Becca's Fandom Space

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?

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.

Sansa Stark:

Perpetually a victim of the plot, denied agency, hated for being whiny, PLUS the whole deal where they changed the plot of the book so they could show her being raped in the show…

Sansa is an incredible character for the exact reasons I hated her ass when I was 14. She's often passive, conforms to expectations, and lashes out at her younger sister for being the opposite. Her arc finds her struggling to navigate a dangerous, violent world that hates women using only the tools she was taught as a girl would keep her safe and make her successful (her passivity, her virginity, her femininity, etc.).

Bashed as the worst and most useless character of the whole series for not immediately killing all the Lannisters ig despite literally watching her father’s head get cut off at thirteen years old. Also catches flak for thinking mean things about the fandom’s chosen son Jon Snow and her sister Arya Stark, but like. This is a middle schooler.

The WHOLE POINT of her character is to illustrate how the game of thrones corrupts innocence, ERGO the character HAS to start from an innocent place. Obviously she’s naive at the start of the series, why would any child raised in a loving household far away from court politics develop any political acumen? But despite this, she does learn quickly, and her character development is among the most exciting in the show (and I’m sure it will eventually be in the series as well)

I could write a dissertation on this one but if you say Sansa is worse that Joffrey you’re a misogynist. In my opinion people hate her because her abuse arc is painfully grounded in reality.

The very first man to use her as a pawn was her father and yet the fandom blames her for this. Sansa’s arc was supposed to be a mirror of her sister’s to show that if they comply (Sansa) if they rebel (Arya) no girls win in a patriarchal society but so many people would rather hate a fictional little girl because she didn’t girl boss her way out of oppression.

According to Sophie Turner (the actress who played Sansa), people hated Sansa so much that they would actually go up to Turner in real life and go "i don't like you" (and Turner would have been in like... her teens/early twenties at this point)

I really need fans to not need her to marry a creepy old pervert to prove that she isn’t vain and put her in her place. She’s twelve. Also these creepy men like her because she’s pretty. It’s also not her job to fix their defective personalities.

George R.R. Martin wrote a really complex world with layers of story and metaphors. He has something to say about climate change and nuclear weapons, these metaphors are obvious. Then he challenges us to look at government, power structures, patriarchal systems, concepts of honor vs what’s actually right, gender roles, and how to meaningfully change all of these things. Then to have people take away nothing other than the book is about a feud between to little girls, Sansa is the villain, and the story will be about defeating her. Sansa and Arya love each other. One conforms, one rebels, neither can win in a patriarchal society. Their arc is why this society is bad for all girls but so many fans willfully miss it because of their own misogyny.

Everyone loved the idea of a free and independent North under Robb or even Jon but they seem really agitated that Sansa was the one who saw it through. They are angry at her when she’s meek and even angrier when she exercises her agency to give her homeland something they seem pretty unified in wanting.

Ned was the very first man to use Sansa. He used her as a cover while investigating the Lannister’s without any sort of regard for how dangerous that is. Yet fans blame Sansa, an eleven year old girl for killing Ned. Girl argued like a lawyer on his behalf, the milk of the poppy defense was great and Ned was ready to through it away because honor. What’s sad is I don’t think that Sansa herself is able to process how much her male family members fail her because it’s too much to handle. People also expect Sansa a kid to stand up to Joffrey at the Trident when Ned a grown adult won’t stand up to Robert. The saddest thing is that I believe if Joffrey wasn’t a bastard Ned would have married Sansa to him. He would have felt bad about it but he would have upheld the system. Fans would naturally see this as Sansa’s character flaw and proof that Ned is good because he feels bad.

I'm going to preface it by saying I genuinely have no ill will towards, nor trying to argue nor shame nor start drama with the person who submitted it. I just have to say, gently and respectfully, that the part in the Sansa propaganda that talks about her being passive feels wrong (and maybe even be a result of unintentionally swallowing some of the character slander we are otherwise successfully fighting against!) for reasons the original submitter might consider below. Sansa Stark is not actually passive. I know it can seem that way because she dissociates a lot (for very understandable trauma related reasons) and cannot directly bring out a massive narrative change on her own because she is both effectively a prisoner as well as completely isolated, but she is actually a fairly active character, it's just that she is active in a more femininely acceptable way in the society of her world. She takes initiative in front of an entire court she doesn't understand the customs of to speak up in defense of her father, thinking on her feet and coming up with an extremely reasonable defense for him that some real world lawyers in modern day use in court (and that would have worked if the authority figure was ANY character in the entire narrative other than who it was at the time). She keeps choosing kindness. She tries to persuade her abusive captor to be kinder and gentler to his younger brother who wanted to honour him on his birthday and was unsuccessful at doing so, she shows courtesy and understanding to a cousin who is from the same family of her abusers (Lancel after the blackwater), she modifies her behavior to appear as acceptable to the people who hurt her and use any insubordination as an excuse to hurt her further, so she uses the facade of a completely nonthreatening helpless unremarkable individual to the point of falsely appearing stupid to actively conspire about her own escape in the godswood (a site of religious significance to her that almost nobody around her cares enough about to frequent and check up on). She operates within the socially acceptable role of a lady which she has been taught her entire short sheltered life, in order to make herself seem less threatening to avoid being targetted by the horrible people around her. She analyzes her situation and acts accordingly by choice. Sure, it can seem passive because that is how women need to appear in a world where the majority of power is held by Men, too many of whom desperately want to keep women powerless and subservient, but she actively tries to make the choice to be good and kind to the young, the innocent, and those who deserve compassion and mercy. She wakes up every day in a world that shows her endless cruelty, she analyzes the risks her behavior might incur, and she keeps choosing kindness despite it all and in the face of it all. And it's not an easy decision. Many people, even in our world, get slighted once and choose to burn every bridge they can find for the rest of eternity to get even. Sansa Stark is not actually passive. She just disguises herself as passive to survive. And people who think that is what she is are proof that her effort is paying off.

Submitting propaganda for my girl Sansa Stark in the form of an anecdote, I once watched the first couple episodes of GoT with a man and he immediately hated Sansa and started saying bad things about her and thats when I knew i didnt want to hang out with him anymore.

Rose Tico:

They harassed the actress off of social media and made burning action figures of her a spectator sport, an incredibly popular YouTuber turned calling fat and ugly into a running gag.

She’s a nice girl who just wants to help and has a lot of anger in her heart because poor people like her are treated like crap!

I mean… we were all there, right? People threw such a big fit about her mere existence that it actually genuinely changed the American political landscape for the worse (and got her basically written out of the next movie)

She literally didn't do anything wrong. Not in an "my favorite character can do no wrong" kind of way, I just mean it's been almost ten years and I still don't know what those dudes were actually mad about. And she's cute and nice and I liked her!

The shit that happened with rose pisses me off beyond belief to this day actually and I don't even gaf about star wars anymore. The fact that not only did she get such a misogynistic and racist backlash to the point of people harassing her actress but that the films themselves capitulated to this and she was completely absent in the next film. Makes me see red fr

Seen as a threat to the finnpoe slash shippers so ofc they lashed out

Rey Skywalker:

called a Mary Sue for being competent at a thing that the movie explained she was competent in

Rey was perhaps not the most original character ever, but she COULD'VE been great if only the writing for her hadn't ignored her in favor of the white men around her and forced her into a really terrible toxic romance with the villain for no good reason.

first of all we’re introduced to her as this smart, brave woman. she can fix the millennium falcon. she can fight. she’s guarded. she’s eager to help people she barely knows. she has this intriguing mysterious backstory about being abandoned on jakku by someone implied to be a skywalker. she’s force sensitive. she has a scene where she gets captured and interrogated by the main villain kylo ren, but actually to a good percentage of the fandom, kylo kidnapping her and torturing her friends and mass killing innocent people including his own dad is completely fine guys. bc reylos think kylo ren is hot so it’s fine. and to them, this interrogation scene means they’re in love and he’s just a tortured sad boy who needs a woman to redeem and fix him. which is basically what rey is used for in the following two movies. also we could have had finnrey as a couple and as the two main protagonists (rather than kylo suddenly becoming way more centered) if people weren’t racist and misogynistic af and instead people went so hard shipping one of the most toxic ships of all time that disney seemed to cave and make it happen despite it making zero narrative sense whatsoever. Crimes End of rant!

Eve:

Hi. It's me. I run this blog and make the polls. I submitted Eve because I kept waiting for someone else to do it and then no one did, so the blasphemy you see before you is all mine.

Anyway, it seems kind of silly to explain why Eve is a victim of fandom misogyny. It's pretty self-evident. But I went and reread the relevant chapters in Genesis for this (because I'm just that dedicated to procrastinating lol) and yeah, unsurprisingly, Adam's agency in the eating fruit from the tree of knowledge incident is totally erased. The Bible does acknowledge that Eve was talked into trying the fruit by the snake, just like Adam was talked into trying the fruit by Eve, but Eve is depicted as a far more active agent than Adam. Here's the quote (using NIV for the sake of simplicity): "When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it." So apparently Adam was just standing there the whole time ig? Just twiddling his thumbs, having nothing to say while his wife actively broke the one rule God gave them about living in the garden of Eden (and He threatened to kill them btw if they didn't follow this rule). And then Adam also breaks that rule, not out of any desire to do so, but just because his wife gave him something to eat. So I guess he has to eat it. It can't be helped!

But of course it has to be written that way, because the point of the Adam and Eve myth is to be an origin story for the patriarchy. That's how creation myths work; they're explanations for the way the world works. There are seven days in a week because that's how long it took God to make the world and also take a nap ig. And women exist because God didn't want Adam to be lonely. But that's not why women have to be subservient to men, it's specifically a punishment for Eve's crimes, or as God so delightfully puts it: "Because you have done this […] Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."

Also, let's be so for real, God totally set Adam and Eve up! He builds this beautiful garden right? And then in the middle of the garden He puts a tree that Adam and Eve aren't allowed to eat from. But importantly, the tree's fruit are what grants you knowledge of right and wrong, and also knowledge in general. Before they eat the fruit, Adam and Eve do not have the capacity for knowledge. Like everything else in the Adam and Eve story this is is yet another creation myth explanation for how life works; this is how humanity gained the ability, or at the least the potential to be knowledgeable and ethical. So, in other words, not only is God sticking this really enticing thing right in front of Adam and Eve and just daring them to test His boundaries, He also does this while deliberately denying them the capacity to differentiate right from wrong!!!!! God basically punishes them for pursuing the very thing that could have prevented them from eating the fruit in the first place! Total set up!

Anyway, I know just spent a long time talking about the text, and this is a tournament about fandom misogyny, not the misogyny of the source material, but I think it's relevant because the Bible is famously a pretty influential book. The Adam and Eve story didn't invent the patriarchy, it's a creation myth, an explanation for something that already existed. But it did provide annoying sexist uncles everywhere with ammo for their bullshit sexist beliefs. You see, they insist, we can't challenge the patriarchy, because it's not some bullshit artificial hierarchy that ultimately makes the world worse in every way. No, it's divinely ordained because God decided it would be womankind's collective punishment for Eve's actions.

All of which is especially annoying given that literally all she did was eat some fruit! Her son Cain killed his own brother for no fucking reason! And this was after Adam and Eve gained knowledge and like ethics or whatever from eating the fruit and presumably passed that ability down to their descendants and by extension to all of humanity. So when Cain killed his brother, we know he did so with the capacity to understand right from wrong which is not something Eve was capable of when she committed her big sin (eating fruit). But somehow Eve's actions, not Cain fully murdering his brother, are the origin of all sin??? Make it make sense!!!

Well actually, the reason it doesn't make sense is completely the fault of fandom misogyny. You see, the concept of "original sin", i.e., the idea that Eve invented sin by eating the fruit, is actually not in the source material at all (and by source material I mean the Old Testament of course). See that stuff is a later Christian interpretation that takes the already quite misogynistic text and makes it way more misogynistic for no real reason. I cannot stress this enough, this shit is fully Christian fanon. As a Jew, I can't remember a time when I didn't know this story, but I only learned that Christians believe that original sin shit about Eve by reading His Dark Materials when I was like eleven. And another thing that's fully fanon is this common portrayal of Eve as this like sexual seductress who uses her feminine wiles to make Adam eat the fruit. As you saw, that actually has zero basis in the text. That fucker didn't need any convincing. She literally just gives him the fruit and he eats it like the fucking dope he is.

Speaking of which, because the Bible needs Eve to be the guiltier party compared to Adam, in order to justify her punishment and by extension the patriarchy, it inadvertently results in Eve being a way more interesting character than her husband. Adam is a passive loser who does nothing of his own accord. Eve gives him fruit from the tree of knowledge, and he has no thoughts about it, head fully empty. He eats the fruit because his wife gave it to him. But Eve has motives! It's not just the snake manipulating her, she wants to gain wisdom! She's curious! Within this creation myth framework, she is the reason human beings have knowledge and wisdom. If it weren't for her eating the fruit (and getting Adam to eat it too, because he certainly wasn't making going to make any decisions on his own), we wouldn't have the capacity to know things, to understand right from wrong, or to learn. Eve gave us that!!!! She's kind of amazing!!! She's not supposed to be, obviously, we're supposed to judge her for her disobedience. But idk, I like having knowledge. Learning is one of the best things about being alive imo, and according to the Bible's creation myth, we only have that capacity because Eve decided to break the rules, to defy God openly. And she lived to tell the tale. That's fucking iconic, who's doing it like her?