Blogging In The Land Of Dragons

Let's get the boring part down first- I think I found the major reason for my misery. I just got blood work done and it showed my vitamin D levels are very low. This can cause depression and mood swings. I think this may have been an underlying problem all long.

With that out of the way, my God are the House fans breaking out the tin foil hats! Since the fan base consists mostly of women, accusations of the writers hating females and portraying them as weak get flung around. It seems these days if women aren't handled with kiddy gloves with their weaknesses sugarcoated they're "bad" characters. Because God forbid a women is shown in a weak situation that can happen in real life. And it's not just in House, it's in many other shows too. (Warning spoilers ahead for St. Elsewhere.)

For example, the 80's medical drama St Elsewhere (aka an Autistic boy's dream world) gets criticism for this same thing. Women were shown getting assaulted, raped (well off screen that is,) addicted to drugs, and put in bad situations. Many of these female characters were very well written, yet fans ignored that and zeroed in on that they got "screwed over" with plot lines. The writer Tom Fontana was accused of being a "woman killer" because he chose to put female characters in realistic situations instead of dancing around sensitive plots and making them unrealistic super goddesses. It''s no surprise the most well liked female characters on the show were the "strong" ones that had an attitude and were played safe with no tragic plot lines. And the fans also forgot that show took place in a run down hospital in a shitty neighborhood where gangs ran rampant. Between this and women being more vulnerable than men in hostile situations of course they're going to have bad things happen to them.

Not to mention the male characters had their share of horrible situations. One gets raped in a prison riot when he volunteered to work there, another got assaulted in the ER and bought a gun for safety, the black doctors and orderlys were targeted a lot, and one guy got AIDS from a woman. Same guy also had gang members break into his apartment and got attacked as well. And the doctor who raped all the women got shot and killed by- out of all people- a female nurse. But nobody objected because men get a free pass for being shown as vulnerable by the feminists.

Now back to House, the female fans are making up the craziest shit. One user on LJ demanded that people looking forward to season 8 to defend their reason of still liking this horrible woman hating show. I won't directly link out of privacy but I picked the best comments from them all (WARNING SPOILERS-)

It's misogynistic to offer Lisa a pay cut and not RSL. It just is. No one can argue she doesn't pull her weight and he does, so what else can it be based on? If it's because of attachment to feminist causes then that's still misogynistic. It might not be intentional even, but that doesn't excuse it. Maybe it's FOX overlords more to blame, but if this shit doesn't get called out, it carries on -- as that Roseanne article in NYmag showed just this week.

I'm all for House hating people. I'm not okay with him hating one group more because of which genitals they happen to have. I expect scathing comments and a sarcastic world view. I don't expect women in this show who have been strong and vibrant to be relegated to replaceable actor units. (Because Lisa needs a pay cut but god forbid RSL make any less from a job he sneers at, right? Who's done more work in terms of screen time in the past year? And we're supposed to write this snub off as coincidence?)

Another conspiracy theory- Robert Sean Leonard (Wilson) hates working on the show yet I see no proof other than fandom creation.

I'm reading as well that she was disciplined/threatened with sanctions over supporting the redefining rape campaign? Sure, FOX is a conservative whackjob of a network, but that doesn't mean this shit should go unchallenged.

Someone asked for links and they ignored that person. Go figure.

But the show itself is treating women as objects. Strippers and hookers and nurses as sex toys, oh my! Throwing 13 across a room? Yeah, she hit Chase first, but his response was disproportionate and a direct result of him exerting his physicality over her. Cuddy being slammed into a wall and other spoilery violations? Not fucking okay.

13 started the fight and kept continuing to smack the shit out of him. And Chase was horrified when he hit back. (See guys it's a-OK for a girl to hit a guy like a maniac but god forbid he defends himself...) And I don't remember Cuddy being slammed into a wall. In fact, if anyone was being abusive in this show it was Cuddy! She used tripwires on House, cut his handrail in the shower (causing him to slip. Let's not forget he's physically disabled.) and other various antics.

While I am forever going to be gutted that Lisa is gone, I am also incredibly glad she left of her own volition and left before any chauvinist executive had the pleasure of firing her. She stood up against whatever was really going on behind the curtain (which we'll never really fully know what WAS going on behind the curtain) and was the bigger person by leaving.

Where do these people get their fucking information?

Oh and non woman related crap-

I really stopped watching properly after the whole 'white privileged boy saves an African nation and then has angst issues over whether his precious white skin will be flanked or not for the murder he committed (meanwhile, a whole nation of African people are still starving and facing no end of prejudice BUT THAT'S OKAY BECAUSE WHITE PRIVILEGE BOY FIXED THEIR NATION THROUGH KILLING THEIR DICTATOR, CHASE SOLVED RACIAL HATE CRIMES AND GENOCIDE WITH A SIMPLE FLICK OF HIS PRIVILEGE)'.

BECAUSE CHASE IS WHITE AND FOREMAN IS BLACK, AND PEOPLE WILL ALWAYS HATE FOREMAN FOR BEING BLACK EVEN THOUGH THEY WILL NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS ADMIT THIS (and may not even realize they think this because it's so socially conditioned to be extra critical of black people that it's "acceptable").

And I also think the writers inflected their own bias towards people of colour into Foreman. His character seemed to sometimes do extra asshollish things for no real reason and with no real justification, and everyone would automatically go, "BOREMAN IS SUCH A FUCKING ASSHOLE, I HATE HIM" without knowing why they thought this of him.

Had Foreman killed Debala (the African leader), he would have come under SO much negative scrutiny and would have furthered the 'proof' that Foreman is a bad person. But Chase was given so many sympathetic exceptions for his actions because of his MAN PAIN (and also because he's white and OBVIOUSLY white people are so much better and less evil than people of colour).

I am not making this fucking shit up.

Oh and to top off all the batshit- A bunch of Lisa Edelstein fans made an ad for a magazine praising their beloved actor. Sounds like a nice gesture...until I found out they blew 8000 dollars to get it printed! And it looks awful too! Yeah I know they can do whatever they want with their money but that could have easily been used for better purposes. Lisa supports a shitload of charities, why not use the money to donate to them instead?

Now that I got all this off my chest, here's the rundown of the fabricated fandom tales-

1.) The writers are women haters
2.) It's ok for a girl to go batshit insane on a man but if he defends himself it's abuse.
3.) The writers are biased against black people and apparently "privileged white men" in the show's universe are horrible people.
4.) Robert Sean Leonard hates his job.
5.) Lisa Edelstein was punished for leaving.

Keep in mind that many of these House fans are adults who are married and hold jobs, but act like gossiping teenagers. Yet if I didn't look at their profiles I would have pegged them as 15 year old brats depending on their behavior.

And for those of you tired of me ranting about the show- well this is my definitive journal on the fandom. I have been removing past journals on the subject as well as tweets too. So this will be my major rant on the subject. Instead of bombarding people with angry journals I'll periodically update this one.

So yeah. All the vitamin D supplements I have to take, eating foods with said vitamin, and going out on more of my adventurous walks BETTER work.

To end this blog entry on a happy note here's a disturbing looking Weird Al in his "Perform This Way" music video