hello, it is me, the problematic 2000

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.

She's literally so interesting and so well acted by both of the actresses who play her. She has such depth and her life was cut short due to racism, misogyny, and ableism. She deserves more than to be reduced to nothing but a liar or a tragic figure to be used to further the relationship between two men.

even people claim to like her will call her stupid for her actions in season two, even though she quite literally spells out her reasons for being so desperate to join the coven. In season one she's shown trying again and again to turn a person and make herself a companion. In season two she tells Louis (her father/brother who she loves but at this point he had gotten physically violent with her when she tried to convince him to kill their maker Lestat once and for all) that the only vampires she's known are him, their white maker (who beat Louis half to death, threatened Claudia by mentioning her rapist, got violent with her, and tried to kill her), the aforementioned rapist, and her white father's white side piece who he was planning to replace her with. She wants to belong somewhere with people like her, yeah she endures humiliation at first but considering what she'd been through at this point, it makes sense that she can justify it for a while to be a necessary evil. It's also important to note that she doesn't have all the information! Louis does not tell her that Armand threatened to kill him the night she was inducted into the coven. There was no way she could have predicted Lestat coming back or Armand and the coven's plan to lynch them. Why does a woman, and especially a Black woman, have to be completely objective and rational and borderline clairvoyant all the time to be deserving of sympathy?

A major theme of s1/2 (I'm not watching s3 lol) is that nothing is really ever about Claudia. Even when Louis says he's doing something for her, it's not really about her. Even her death wasn't about her, it was about Louis and Armand and the coven's relations with each other. And yet the fandom picks up on this, but does not critically examine it. So in fandom…..nothing is about her. It's about Lestat, or Louis, or occasionally Armand, or Loustat's relationship. Nobody ever puts her first despite her being one of the most interesting characters. It hurts my heart!!! Another big part of the show is how infantilized she is and how much she hated that. She HATED being seen as a little girl. When she dies, she is in her 40s or 50s. And yet…you guessed it… fandom sees this and is like "aw, Loustat's little daughter" or "Louis's little sister" when she actively fought against being treated like a little girl and has an (amazingly well acted, kudos to Bailey Bass) breakdown in s1 over the fact that her mind will age but her body will not. Justice for my fully grown mature adult woman!

Korra:

Fandom picked her apart, called her a b*tch, blamed her for every bad thing that happened TO HER in the plot, disliked that she's loud, disliked that she's strong, disliked that she's confident in her strength, disliked that she's not like their beloved boy Aang. It's been years and you still can't sneeze in this fandom without something starting to yell that Korra is the worst Avatar ever.

She is so so strong. She did her best. She faced down enemies and cataclysms like most Avatars before never did and she fought tooth and nail for both humans and spirits, almost dying in the process, multiple times. Her personal growth and the character arc of such is impressive and well done. She's ride or die for her friends and for strangers too. And the fact that she takes no crap and can punch someone's face in for it is a bonus, not a flaw.

She gets an insane amount of hate for not dealing with everything that happens to her "better", mainly for showing traits considered cool in male characters like being a hothead and choosing violence

My bisexual queen went through the horrors while saving her world four times and she does not deserve the hate she gets, give her a break

She made mistakes and experiences "negative" emotions. People acted like she was the devil incarnate. Meanwhile; those same people fawned over Zuko, who is not only notoriously hot-headed but also literally raided and burned whole villages. People also do not seem to hold the same contempt for Azula as they do for Korra, which I believe is in part due to racism/colorism.

She was trying her best and she had the whole world on her shoulders with very little help to hold it. also, put "korra back muscles" into the search engine of your choice and behold.

Martha Jones:

She was the first main Black companion on Doctor Who…I'll just talk about the fandom racism/misogyny itself and not the racism/misogyny in the show itself. She was subject to overt and subtle misogynoir from the fandom, especially since she came after white fan-favorite companion Rose Tyler. People disliked her for having a crush on the Doctor, which Rose also had, and was unfavorably compared to Rose. There's a lot more, but I don't want to write a whole essay.

She's a medical student, and incredibly smart and capable! In her stories, she's incredibly compassionate to those around her, and offers emotional as well as medical assistance. Also, she has incredible style!

Martha gets absolutely shafted by the fandom, most of whom cannot seem to forgive her for not being Rose Tyler. That she dares to leave the Doctor and live her own life is apparently an act more evil than any the Daleks could dream of. A lot of fans insist that Martha's race has nothing to do with why they dislike her. A lot of fans are fucking liars.

Martha is competent and intelligent and screams way less than usual for a companion so she is clearly excellent.

I think fandoms been very racist and misogynistic towards her, relagating her as some spineless woman always pining after the doctor instead of a badass MD who saved the day many times

Not only misogyny but racism too. Martha is an incredibly smart and brave character who doesn’t get half the credit that the Doctor’s other (WHITE) companions get. She gets dogged on by the fandom for a lot of reasons that are overlooked or forgiven when Rose Tyler does a lot of the same things.

She was the only RTD companion who wasn’t given superpowers in order to save the day. Girl saved the world with nothing but gumption and a good pair of walking boots.

I still see hate fics for her in the big year of 2026 please god she's not getting in the way of your ship she walked away from that bum ass alien 15 years ago

So many fans consider Martha a "rebound" companion for 10 and say that she only cares about impressing him or something. Completely ignoring the fact that she was charmed into coming with him! Just like everybody else who travels with the Doctor. She also canonically SAVED THE WORLD by giving the people something to believe in and got to leave on her own accord without something terrible happening to her. She's also shown to be incredibly smart and talented, quickly adapting to situations even if she might be freaked out at first. And after she leaves she gets to work with UNIT (and im pretty sure she also appears in the Torchwood spin-off series) and eventually she ends up with someone who understands what she's been through. Martha is SO MUCH MORE than just a rebound companion or a girl obsessed with the Doctor. Sheis (at the time of meeting her) being trained to be a full on doctor who has incredible will power and a clear desire to help others.

I was part of the crowd who hated her for "getting between" my ship and "replacing" Rose. I even avoided rewatching the season she was in when i rewatched most everything else. (Just to be clear i wasn't part of the fandom during this time and i didn't spread the hate). After seeing her on this blog i started thinking back and reflecting on my opinion of her and concluded that i was being super misogynistic and racist. I decided to rewatch her season and even just a few episodes in i could tell how amazing Martha is. She's everything you could want in a companion, she's smart, capable, compassionate, brave, she balances The Doctor's personality really well. In fact i found myself more annoyed with The Doctor for how shittily he treated Martha, and the writers for not handling the whole thing better. All this to say: Martha get behind me i will defend you with my life and the lives of everyone who has ever hated her

Thirteen:

Despite being a great incarnation of the character, somehow she is uniquely bad. Despite having many of the same traits as the 'male' Doctors, somehow it is worse when she does it. She's constantly held up to greater scrutiny and one cannot help but see that misogyny plays a huge role here

Dared to be an incarnation of The Doctor who was played by a woman and all the needs and geeks were as normal about that as you'd expect

‘Jodie Whittaker (actor) killed the show’ ‘the Thirteenth Doctor sucks and is bad and new who sucks after her!!’ Etc holy moly. So much bashing of the show because of her and not because the writers just sucked for a while (which honestly is the case for most of the show)

She's literally the exact same character the Doctor has always been- hypocritical self righteous bullshit and all. But for sooooommmmeeee reason it's charming and compelling and adds great depth to the character when it's David Tennant but it's shallow and poorly written and inconsistent when it's Jodie Whittaker

She won the poll for Doctor most likely to bite someone even though Eleven bit someone onscreen. She's great

This may have already been said but BBC literally had to apologise for 13 not knowing how to comfort Graham at the end of Can You Hear Me. Which is completely insane because when a male doctor gaslights his female companion that’s allowed but she’s not allowed to be even just awkward?