To Stop Using This Term - Tumblr Posts

Sometimes tumblr takes established academic terms for discussing social issues around systematic oppression and privilege, and strips all reasonable nuance and utility from those terms in order to use them as blunt force weapons in fandom wank.

Other times, tumblr seems to create its own nonsense terms, like 'female coded' male characters.

My biggest problem with that term is that it seems to almost always refer to badly written characters. Is it a problem that many female characters are still poorly written? That they are often relegated to secondary characters or passive narrative objects in someone else's story, that many female characters are written to lack agency even in their own narratives? Yes. Yes it is.

But the misogyny comes from the lack of well written stories about girls/women as compared to stories about boys/men, not when individuals dislike any given badly written character. Especially not when someone dislikes a badly written male character!

Trying to justify liking poorly written male characters on moral grounds by labeling them 'female coded' also implies that bad writing is an inherent trait of female characters. Which, I would argue, actually indicates a much more dismal view towards fictional women than someone who doesn't like a male character with a shoddy narrative that treats him more like a passive object than a person.

Characters are not real people, people are allowed to dislike a fictional character on the basis of bad writing, and for the love of god please stop conflating 'passive narrative object' with 'inherent trait of a female character'!