Tag: good shit

feynites:

Winning the villain over to your side is a power fantasy.

Like, a really big one, too.

Social emphasis has it that men should value strength,
aggression, and violence, and women should value kindness, empathy, and
community. But really, anyone who has
learned to prefer social success to might/aggression is going to favour a
strategy where you can make your enemies into allies of some kind, over one
where you just kill them. As a display of dominance, killing is overly
simplistic. And it’s also hard to ignore the reality that luck usually has more
to do with most fights than actual strength.

So, many people vastly prefer stories where the villains don’t
die, but instead, get won over by the hero. It’s also a much more prevalent
power fantasy among women than it is among men, because women are often taught
that violence on our parts is inherently distasteful and ignoble. If you can’t defeat your enemies by putting a
bullet in their heads, then what could
be more satisfying than convincing that enemy to come and fight other people on
your behalf instead?

This is a major component to why villains end up as popular
shipping material. I honestly don’t think it’s the ‘bad boy’ impulse, or some
branch of misogyny, or at least, not in a majority of cases. It’s a total and
sincere power fantasy. Someone going ‘all I care about is myself and all I want
to do is DESTROY THE WORLD MWAHAHAHA’ meeting you and then being like ‘oh no
wait I also want to please you and spend time with you and I want that so much
that I will now give up those other things’ implies an intoxicating level of
charisma.

Of course, like most power fantasies, it pays to tread
carefully with it. Because real life rarely accommodates such things, and as
with some muscle-bound hero easily lifting a house over his head, being able to
take a wholly selfish being and convert them into a devoted companion is… unlikely to happen outside of fiction.
For a lot of reasons.

However, I bring it up because I am C O N S T A N T L Y
seeing the compulsion to ship characters with villains misattributed to A)
agreeing with the villains, B) some form of self-hatred, C) a noble impulse
towards compassion and understanding, or D) sheer stupidity, and really… it’s
just another power fantasy. Wonder Woman punches a tank. Tony Stark buys an
entire island. Storm calls down a lightning strike. Batman outwits all his clever foes. And some seemingly random,
ordinary human woman convinces Lex Luthor to chill out and stop trying to kill
Superman. It’s all power, displayed
in fantastical proportions.

(Which isn’t to say that you have to like it or think that
every such relationship is good and healthy, gods no, but once you realize that
everyone’s just pretending to be the Superman of relationships, it’s easier to just go ‘oh that’s what you’re after’ and… y’know… fret less.)

forthegothicheroine:

doctor-q:

oliviajewels:

marzipanandminutiae:

forthegothicheroine:

I feel torn about tumblr’s love of southern gothic.  There’s a lot of cool stuff in that genre to be admired, but I feel like sometimes those posts (especially when made by people who don’t live in the south- and hey, neither do I) come across as “aren’t poor people spooooky?”

As a born-and-raised southerner, I was surprised to discover this literary convention because a lot of modern southern gothic fantasy written by southerners focuses on old-money families who turn out to be [witches/werewolves/vampires/etc]. I didn’t encounter the “scary redneck mountain people” variant in non-fantastical media until later, and it baffles me because the modern southern elite are TERRIFYING.

Endlessly smiling hypocritical senators in tacky palatial houses with wives who espouse “traditional values” while being poisonously sweet and cutthroat? Those make much more frightening antagonists for gothic heroes/heroines to fight. If you live in the south you will probably never meet backwoods demon sibling-spouses but you’ve definitely seen the void staring out of a “Live, Laugh, Love” picture frame.

ACCURATE

Tumblr inherently misunderstands the function of Southern Gothic literature and has appropriated it for its pervasive almost supernatural poetic style. They don’t understand its themes, why it was written, or how to properly write it. Actual Southern Gothic literature is not as melodramatic as one might think and it isn’t about aesthetic style points. It’s style is actually scathingly sarcastic in a nearly caustic way, and it’s meant to amplify structural violence by turning upstanding members of society into villains. It does make the poor grotesque at time, but in the same novel also redeems them by showing how societal ills have painted an unfair picture.

Southern Gothic is a genre for the poor, the colored, the queer; it’s not about signs that say “Hell is here” or forcing tired stereotypes that fundamentally misunderstand poverty, racism, and homo-/transphobia onto the South in a sweeping sensationalist way. Appropriated Gothic Americana aesthetic takes the voice from Southern authors who want to talk about real systemic wrongs and evils in a way that provides accurate social commentary.

That’s not to say that the neo-gothic Americana style that Tumblr has no merit; it’s just difficult as a southern writer to watch people play around with serious topics for the sake of dramatic aesthetics and not realize that they’re being harmful and sort of mocking a tradition that they haven’t bothered to really study. 

30k comments in and somebody finally understood what I was getting at.