime!fic based around Pokemon DPPt, and while Dawn is indeed irritating (and the bits about Cyrus raping Dawn are indeed vile) it's Lucas who's getting most of my hate.