The backlash against Mary Sues wasn’t solely driven by misogyny. There were a substantive number of “Mary Sue” fics that existed solely to shit on canon female characters.
I mean, you only have to peruse a few “Mary Sue” fics in the anime archives to know that, but for my part, THE fic in my primary fandom is a Mary Sue where a white, blonde woman takes the narrative place of a woman of colour in the lead, and the same woman of colour is reduced to a stereotypical mean girl, shrewish wife, nagging mother, and ineffective, nagging grandmother.
And at the time, those were not uncommon tropes.
One big reason for my migration to tumblr five years ago was because of the racialized misogyny toward Carter (Taraji P. Henson) in Person of Interest fandom on livejournal. That racism showed up elsewhere (IMDB forums, facebook, TWoP forums, etc.), but LJ was where I spent most of my fannish time.
(This is not to say that tumblr was a safe haven… it’s complicated.)
I remember being surprised during season one at how many original female characters showed up in fanfic posted to FFN, since there had already been a big backlash to “Mary Sue” stories and slash was pretty dominant everywhere…
…and I’m just now connecting the dots to realize that OF COURSE some fans wanted to pair Reese with a white woman, not with Carter. OFCs were basically the only way to accomplish that on Person of Interest in season one. (Zoe Morgan was white, but she was too old. As in, the actors have a four year age difference, sheesh. Yay, racism and ageism?)
PoI fandom did eventually start cranking out fanfic pairing Carter with Reese. At one point it was the second most popular pairing. This was around the same time that Carter fans were labelled the “mean girls” in fandom, by the way. Because that’s another thing that happens.
(All of this is true at the same time: misogyny leads to a backlash to OFCs, racialized misogyny leads to white OFCs in place of women of color, etc.)
This is all incredibly interesting. I only came to Fan Fiction in general shortly before Carter died so I was in and out of the POI community lightning fast. I didn’t have an opportunity to really inspect or critique the fandom. But that said, it is so similar to all the other fandoms where the romantic pairing is bw/wm that this is hardly revelatory. Like, yeah, this is Careese but also Richonne, WestAllen, Bamon, Ichabbie, shit, I can’t even remember the name of the Tomorrow People ship but that one too, etc. LOL! Sidelining/Erasing Black women protagonists/love interests right out of their own stories is like, Fanfic Writing 101.
Been looking at this for a while, and something about it seemed off. Something else is going on here, behind the scenes. And it hit me.
Look at where the floor is. Her legs, in order to reach it, must be Liefeldian in length! And then the obvious solution presented itself.
She’s standing on a dog!
No wonder this man is in here crying. She is a monster.
Far be it from me to argue with someone with nineteen years and counting of artistic experience, but that is exactly what I’m going to do, right now! Watch me!
Yes, examination of that background and the marks on the floor of the shed lead me to the conclusion that there’s a great big hill of sand for her to be standing on. Thus obviously the reason he’s crying is that he’s just finished sweeping and now she’s letting all the sand in. As someone who spent many years at a summer camp with a sandy bank by the lake, and who was often made to sweep his own bunk, I can assure you that this is an unforgivable offense. Sand is the worst and there is always more of it.
I will give you that there definitely appears to be sand. However, it’s a clearly not a solid fixture of sand which would support the weight of an adult human woman.
everytime I hear about children of the corn I think about the guy I met at comic con who actually lived in the town they filmed that movie at, and on the farm where they filmed in the corn.
he was a teenager at the time and him and his friends would get drunk on moonshine and rustle the corn and let the air out of the tires of the production team’s trailers and shit.
and now there’s Wikipedia pages about how the children of the corn set was haunted and they thought they angered god but it was really just drunk hillbillies
I don’t like adding to posts but I also have a funny story like this, so I was watching the movie the Blair witch which takes place in burkettsville maryland, which to me is so funny because that is were my grandfather lives and the town is literally just old people and cows with their main street consisting of a post office. Well anyway he told me that after it came out people were coming in like bus loads to the town to find the witch and my grandfather lives up in the Mountain area and people were up in his property trying to find the witch and it made him angry so he went out and hung up stick people and stacked rocks and it freaked the people out so they started thinking something was out there when really it was my 80 year old Italian grandpa who wanted people out of his woods.
We had ghost hunters come to a historic house in my town to film and if you think every high school kid in town respectfully stayed at home that night instead of going to fuck up that filming you’re dead wrong.
this is comforting, actually, sometimes paranormal things are just a bunch of bored people dicking around in the woods.
08 Jul 2017 @ 09:29AM / 
