Vids celebrating individual female characters

[alias_sqbr]

A continuation of naraht's post, itself a response to thingwithwings' post.

First the vids, then some meta.


First, an multi-character vid, but it has some interesting meta about how creating a triumphant vid sometimes requires you to construct your own reality: Jack or, Adventures in Reading Against the Text, Heroes. Nikki/Jessica, Claire and Monica.

Vids which celebrate an individual female character

Doctor Who:
And she was Rose
Don't Touch that Dial Martha
(How do I not have any Donna vids??)

Torchwood
Wild Hope, Tosh. Be warned, this made me cry.

Leverage:
And Parker Was Parker

Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel the Series:
Boulevard of Broken Songs Buffy, and the fact that Buffy's story is by necessity the story of a bunch of other people.
Without Me Lilah
Ing Anya
Happy Girl Tara

Chuck:
Creator Sarah

Avatar the Last Airbender:
Paper Planes Toph

Lord of the Rings:
No Man's Woman Eowyn

Heroes:
The Wreckoning Nikki/Jessica (they share a body, they count as one character :P)

The Middleman:
Wake up Wendy Watson

BSG: There's a whole heap of vids about Starbuck, but naraht linked to them already and I'm lazy.

I have resisted the temptation to just list all my favourite femslash vids, since they're about TWO characters.

Vids which are more just summaries of canon, where canon is about women (and specifically a female protagonist) being awesome:

Are you out there Contact
Hold Me Now Princess Tutu
Gossip Folks Dubbie Middleman
Walking on the Sun Lost Girl
Whatever it takes Bend it Like Beckham
Big City Life Dark Angel

I find this sort of meta (see also On the Prowl) really interesting: it paints a picture of fandom as being filled with lots of fanworks about men (covering a huge spectrum from celebratory to woobiefying etc) and a small amount of empowering feminist works about women (mostly happy, some angry) To which my kneejerk response tends to be: clearly you don't hang out with as many femslashers as I do. Then again she is specifically talking about vidders, and I'm not super connected to vidding fandom. Plus I think I just filter out a lot of the fannish things I encounter because I have no interest in them.

I get the feeling I (and a lot of the people I hang out with fannishly) differ from a chunk of fandom in that I am quite happy to have female characters fill my "angsty woobie who has horrible things happen to them" needs, which on the plus side means more fanworks about women but also means those works aren't necessarily empowering or feminist etc, they're just what I like. Most of my vids about individual characters of any gender are about angst and violence and attractive morally ambiguous brunette women being melancholy (I could make a fairly long list just of "Eliza Dushku being sad and violent") nb "Wild Hope" above is also fairly angsty, but it's still about what a great person Tosh is. Compare to, say, Just which is about Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer screwing up her life.

Which isn't a criticism of thingwithwings, exactly, since I think the sort of pattern she's talking about is fairly ubiquitous in fandom as a whole. But I thought the difference was worth mentioning.

Comments

[caramarie]

I often feel really grateful for having grown up in Harry Potter femslash fandom – it's like I have this baseline expectation that there will be plenty of awesome women around, and plenty of people creating fanworks about them. And I've never failed to find that. So when people talk about that picture you describe, I just have to double-take, because that's never been my experience. Not even in vidding fandom.

And it's not all celebatory, but I wouldn't want it to be. I like my angst and violence as well ♥

[alias_sqbr]

I was multifannish for a long time before settling into any specific fandoms, and I don't think I have it in me to really get into a fandom unless it has a lot of female characters and fans who focus on them. At this point I'm in a nice positive spiral where I make friends with people in one female-character-friendly fandom and they get me into other similar fandoms where I meet even more like minded people :)

[giandujakiss]

Aww, thanks for the mention of Walking on the Sun!

By the way, if you are in need of Donna vids - sweetestdrain made this one.

[alias_sqbr]

Walking on the Sun is a great vid, thanks for making it! Rewatching helped inspire me to have another go at the Lost Girl fic I never got back to after the end of last season.

That's a fantastic vid, thankyou! Ah, poor Donna :(

[lizbee]

I get the feeling I (and a lot of the people I hang out with fannishly) differ from a chunk of fandom in that I am quite happy to have female characters fill my "angsty woobie who has horrible things happen to them" needs, which on the plus side means more fanworks about women but also means those works aren't necessarily empowering or feminist etc, they're just what I like.

Yes, this!

I find I'm often drawn to stories about women who have hit rock bottom (morally, emotionally, etc) and who find a way out of it. Or who find that the teachers who they thought were empowering them were actually being manipulative, and finding a way to keep that relationship whilst finding their own power.

For me, that's a feminist narrative, but it's predicated on a foundation that I understand others would find problematic. So I'm sort of torn between "my id, my way" and "...yes, that is indeed full of fail".

Which is, in fact, mostly irrelevant to your post. I apologise; I've just come home from the third and probably final Borders closing party, and wine makes me ... effusive.

[alias_sqbr]

No, that was interesting! And I totally like that narrative myself. Hmm. Now I'm thinking we need more meta about female characters that isn't about gender/sexism: not "Yay strong female characters" or "boo sexism" but "Let's explore this particular kind of narrative as it applies to female characters, not (just) because it's (dis)empowering, but because it's interesting".

[lizbee]

Yeah! Although I feel like that would be difficult to manage or moderate without falling into the trap of dismissing sexism.