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[veleda_k]

I said I was was trying to post content other than memes, but... I am weak. (And I like memes that run the chance of giving me an opportunity to meta.)

Give me one or ships, and I'll give you my honest opinion/take on them.

(Note: it says honest, so only ask if you're sure you want to know.)

This entry was originally posted at http://veleda-k.

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Part three, fuck

[veleda_k]

And if you thought I could talk about White Collar without talking about White Collar fandom, then you underestimate my bitterness. (Never underestimate my bitterness. I am the grand lord of bitterness.) 'Cause White Collar fandom sucks. I talked a bit about fandom’s inability to even recognize that Neal has wronged Sara. This is problem with just about every character in regards to Neal, but it hits Sara really hard. White Collar fandom is really sexist, and it has enormous difficulty recognizing that women characters even have points of view to be acknowledged. I vividly remember one person commenting about 4x04 that they wanted to punch Sara in the face during her conversation with Neal about Cape Verde because she was "making it all about her." And, of course, this was patently false. Sara specifically said it wasn't about her. But what's really going is the idea that Sara doesn't have the right to have feelings, especially not feelings that aren't convenient to Neal. (I love Neal a whole lot, but, god, he is fandom's great white dick.) Again, this isn't something that only Sara faces, but she gets it hard because she presses so many of fandoms other buttons. Sara doesn't perform femininity well. She's blunt, she can be abrasive, and she doesn't coddle male egos. Her visual presentation is feminine, but it's a sharp femininity, not an accommodating one. She's a female love interest in a strongly boyslash focused fandom. She's overtly sexual. Like, I've seen a fair amount of Neal/Sara hate that boiled down to "they have too much sex," and it was agreed that Neal was too pure for that sort of thing, so it must be Sara tainting him.

Credit where credit is due, Sara and Neal/Sara had a strong upswing in popularity as season 4 went on. I'm honestly not sure why that happened, though of course I've thought about it. It's possible that Sara's introduction was further from fandom's mind, so they stopped judging her so much on it. (Because Sara was initially confrontational and adversarial towards Neal, but that only lasted like two or three episodes, because she let her walls down, and we saw what a warm, compassionate person she was. But throughout season three, her haters refused to admit she had had any development or character exploration since her first episode.) It's also possible that people felt that season four Neal/Sara conformed more to conventional relationship standards than season three Neal/Sara, so they no longer found it so threatening and/or uncomfortable. But these are only hypotheses. I don't think I have the answer.

Of course, Sara got her popularity boost just in time for those fans to turn their hate on Neal's new love interest. (And the way fandom reacted to Rachel, and how that differed from reactions to past male villains is a post of its own.)

And that may have been more than you wanted to know. I LOVE these two. And I have FEELINGS. And THOUGHTS.