You Bitches Keep Your Mouth Off Suki

[redbrunja]

Dear Avatar fandom,

The next time I find someone saying (via explicit text or via lyrics in a vid) that Suki is:

-a fling of Sokka's

-seduced him

-isn't worthy of him

-somehow did him wrong

-is not heart-wrenching important to him,

I will smack you with metal fans until the stupid bleeds out of you.

I do no care if you ship him with Toph. I do not care if you ship him with Yue. I do not care if you ship him with Ty Lee.

But fucking respect the relationship he has with Suki and stop trying to cheapen what is arguably the second most important female relationship in his entire life. (fyi, Katara is #1 in that category.)

No love,
redbruna

Comments

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Whhhaaaa....?

Geez.

I wasn't a big fan of Kennedy(she felt forced in to me to make sure Willow didn't end up alone, and as a result, her telling Willow she had to move on eventually almost had a feeling of "you have to move on now, with me" to it) but sheesh.

I may not care for her, but come on. If Tara had popped back up alive somehow, I have no doubts that Kennedy would have bowed out. She may have been too agressive for me(at least in terms of pursuing a woman who she knew lost the person she loved less than a year before) but she wasn't possessive, and she certainly wasn't evil.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Yeah, maturity in fandom is incredibly rare.

Really, I think Kennedy would have been more popular if they hadn't pushed Willow/Kennedy so hard. I just don't think we were ready to have Willow move on so quickly. (I had the same problem in season 4. Buffy/Angel was so self-destructive by the end that I was happy to see her move on, even though the pairing left me kinda ho-hum, but Willow/Tara took a while for me to warm up to-probably early s5-because I found it hard to believe that Willow was able to get over Oz and be in love with someone else in a handful of episodes.) Kennedy probably would have gone over a lot better if they'd made it clear that she liked Willow, but realized Willow wasn't quite ready yet.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Yeah...it wasn't just that Willow needed time to recover from Tara's death, it was also that WE needed time to recover. There was a "well, she's dead, time to move on" element to the whole thing. It was like "What? WAIT! You told us to love her for three years! Don't tell us to just forget about her now!"

There's also the element that Willow was, for lack of a better word, out "personal connection" character. Xander is the entry one...we see the supernatural world through his everyman eyes, but Willow is the one the show always set up for us to feel the greatest emotional connection with, even moreso than Buffy. While they sometimes took things a bit too far with that, IMO, they put her forward as the one whose pain and fear we were supposed to feel, so her losses-Xander who never loved her the way she wanted, Oz whose nature forced them apart, and Tara, the "great love" who was taken from her-were the ones we were meant to feel the strongest. When you set a character up so that her pain is the pain we're meant to feel the most, it's going to be harder for us when she moves on. And, honestly, by the time Kennedy came along, I think we just didn't want to see Willow get hurt again, or in a position to be hurt like that again.

Another reason Ithink it's easier with Buffy is simply the fact that we expect the main character to have a love interest at any given time. It's just built into our minds to expect it. Plus, all Buffy's relationship just went really, really bad in the end, to the point where Buffy probably was better moving on. Willow's romances were the opposite...with both Tara and Oz, you could seethem together forever, if something hadn't separated them. And really, if Buffy hadn't come along, and Xander hadn't fallen for her, and then(after Willowwas with Oz) Cordy? They probably would have gotten together, and stayed that way.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

"Its like you read my mind, except you're far more eloquent."

Why thank you, thank you very much.

I wasn't watching Buffy/Angel until near the end of Angel s4, when TnT was showing Angel reruns during the day, but I knew about Willow/Tara then, and I heard about Tara's death. I suspect the "NO! YOU CAN'T KILL HALF OF THE LESBIAN PAIRING!" is a large part of why we got Kennedy pushed so hard...they had to either leave Willow single and risk a "lesbians can't be happy" type of message, or give her a new love interest before we were ready.

Hmm...what's "The Kitten" board?