#fandom crit

colm fahey was NOT a good father and he did not have a healthy relationship with his son whatsoever. in fact it's literally stated that the primary cause of jesper's gambling addiction stems from his father because he instilled fear and shame within jepser just for being grisha. even in his childhood, aditi had to teach jesper to use his powers as a fabrikator in secret. a father who fears his son cannot have a healthy relationship with his child because no matter how much he hides it, that fear will always be apparent through his actions.

Broadcast TV was built around those pauses: big fall premieres, holiday breaks, sweeps weeks, midseason returns, May finales, summer reruns (god summer reruns where you discovered new shows you didn't even know existed and got invested in and got to start a new season in the fall). The rhythm of watching TV was never just episode-episode-episode until you collapsed. There were gaps. And those gaps mattered.

I think watching a TV series week by week is important. Not because binge watching is wrong or never fun (I love to couch rot with the best of them), but because weekly viewing gives a story time to become part of your actual life. You spend the week thinking about an episode. You talk about it with other fans. You post about it. You rewatch scenes over and over and over. You notice things (things that aren't even meant to be noticed). You build theories. You sit with character choices before the show tells you what they mean (and maybe you disagree with the showrunners and you call them out on those choices).

A hiatus gives an episode time to breathe. The hiatus is the oxygen for the creative fire. It gives the viewers time to rewatch, argue, gif, write fic (so much fic), build and rewire theories, notice parallels, change their minds, and actually sit with what happened before canon moves on.

Sure, a hiatus can be frustrating because it makes us wait, especially when it feels like the rhythm of the show keeps getting interrupted by less important things like basketball and election coverage and the Olympics. But waiting is also where delicious, delicious anticipation lives. It is where fandom turns a show from something we watched into something we are collectively thinking about, chewing on, clamoring for.

Binge culture can be fun because you gulp down the content you crave, but it often turns watching into consumption: finish the episode, finish the season, post the reaction, post the gif, post the coda, move on. Broadcast hiatuses interrupt that pace. They force you to slow down. They make room for anticipation. They let the fandom breathe.

Even some that are major Sakura fans act like it was some moral failing on her part for not dating either of them! And it always irks me because no woman owes a man her love, and no man can call dibs on a woman’s feelings.

Fanfic Writer: Here’s a story about a character dealing with the trauma of childhood sexual abuse.

Me: Ah yes, a goldmine for angst. Who’s the character? Selina Kyle or Holly Robinson, who were forced into prostitution at a young age while homeless and desperate? Stephanie Brown, who was groomed for molestation as a kid, barely escaped and then had a creepy relationship with an older man that resulted in a teenage pregnancy?

Writer: Actually, it’s Jason Todd.

Me: Oh. Huh. Jason has never been sexually abused in comics canon.

Writer: Yes, but we don’t know that he wasn’t. He was homeless and desperate as a kid! He could have been a prostitute!

Me: Well, that’s… just Selina and Holly’s backstories, but okay. What else you got?

Writer: I have a fic about a character learning to feel secure in a home and found family after an unstable, abusive, deprived childhood.

Me: Cool! That applies to all the aforementioned female characters and Cassandra Cain, who was a homeless vagrant for nine years after fleeing the absolute hell of her upbringing. It’s part of why I enjoy their arcs so much.

Writer: I also have one where a character is acting as the protector of the poor community they grew up in, with a special focus on looking out for kids in similar situations to them, wanting to be there for them in contrast to how the adults in their own life had failed them. They reflect on their past and stuff. You know, how they have hope for this community against all odds. Even if they might have been part of the systematic problems keeping these underprivileged people down earlier in their career, but now they want to atone for that.

Me: This is exactly why Selina became a vigilante instead of just a thief! She did some self-reflection and realised that having made her own fortune, she’d abandoned the lower classes to indulge herself like all the complacent social elites she hates. So she vowed to protect and support the East End, her old neighbourhood (which happens to contain Crime Alley). She and Holly both later ran the Alleytown Kids, a gang of needy children that Selina had been a member of in her day. She even renamed it the Alleytown Strays. And the idea of becoming what your childhood self needed, both for yourself and all the kids like you today, is foundational to why Stephanie ascending as Batgirl feels so right to me; she went from being a girl sitting on her roof wishing a Bat would save her to being the Bat saving and inspiring kids.

Writer: Yeah, but how does this sound? A hero’s war with depression, self-loathing, even suicidal ideation. They wonder if they can do anything but kill. They carry the pain of being violently murdered, thanks to their own long-lost mother no less, after which they were resurrected and later separately healed in a Lazarus Pit.

Me: I love it! Are you referring to Cassandra?

Writer: Um. Ooh, how about this fic? It has a gritty, tragic, tormented antihero wrestling with the moral complexity of their lethal actions, their fraught relationships with the Batfamily, and how closely they veer to embodying the very evil they seek to destroy. They’re true vengeance in a purer, sharper form than Batman, who they at once emulate and scorn. A hunter stalking Gotham’s worst souls in the night. They go on a beautiful journey to discover some degree of idealism, build stronger bonds, navigate emotional vulnerability and dare to believe that they are not damned or broken, and are still capable of healing as well as hurting. There are also themes of religion and spirituality.

Me: …What religion?

Writer: The antihero is Catholic.

Me: Oh my God. That has to be Helena Bertinelli.

Writer:

Me:

Writer:

Me: All your stories are about Jason Todd, aren’t they?

Writer: No! Some of them are about Dick Grayson or Tim Drake!