Vérité et Masques wrote:
Airbenderedacted wrote:
This post does a
fantastic job explaining the reasons behind the majority of the fandom's vitriol with Pearl:
http://tinyurl.com/ptkkb53(It's long, but
very much worth the read. Spoiler alert: A
lot of the hate that Pearl gets stems from ableism and homophobia. I
seriously reccomend reading the post if you never suspected/noticed this.)
Aw man. This blog post was actually doing a good job of explaining the issue. Then it went into homophobia claims. What a shame, I had thought I found one of the smarter parts of Tumblr.
Anyhow, the first part is (somewhat) true; there's a few parts where the writers loses it. The second part is Tumblr stupidity.
Nah, the second part was spot on too. People are way more critical of queer relationships than they are of straight ones for exactly the reasons the person who wrote that post said. People are more compassionate towards things they are familair with than with things they are not. Straight pairings are the norm in the media. We've seen them in every way, shape, and form they could possibly come in. Queer relationships, however, are a whole new territory, so people are much quicker to criticize any imperfections there may be in one than they would be to criticize the faults in a straight pairing, beacuse (again) we've already seen it all when it comes to them, and are able to sympathize easier. It's not a hard concept to grasp. Waving it off as "Tumblr stupidity" simply because such a phenomenon never occured to you is extremely close minded. (That goes for the parts you say the writer "loses it" at, too.)
As someone who has been in this fandom since the very beginning, I've seen a lot of different sides of it, and have listened to the opinions of tons of different fans of various ages, backgrounds, sexualities, etc. Nearly every single person I've ever seen hate/dislike/severely criticize Pearl (in an unwarranted way) had ableist or homophobic roots to those opinions of theirs. Many of them weren't ableist themselves, and fewer were homophobic, but their dislike of her character (or the things she did) stemmed from those kinds of mindsets. Very few people disliked her for reasons completely seperate from things like that (because she reminded them of a bad person in their life or something, for example.) This is how I know for a fact that the writer of that post hit the nail on the head when they said that the fandom's collective scrutiny of Pearl come from ableist and homophobic places. Because they really do.
This isn't to say that every person guilty of being harsh on her for such reasons is ableist or homophobic of course, but their reasonings for reacting to her character in such ways really, really are.