Looking for female characters

[schneefink]

MCSR Ranked season 10 playoffs were very exciting! With triumphs and heartbreak, depending on who you were rooting for. And I was rooting for Infume, so…

But I still don't really want to get into MCSR as a fandom, apart from the sports aspect, and one of the reasons is because currently the overwhelming majority of top runners are men. There are active efforts to include more women, from tournaments to casters etc., and I appreciate that and maybe it'll be different at some point, but that's the situation currently.

[Insert a paragraph here about all sports comes with narratives and there's not really an unambiguous dividing line between that and RPF; maybe some other time.]

I was reminded of that again because I saw glimpses of discussions in another MCYT fandom about male characters getting more fandom attention than female characters. (Flight SMP, and people point it out here in particular because it's a rare case where men are actually the minority on the server, which is fair; though otoh one of the men in question is one of the most famous people on the server by far so he already had more fans and it's a small fandom to begin with.) Some people are making good points and others really aren't, as usual. I get annoyed when people try tell me I need to do fandom a certain way.

My main fandom at the moment is Hermitcraft, which is a server with 26 members, 22 of them men. Of the four, Cleo is one of my favorite Hermits period; I watch probably more videos by Pearl, Gem, and False than I would otherwise because I want to support them. I do like Pearl and Gem and their videos a lot, I just don't feel as actively fannish about them, at least not as much as the rest of my favorite (male) Hermits. (And I like False in general but idk it's just not quite my vibe.)

I had a brief Hades 2 phase recently (I still play sometimes and enjoy it but my enthusiasm has waned) and it was really nice for a change to be in a fandom with so many female characters, where (bonus) those were also the characters I was most interested in: Melinoe, Hecate, Medea… (not the canon f/f romances, sadly. I still haven't finished those storylines because I dislike both options.)

Idk where I was going with this. Now that I think about it maybe I should think about some of those Hades 2 fic ideas a bit more.

Comments

[isis]

Have you played the Horizon games? You might enjoy them! MC is female.

[sholio]

Yeah; on the one hand, the heart wants what it wants, etc, and people can be very judgmental about what other people in fandom like. (Insisting that people ought to write characters other than the ones they want to write typically doesn't end well ...) But also, I've spent the last few years in fandoms that are dominated by male characters, or else in the slashier end of fandoms with mixed casts, and I'm really starting to miss the fandoms in which I wrote about female characters a lot! (I do want to write more about the women of B5, because there are a lot of them that I love, but unfortunately most of the story ideas I have are not currently about them ....)

[schneefink]

Sadly I currently don't have the required hardware. I tried it out for two hours once and it was fun, so it's definitely on my list of things to play once I do :)

[shadaras]

Yeah, it's very... I don't expect anything else from esports (or fandom, tbh!), but I know that I find it way easier to be fannish about canons that have women and care about women.

(With sports of any sort, I care so much more about The Game Itself than the People Playing The Game, and have basically zero interest in knowing anything about the players' lives outside the game. xD This is why I do not get into Sports Fandom, where people for some reason also often care about the people's lives too...?)

[schneefink]

(Insisting that people ought to write characters other than the ones they want to write typically doesn't end well ...)
Yeah, especially when some people claim creating fanworks about the "right" characters is a moral issue somehow. It must be an exhausting way to be fannish.

[schneefink]

For me, sports generally becomes more exciting with narratives: things like "rematch against the team/player you lost to last year" makes the stakes feel higher, and even more when you get interviews/streams where they explain just how important the game/tournament is to them. And then there's narratives like "having to defeat your good friend to advance," which become more powerful when you know more about their friendship - and it's kind of a sliding scale from there ^^

[shadaras]

I'm generally more interested in team sports than individual stuff, which I think makes the slide from "how did the team fare previously?" to "specific information about players that isn't things like 'oh so-and-so used to play for this other team' or 'so-and-so grew up with that other person'" a little less likely? idk, I hear this stuff as Interesting Trivia and then see zero reason to investigate further than what I'm told by people commentating on a given Sports. xD It truly just... isn't something I get fannish about beyond, yeah, narratives about "can this underdog team make it to the top?" or "can this team finally beat this other team? what if a new player/team wins the championship?" or the like. (And even then it's not fannish in the creative/analytic way that I get about fictional stuff; it's just investment and hope in seeing a satisfying storyline, y'know?)

[petsohp]

sorta shooting blindly here, especially because I am about to reccomend something here, BUT have any of you two heard of the esports series of players (2022)? the show has aspects of what both of you are saying, and plus, it is by far, the best series that has handled the overall environment of esports. Yes the game is Lol, and its in its proffesional setting, but the thing about esports is that....its still a sport. I watched it with my friend who only knows about american football/baseball, and while she was hesitant in the beginning because she doesn't know anything about esports nor the community, by episode 2 she goes 'i've seen this sports narrative documentary before xd'

[shadaras]

I haven't heard of this! Is this a documentary or a fiction series, and where would it be found? (I don't want to try searching such a generic title if you have the link easily to hand.)

[schneefink]

In NHL hockey it was the team media and journalists writing player profiles that went into details about their private lives - not much investigating required to get started ^^
But yeah, if there hadn't happened to be narratives I find interesting I most likely would have ignored it. I can never predict what'll grab me in a fannish way.

welcome the hellscape: the current digital era.

[petsohp]

Not really funny story, but I wanted to hunt down for you the totally legal links (:v) for the show, but all the sites I used to do my hunting have been shot down; and to add the cherry on top, you can't even watch it legally. Paramount+ did a merger in 2023 (https://www.tvline.com/news/paramount-plus-cancelled-shows-list-real-world-homecoming-1234927886/) that wiped it off its platfrom.

Anyways.... heres the wikipedia link, just to show that I didn't make the show up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Players_(2022_TV_series)

Re: welcome the hellscape: the current digital era.

[shadaras]

Oh, that's a shame, considering that Paramount+ is a streaming service I have access to, so if it were still on there I could give it a try...