recentering

[beccaelizabeth]

I understand wanting your OTP to be the center of the universe. And I know I tend to read about white men. But it still bothers me, a lot, when rewrites and AUs and fanfic in general shoves women and black men out of the story, and gives all their work to white men.

Fury started the Avengers Initiative and is the center of the SHIELD universe. Yes, the TV series has messed with that, that pisses me off too, but that's no reason to follow it down. Fury and Natasha brought the team together, with a little help from Coulson, not the other way around.

Pepper and Rhodey are Tony's support, the most important people in his life (plus Happy, who gets vanished pretty much always). New friends are fun and all, but day to day life for *decades* has been Tony, Pepper, Rhodey. That doesn't just go away when he has new shiny (white male) toys to play with.

If the only way you can get to your OTP is to vanish more important people, your thesis is flawed.

I like to think of fanfic as a way of fixing the invisibility usually present in the media, but there are some ways we manage to be worse. Which is purely embarrassing, given the already low standards of the original.


There's also a lot of cases of humans don't work like that. Like, matchmakers. If, upon turning the story around so you're seeing it from the matchmaker characters eyes, they have no purpose, goal or thought other than getting two white guys they may only vaguely know to go and be happily ever after together, the whole story has a huge great problem, because no one thinks like that. It's an extra large problem if the matchmaker is from categories other than white men (actually can you think of any that are white men? because it's eluding me right now.) Why does this character exist the first few decades of their life? What is their continued reason for being after the OTP kiss? If you can't tell from the story, problem!

I do sympathise with the need to give the OTP a new push, especially with characters who have known each other in canon for a really long time without noticeably dating. There's just ways and ways of doing it.



I get really cranky, and yet I know I'm not writing awesome women and people of colour, or indeed reading pairings featuring them. That makes me part of the problem. Boo.


But still, problem.

Comments

[chordatesrock]

This.

[violetemerald]

I always find that my favorite matchmaker characters in fanfics generally have complex lives of their own too in addition to being matchmakers. ;) It's true, you need the character who's acting like a "shipper" to not be only a shipper or else it loses all sense of plausibility.