One of my favorite things about Korrasami is that the aspects of the ship’s canon development that are usually the most heavily criticized are the parts that queer folks point to as the strongest and most relatable. Like. I’m sure it wasn’t even intentional on Bryke’s part because it is just so intimately accurate.
Please. Take it from a girl who slowly fell in love w her friend lmao. It’s painfully subtle from the outside looking in. It’s hesitant af even after it’s silently deemed Inevitable or even official by both parties. Explicit Romantic Contact™ means jack shit next to the gradual process of becoming each others’ main support system (read: Asami being present for a Tenzin Talk in 408. Those tiny shifts are huge, and I think that moment is frequently overlooked bc it’s in the clip episode).
So like. Listen to the gays when they say they felt it coming, even if they didn’t believe it would ever happen, because a lot of queer romance develops well outside the conventions we’re used to seeing, both in media and in real life, and K/A is, imo, a really strong example of that phenomenon.
Tag: meta
There’s way too much
pro-Mon El/pro-Karameldiscussion taking place under the protective veil of ‘Word of God’/’Death of the Author’.
- “He’s not human; stop holding him to human/earthly standards.”
- “He was born into a slave-owning society; that’s not his fault.”
- “When he said [x-y-z], he didn’t mean [x-y-z], he meant [a-b-ampersand]; stop taking things so literally.”
He didn’t do anything. He wasn’t born anywhere. He isn’t real.
He isn’t an actual person functioning under the circumstances of his upbringing, or reacting to outside stimuli based on the chemical impulses in his brain, because he doesn’t have one.
He’s a fictional character, whose actions, speech, history, and traits are written for him, by actual, living, breathing, thinking human beings, who sit down in a room and consciously decide who he’ll be, where he’ll come from, what he’ll say, and how he’ll react.
So when he does something on-screen, it’s reflective of the Supergirl writers who decided he would do it.
He is not real, but the people who control him sure-as-hell are.
So when we criticize the racism of replacing James – a successful black
man with a good heart and a deep, continued respect for Kara – with Mon
El – an irresponsible, entitled white prince, who owed slaves and has
openly mocked, criticized, and degraded Kara (in public) on multiple occasions that
span the entirety of the season – we’re criticizing the writers, who
purposefully decided to make these things happen.
When we criticize Mon El’s abusive behaviors – the disrespect, the mean-spirited hyper-criticism, the lying, the possessiveness, the ignoring and defying Kara’s wishes, etc. –
we’re criticizing the writers, who purposefully decide to continue this behavior, episode after episode.
When we criticize the huge amount of screen-time dedicated to Mon El at the detriment of the other characters who play more relevant roles in the greater plot of the series, we’re criticizing the writers, who have purposefully decided to write him into more and more of the script in increasingly more irrelevant ways, while purposefully deciding to leave out the veteran characters to give him a spot (like James).
None of your arguments are actually relevant to the discussion that’s clearly going right over your head.
You’re angry that we’re attacking your ship and your character, so you jump on the defense like you think we’re grasping for unfounded arguments in a jealousy-driven ship-war, instead of acknowledging the problematic aspects of it and joining the conversation to rally the fandom against the writers who continue to disrespect and portray the character you love, and relationship you adore in a way that undermines the reasons you love it, and the potential you see in it.
The writers didn’t have to break Kara up with her black love-interest in order to be with a character who didn’t have to be a white slave-owner.
The writers wanted to break Kara up with her black love interest, and they wanted her new white love-interest to own slaves.
They weren’t obligated to make him this way.
Someone chose to give this white man the title of slave-owner, when only 151 years prior to that decision, white people literally owned enslaved black people. That means there are absolutely middle-aged people watching this show whose parents and/or grandparents either were slaves, or owned slaves.
This is not an irrelevant issue, and you cannot argue that the writers didn’t make a harmful, racist choice to include it.
They did that, they chose that, and they will continue to make this same kinds of choices regarding your favorite character if you don’t start getting angry at the writers who keep giving you a shit character to work with.
tl;dr – Mon El didn’t have to be a such terrible person; how are you not angry at the writers who continuously choose to degrade him as a character
I haven’t seen season two yet (delaying because of hearing about all this on tumblr ha) but I really appreciate this. It’s something good to keep in mind looking at all media–you can debate something in the context of a particular universe all day but it really comes down to the story the writers are choosing to tell. What kind of values does that story inherently have? What does it say? It’s a choice someone has made.
Okay so we can all agree that Wonder Woman (2017), Dir: Patty Jenkins was a goddamn masterclass in storytelling, especially with the inversion of male-coded language. The “No-Man’s Land” scene gave me chills and every time they played her theme song I wanted to get up and roar.
But I wish they’d taken it a step further. I wish Ares had been a woman. Maybe, like Diana, she was always the daughter of Zeus, an Amazon sent to free her people. Maybe she was Hippolyta’s firstborn. But she wasn’t satisfied just hiding away from the world, she wanted to make men pay for what they did to her people. It would explain why Hippolyta was so reticent to let Diana learn to fight, lest she go down her sister’s path.
And it would totally work as a Big Reveal because with people’s basic knowledge of Greek mythology (which was kind of Christianized in the movie anyway) and some clever writing, the audience would assume, like Diana, that Ares was a man.
It would also be so much cooler as a fight, because instead of Condescending Mustache Man smirking, “You have so much to learn,” Ares could have held her hand out to Diana like so many Amazons had before her and said, “Please. Let me teach you. We can rid this world of men and make it like Themyscira. We can go home.”
I just think it would be so much more compelling, and so much harder for Diana to refuse one of her sisters – her only true sister – who claims to be trying to make the world over into the paradise where Diana grew up, than some mustachioed asshole rying to rip the world apart.
It also totally shatters the second-wave feminist idea of “women good, men bad,” which is touched on when you see Diana’s rage and Steve’s gentleness, but never really driven home.
If you’re going to subvert male-dominated language, go all the way. Make Ares a woman.
Question of Smoke 