Day 3: My Least Favorite Character
Feb. 2nd, 2011 12:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blackfrancineDay three is supposed to be on my least favorite character. And this was a tough one. A little while ago, it probably would’ve been Xander. Because of his mansplaining in Into the Woods and slut shaming in… well, too many episodes to count, really. But. I’ve sort of had a Come to Jesus moment with Xander (in this scenario, Xander is not Jesus. I don’t know who is—but it isn’t Xander). I’m still not crazy about him, but my seething hatred has dissipated.
Willow was another contender—mainly for her baby talk. Snuggly wuggly? Smoochies? Ugh. I can’t stand baby talk. Not to mention the “Baby” talk with Tara—them calling each other “Baby” and “Sweetie” all the time. Gag me. But that hardly seems like grounds to award her the Least Favorite Character title.
I realize that everyone is going to think that I’m a total freak and that no one in the entire world feels the way I do about this character, but whatever. I’m a lone wolf. A renegade. I follow the beat of my own drum and all that.
So, without further ado, the Least Favorite Character title goes to…
Veruca.
So. I know. No one but me cares that Veruca exists at all. I get it. She’s in what? 2 episodes? So few appearances, and yet my hatred for her burns hotter than the fires of a thousand suns. And maybe it’s cheating to choose her as my least favorite character—because she’s obviously effective. I mean, come on, she got the job done: she’s a Bad Guy, so I’m supposed to hate her. But I don’t know that she ever meant to be this effective.
Now, I like Willow and Oz. And, heck, I like Oz by himself. But my dislike of Veruca has very little to do with how she interfered with their relationship or even with how she tried to seduce Oz into evil, reckless wolfiness. My dislike of Veruca is centered wholly around what she represents to feminism.
There’s a certain type of misogyny in our culture that operates largely through consumerism—and it basically proclaims feminine things—items marketed to women—to be less *cool* than items marketed to men. For instance Kerouac is cool; Joyce Carol Oates is not. The Ramones or Led Zepplin or The National are cool; The Monkees or New Kids on the Block or Miley Cyrus aren’t. Chuck Taylor tennis shoes are cool; high heels aren’t. Coolness is the realm of men. And yet, it’s something that we’re all supposed to aspire to.
There’s a lot of women who freely subscribe to these standards—shaming women who are attracted to more traditionally feminine media and consumer goods. A lot of these women consider themselves feminists while still openly condemning the feminine as being inferior to the masculine. And that’s who Veruca is.
She’s the girl who thinks of herself as a freewheeling good time girl. Someone who can’t be brought down with your bourgeoisie hangups, man. And yet she undermines Willow to her boyfriend because Willow is too girly to know music jargon. And she’s the girl who condemns the eating habits of other women—women, who, by the way are presumably being swayed by conventional ideas of female attractiveness. But with no hint of awareness, Veruca blames the women for not being cool enough to throw off the ubiquitous messages of beauty expectations, saying “I like to eat. I hate chicks who are like, "does it have dressing on it?"
I said somewhere else a while back that I sort of think of Veruca as the Taylor Swift of BtVS. Not Taylor Swift the actual human person—but the incarnation in that song about “She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts.” I know, this sounds ridiculous—but GOD that song infuriates me. And for the exact same reason that Veruca does.
Here’s some of the lyrics:
You’re on the phone with your girlfriend, shes upset
Shes going off about something that you said
Cause she doesn’t get your humor like I do
I’m in my room, it’s a typical Tuesday night
I’m listening to the kind of music she doesn’t like
And she’ll never know your story like I do
But she wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts
She’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers
Dreaming about the day when you wake up
And find what you’re looking for has been here the whole time
If you could see that I’m the one who understands you
Been here all along so why can’t you see
You belong with me, you belong with me
The speaker in the song—let’s call her Taylor—believes her friend/love interest is better off with her because she knows his soul. How can we tell that she knows his soul? Well, duh. Through the products she purchases with her allowance. The contents of her iTunes, her worn concert T-shirts, her collection of Monty Python DVDs. THESE ARE HER SOUL. Except… they’re not. And the high heels and the cheerleading skirt and the bedazzled cell phone aren’t her adversary’s soul either. None of that shit matters. None of that shit tells you anything about how cool a person is. But Taylor thinks it does. And Veruca thinks it does. And they both wield their guy’s-girl coolness as a weapon, attempting to steal another woman’s boyfriend. It just… chaps my hide.
Also, I don't know if anyone else is watching Cornell West on Craig Ferguson right now, but, man. I love that guy. Cornell West needs to just go door to door teaching people. He's so warm and engaging and almost hypnotic in his speaking cadence. But man, so much kindness and wisdom. It warms my heart to hear him speak.
Willow was another contender—mainly for her baby talk. Snuggly wuggly? Smoochies? Ugh. I can’t stand baby talk. Not to mention the “Baby” talk with Tara—them calling each other “Baby” and “Sweetie” all the time. Gag me. But that hardly seems like grounds to award her the Least Favorite Character title.
I realize that everyone is going to think that I’m a total freak and that no one in the entire world feels the way I do about this character, but whatever. I’m a lone wolf. A renegade. I follow the beat of my own drum and all that.
So, without further ado, the Least Favorite Character title goes to…
Veruca.
So. I know. No one but me cares that Veruca exists at all. I get it. She’s in what? 2 episodes? So few appearances, and yet my hatred for her burns hotter than the fires of a thousand suns. And maybe it’s cheating to choose her as my least favorite character—because she’s obviously effective. I mean, come on, she got the job done: she’s a Bad Guy, so I’m supposed to hate her. But I don’t know that she ever meant to be this effective.
Now, I like Willow and Oz. And, heck, I like Oz by himself. But my dislike of Veruca has very little to do with how she interfered with their relationship or even with how she tried to seduce Oz into evil, reckless wolfiness. My dislike of Veruca is centered wholly around what she represents to feminism.
There’s a certain type of misogyny in our culture that operates largely through consumerism—and it basically proclaims feminine things—items marketed to women—to be less *cool* than items marketed to men. For instance Kerouac is cool; Joyce Carol Oates is not. The Ramones or Led Zepplin or The National are cool; The Monkees or New Kids on the Block or Miley Cyrus aren’t. Chuck Taylor tennis shoes are cool; high heels aren’t. Coolness is the realm of men. And yet, it’s something that we’re all supposed to aspire to.
There’s a lot of women who freely subscribe to these standards—shaming women who are attracted to more traditionally feminine media and consumer goods. A lot of these women consider themselves feminists while still openly condemning the feminine as being inferior to the masculine. And that’s who Veruca is.
She’s the girl who thinks of herself as a freewheeling good time girl. Someone who can’t be brought down with your bourgeoisie hangups, man. And yet she undermines Willow to her boyfriend because Willow is too girly to know music jargon. And she’s the girl who condemns the eating habits of other women—women, who, by the way are presumably being swayed by conventional ideas of female attractiveness. But with no hint of awareness, Veruca blames the women for not being cool enough to throw off the ubiquitous messages of beauty expectations, saying “I like to eat. I hate chicks who are like, "does it have dressing on it?"
I said somewhere else a while back that I sort of think of Veruca as the Taylor Swift of BtVS. Not Taylor Swift the actual human person—but the incarnation in that song about “She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts.” I know, this sounds ridiculous—but GOD that song infuriates me. And for the exact same reason that Veruca does.
Here’s some of the lyrics:
You’re on the phone with your girlfriend, shes upset
Shes going off about something that you said
Cause she doesn’t get your humor like I do
I’m in my room, it’s a typical Tuesday night
I’m listening to the kind of music she doesn’t like
And she’ll never know your story like I do
But she wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts
She’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers
Dreaming about the day when you wake up
And find what you’re looking for has been here the whole time
If you could see that I’m the one who understands you
Been here all along so why can’t you see
You belong with me, you belong with me
The speaker in the song—let’s call her Taylor—believes her friend/love interest is better off with her because she knows his soul. How can we tell that she knows his soul? Well, duh. Through the products she purchases with her allowance. The contents of her iTunes, her worn concert T-shirts, her collection of Monty Python DVDs. THESE ARE HER SOUL. Except… they’re not. And the high heels and the cheerleading skirt and the bedazzled cell phone aren’t her adversary’s soul either. None of that shit matters. None of that shit tells you anything about how cool a person is. But Taylor thinks it does. And Veruca thinks it does. And they both wield their guy’s-girl coolness as a weapon, attempting to steal another woman’s boyfriend. It just… chaps my hide.
Also, I don't know if anyone else is watching Cornell West on Craig Ferguson right now, but, man. I love that guy. Cornell West needs to just go door to door teaching people. He's so warm and engaging and almost hypnotic in his speaking cadence. But man, so much kindness and wisdom. It warms my heart to hear him speak.
