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neveralarchI am caught up on Teen Wolf! And OH MY GOD.
I just. This show, man. Aaaagh. This isn't even about the finale, okay, it's just that I have been watching this show during every single bit of my free time and I love it, wow, I just can't.
It's so good! Like, not even guilty pleasure, you have to ignore this bit and this bit, make excuses for it good, because I do that with shows a lot, but no! Teen Wolf is great, I love it, wow. Like, sometimes there are places where I think it stumbles, and it needs more women, more please, but I hear Jeff Davis is working on that next season, so I am willing to talk about what I've already got.
Melissa McCall! Erica! Victoria Argent! French teacher/counselor whose name I can't remember but who is totally badass! Lydia, okay, Lydia gets her own paragraph, but Lydiaaaaa. They're just all such wonderful perfect characters. I like Allison as well, but I feel like her character arc is so in flux right now that I can't really talk about her with coherency. But there's just all these awesome women, and I want Erica and Lydia to hang out and be THEMSELVES at people, like actively and aggressively be self-confident and awesome and great human beings.
And the guys! I love Scott, he is just such a teenager - smart and kind of dumb at the same time, wrapped up in himself and his hormones while still trying to be there for his friends, agh. Scooott. Derek Hale's face! Isaac Lahey's face! Wait, did I talk about Victoria Argent's face before? Because she also has a great face, wow. And and and Chris Argent and his code, and Boyd, and Gerard Argent and the way Michael Hogan totally and awesomely overacted him, and Danny Mahealani, and Coach Bobby Finstock and his Independence Day speech, and Boyd, and Peter (Peter gets his own paragraph, you have no idea), and Danny,and Lydia, and Vet Deaton, and Boyd, and Sheriff Stilinski, and Stiles, and Danny, and wow, I'm just listing characters, I cannot be coherent about this show at all. This is what I have been brought to.
Okay, I'm going to try. Here, let me talk about Lydia:
Lydia just works so hard at keeping herself together, being unflappable and adaptable and I am so fascinated by that, by people who can feel the ground shaking underneath them and can still put a brave face on it and do what they think needs to be done. Sometimes that makes her seem unfeeling, or just ignorant, but no! She is feeling things, she's just not going to let it slow her down. She will push through a breakdown and being attacked by a werewolf, and show up to school as soon as she's healthy, and then she'll push through being the new weird girl to be brilliant and awesome and she's totally going to win the Fields Medal with perfect makeup and a dazzling smile.
And Peter! Peter Hale is such a terrible person, and it is as if they wrote a character to push all of my buttons, every single one. It may have become known that I am ALL ABOUT amoral (or at least not very moral) characters who have their own agenda? And it helps if they're amused by the good guys, and sarcastic and sassy, and look, this is why I love the Master and why I love Malcolm Tucker, and you guys missed it because I didn't post about it, but I was totally wrapped up in Tarrlok feels for a solid two weeks. And then Peter??? Hale??? The way he eyerolls at Derek and doesn't pay much attention to the dead body in his trunk, and his constant half smile on his stupid face and wow, rude, how are you a character that exists.
And Scott is a POC (even if it's not brought up explicitly in the show, but anyway, the lead actor in this show is a POC if nothing else), and Danny Mahealani is a gay POC that everyone likes and is always treated pretty damn well by the narrative, and Vet Deaton and the French teacher are around being awesome mysterious competent POCs and everything is beautiful. And there's single parents because of the death of a parent, or because the other parent is hinted to be an asshole, and sure, they're having a tough time but the suggestion that Melissa McCall is somehow NOT ENOUGH for Scott is treated as offensive and ignorant. And that happens a lot! Things that I expect shows to bring up and then kind of pass off as somehow unimportant are not passed off - men being creepy at women is treated as shitty and creepy, the good guys face repercussions for doing irresponsible things (even with good intentions), letting your grades slip has serious consequences. There's not even any homophobic freakouts from the teen boys, even though there's about a hundred places where a certain kind of writer would have just automatically added one in. Every time the characters just roll with a scene instead of breaking out 'no homo' or 'but not in a gay way,' something inside of me comes back to life. Like, I realize Jeff Davis (the show runner) is an out gay man, but Mark Gatiss has taught me not to trust this as any kind of sign of how an issue is going to be handled. But Jeff Davis! Jeff Davis, you restore some of my hope.
Jeff Davis is also pretty chill about fandom and shipping and is talking to fans about making one of the established characters bisexual, and I want to be in this fandom so much and hang out and wait for the third season, it cannot come soon enough, but nope, can't do it. And this is driving me up a wall. Because I love this show! I love its comedy, and its seriousness, and its terrible cheesy season two opening sequence, but the fandom is pretty focused on stuff that I just can't deal with.
I can't read underage, and surprise, most of the characters in Teen Wolf are 16, there's a lot of underage. In Homestuck I got through this by the fact that everyone was underage, a lot of them were aliens, it's a comic, man, chill, this is good fic. But in Teen Wolf fandom the main pairing (Stiles/Derek) has a large age difference and a lot of the fic has a power imbalance towards the older guy and nope, nope, can't do it. I can't even browse for fics in that pairing because running into one that has underage and dubcon and the characters thinking that this is all totally romantic just turns me off fic altogether, and those kinds of fics are everywhere. I'm not saying people shouldn't write underage Stiles/Derek, because it's not really my business, but the problem for me is that this fandom produces practically nothing else. I want Lydia-centric genfic and Erica/Boyd/Stiles/Isaac and Danny/Stiles and a LOT more fic about the adults because Coach Finstock and Victoria Argent and Chris Argent and Vet Deaton and Melissa McCall all rock my world. But the rare pairings or rare characters in this fandom are rare to the point of two or three fics out of thousands, and I've already read everything I can find. I gave up on reading Peter Hale fic, because I always think that I can read incest but no, no I cannot, nope. And seeing it in the warning bar does not dissuade me because PETER HALE, but it is always a mistake for me.
So I am stuck with all these feelings, and I don't even like horror, and I find season-length plots kind of tedious, but this show sucked me in with humor and adorableness, and now I'm literally flapping my hands and squeaking whenever Coach Finstock says something or Peter Hale does a thing with his face or Lydia is on screen ever, at all. I've been fandom-hopping pretty hard for a while, so I'm not sure if this depth of feeling is going to last long now that I've run out of show, but it's hitting me pretty hard right now.
Obviously. Since I just wrote a fucking essay about it.
I just. This show, man. Aaaagh. This isn't even about the finale, okay, it's just that I have been watching this show during every single bit of my free time and I love it, wow, I just can't.
It's so good! Like, not even guilty pleasure, you have to ignore this bit and this bit, make excuses for it good, because I do that with shows a lot, but no! Teen Wolf is great, I love it, wow. Like, sometimes there are places where I think it stumbles, and it needs more women, more please, but I hear Jeff Davis is working on that next season, so I am willing to talk about what I've already got.
Melissa McCall! Erica! Victoria Argent! French teacher/counselor whose name I can't remember but who is totally badass! Lydia, okay, Lydia gets her own paragraph, but Lydiaaaaa. They're just all such wonderful perfect characters. I like Allison as well, but I feel like her character arc is so in flux right now that I can't really talk about her with coherency. But there's just all these awesome women, and I want Erica and Lydia to hang out and be THEMSELVES at people, like actively and aggressively be self-confident and awesome and great human beings.
And the guys! I love Scott, he is just such a teenager - smart and kind of dumb at the same time, wrapped up in himself and his hormones while still trying to be there for his friends, agh. Scooott. Derek Hale's face! Isaac Lahey's face! Wait, did I talk about Victoria Argent's face before? Because she also has a great face, wow. And and and Chris Argent and his code, and Boyd, and Gerard Argent and the way Michael Hogan totally and awesomely overacted him, and Danny Mahealani, and Coach Bobby Finstock and his Independence Day speech, and Boyd, and Peter (Peter gets his own paragraph, you have no idea), and Danny,
Okay, I'm going to try. Here, let me talk about Lydia:
Lydia just works so hard at keeping herself together, being unflappable and adaptable and I am so fascinated by that, by people who can feel the ground shaking underneath them and can still put a brave face on it and do what they think needs to be done. Sometimes that makes her seem unfeeling, or just ignorant, but no! She is feeling things, she's just not going to let it slow her down. She will push through a breakdown and being attacked by a werewolf, and show up to school as soon as she's healthy, and then she'll push through being the new weird girl to be brilliant and awesome and she's totally going to win the Fields Medal with perfect makeup and a dazzling smile.
And Peter! Peter Hale is such a terrible person, and it is as if they wrote a character to push all of my buttons, every single one. It may have become known that I am ALL ABOUT amoral (or at least not very moral) characters who have their own agenda? And it helps if they're amused by the good guys, and sarcastic and sassy, and look, this is why I love the Master and why I love Malcolm Tucker, and you guys missed it because I didn't post about it, but I was totally wrapped up in Tarrlok feels for a solid two weeks. And then Peter??? Hale??? The way he eyerolls at Derek and doesn't pay much attention to the dead body in his trunk, and his constant half smile on his stupid face and wow, rude, how are you a character that exists.
And Scott is a POC (even if it's not brought up explicitly in the show, but anyway, the lead actor in this show is a POC if nothing else), and Danny Mahealani is a gay POC that everyone likes and is always treated pretty damn well by the narrative, and Vet Deaton and the French teacher are around being awesome mysterious competent POCs and everything is beautiful. And there's single parents because of the death of a parent, or because the other parent is hinted to be an asshole, and sure, they're having a tough time but the suggestion that Melissa McCall is somehow NOT ENOUGH for Scott is treated as offensive and ignorant. And that happens a lot! Things that I expect shows to bring up and then kind of pass off as somehow unimportant are not passed off - men being creepy at women is treated as shitty and creepy, the good guys face repercussions for doing irresponsible things (even with good intentions), letting your grades slip has serious consequences. There's not even any homophobic freakouts from the teen boys, even though there's about a hundred places where a certain kind of writer would have just automatically added one in. Every time the characters just roll with a scene instead of breaking out 'no homo' or 'but not in a gay way,' something inside of me comes back to life. Like, I realize Jeff Davis (the show runner) is an out gay man, but Mark Gatiss has taught me not to trust this as any kind of sign of how an issue is going to be handled. But Jeff Davis! Jeff Davis, you restore some of my hope.
Jeff Davis is also pretty chill about fandom and shipping and is talking to fans about making one of the established characters bisexual, and I want to be in this fandom so much and hang out and wait for the third season, it cannot come soon enough, but nope, can't do it. And this is driving me up a wall. Because I love this show! I love its comedy, and its seriousness, and its terrible cheesy season two opening sequence, but the fandom is pretty focused on stuff that I just can't deal with.
I can't read underage, and surprise, most of the characters in Teen Wolf are 16, there's a lot of underage. In Homestuck I got through this by the fact that everyone was underage, a lot of them were aliens, it's a comic, man, chill, this is good fic. But in Teen Wolf fandom the main pairing (Stiles/Derek) has a large age difference and a lot of the fic has a power imbalance towards the older guy and nope, nope, can't do it. I can't even browse for fics in that pairing because running into one that has underage and dubcon and the characters thinking that this is all totally romantic just turns me off fic altogether, and those kinds of fics are everywhere. I'm not saying people shouldn't write underage Stiles/Derek, because it's not really my business, but the problem for me is that this fandom produces practically nothing else. I want Lydia-centric genfic and Erica/Boyd/Stiles/Isaac and Danny/Stiles and a LOT more fic about the adults because Coach Finstock and Victoria Argent and Chris Argent and Vet Deaton and Melissa McCall all rock my world. But the rare pairings or rare characters in this fandom are rare to the point of two or three fics out of thousands, and I've already read everything I can find. I gave up on reading Peter Hale fic, because I always think that I can read incest but no, no I cannot, nope. And seeing it in the warning bar does not dissuade me because PETER HALE, but it is always a mistake for me.
So I am stuck with all these feelings, and I don't even like horror, and I find season-length plots kind of tedious, but this show sucked me in with humor and adorableness, and now I'm literally flapping my hands and squeaking whenever Coach Finstock says something or Peter Hale does a thing with his face or Lydia is on screen ever, at all. I've been fandom-hopping pretty hard for a while, so I'm not sure if this depth of feeling is going to last long now that I've run out of show, but it's hitting me pretty hard right now.
Obviously. Since I just wrote a fucking essay about it.
