"you can pry fanille from my cold dead hands"

Oerba Dia Vanille:

Vanille has been labeled "the worst character in the franchise" by losers who cant appreciate it when women aren't perfect. She lies and is mentally ill and it makes her so interesting and compelling and yet too many people called her a bad character because she had flaws. The plot of the game wouldn't exist without her. She also got a lot of hate for being "annoying" and hiding her depression/mental illness behind a happy facade but when a man in a later game did this, he was beloved and called "real" for it. These same people also say theres gay subtext between this man and another male character despite one of them having a female love interest all while ignoring that Vanille arguably had some of the most explicitly gay subtext in the franchise before there was ever a canonically gay character. And she had no male love interest. Also people disliked the voice acting and took it out on the character…? Misogyny is a disease.

Vanille is one of my all time favorites. She is a multifaceted character who has made mistakes, but they come from a really understandable place. Her struggles that she covers up with a happy facade ring really true to a lot of people who struggle with mental illness and it makes her really compelling and sympathetic to those of us who have been in that situation. Also, she once again has explicitly gay subtext with another girl character and their relationship is full of its own complexities and both Vanille and this relationship deserve more appreciation and love! She was born in the wrong era, because people didnt love women's wrongs back then…

Lorelai Gilmore:

I know that if Lorelai were a man i wouldn't constantly be seeing people (on tumblr, on reddit, on tiktok, in 8 million insufferable video essays) claiming that she's just as bad or worse than her abusive parents, or criticizing her for going low contact with them, or calling her annoying for using humor as a defense mechanism, or pointing to her every mistake as proof that she's an irredeemably terrible mother, etc. Like, I've seen how people treat single dads in media who have made far worse parenting mistakes than Lorelai ever did, and they get so much more grace than she does about everything. She was a runaway teen mom who grew up with emotionally abusive parents. I think, considering those circumstances, she did a pretty damn good job.

Lorelai, my best friend! she's funny, she's hot, she's a small business owner, she has so so much ADHD, she's a coffee addict, she's always volunteering in her community, she is physically incapable of not making a joke at the most inopportune moments, she loves her daughter more than anything, she's confident and self-assured but also her worst nightmare is for her daughter to turn out like her. When she was 16 she found a town full of people as weird and off-putting as she is and she's never ever going to leave. She's trying so hard to break the cycle of abuse and be better than her parents, and she's not always as successful at it as she wants to be, but she always owns up to her mistakes, and she never stops trying!!! She's complex and nuanced and if I see one more person compare her to Amy Poehler's "cool mom" character in Mean Girls I'm going to explode. People just love to take complex female characters, especially moms, and reduce them to caricatures of themselves and then criticize them based on that caricature, while completely ignoring their actual actions and behavior.

While Lorelai is more loved than some other submissions I can’t help but to feel that the criticism she receives is often in part due to misogyny. She handles her abusive parents with so much grace yet the 30 percent of the time she does clap back she gets accused of being immature to her poor old mother who just wanted a relationship with her. I don’t think a man would be expected to smile as his mother told his child that his old golf clubs were collecting dust with the rest of his potential. I also think that her snarkiness would be more appreciated coming from a man rather than just “annoying.” The last point I’ll make is when people blame her for Christopher’s failures. Apparently her not staying with Richard and Emily for the rest of her life forced Chris to become a deadbeat?