A fly that's trapped

Veth Brenatto:

Treated as mom of fandom favourite male character (Caleb Widogast) without any kind of interiority or interests of her own. Also treated as a joke character with some transmisogynist overtones (she's played by a male actor (actual play, this is fairly standard) and people are very weird about it).

They hate to see an unconventionally attractive and eventually fat brown woman played by a man. Veth is routinely excluded from/minimized in fanworks (ex. art about "the girls" which includes every other main female character). She is rarely treated as a serious character in analysis or shipping. She is relegated to the role of mother for her closest friend despite being younger than him, and having a complex relationship with him which includes romantic feelings at least on her end.

Veth collects buttons despite getting bullied for it her whole childhood. She's power-hungry. She's torn between the life she wants and the one she thinks she should want. She's the dead mother trope. She's an alcoholic. She will flirt with anyone. She hates herself. She's codependent with a guy she met in jail. Everyone needs to rotate her in their minds now!!

Before it was revealed she was a mother, it was all super infantilizing - eeew she's just a little girl. Afterwards it became all "oh she's the team mom!" especially towards a character she has canonical feelings for. (bc he's a white boy they ship with other people so of course his closest relationship (with Veth) can't possibly have romantic undertones even when they are canonically stated). Also a whole lot of bullshit about calling her a shitty person and a shitty mother for continuing to travel with her adventuring party instead of going home to be a housewife.

She's badass af. Also she's hilarious. She's a master alchemist but doesn't believe there are other planets. She has a tragic backstory worthy of a thousand fics. She's an allegory for working mothers, and an allegory for weird girls, and an allegory for transness. She's short, fat, and sexy as hell. I love her.

she's one of the most complicated pcs they've ever had who is played with consistent biases and motivations who has the craziest fucking backstory reveal ever where [spoilers for the entire campaign!!!] after she's first introduced as a lovable 'little goblin girl' who the fandom had no problem shoving into the 'devious but ultimately well meaning girl who doesn't know better' archetype alongside her older, more world-weary 'father figure', it's slowly revealed that 1) she isn't a little girl at all and sees the 'older', 'sadder' man she's inseparable from not as a father but instead closer to a son 2) she's ridiculously horny all the time but also seemingly yearning for a boy from her past and a life lived in a different body 3) wait no she doesn't exactly see caleb as her son. i mean she does but its way more complicated and fucked than all that. she's using him as a stand in for both a son AND a husband, and he's using her a stand in for his own parents AND his former lovers 4) yeah so actually she was a fully grown halfling woman with a husband and son who got put into a body that isn't her own as a punishment after protecting both of them from goblins, which is why she's terrified of water (something previously played as a joke) AND why she hates goblins (something previously played as simple self-hatred). 5) once they turn her back into a halfling it's revealed that all the kleptomania and the weird voice and her general insanity actually had nothing to do with being a goblin and she was just like that even as a weird halfling child who presumably made mud soup and got bullied for being a freak. anyway as this character arc progressed the fandom started losing interest as soon as they couldn't portray her as disaster-daughter, and now that she's fat, grown, and a mother people fully do not care about her despite her dynamic with caleb remaining fucking crazy and fascinating til the very end. there are obvious parallels to being trans baked into the premise of her arc but people don't really have much to say about that. she's so far the only major pc that's an entirely different gender from the player and a lot of the praise people have is exclusively for the comedy of early goblin nott and not any of the more serious aspects of her arc later on. i would say she's by far the second most morally complicated member of the bunch (beat out only by her son-lover-brother-friend) but often she's reduced to either comedic relief or just 'mother' and so that aspect never really gets explored. i know there ARE veth fans out there i know but i just wish she was more widely appreciated in the same way as caleb is for her dramatic ass life and i wish people would focus more on their dynamic instead of just on the more romantic shippy caleb relationships. ALSO!! even while her goblin form was constantly described as off-putting and terrifying and disgusting people drew her almost exclusively as cutesy in a way im sure they wouldnt have done for a boy

man she's fucking awesome like idk what to say that i havent said above. she spends most of the story being physically GROSS she has big yellow teeth she eats like an animal she loves to kill people. then she gets back to her normal self of dark-skinned fat woman who's described as not particularly attractive and generally pretty weird. by which i mean she's hot as fuck. she never stops being outrageously horny all while she's got a full husband waiting for her back home. she justifies this to herself somewhat but it's clear this is a morally questionable action and she just dgaf lmfao. she's headstrong and completely insane and genuinely STRANGE like she is fucking weird!! in a way female characters dont tend to get to be. and of course her dynamic with caleb is something i could talk about for years and years. it's such a fun dissection of the 'sad father and feisty daughter' that doesn't ever contradict itself, just lets the audience (and other players!) make assumptions that later get disproved. a large part of her arc centers around choosing whether to settle down or not and she doesn't even end up settling down! arguably the one character who had the strongest foundation for going back to nurture a family by the end and she doesnt! or she does, but it's clear that everything she's gone through has given her a taste of something she isn't going to be able to live without, and it's simply not feasible for her to go back to her life of housewife anymore. she loves her husband but feels confined by her relationship with him and the story both of them with endless empathy. she CAN choose both by the end, it isn't family or career, it's both. she has love and adventure. she doesn't have to be there for her son 24/7. she literally gets the deadbeat father treatment where she's worried that she's gonna have to go back to raise her kid. she's literally a deadbeat mom. and the solution is not to become Just a mother but just to get like. a work-life balance. she gets to have both and she isn't a villain for wanting both. she's just a normal woman. who is completely insane for unrelated reasons. everyone talk more about veth brenatto

Catra:

God, where do I even begin? The double standards people in this fandom have towards Catra versus a character like Zuko for example is insane. People constantly are saying that Catra had less of a redemption arc than Zuko when 1.) Catra was with the Princess Alliance/on the Rebellion's side actively for more episodes than Zuko was with the Gaang and 2.) Catra risked more than Zuko did by turning coat imho. Catra thought she was fully going to die when she got Glimmer off of Horde Prime's ship, and she had good reason to believe that. Instead, she was tortured, had a chip implanted in her nervous system that caused Horde Prime to be essentially in her head and put her into his massive hive mind network of clones, and electrocuted her nervous system over and over to manipulate Adora. People treat Catra like she's this irredeemable monster who can never do enough to make up for the things she's done, but are totally forgiving of male characters in similar situations who have done MUCH worse things (even in this same fandom; people are way quicker to forgive Hordak than Catra). There's also a lot of lesbophobia involved in the Catra hate as well and racism, considering Catra is a visibly brown-coded lesbian. The ableism too is all over the place. Catra is obviously mentally unwell for most of the show until she begins the journey towards healing and is the victim of abuse so severe that most people in the audience of this show will never experience the likes of it (being kidnapped as a baby, raised as a child soldier, brainwashed, having your oxygen/movement restricted as punishment, verbal abuse, constant degradation, bullying from the other kids in your situation, being told over and over that you're only worth being kept around because your best friend likes you, being physically tortured as a form of punishment and manipulation, and that's only scratching the surface).