(no subject)
I'm still re-watching Haven and talking to 
roseveare about it all the time, and reading the TWoP boards as well as Tumblr and other places. I'm just trying to spare you guys most of my obsessive fannishness. (You know what I'm like, it'll pass in a month or two and then just be another fandom, if that.) But just like the "rape" issue, this is one where I feel I'd benefit from more viewpoints.
I'm getting really uncomfortable with the way some of these fans are deriding Eric Balfour's looks.
I don't mean the fact that they don't find him attractive. That's fine. Being shallow about it is fine too - this is fandom. (Heck, considering I have an entire photo post on Tumblr fetishizing his left hand, I have no moral high ground when it comes to shallowness.) It's just that, even in the nicer parts of fandom (i.e. not the cesspool of trolling hate that is the imdb forums), they keep coming back to the same things: long face, greasy hair, big nose.
It feels to me rather like when somebody pointed out that the negative slant on the descriptions of Snape in the HP books resemble old anti-Semitic stereotypes. Somehow, physical traits that appear "ethnic" are treaten as ugly, and it's hard to shake the feeling that Balfour's being derided for not fitting an All-American model that is pretty damned shady to begin with.
Then again, I am so not an expert on this, and it might just be that I'm overprotective of my latest fave. (That has been known to happen, after all.)
This entry was originally posted at http://katta.dreamwidth.org/615117.html and has
comments there.
roseveare about it all the time, and reading the TWoP boards as well as Tumblr and other places. I'm just trying to spare you guys most of my obsessive fannishness. (You know what I'm like, it'll pass in a month or two and then just be another fandom, if that.) But just like the "rape" issue, this is one where I feel I'd benefit from more viewpoints.
I'm getting really uncomfortable with the way some of these fans are deriding Eric Balfour's looks.
I don't mean the fact that they don't find him attractive. That's fine. Being shallow about it is fine too - this is fandom. (Heck, considering I have an entire photo post on Tumblr fetishizing his left hand, I have no moral high ground when it comes to shallowness.) It's just that, even in the nicer parts of fandom (i.e. not the cesspool of trolling hate that is the imdb forums), they keep coming back to the same things: long face, greasy hair, big nose.
It feels to me rather like when somebody pointed out that the negative slant on the descriptions of Snape in the HP books resemble old anti-Semitic stereotypes. Somehow, physical traits that appear "ethnic" are treaten as ugly, and it's hard to shake the feeling that Balfour's being derided for not fitting an All-American model that is pretty damned shady to begin with.
Then again, I am so not an expert on this, and it might just be that I'm overprotective of my latest fave. (That has been known to happen, after all.)
This entry was originally posted at http://katta.dreamwidth.org/615117.html and has
comments there.