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]

I...identify about equally with males and females? At least in anime/manga. Pretty much always females in other mediums. But when I identify with males, I have no interest in pairing them with the guy I find hot...I always just want to find them a sweet girlfriend(or boyfriend, if that actually is what they prefer.) But even then, the angst/story of the females still hits me harder a lot of the time, even if I don't identify with them at all.

Like, Ishida, the guy in this icon? He gives me so many "me at 16" moments(minus the stick up the butt, I hope) that it's almost creepy. But I could never dream of slashing him with the two guys I like, Ichigo and Renji(even though Ichigo's way too young for me.) For one thing, all three would literally die first. I'm not about to make a character OOC(and even if everything else is perfect, if you change that, you are changing the character) in my head or in fanfic, just so the character I connect with can get some action with the person I find hot. For another, Renji is absurdly hung up on his childhood friend, Rukia, and Orihime, another girl I like, has a massive crush on Ichigo that he'll probably reciprocate if he ever grows the brains to notice it. (And while I don't really ship anything in Bleach, Renji/Rukia and Ichigo/Orihime are about as close as I come, simply because Renji and Orihime are so obvious in their adoration, and Rukia and Ichigo so dense about it.)

Really, though, 2 out of 3 times, there isn't anyone I completely identify with. I don't need a POV or identification character to care about the characters or be interested in them or the story.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. You comment made me ponder. I don't need a 'this is me' character to get into a story, but if I care about the show, I'll end up with a favorite character (male or female, but more likely to be a girl) and if there is no women, it's less and less likely that I'll fall in love with the story.

Saiyuki's an odd duck in that respect.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Aye, I don't need an identification at all myself, though when there is one, it is a nice bonus. Well, sometimes. Even then they aren't always my favorites. Off the top of my head, the only exception to that is Sunbi in Dokebi Bride. Honestly, though, the "identification" thing is something I've only seen used to explain slash, making me think of justification.

I realized today that I've been cursed regarding fictional characters since I was 12. (And will likely post on this shortly.) The first 2 fictional characters I ever seriously fell for(though not in the crushing way...that started a bit later) were Jubilee in the X-Men comics, and Wren Ohmsford in Terry Brooks's Shannara series. Wren is barely an afterthought for Brooks, despite being the best character he ever created. Marvel doesn't care about about Jubilee, and fans love to hate her for not being Kitty Pryde.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Yeah... identification may have been the wrong word to use. What I mean is, while my favorite character may be male or female, if there aren't any females around, like, at all, I'm much, much less likely to get attached to the series.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I've always done much better with a female character to latch on to, from my earliest fictional experiences, but it's not until the last 6 months or so that I've pretty much lost tolerance for things if there's no girl around in an important role, no matter what that role is. I think the last thing to get by that was Scott Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora, but even it had some awesome female characters in bit roles, but mostly got by on awesome wit and approach.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

I'm the opposite; when I was younger, I would not read a book if there wasn't at least a girl in a strong secondary role. As I've gotten older, that has loosened slightly, but in all honesty, not that much.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I think there's just barely enough of an age difference between us that that, while I never really had the problem of finding things with female characters in them, it was sometimes easier to find things without that addressed the rest of my fictional needs. As I said earlier this week at my LJ, I lucked out in the my first fantasy(and really, first non-children's) book featured a strong female character...and them I read the rest of the series and learned that she was secondary to stupid farmboys. And not the kind who go off and become The Dread Pirate Roberts. I'd say they're closer to the Eragon variety, but, well...honestly, that would be mean to them. They don't deserve that.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

*nods*

I was really lucky. I started reading just as all the writers who hadn't had teenaged girl heroines grew up and say, 'we need teenaged girl heroines.'

I am truly blessed.