But it's not even entirely, I think, about what people are willing to write - like, Scully in X-Files has almost as much canon trauma as Mulder does, and people writing XF het did in fact torture her almost as much as they tortured Mulder. But she is so not a woobie - she's either an awesome character who's had to put up with a lot of crap and lived through it, or alternately, a badly-written character who's embodying a bunch of problematic stereotypes, but never both.
Some of that's about media & fandom's problems with writing female characters, but some of it is just inherent in the way we think about gender, I think.
(I think for me the thing that clinches it is that I would really, really hesitate to describe a female character on an open channel as "so pretty when she cries". Which makes me wonder if I should be describing male characters that way so blithely, and yet.)
no subject
But it's not even entirely, I think, about what people are willing to write - like, Scully in X-Files has almost as much canon trauma as Mulder does, and people writing XF het did in fact torture her almost as much as they tortured Mulder. But she is so not a woobie - she's either an awesome character who's had to put up with a lot of crap and lived through it, or alternately, a badly-written character who's embodying a bunch of problematic stereotypes, but never both.
Some of that's about media & fandom's problems with writing female characters, but some of it is just inherent in the way we think about gender, I think.
(I think for me the thing that clinches it is that I would really, really hesitate to describe a female character on an open channel as "so pretty when she cries". Which makes me wonder if I should be describing male characters that way so blithely, and yet.)