I stopped watching t100 once it became obvious the plot was ‘and they all suffered forever’. But this year I read my first ever Clexa fic and kinda got into it the whole thing. I never quite cared for them when they were big(I guess they’re still big) but it was so nice to see Lexa come back. Even in the weird ass circumstances. Idk it was like sometimes we lose, but we still win.
Wait, when was it that it became obvious to you, so you stopped watching, I mean? As in, in the middle of s3 or even after, meaning you watched at least some of Clexa live and didn’t get into it or before that? Because for me it was after like the first few eps, and then I spent the next couple of years resolutely not watching even when Clexa started to take over my dash.
It’s neat to be able to take what I’ve learned about my ship tastes and preferences in the last couple of years, very much in part due to analyzing what’s worked in ships for me with anons, and see why I didn’t originally warm up to it and also why I then fell so hard for it. For me, it’s exactly as you said, I originally viewed the show as grimdark edgelord, where characters were meant to suffer. And I now know explicitly what would have just been a vague feeling then that I don’t like that, I want at least the possibility of endgame, a chance to hope. And after the s2 finale, my choice felt vindicated.
And then the news of ADC returning for s3 spread and I did have some FOMO, lol, but still thought it just wouldn’t be that kind of show, relationships would always be secondary. But the bow, man! The framing of that was so romantic, so soulmate-y. Objectively so! I love that kind of thing, all mutually transformational and pining and devoted. You’re saying you weren’t into them then?? I read a few fics at the time, I remember, mostly AU because I wanted to see where the show would go in canon instead of seeing how ficcers dealt with it (lol).
And of course that framing was why what came after was so painful, a bait and switch of the worst type, exacerbated by the underrepresented marginalized group they were leading on. I dove pretty deeply into fics then, canon and AU, and only slowly moved into other fandoms. Which fic did you read that made you get into them? And yeah, I guess they’re still big, or at least, the once and always fans who’ve returned now show how it’ll always be remembered. But man, it was something then, a singular force. I’ve never seen anything like that for f/f. But I guess if you missed out on that, you also missed out on how it all ended, which, not the worst thing!
You got kind of the best of both worlds, being able to get into it without the shock and then getting her back! I know it wasn’t her her, everyone does, the feelings are so mixed, but I think it still ended up providing a bit of closure and healing something that’d been scabbed over for four years. Part of what hurt so much then was that we knew that on every level, Lexa was something amazing, even as just a business decision, never mind as an artistic and representational character. We’re always told that part of the reason we don’t get more mainstream f/f content is that the audience support isn’t there, but it was here, critical and commercial success in every way! And yet, none of that was enough to save her, they would rather hurt the show than keep her. It was shocking and such a clear reminder of our place in the world, or so it felt. So to see her come back at the end and be treated even a little as how we always saw her, this hugely significant person to Clarke and the show and even closing off the whole series, it finally settled something in us that’d been feeling so wrong all these years. As you said, even as a loss, it felt like a win.
What happened on March 3rd 2016?
That was the date of episode 3×07 of The 100, where Lexa, one half of Clexa, was killed a minute after finally getting together with her main character love interest. She’d been introduced the previous season and then returned to much fanfare the next, with fans invited to come to the taping of the season finale with her in it. Turns out she’d been killed some episodes before and what appeared in that ep was an AI construct.
Fans carry a LOT of distrust over that, especially since the rest of 2016 seemed to only confirm those feelings of being a target by continuing to kill so many more f/f characters. As shows have slowly started to replenish that lost rep, people are beginning to relax, but I suppose this fandom experience is reminding people of Clexa, a canon f/f fandom this invested and enthusiastic and large.
Orphan Black is racist.
So, yeah, Cosima’s dreads are racist, we all know that. But that is not the (only) reason Orphan Black is racist! Since there is no day like today and all that, I’m gonna talk about Orphan Black’s racism.
The [Orphan Black Wikia] and [IMDB] are going to be my main sources, JSYK. Anyways, what I was going to say…
Fact: Almost everyone in the show is white.
We’re talking about a show that is based in Toronto, a city were Chinese, Indian/South Asian and Filipino people make 27% of the population, and Black people are a good 9%. Latinxs and other racial minorities add to make it so 50% of Toronto isn’t white
[Wiki], and yet almost everyone we see in the show, both characters and extras, are white.
And, yeah, the LEDA and CASTOR clones are white, so we can assume most of the main characters are going to be white clones. Cool, all racism is forgiven, right? Wrong. Out of the totality of named non-clones we have:
- 36 white characters (6 main, 11 recurring).
- 9 characters of color (1 main, 1 recurring and Allison’s two adopted kids).
And the numbers become even more abysmal if we include the clones, with 14 LEDA clones (6 of them with prominent storylines) and 7 CASTOR clones (3 of them with prominent storylines).
The only regular/recurring characters of color are:
- Art, an “angry black cop” whose entire storyline is helping Sarah.
- Vic, a brown drugdealer who is abusive, always portrayed as stupid and always being physically hurt, manipulated or threatened (usually by white characters).
- Gemma and Oscar, Allison’s adoptive children, who are never granted the same level of agency and screentime as Kira (Sarah’s white child) is.
We have dead characters of color:
- Amelia, whose only role in the narrative is being the womb were Sarah and Helena were gestated and dies violently (at a white clone’s hand) during her only episode.
- Maggie Chen, who was dead from the very beginning, killed by another white clone, and her only purpose is to be a dead villain.
And vanishing characters of color, too:
- Janis, a coroner who shows up in three episodes and has no story.
- Meera, Allison’s neighbor with no storyline besides being a vaguely antagonistic figure, shows up in four episodes.
- Raj, an IT guy in Beth’s precinct who has no personality besides being kind to Beth/Sarah and only shows up in three episodes.
BONUS: Ramon, a white character with an Hispanic-sounding name who deals drugs and guns!So, no, it’s not Cosima’s shitty, culturally-appropriative dreads that make the show racist. It’s the show’s racism. Y’all are surprised that [the show is lesbophobic/sapphobic as fuck], but you never cared to discuss its racism (and shut down every attempt at criticism in the past couple years) so now the fact that they don’t actually care for respectful writing and healthy representation has blindsided all y’all.
Opinion: The show ruined itself by being racist.
I mean, in my opinion, all-white casts automatically doom a show. I’ve talked about how difficult it is for me to watch mainly-white shows because I just cannot stop noticing the lack of realism, I can’t stop realizing just how many people of all races I see everyday when I look at a shot of a busy street and I see only white people. It looks unnatural. It throws me off. And yet, at the beginning, I was willing to push through the overwhelming whiteness of it all because the story being told made it worth my while.
But the show ruined its own narrative when they created CASTOR but refused to cast actors of color in a bunch of recurring roles. CASTOR only made sense within Orphan Black’s narrative about autonomy, oppression and the possession of the body if the “male” clones were actors of color.
The show worked in S1/S2 because each clone represented a way in which different institutions owned the female-perceived body: Helena belonged to a religious institution, Allison was ruled by the boundaries and obligations of the suburban family life, Beth was part of the police and so belonged to the State, Rachel was owned by the corporate world and, along with Cosima, was both a scientific subject and a scientist, owned and ruled by scientists. Sarah, even as she was presented as “the only outside player”, was weighed by her motherhood first and her romantic relationships second. I can’t find these posts now, but many people wrote great analysis on this theme and I loved this about OB.
It worked because it was a story about women, about how the Powers That Be want to own women. And what’s a clearer ownership than creating them, patenting them, tagging them as a corporation’s property; imposing romantic partners on them as a way to manipulate them, gaslight them and control them; invading their bodies and controlling their every physical change, deciding whether they can procreate or not? Orphan Black was called [TV’s Most Important Debate On Reproductive Rights At The Moment], and (despite its racism) i think it really deserved that title.
And yet, when they could have extended their narrative to a discussion about how the brown/black male-perceived body is also owned, exploited and invaded by institutions, about how State and corporate interests kill brown men when they are not useful to them, about how the Powers That Be don’t want brown men to reproduce. Damn, I know I read an excellent post about Art-clones like two years ago.
But they chose to cast a white dude for the next batch of clones, because apparently whiteness wins over good storytelling, and the whole metaphor fucking fell apart.
PS: if anyone has the posts I’m talking about, I would greatly appreciate being linked to them! I cleaned up my blog a few months back and deleted a lot of good meta that I haven’t been able to find again.
EDIT: not all, but [here is one] of the Clone!Art posts I was talking about.
Even if y’all don’t agree with me on the second part, the purposeful and unrealistic whiteness of the show is undeniable and undeniably racist. Cosima’s dreads are racist. Its treatment of Amelia was racist. The myriad of stereotypes and the constant violence thrown at Vic are racist. The sidelining of Arthur Bell is racist. So, as I was saying….
Orphan Black is racist.
I’ve been thinking about this post since yesterday and the thing is…it’s not new information, right. It was pointed out. And it’s not that we all didn’t care, it’s just, like everyone knows, there’s no perfect media, you have to switch some part of your sensibilities off and ultimately it’s up to you how much you can tolerate. When it comes to representation, a lot of media will get some things right, some things not so much. There’ve been a ton of examples lately, they’ll have strong white women, or they’ll have LGBT content, or they’ll have strong PoC representation, but aside from a very few shows (yay, Shonda), most don’t even manage to do two of those well.
And we’re all so desperate for anything that represents us. We’ll watch PoC-led shows that aren’t great on LGBT, and as with OB and The 100, we’ll watch LGBT shows that are pretty darn racist. And we’ll think so what if it isn’t great in that respect, it’s good enough in this.
But it’s not?? As OP points out, how were we surprised that OB’d turn out to be this tonedeaf and cringeworthy about LGBT issues when they were so ignorant when it came to race? Multiplied by a thousand for The 100. If they can misunderstand and mistreat one marginalized group, why did we think they’d be different when it came to another? Especially when they were part of neither.
I think this is proof that we can’t just let some things go and praise them for others. Praise, sure, when due, but definitely call out problems. We must demand better in every way.
Orphan Black is racist.
So, yeah, Cosima’s dreads are racist, we all know that. But that is not the (only) reason Orphan Black is racist! Since there is no day like today and all that, I’m gonna talk about Orphan Black’s racism.
The [Orphan Black Wikia] and [IMDB] are going to be my main sources, JSYK. Anyways, what I was going to say…
Fact: Almost everyone in the show is white.
We’re talking about a show that is based in Toronto, a city were Chinese, Indian/South Asian and Filipino people make 27% of the population, and Black people are a good 9%. Latinxs and other racial minorities add to make it so 50% of Toronto isn’t white
[Wiki], and yet almost everyone we see in the show, both characters and extras, are white.
And, yeah, the LEDA and CASTOR clones are white, so we can assume most of the main characters are going to be white clones. Cool, all racism is forgiven, right? Wrong. Out of the totality of named non-clones we have:
- 36 white characters (6 main, 11 recurring).
- 9 characters of color (1 main, 1 recurring and Allison’s two adopted kids).
And the numbers become even more abysmal if we include the clones, with 14 LEDA clones (6 of them with prominent storylines) and 7 CASTOR clones (3 of them with prominent storylines).
The only regular/recurring characters of color are:
- Art, an “angry black cop” whose entire storyline is helping Sarah.
- Vic, a brown drugdealer who is abusive, always portrayed as stupid and always being physically hurt, manipulated or threatened (usually by white characters).
- Gemma and Oscar, Allison’s adoptive children, who are never granted the same level of agency and screentime as Kira (Sarah’s white child) is.
We have dead characters of color:
- Amelia, whose only role in the narrative is being the womb were Sarah and Helena were gestated and dies violently (at a white clone’s hand) during her only episode.
- Maggie Chen, who was dead from the very beginning, killed by another white clone, and her only purpose is to be a dead villain.
And vanishing characters of color, too:
- Janis, a coroner who shows up in three episodes and has no story.
- Meera, Allison’s neighbor with no storyline besides being a vaguely antagonistic figure, shows up in four episodes.
- Raj, an IT guy in Beth’s precinct who has no personality besides being kind to Beth/Sarah and only shows up in three episodes.
BONUS: Ramon, a white character with an Hispanic-sounding name who deals drugs and guns!So, no, it’s not Cosima’s shitty, culturally-appropriative dreads that make the show racist. It’s the show’s racism. Y’all are surprised that [the show is lesbophobic/sapphobic as fuck], but you never cared to discuss its racism (and shut down every attempt at criticism in the past couple years) so now the fact that they don’t actually care for respectful writing and healthy representation has blindsided all y’all.
Opinion: The show ruined itself by being racist.
I mean, in my opinion, all-white casts automatically doom a show. I’ve talked about how difficult it is for me to watch mainly-white shows because I just cannot stop noticing the lack of realism, I can’t stop realizing just how many people of all races I see everyday when I look at a shot of a busy street and I see only white people. It looks unnatural. It throws me off. And yet, at the beginning, I was willing to push through the overwhelming whiteness of it all because the story being told made it worth my while.
But the show ruined its own narrative when they created CASTOR but refused to cast actors of color in a bunch of recurring roles. CASTOR only made sense within Orphan Black’s narrative about autonomy, oppression and the possession of the body if the “male” clones were actors of color.
The show worked in S1/S2 because each clone represented a way in which different institutions owned the female-perceived body: Helena belonged to a religious institution, Allison was ruled by the boundaries and obligations of the suburban family life, Beth was part of the police and so belonged to the State, Rachel was owned by the corporate world and, along with Cosima, was both a scientific subject and a scientist, owned and ruled by scientists. Sarah, even as she was presented as “the only outside player”, was weighed by her motherhood first and her romantic relationships second. I can’t find these posts now, but many people wrote great analysis on this theme and I loved this about OB.
It worked because it was a story about women, about how the Powers That Be want to own women. And what’s a clearer ownership than creating them, patenting them, tagging them as a corporation’s property; imposing romantic partners on them as a way to manipulate them, gaslight them and control them; invading their bodies and controlling their every physical change, deciding whether they can procreate or not? Orphan Black was called [TV’s Most Important Debate On Reproductive Rights At The Moment], and (despite its racism) i think it really deserved that title.
And yet, when they could have extended their narrative to a discussion about how the brown/black male-perceived body is also owned, exploited and invaded by institutions, about how State and corporate interests kill brown men when they are not useful to them, about how the Powers That Be don’t want brown men to reproduce. Damn, I know I read an excellent post about Art-clones like two years ago.
But they chose to cast a white dude for the next batch of clones, because apparently whiteness wins over good storytelling, and the whole metaphor fucking fell apart.
PS: if anyone has the posts I’m talking about, I would greatly appreciate being linked to them! I cleaned up my blog a few months back and deleted a lot of good meta that I haven’t been able to find again.
EDIT: not all, but [here is one] of the Clone!Art posts I was talking about.
Even if y’all don’t agree with me on the second part, the purposeful and unrealistic whiteness of the show is undeniable and undeniably racist. Cosima’s dreads are racist. Its treatment of Amelia was racist. The myriad of stereotypes and the constant violence thrown at Vic are racist. The sidelining of Arthur Bell is racist. So, as I was saying….
Orphan Black is racist.
I’ve been thinking about this post since yesterday and the thing is…it’s not new information, right. It was pointed out. And it’s not that we all didn’t care, it’s just, like everyone knows, there’s no perfect media, you have to switch some part of your sensibilities off and ultimately it’s up to you how much you can tolerate. When it comes to representation, a lot of media will get some things right, some things not so much. There’ve been a ton of examples lately, they’ll have strong white women, or they’ll have LGBT content, or they’ll have strong PoC representation, but aside from a very few shows (yay, Shonda), most don’t even manage to do two of those well.
And we’re all so desperate for anything that represents us. We’ll watch PoC-led shows that aren’t great on LGBT, and as with OB and The 100, we’ll watch LGBT shows that are pretty darn racist. And we’ll think so what if it isn’t great in that respect, it’s good enough in this.
But it’s not?? As OP points out, how were we surprised that OB’d turn out to be this tonedeaf and cringeworthy about LGBT issues when they were so ignorant when it came to race? Multiplied by a thousand for The 100. If they can misunderstand and mistreat one marginalized group, why did we think they’d be different when it came to another? Especially when they were part of neither.
I think this is proof that we can’t just let some things go and praise them for others. Praise, sure, when due, but definitely call out problems. We must demand better in every way.
Orphan Black is racist.
So, yeah, Cosima’s dreads are racist, we all know that. But that is not the (only) reason Orphan Black is racist! Since there is no day like today and all that, I’m gonna talk about Orphan Black’s racism.
The [Orphan Black Wikia] and [IMDB] are going to be my main sources, JSYK. Anyways, what I was going to say…
Fact: Almost everyone in the show is white.
We’re talking about a show that is based in Toronto, a city were Chinese, Indian/South Asian and Filipino people make 27% of the population, and Black people are a good 9%. Latinxs and other racial minorities add to make it so 50% of Toronto isn’t white
[Wiki], and yet almost everyone we see in the show, both characters and extras, are white.
And, yeah, the LEDA and CASTOR clones are white, so we can assume most of the main characters are going to be white clones. Cool, all racism is forgiven, right? Wrong. Out of the totality of named non-clones we have:
- 36 white characters (6 main, 11 recurring).
- 9 characters of color (1 main, 1 recurring and Allison’s two adopted kids).
And the numbers become even more abysmal if we include the clones, with 14 LEDA clones (6 of them with prominent storylines) and 7 CASTOR clones (3 of them with prominent storylines).
The only regular/recurring characters of color are:
- Art, an “angry black cop” whose entire storyline is helping Sarah.
- Vic, a brown drugdealer who is abusive, always portrayed as stupid and always being physically hurt, manipulated or threatened (usually by white characters).
- Gemma and Oscar, Allison’s adoptive children, who are never granted the same level of agency and screentime as Kira (Sarah’s white child) is.
We have dead characters of color:
- Amelia, whose only role in the narrative is being the womb were Sarah and Helena were gestated and dies violently (at a white clone’s hand) during her only episode.
- Maggie Chen, who was dead from the very beginning, killed by another white clone, and her only purpose is to be a dead villain.
And vanishing characters of color, too:
- Janis, a coroner who shows up in three episodes and has no story.
- Meera, Allison’s neighbor with no storyline besides being a vaguely antagonistic figure, shows up in four episodes.
- Raj, an IT guy in Beth’s precinct who has no personality besides being kind to Beth/Sarah and only shows up in three episodes.
BONUS: Ramon, a white character with an Hispanic-sounding name who deals drugs and guns!So, no, it’s not Cosima’s shitty, culturally-appropriative dreads that make the show racist. It’s the show’s racism. Y’all are surprised that [the show is lesbophobic/sapphobic as fuck], but you never cared to discuss its racism (and shut down every attempt at criticism in the past couple years) so now the fact that they don’t actually care for respectful writing and healthy representation has blindsided all y’all.
Opinion: The show ruined itself by being racist.
I mean, in my opinion, all-white casts automatically doom a show. I’ve talked about how difficult it is for me to watch mainly-white shows because I just cannot stop noticing the lack of realism, I can’t stop realizing just how many people of all races I see everyday when I look at a shot of a busy street and I see only white people. It looks unnatural. It throws me off. And yet, at the beginning, I was willing to push through the overwhelming whiteness of it all because the story being told made it worth my while.
But the show ruined its own narrative when they created CASTOR but refused to cast actors of color in a bunch of recurring roles. CASTOR only made sense within Orphan Black’s narrative about autonomy, oppression and the possession of the body if the “male” clones were actors of color.
The show worked in S1/S2 because each clone represented a way in which different institutions owned the female-perceived body: Helena belonged to a religious institution, Allison was ruled by the boundaries and obligations of the suburban family life, Beth was part of the police and so belonged to the State, Rachel was owned by the corporate world and, along with Cosima, was both a scientific subject and a scientist, owned and ruled by scientists. Sarah, even as she was presented as “the only outside player”, was weighed by her motherhood first and her romantic relationships second. I can’t find these posts now, but many people wrote great analysis on this theme and I loved this about OB.
It worked because it was a story about women, about how the Powers That Be want to own women. And what’s a clearer ownership than creating them, patenting them, tagging them as a corporation’s property; imposing romantic partners on them as a way to manipulate them, gaslight them and control them; invading their bodies and controlling their every physical change, deciding whether they can procreate or not? Orphan Black was called [TV’s Most Important Debate On Reproductive Rights At The Moment], and (despite its racism) i think it really deserved that title.
And yet, when they could have extended their narrative to a discussion about how the brown/black male-perceived body is also owned, exploited and invaded by institutions, about how State and corporate interests kill brown men when they are not useful to them, about how the Powers That Be don’t want brown men to reproduce. Damn, I know I read an excellent post about Art-clones like two years ago.
But they chose to cast a white dude for the next batch of clones, because apparently whiteness wins over good storytelling, and the whole metaphor fucking fell apart.
PS: if anyone has the posts I’m talking about, I would greatly appreciate being linked to them! I cleaned up my blog a few months back and deleted a lot of good meta that I haven’t been able to find again.
EDIT: not all, but [here is one] of the Clone!Art posts I was talking about.
Even if y’all don’t agree with me on the second part, the purposeful and unrealistic whiteness of the show is undeniable and undeniably racist. Cosima’s dreads are racist. Its treatment of Amelia was racist. The myriad of stereotypes and the constant violence thrown at Vic are racist. The sidelining of Arthur Bell is racist. So, as I was saying….
Orphan Black is racist.
I’ve been thinking about this post since yesterday and the thing is…it’s not new information, right. It was pointed out. And it’s not that we all didn’t care, it’s just, like everyone knows, there’s no perfect media, you have to switch some part of your sensibilities off and ultimately it’s up to you how much you can tolerate. When it comes to representation, a lot of media will get some things right, some things not so much. There’ve been a ton of examples lately, they’ll have strong white women, or they’ll have LGBT content, or they’ll have strong PoC representation, but aside from a very few shows (yay, Shonda), most don’t even manage to do two of those well.
And we’re all so desperate for anything that represents us. We’ll watch PoC-led shows that aren’t great on LGBT, and as with OB and The 100, we’ll watch LGBT shows that are pretty darn racist. And we’ll think so what if it isn’t great in that respect, it’s good enough in this.
But it’s not?? As OP points out, how were we surprised that OB’d turn out to be this tonedeaf and cringeworthy about LGBT issues when they were so ignorant when it came to race? Multiplied by a thousand for The 100. If they can misunderstand and mistreat one marginalized group, why did we think they’d be different when it came to another? Especially when they were part of neither.
I think this is proof that we can’t just let some things go and praise them for others. Praise, sure, when due, but definitely call out problems. We must demand better in every way.
