athenadark:

athenadark:

shut-up-teen-wolf-fandom: Kate Argent is a ‘psycho’ but Peter Hale is ‘uncle sassy’ Victoria is ‘insane’ but Chris is ‘tragic’ Allison is a ‘crazy bitch’ but Derek is ‘misunderstood’ just let that sink in. let’s roll this back Kate Argent is a psycho, she burned a…

you misunderstand, I never said that they were “good” people, but they are creations of their families. Derek’s “abuse” is a predisposition towards violence which makes sense because, guess what, he’s a werewolf and so any injuries would heal quickly unlike mental hurt. Chris’ “abuse” was taking his daughter out to begin her training as a hunter where she was perfectly protected but where fear would make her work faster.

The point I was making was that the very richness of the characters in canon means that they are not simple figures, Derek is not out there beating up teenagers just because he can, he tries to make a home for them but fails miserably and ends up using them as soldiers because he doesn’t know what he’s doing - this isn’t abuse, it’s ignorance.

Chris, as far as we can tell, has spent Allison’s life protecting her from hunting and when she throws herself into it he trains her as he was trained, as the hunter watching over her was trained. That’s not abuse, it’s tradition (yes it’s fucked up but there was reasoning behind it and Allison was protected by the hunter outside, and even Peter waited until she was out to gnaw on his spleen)

There are women in this fandom who are not shown as the wicked witch, Lydia for example, who is shown as strong and independant and sometimes the only one with her head screwed on right. Erica is never shown as anything other than a girl who was given power and enjoys the power her sexuality gives her over others and whose fews acts of wanton violence are reined in - by Derek.

So take your argument about feminism somewhere else because in this case at least the women are rich and detailed, they occupy traditional male roles (Kate as the seducer for example) and stand toe to toe with the men. That is what feminism is trying to achieve. Yes fandom needs to come a long way in how they present these women, but teen wolf is one of the few fandoms where it’s not truly awful. Seriously, try something like Weiss Kreuz where the strong trained female agents are completely written off or as villains. Or Gundam Wing in which Relena Peacecraft goes from diplomat and activist to sappy girl who stands on cliffs shouting the hero’s name.

I made a post the other day about how we should give our female characters the same richness as we do our male, but here’s the thing, that same weighting means they can be villains, and they can be heroes and they can be everything in between, because we, as women, can. But here’s the thing, so can the men in fandom, that means Chris is tragic because his circumstances make him so, that means Derek can be abusive or abused and broken, it’s how we as writers interpret them because the canon is good enough to give us characters rich enough to explore.

and next time you argue with someone like this, instead of giving them a medal, how about proving your point with canon - it makes you look like much less of a douche