Felicia. She/her. Fanfiction writer. Ship-positive. Mostly Buffyverse and Byronic (anti)heroes: Grishaverse’s the Darkling, the Sandman’s Dream, etc. Side blog endlessnirvana for Nirvana in Fire is mostly dormant.
Before the internet, librarians were the gatekeeper of knowledge. For your reading pleasure, the New York Public Library released a cache of queries and conundrums called in from the 1940s to the 1980s.
it’s hard to articulate but I feel like there’s a real underlying misogyny to the way some people react to women liking/being attracted to characters like Spike. There’s this really weird moral panic that treats women like these absolutely helpless children who are so easily led around that they can’t handle anything other than the most ideologically pure content at all times. David Fury comparing Spike fans to people writing love letters to serial killers comes to mind, as though liking the funny vampire man on tv is even close to venerating actual monsters who have taken real lives. Like I’m not saying we’re not allowed to be critical of media, but I think it’s weird how often there’s a backlash this sort of thing. Literally some people see women having a crush on a villain character and act like fantasizing about villain dick is going to corrupt women or something. As though women need to be protected from their own sexual fantasies because if allowed to indulge uninhibited, they’ll…. i don’t know, be seduced by real criminals?
(and I maintain that Spike is an especially weird subject for this behaviour, considering that people specifically wanted redemption for him. Romanticization would be saying he didn’t need redemption in the first place.)
Like…. we don’t do this to straight men. We don’t see a guy who likes Harley Quinn or something and say “god, what a sick freak, romanticizing domestic terrorism”. A lot of times it kinda just feels like another excuse to shit on women for the things they like idk.
