Fixed points? Not with me around!

I’m not even active on tumblr anymore, and I’m still pissed at Supernatural for everything, but I can’t deny that this show gave me one of the best characters in the history of television and one of my favorites in the whole world: Castiel. 

Today, 18th September, marks 10 years since Misha Collins joined the Supernatural cast and gave life to the dorkiest, most human angel of the garrison. Words cannot explain how much I love Cas, and what his character means to me. 

He’s a soldier, an angel who rebelled against Heaven, choosing his human friends, his human family over it. He defied angels’ very own nature when he started growing feelings for the Winchesters and for humanity. He not only rebelled, but he chose the Winchesters over and over again over anything else. Since Castiel laid a hand on Dean in Hell, he was, indeed, lost. But he found a home on Earth, he found people who loved him and whom he loves with all of his newly grown heart. Castiel’s story is one of free will, self-sacrifice, friendship, and, most of all, love. He’s one of the best characters in the Supernatural universe and, even if he’s not always appreciated in the show or outside of it, he undoubtedly earned his spot besides the Winchesters. 

So I want to thank Misha for playing Castiel on this show; I want to thank him for making him this nerdy dude with wings who gets soft over his two favorites humans - and Jack; and I want to thank him for blowing away every expectations any time he has to play a new character and show us what it actually means ‘acting on camera.’ Without him, Cas wouldn’t be the angel he is today, and without him, there wouldn’t be any anniversary to celebrate. So thank you. Always. 

To these ten years of Castiel. 

And hopefully many more. 

Oops, it seems we’ve reached the end of the queue. 

I need to get off social media for a while so I won’t be filling the queue again for now. 

I hope to see you all very soon <3 

It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?

#friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to good use and did some calculations about ship ratios#and yes considering the gender ratios of characters#the prevalence of gay ships is completely predictable (via sarahtonin42)

I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.

Totally.

A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.

(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)

Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:

Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66

Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.

The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?

YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!

Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.

I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.

This doesn’t even account  for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well. 

But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.

Yay, mathy arguments. :)

This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.

In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het).  (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.

Words to describe Ohno Satoshi  

I see a lot of emotions in Aiba-chan’s eyes. ;;

└ YamaTarou (brief) reunion~ ヾ(＠^ー^＠)ノ   ヾ(´ε｀ ヾ)

Bonus:

Cos Neens doesn’t want to be too obvious he’s missing Sho-chan already.

Cr: Nino-san filming

NB: Pardon any errors in translation.

He’s so cute! Someone help me!

└ It takes close calls to open up one’s heart voice ne~ V(^o^)V

Cr: VS Arashi 18.08.2016

TCR | 2014.07.31

         Peter Pan by J.M.Barrie ❝ All children, except one, grow up. ❞