allsome

like one of the biggest examples i see this with is fathers in warrior cats. and to be abundantly clear. i think fathers are written horribly in warrior cats. we HARDLY ever see them interact meaningfully with their kits and usually when they do it's through a very heteronormative sort of "strong protector dad and soft worrying wife" lens (think ferncloud and dustpelt 99% of the time). but i think when we don't see fathers interact with their kits much, many people's assumption is that they are bad fathers (e.g. graystripe with the B squad). and i suppose my problem with this is that it's such a bad way to approach. well. media? like ok to be clear and to get it out of the way, yes, you are 100% absolutely allowed to think graystripe is a bad father. if you want to look at the books and say "well, we don't have very many scenes of graystripe interacting meaningfully with his kits, so i see him as an absent and negligent father" then that is your god given right. i think my problem is the people who seem to take this as canon. when in reality, there's just so much of thunderclan background characters' lives we don't see. graystripe Could be interacting with his in the background, but it's not relevant to any of the stories that the authors want to tell, so it's not really shown. IN ADDITION TO the books are written in a heteronormative lens that probably values a man's interaction with his children lower than a woman's and so are written out less.