aiffe:

I’ve read a lot of great essays about how fandom is female-majority and creates a female gaze and a safe space for women and etc. But spend five minutes in fandom and you’ll have an unsettling question.

Why does a female-majority, feminist culture hate female characters so much?

It’s not a question of if it happens. You know it does. You can go into any fandom and see it. Some fandoms are worse than others, but it’s always there. Scroll down the Tumblr tag for any show, movie, book, comic, whatever, and you’ll see nothing but love for the men, and a lot of unjustified hate for the women, maybe with a few defenders here and there insisting on their love for the women in the face of all that hate.

To be clear, we’re not talking about female villains. Male villains get just as much hate. It’s fine if you hate Bellatrix Lestrange or Dolores Umbridge, you’re supposed to. (I personally stan for Bella, but I realize that wasn’t the authorial intent.) This is about people hating Hermione, Ginny and Luna, but loving Harry, Ron and Neville. This is about how ambiguous male antiheroes, like Snape, Zuko, or pretty much any male vampire protagonist can get away with walking that fine line between good and evil and not only remain sympathetic, but be even more beloved for how ~tortured~ he is, but when a female character is morally gray that bitch has to die.

So you can’t tell me it’s okay that you hate Sansa because you also hate Joffrey and he’s a dude. They’re not comparable. It isn’t even comparable if you pick a female antihero. Let’s do this apples to apples, here.

We all know that fandom does this. We all know that it’s fucked up and symptomatic of internalized sexism. What’s really fucking weird about it, though, is that the women doing this hating often aren’t ignorant. These are feminists. These are women who can go on meta-analyses of the writing. Some will hide behind pseudo-feminist reasons for their hate—oh, it’s the writing, we just aren’t given strong female characters! (I saw this used for the women of AtLA: Katara, Toph, Azula, et al. This was about when I just backed away slowly because I know a lost cause when I see it.) I’ve seen women who denied being sexist, but couldn’t name a single female character they liked. And it’s always that the female characters aren’t good enough, even when they obviously have a double standard, and they’re measuring women on an impossible scale full of contradictions and no-win binds, while the men are just embraced and loved pretty much for existing.

The reaction nearly every time one of these women is called out is not to say, “Huh, you may have a point, I should examine the way I judge and process women’s actions more closely,” but an insistence of their feminism, followed by a more detailed description of why that particular woman is terrible and she hates her, as if the whole point were not that fandom is already oversaturated with that kind of hate, and as if the person doing the calling out were not already 110% done with that bullshit.

Particularly telling is that male-dominated corners of fandom do not have this problem. They fetishize, they objectify, they ignore. They don’t hate like this.

We know it happens. What I want to know is WHY.

Theories follow below the cut.

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I like pretty much all of this, except for the Korra bit. I love Korra as a character, I really do. But I really hate how her development as a character and as the avatar was handled in the series.

Yes, Aang did clear most of his chakra’s in 20 minutes and almost attained avatar state right then and there. But he didn’t. He wasn’t able to. It wasn’t until the very finale, and after much spiritual and personal growth (and a little bit of luck) that he was able to achieve full control the avatar state. He was also a very spiritual person in general and had years of experience with spirituality in general from the Air Nomads. He was also at the very least able to enter the spirit world and call on previous incarnations of himself for advice at will by the end of the series.

Korra, however, was barely able to meditate properly by the time the season ended. She couldn’t even properly call out to Aang, her previous incarnation, until she was contemplating suicide. You really can’t compare spiritual ability between Aang and Korra at all because they are at completely different levels. 

And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, Korra gets full control of the avatar state AND the ability to spirit bend? No matter how many physical trials she’s been through in the show (and yes, she does go through a lot, physically), there was no way she had grown enough (spiritually or as a person) to warrant getting super charged all in one go. 

Korra, through all of the episodes, never really grows substantially at all. Her power and position as the avatar is called into question a few times, but then the issue is dropped completely and left forgotten, with Korra more or less just shrugging it off because hey, she’s the avatar, she’s powerful and can punch through whatever problems she has, right? Now, this certainly doesn’t make her a bad character, but it certainly doesn’t make her an avatar who is mature, responsible, or ready enough to handle the power that comes with full control over the avatar state or the ability to spirit bend people at will.

Korra at the ending of the first season is nearly exactly the same as the Korra from the beginning of the season, with a few minor differences. Sure, she might be a little more humbled in general, but she still lacks understanding of her position of power in the world and of the proper spiritual growth and insight needed to be a balanced, well rounded, fully realized avatar. 

So, yeah. I still really love Korra as a character. I love her her in all her fierce, flawed, fiery glory. But there is a difference between being flawed and then learning and growing as a person from those flaws (and making for interesting and realistic character development!), and being a flawed person who never grows or learns from those flaws and keeps making the same mistakes over and over again.

tl;dr Korra is a good example of a really good character who just was not written well enough. I would feel the exact same way about her development if she were a dude, and even still I still really like her as a character and yeah well there u go I guess.