#cottageracoonfloat

6. What's a relationship in media (romantic, platonic, familiar) that especially means a lot to you?

Since I'm allo, I do enjoy the romantic relationships a lot but honestly, all those relationships are important and fascinating to me. Like, there's so much potential in all of those. What I do NOT like is when a romantic relationship is portrayed in such a way that suddenly all other relationships these characters have with others become meaningless. I'm not one for super dramatic Romeo & Juliet types of romance in general.

Not sure if that really answers your question but ... that's what I have to say about that XD

9. What is a character you think was overlooked or given a poor ending by the creative team? How would you have changed their story?

Weirdly, one of the first characters that came to mind was Katherine Beckett in Castle even though she was neither overlooked nor given a poor ending. But after the producing team of the first seasons left, I was just very unhappy with how the new team wrote her, especially how she suddenly no longer trusted Castle and no longer involved him even though all the previous seasons had been about building that trust and realising that they're stronger together. So it just made absolutely no sense to me other than that they wanted to introduce some drama and obstacles but at the expense of this beloved character's characterisation.

10. Misogyny in fandom spaces is something that is a consistent topic of discussion. Care to weigh in?

My thoughts on this are complex because I believe it's a very complex topic with a lot of contributing factors that aren't easy to disentangle.

I do believe once you wear slash glasses you tend to approach new media you encounter with those on, looking for the next one, consciously or unconsciously. Just a case of "what you know is what you see."

I do think there's a tendency that's very worrying of shoving aside canonical female love interests and bashing them in favour of the "progressive" gay ship. Which I wholeheartedly condemn even while supporting everyone to ship what they like.

I do think there's a skewed focus on male characters from a mostly female identifying fandom when it comes to fanfic etc (because most fanfic writers are still women) that can come from attraction, from more male characters on offer, from the previously mentioned acquired habit, from internalised misogyny and body issues, from a spiral of femslash getting less attention so there's less "reward" in writing it, from a snowball effect of big ships with lots of contents reinforcing themselves, ...

But I very much do not support people telling other people in a hobby space what they should or should not ship for fun. It's good to discuss it. It's good for each and every one to regularly check their own bias. But at the end of the day, you cannot force someone to do something for fun. You can only encourage them.

And honestly, aggressively worded "name a female character you like. I dare you. You canNOT name a male character" posts are not helpful.

Right. This is more political than I usually get in fandom but ... yeah. Those are my two unhelpful cents.