#brydeswhale

I wholeheartedly endorse shipping Sansa with Gendry or Ned Dayne solely to provoke Arya fans. Lol

In a last ditch effort to explain himself and his entire line from being wiped off the face of the earth, he tries to talk about his little prophecy.

“Yeah, yeah, the return of the Long Night,” Torrhen Stark yawns. “We’ve all seen it. Shut the fuck up.”

Interesting observation.  It’s like you watched the show!

Someone was talking to me, last night in fact, that they believe there’s a reason many fans don’t like Scott.  They said that many parts of the fandom resent that the show, in its lead, rejected “their preferred narrative of worshiping inherited power and/or power attained through violence.”  I can’t really argue with it.  I tend to focus on the racial aspect of fandom dislike, yet I think that they’re interrelated.  It’s not just that Scott rejects the possibility of succeeding through lethal violence, it’s that he rejects it when doing so is not offered to white characters.

There are white male characters in the show who not only possess the capacity for lethal violence, they employ it as often as they can, yet it’s never shown as a victory.  Peter murders ten people, even criminals in police custody, even innocent people, even allies, even family members, and it’s never portrayed as triumphant.  Even his executions of Jennifer and the Mute are portrayed as signs of incipient madness and bloody horror.  Derek fails miserably at trying to kill people other than his own family member which brings him nothing put pain, and loses his replacement pack in the process.  Matt is more successful, but his motivations are shown as rather pathetic deficiencies in his personality.   Gerard keeps getting screwed by his own strategies.  Stiles is almost destroyed by the lethal violence he grasps for in desperation.  

To these parts of the audience, that’s not how it’s supposed to be.   Think about other examples of supernatural shows on television: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, the Originals, etc.  Violence -- especially death in judgement -- is the prerogative of protagonists.  In fact, one of the ways they mark the protagonist in these shows is the casualness of how they approach lethal violence.  How many times did Buffy casually kill vampire extras like an afterthought? Don’t get me wrong, I love BTVS, but Buffy’s execution of vampires is ultimately reduced to something banal, like brushing her teeth.

Connected to this is a number of tropes that they love, especially that of aristocratic  or superior white men -- deprived of their rightful place or recognition in the world -- conquering those who oppress them and punishing them, even killing them, and thus they reassert justice in the world.  It’s literally written into the genetics of fiction that the hero kills the villain.

Yet, the audience has trouble remembering that the biggest victim -- though not the only victim -- of Season 1 is Scott McCall.  He had a life -- not a great one, but not a bad one either -- he had hopes and dreams.  He didn’t want to sit on the sidelines anymore, he wanted to play first line and he worked for it.  His father was neglectful, but he had a great mom and a fantastic best friend.  

When Peter chooses him to become his murder assistant, it all goes downhill from there.  He lies to his mother.  He stalks Stiles in the locker room  and disappoints him repeatedly due to his lycanthropy.  It threatens his relationship with Allison.   Derek manipulates him and uses him to hunt and kill the alpha.  Peter violates him and threatens his loved ones.  The Argent parents’ whole purpose in life is to kill him.   This injustice can’t be solved through lethal violence; this injustice is caused by lethal violence.  

And yet, the audience gets confused when he tells Deucalion “I’m not like you. I don’t have to kill people.”   It just doesn’t occur to them (the villains or parts of the fandom) that Scott simply doesn’t want to be forced to do to others what was done to him.  People complain that he’s a hypocrite because he makes first line due to his werewolf abilities while disliking being a werewolf, as if he’s supposed to stop playing and focus on being the Hale Family’s newest servant in gratitude.   Yeah, he gets power, but the cost is constantly too high, such as when Stiles compliments Erica’s appearance in Season 2, and Scott says “How good do you think she's gonna look with a wolfsbane bullet in her head?”  Scott’s breaking the established script the audience expected, where he learns to relish his power over others.   When Derek manipulates Scott into believing that he has to kill the alpha to be human again, Scott’s determination to do it is not presented as Scott’s decision to serve justice but as Scott’s desperation to make the nightmare end.  

Yet it doesn’t end, does it?  Do we ever see Scott have a season enjoying first line at all?  Do you think he loved being a werewolf when he held Allison’s dead body in his arms or watched Kira join the Skin-walkers?  When he used his supernatural hearing to listen to his mother cry or Dr. Geyer struggle to save her life?  When he watched Derek fall from the ledge in the mall and think it was his fault?  He rejected the capacity to do lethal violence to others as a way of reasserting justice in the world because he never saw the use of violence successfully restore anything.   Peter’s defeat in Season 1 and 4 ended a nightmare -- it didn’t erase the monumental changes to his and his friend’s lives, the horror they lived through.  Matt died miserably; Gerard died miserably; Jennifer died miserably; Derek gathered more pain into himself.  No one lived happily ever after because they could kill the people who hurt them -- they just continued the cycle.  

Scott’s development as a protagonist -- and, not coincidentally, his subversiveness as a character in an action-adventure show -- hinges on his increasing capability to employ lethal violence as a corrective, while constantly repudiating it as anything but an unfortunate and painful necessity.  Do you notice that he never talks about or takes pride in the defeat of his enemies?  Not Peter, not Derek, not Gerard, not Jennifer, not the Nogitsune, not Kate or Theo or The Beast or Douglas or the Anuk Ite.  He defeats them and then he’s done.  There’s no celebration of the defeat of the enemies, like Ewoks dancing while burning stormtrooper helmets at the end of Return of the Jedi.  He employs violence when he has to, he regrets the necessity, but he doesn’t dwell on what they did to him. Instead, he has hope for Peter and Deucalion and Theo.   

A Bryde's whale swims near the surface of the Indian Ocean near Sri Lanka.

I never knew anyone else thought Seth was a jerk

Oh maaaaaaan, you’ve never seen me rant about how I’m 100% sure that Davis was an OC fan and Seth was his favorite character and he based TW’s characterizations and dynamics on The OC’s as much as he did BTVS?

Gaiman is awful.