#female fandom
what is WITH the last two years with all these major franchises and tv shows fucking up so badly in their last films/last seasons
endgame, rise of skywalker, game of thrones, supernatural……..like the endings just fuck up the whole journeys/plots/characterizations it’s ASTOUNDING
Its the pressing need to write absolutely unpredictable plottwists, which forces them to write nonsensical shit bc god forbid some dude on reddit accidentally called the ending, and also the same old racism/homophobia/misogyny as always.
Its also a curious level of denial about who your core fanbase is. All of these wanted their Target audience to be someone else than who their most loyal fans were.
The typical comic fans are kids and teens, marvel wants to make blockbusters for adults. Star wars fans are hyperfocused sci fi nerds AND a lot of minorities and disney wanted to make Big numbers in china and also generally wanted to appeal to a larger audience instead of a loyal, smaller group. The initial got fans were fans of the books, history nerds and lotr stans, d and d wanted to write their own story and shifted the original Story around to basically make a sexed up talent show, you tune in every week to see who makes it to the next round. And now the most dedicated, loyal and borderline obsessive spn fans are of course young women, many of them queer. Same as with sherlock, the creators HATED this, bc they wanted their show to be for men. They begrudgingly played into the fanservice for the ratings, but deep down they hated themselves for it and let us know IN CANON how much they disliked their own fans.
All of these were very good at convincing their fanbase some kind of reward was waiting for them if only theyd stick around and none of them deliviered. But hey, at least many people were watching.
THIS.
It’s actually very obvious that 99% of mainstream media creators get visibly embarrassed by a female majority fanbase. The condecension is thinly-veiled even when they’re in the middle of asking for attention/money from a demographic they obviously despise.
It’s a mindset that says ‘women have bad artistic taste’ and concludes that ‘if women like a piece of artistic creation that means there’s something wrong unless it’s specifically designed for women, in which case it is already categorically inferior and peripheral’. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with conscious authorial decisions (although many of them are intentionally misogynistic in this respect), because it’s a mindset that runs deep and has a much longer history than capitalism - it is a reflection of men’s monopoly on the right to build and add to the semiotics of artistic expression. For centuries. Across many cultures.
It is harsh and cynical; once you start to notice that, it becomes practically impossible to whole-heartedly embrace any fandom of mainstream media at all. That’s why it’s not the fans’ fault for not seeing that, no matter how obvious it seems to outsiders - sometimes in some areas women are still so invalid that praise and love from them are detested and promptly avoided, even at the cost of bringing down the whole story.
This isn’t something we’d get rid of any time soon; people will get new mainstream media obsessions and get hurt when its creators do something silly to avoid women’s approval.
But in the long run we must create our own stories. If you feel like you don’t get what you want, if you feel like your perspective is being constantly invalidated, then draw, write, and support artists who are doing the same.
STOP the infighting and purity policing because we can’t afford to do that. We are in this together.
Our voices remain marginal till this very day, and our priority really shouldn’t be taking down someone who simply likes a differen ship, a problematic trope, or a character you hate. Tolerance is hard but try your best if you really want to see a win instead of these endless sequence of predictable disappointments.
This isn’t even about spn just about basically any mainstream fandom
Just to add to this interesting discussion; the privileging of male perspectives in story, in film and television, is definitely evident from data, in terms of roles for women in front of and behind the camera:
https://seejane.org/wp-content/uploads/key-findings-gender-disparity-family-films-2013.pdf
And it’s true, sometimes female fanbases are actively disliked and discouraged:
https://io9.gizmodo.com/paul-dini-superhero-cartoon-execs-dont-want-largely-f-1483758317
I don’t think we can analyse all these texts as suffering from exactly thesame failings in terms of their ending, however.
Game of Thrones may have tried to surprisefans, but SupernaturalandRise of Skywalker tried to please certain segments of the fan audience (at the expense of others). A Reylo ending for Rise of Skywalker and a Just-the-Brothers ending for Supernatural were fanservice. And it was that, cartoonish idea of, fanservice which impacted narrative and character growth.
Avengers: Endgame - the privileging of the heteronormative family remains a given in products this huge. The ending wasn’t “leftfield” to evade fans who had guessed ahead. The ending was, predictably, normative. Women are seen as a “reward” for male heroism; Peggy becomes Cap’s reward. Women who are not family-normative are seen as expendable; hence Nat’s sacrifice for Barton (because Barton had a heteronormative family). Elements capable of “queer readings” (the team as “found family”, the close relationship between Cap and Bucky) got shut down by a heteronormative ending - dull and regressive, yes, but not leftfield.
In fact, it’s not the narrative trying to “surprise” fans which unites the endings of Game of Thrones,Rise of Skywalker,Avengers:EndgameandSupernatural; it’s the unimaginative straightjacket of (white) heteronormative patriarchy. Disruptive elements allowed space in the middle of the story are given normative endings.
Rey, is the hero of the new Disney Star Wars trilogy, and hey, that’s cool, a woman in the Luke role. But, she’s written by men (and the virgin/ whore dichotomy is, apparently, still going strong with them) and so she is girlish and un-sexual (virgin category) and her story evolves to revolve around a troubled white man (Kylo Ren). Rey’s “purity” saves petulant Alt-right manchild Kylo, changing him back into “nice” Ben. It’s Beauty and the Beast, in space.
Wonderful female characters who were allowed to breathe and evolve over the course of Game of Thrones get put back in their boxes at the end. Cersei becomes just the bitch her “nice” brother couldn’t escape from. Dany becomes just the power-mad bitch her “nice” lover Jon Snow had to murder. And the final scene is Brann’s council (all dudes except Brienne) discussing the need to rebuild the city’s brothels as a top priority. Proper patriarchy is restored…
Supernatural, well, what even was that fuckery. But there are no women, no POC, and no queer folk visible in that final Heaven, only white men-folk. All the interesting elements allowed to breath in the middle of the story were bleached out at the end; blood family was reinscribed as more important than found family; Sam got some blurry heterosexuality; Dean and Cas were not allowed to reunite, in case queerness “tainted” the final bow on the corporate product.
Greater diversity in writers rooms, directors’ chairs, producer roles and, crucially, at senior corporate levels in the film and television business is so, desperately, desperately, needed, to lift the curse of the Boring Dudebro Ending.
