hello, it is me, the problematic 2000

Emily Connor:

She's the only human woman in MST3K who isn't a villain, and practically every other post I see about her talks about how she's obnoxious and annoying and the worst part of the show. Even the writers hate her; she was only in 4 episodes and debuted her during the 2020 Turkey Day livestream.

She's funny, she's incredibly smart, she'd been working with MST3K for years before she officially joined the show, and she deserved more than the 4 episodes the writers gave her. She's also the host that gets along the best with the bots, imo.

Lapis Lazuli:

The way people talk about her you'd think she killed their dog. She gets called emotionally abusive for being kind of rude and acting like a traumatized person.

Angelique:

She's not outright hated by the fandom, but she does get sidelined and reduced to the cheerleader of yaoi "girl boss" character type. The fact that she's a Black woman and the other main characters are white men doesn't really help.

She's a very interesting character being a brilliant scientist who starts out working with Drs. Thomas and Samantha Morose to genuinely help people. She really admired Samantha and the two of them had a mother daughter relationship. Unfortunately, Thomas didn't feel the same way about her. And then after Samantha falls ill and dies, he blames it on her and her project not working. She then has to watch as Thomas goes completely mad and starts experimenting on and killing her fellow scientists. He even purposely traps her to be eaten by spiders and she loses an arm due to this. Thankfully the protagonist of the game, Howard, helps free her and she's able to create a prosthetic arm for herself with slime from the project she was working on. And in pretty much all the endings of the game, she escapes and starts her own research lab. Another detaiI I find interesting about her is how she implies she wasn't comfortable with some of the morally dubious things Samantha guided her to do despite their close relationship, and after she escapes, she makes sure that her work in her own lab won't be that unethical. Just the concept of disagreeing with somebody you're close to and wanting to do things better than how they did. I've probably yapped too much by now, so I'll just end with saying that I think her character and her past have great potential for deeper exploration, but sadly the fandom doesn't seem to think the same.

Claudia:

She's a young black woman who is constantly ignored over the men in the show and reduced to nothing more than tragic pieces of the mens' life story by many of the fans and sometimes even the showrunners.

Not only is she just the best girl around but she's so incredibly complex---we as the audience still don't know the real and true her. I would die to get to know her but it's shocking a large part of the IWTV fandom isn't the same!

I can't speak to her treatment from book/movie fans but TV fans literally only talk about her in relation to being Louis and lestats "daughter". By the end of her life she's in her 40s and yet the fandom only treats her as their young daughter and she is defined by that instead of her actual character

due to claudia being a black woman who is directly opposed to everyone’s white male pookie (lestat) there has been a lot of misogyny thrown at her in the form of calling her a liar because the events of her personal diary (that was never supposed to be read by anyone) don’t align with lestat’s own account of events. she is seen as manipulative and selfish and someone who was trying to drive a wedge between louis and lestat, and her own classification as a victim of abuse in this family dynamic is undermined by her efforts to remove herself and find her own community. the abuse she faces by other male leads like louis and armand is minimized even if fans are able to see lestat’s abuse for what it is, even though armand staged a lynching for her, louis, and her companion madeleine and lied about it, alongside louis minimizing lestat and armand’s actions against her. the fandom is happy to take all the male characters at face value but as far as claudia is concerned everything she did was duplicitous and self-serving.

claudia deserved better from her “family” and it breaks my heart that her life in the grand scheme of things was cut so short just as she was finding her happiness. she is incredibly funny and the love she finds with madeleine is so beautiful. the struggle of being a woman in a body that is at odds with you and who you really are and what you want to be able to do in the world is very compelling and easy to empathize with from so many different avenues whether it’s by race, disability, and/or gender/sexuality. she is such an incredible character that should be seen as more than just an obstacle and loustat’s dead daughter. her and madeleine are the best lesbian vampires and everyone should be tuning into the yuri.

She's either a horrible and manipulative girl who lies in her own personal diaries for some reason about the abuse she faced from her white father or she's an idiot who got what was coming to her when she was lynched or just a tool to be used to further the relationship between two men. Her story is quite literally never her own, her diaries shared again and again without her consent and picked apart by both the characters in universe and fans.