oh noes! someone is wrong on the internet!

[such_heights]

f_march_madness has started up again, and the preliminaries are filled with people who seem to fundamentally not understand how fandom works, and the errors in argument involved are really frustrating me.

So! In the prelims, ie when people vote for a character from each fandom to go forward into the main competition, there's a theme in some of the major fandoms where a minor or former character will end up being selected, which seems disingenuous when five minutes hanging out in the fandom on tumblr, LJ, AO3 etc will make it apparent that, say, Jo Harvelle is not the most popular character in Supernatural. Some people over at the comm say that the fact she wins is just posturing by people trying to make themselves feel better about their choices. Which demonstrates a total lack of understanding about what's going on when people vote for these things and it's aggravating.

From this year's post comes the ever so charming: 1. Vote for your FAVORITE character in each poll. Stop playing. This is an Internet Competition™, not your grand stand against the patriarchy.

Excuse you, FMM mods. Everything I do is a grand stand against the patriarchy! *Night Vale voice* Everything.

And then there's this comment (contains gifs, is nsfw, may make your head explode) which includes the line FMM is not about pretending we are all better social justice warriors than we are, it's about a Deathmatch of favorites.

And I'm so annoyed because that's not even what's happening. You're not polling each fandom for their favourite character on the show, you're polling all of fandom to pick characters from a bunch of fandoms that will include shows that they have never seen or actively dislike. And that's where the voting for minor characters comes from.

With mega fandoms like SPN, and particular in the days of tumblr, although not everyone voting is an actual SPN fan, most people probably have an opinion of some kind about the show and a sense of who the characters are, and particularly with massive fandoms I think it's quite common for people not in the fandom to get invested in underdogs and the characters that the people in the fandom are terrible towards - see Martha Jones' strong polling in Doctor Who or Sansa Stark for Game of Thrones. So for any given poll, I'd argue that a decent chunk of the people voting aren't even active in that fandom, but they think that this one woman seems pretty great via tumblr.

FMM isn't a vote of fandom favourites within each fandom, it's a vote of fandom favourites via fannish osmosis. I've never watched Arrow but I'm charmed by Felicity in the gifsets. I don't particularly care about BBC Sherlock so I'm unlikely to vote for the leads, but I've seen enough to believe that Molly Hooper is a perfect human being. I really liked Peggy in the half a dozen Mad Men episodes I watched. Etc, etc. Obviously pretty much all my favourite characters are women anyway because that's how I role, but even with people who aren't quite so primed that way the point holds.

And I absolutely think that there's a larger point to be made about how all of these fantastic female characters earn very enthusiastic and fun fan campaigns during this contest but that same enthusiasm isn't reflected in the fanworks that people make, consume and rec, but jfc FMM commenters seem to be very obtuse this year. Don't make me come over there!

Comments

[thingswithwings]

Yes, this, exactly. I vote for Jo Harvelle because I have seen a very large number of Supernatural episodes and I actively hate Dean and Sam and Castiel etc. I spite-vote for Jo (b/c I hate the others) AND I legit-vote for Jo (b/c she's one of the few characters I actually liked on that show). I think you're right about "I haven't seen GoT, but Sansa Stark seems cool in gifsets!" - that's my GoT voting strategy - and then there's also the factor of "I hate this show, so naturally my favourite character is the underdog who goes against the main characters/does things differently/doesn't get enough screentime." Same thing, I think, if you've fallen out of love with a show you used to like.

Also I think "who on this show do you want to write porn about" and "who on this show is the best character" are two completely different questions, so it's ridiculous to say "there's more fanfiction about X therefore X is the best character." That's . . . those two things aren't even vaguely related!

For me, the larger question also comes down to: if a bunch of people want to spend one month talking about and posting gifsets for and getting excited about women characters and characters of colour and underdog characters in general, why do we have to examine the motives for that? Can't we just be pleased? If you want JohnLock go hang out on tumblr, there's no shortage. Maybe this is one time when a lot of people express their love for those characters when they otherwise wouldn't, because in other places in fandom it's not popular to do so and no one cares about your Jo Harvelle feelings. So can we conceptualize it as a haven for feelings that we don't get to express otherwise, rather than as a bunch of people pretending to have feelings they don't have?

And like . . . who is giving me credit for being anti-patriarchy by voting Skyler White or whoever? No one's going through the votes and noting ppl's names in order to say, "oh, wow, twings is really good at supporting women characters! What a good person!" You don't get a cookie for it, so what's the motivation if it's not love/spite/other feelings?

SORRY I vomited feelings in your comments but I was so angry about this <3 thank you for posting you are lovely

PS your use of Night Vale voice was flawless