I’ve been following some of the discussion about ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
counteragent’s recent fanwork about fourth walls, SPN, and marital relations, and I have a lot of thoughts. Initially, I should say that I loved it as a fanwork; I thought it effectively communicated its story and allowed me to invest in the characters.
What intrigues me most about various reactions is the idea that there has to be a single “villain” of the story. Do I have to pick?
Let me unpack that a little. As to Kripke (here, “Kripke” will stand for “the forces that get SPN to TV in the form it has”): No, I don’t think he has an obligation not to speak about/back to fandom. It's not Fight Club and it's not his Fight Club anyway. Yes, I do think he executed his portrayal of fangirls very badly, in line with SPN’s general problems with women, sexuality, and women’s sexuality. And we can totally call him on it! I’ve seen lots of fans debate issues of power, appropriation, othering, and so on in our own works; just because SPN’s creative forces are unlikely to listen to criticism in this vein is no reason to exempt SPN.
And one of the things SPN’s specific portrayal of “Supernatural” fandom did was contribute to the popular denigration of women’s icky sexualized overinvestment in fiction (fanboys took their hits too, but not in the same way). Becky can definitely be an awesome character, but it takes work to make her so, and the show didn’t see her that way (see: her transfer of affection from Sam to Chuck and how that was played). Specifically, the episodecounteragent’s story is about foregrounded the extent to which female fans’ investment is about sexual desire for the male leads and portrayed that as laughable.
Unsurprisingly, this is messy! Because one thing that might happen when a man sees a portrayal of female fans’ sexual desire, and connects that to his wife’s fandom, is that he will conclude that her sexual desire is focused elsewhere: she doesn’t want him, she wants them. And, bonus, her wanting is ridiculous! His wife would rather have this ridiculous fantasy than the real him! The problem I have with the portrayal is different than the problem he has, and his problem may well be bound up with patriarchal assumptions, but it also strikes me as well within normal human range for people in apparently/default monogamous relationships.
So she feels outed.
On to the husband as villain: What fascinates me about this work is how people feed their own experiences into it (I think this is something that visual works are even more subject to than textual ones, so we were having reactions to the images that were hard to articulate in conventional meta terms); I’ve even seen people who commented that they imagined the existence of panels that weren’t present when they looked back.
Is the husband an abusive/worthless/controlling whatever? Well, he might be. The fact that they had nice interactions before the fight, in which he gave in to her desire to watch SPN, tells us nothing about whether he’s abusive etc. except that he’s not a monster 100% of the time. Likewise, his freakout over what being a fangirl means—all that time she spends on the internet, desiring other men—suggests to me that he is capable of freaking out. If you judged me by the worst thing I said in the heat of passion, especially if I was in a fight about some underlying issue like how much emotional energy my partner was supposed to be devoting to me, well, I hate to think how that would end.
So she freaks out too. In my own version of the story, they both calm down later. Multiple readings!
There’s a lot I haven’t even touched on—it’s a rich and possibly contradictory work. I haven’t talked about the baby, the expectations that mothers will devote libidinal energy first to children and then to men and never to themselves, the emotional effects of exhaustion in the first months of childrearing, the extent to which you do need to attend to others’ needs as well as your own, and the outlet that fandom provides just not to think about all that stuff. (I also haven’t talked about the reaction that essentially casts the woman as the villain of the piece for not dumping the guy/getting herself knocked up by a man who’d get angry over her investment in fandom/etc., because I am not prepared to react calmly to that. SPN blames enough women already for their choices and circumstances for my taste, thanks.)
Now I really need to finish grading.
counteragent’s recent fanwork about fourth walls, SPN, and marital relations, and I have a lot of thoughts. Initially, I should say that I loved it as a fanwork; I thought it effectively communicated its story and allowed me to invest in the characters.What intrigues me most about various reactions is the idea that there has to be a single “villain” of the story. Do I have to pick?
Let me unpack that a little. As to Kripke (here, “Kripke” will stand for “the forces that get SPN to TV in the form it has”): No, I don’t think he has an obligation not to speak about/back to fandom. It's not Fight Club and it's not his Fight Club anyway. Yes, I do think he executed his portrayal of fangirls very badly, in line with SPN’s general problems with women, sexuality, and women’s sexuality. And we can totally call him on it! I’ve seen lots of fans debate issues of power, appropriation, othering, and so on in our own works; just because SPN’s creative forces are unlikely to listen to criticism in this vein is no reason to exempt SPN.
And one of the things SPN’s specific portrayal of “Supernatural” fandom did was contribute to the popular denigration of women’s icky sexualized overinvestment in fiction (fanboys took their hits too, but not in the same way). Becky can definitely be an awesome character, but it takes work to make her so, and the show didn’t see her that way (see: her transfer of affection from Sam to Chuck and how that was played). Specifically, the episode
counteragent’s story is about foregrounded the extent to which female fans’ investment is about sexual desire for the male leads and portrayed that as laughable.Unsurprisingly, this is messy! Because one thing that might happen when a man sees a portrayal of female fans’ sexual desire, and connects that to his wife’s fandom, is that he will conclude that her sexual desire is focused elsewhere: she doesn’t want him, she wants them. And, bonus, her wanting is ridiculous! His wife would rather have this ridiculous fantasy than the real him! The problem I have with the portrayal is different than the problem he has, and his problem may well be bound up with patriarchal assumptions, but it also strikes me as well within normal human range for people in apparently/default monogamous relationships.
So she feels outed.
On to the husband as villain: What fascinates me about this work is how people feed their own experiences into it (I think this is something that visual works are even more subject to than textual ones, so we were having reactions to the images that were hard to articulate in conventional meta terms); I’ve even seen people who commented that they imagined the existence of panels that weren’t present when they looked back.
Is the husband an abusive/worthless/controlling whatever? Well, he might be. The fact that they had nice interactions before the fight, in which he gave in to her desire to watch SPN, tells us nothing about whether he’s abusive etc. except that he’s not a monster 100% of the time. Likewise, his freakout over what being a fangirl means—all that time she spends on the internet, desiring other men—suggests to me that he is capable of freaking out. If you judged me by the worst thing I said in the heat of passion, especially if I was in a fight about some underlying issue like how much emotional energy my partner was supposed to be devoting to me, well, I hate to think how that would end.
So she freaks out too. In my own version of the story, they both calm down later. Multiple readings!
There’s a lot I haven’t even touched on—it’s a rich and possibly contradictory work. I haven’t talked about the baby, the expectations that mothers will devote libidinal energy first to children and then to men and never to themselves, the emotional effects of exhaustion in the first months of childrearing, the extent to which you do need to attend to others’ needs as well as your own, and the outlet that fandom provides just not to think about all that stuff. (I also haven’t talked about the reaction that essentially casts the woman as the villain of the piece for not dumping the guy/getting herself knocked up by a man who’d get angry over her investment in fandom/etc., because I am not prepared to react calmly to that. SPN blames enough women already for their choices and circumstances for my taste, thanks.)
Now I really need to finish grading.
Tags:
From:
no subject
In other words, I saw his treatment of LARPing and the fact that the men ultimately got to be heroes as much more affectionate than his treatment of women's activities.
From:
no subject
It's the latter part of this that I don't see. I don't see Becky as grotesque, I suppose. Unmoored from reality, yes, but portrayed as grotesque, no.
Becky's not shown as having something to be ashamed of, nor punished for her activities. They cast her as cute and wrote her as being desirable to a recurring sympathetic male character. They rely on her knowledge of the books to provide passive assistance at the end. She's alive at the end of the episode and has hooked up with Chuck, which is a better streak of luck than most women have on Supernatural.
Of course, this isn't to say that the portrayal isn't problematic. She's in no way treated as three dimensional: we have no real concept of her motivations, nor justifications or speeches, in her relationship with Chuck, she's little more than an object of attraction to be won, and ultimately, in the two episodes she's been in, she's served as little more than human navigation system to get them where they need to go.
From:
no subject
And just to add - the male fans are shown as being able to separate LARPing from real life -they break character, talk about staying in character - it's a game. Becky is never playing; this is her real life, which is why she comes off as delusional. And at first, the only fans we saw (Monster at the End of This Book) were women. Suddenly Kripke wants to tell a story about fans who actually step in an fight ghosts and the entire gender changes, and doesn't reflect the actual SPN fanbase at all. Becky is not only inappropriately sexual, but that's all she can be - she can't also go dig a grave and fight ghosts and talk about what the stories mean to her in relation to real life, because she doesn't have any boundaries or grasp of reality, and she's not interested in anything other than sexual fantasies.
From:
no subject
It's not that your reading doesn't make sense to me, but on an emotional level, I personally can't see her as grotesque -- I just liked her too much.
From:
no subject
Not as a behavioral aspect.