sadface

[eleanorjane]

I do not understand fan authors who will AUify Pacific Rim so that Chuck Hansen lives, specifically so they can slash him with Raleigh, when Raleigh has a canonical het love interest with whom he has massive chemistry.

I mean, I get that some fans are exclusively slash fans. And I am all for giving heteronormativity the finger. (Hur hur hur.) But I am so sick of women being disappeared so that people can tell even more stories about dudes, and it makes me doubly sad when it happens in fandom, because I can't shake the feeling that we are better than this, and deserve better than this.

(Caveat: no offense intended to people who were genuinely interested in the dynamic of the two guys in question and wanted to explore that. It's the trends, not the specifics, that are ensaddening.)

Comments

[musesfool]

Also, Chuck is just SO GENERIC. He's douchebag with daddy issues. We've seen him a million times before in every action movie ever. I basically can't remember his name or his face until someone reminds me because he's so uninteresting to me.

[eleanorjane]

Well, yeah, that too. I mean, Raleigh has no chemistry with Chuck and basically ignores him ... until Chuck starts disrespecting Mako, at which point Raleigh throws down.

I dunno, the slash just feels really painted on in PacRim, for me. It's not an interesting exercise in "what if?" here, it's just "omg gotta slash him with someone".

(For god's sake, if they have to slash him, STACKER PENTECOST IS RIGHT THERE AND NOT ANY DEADER THAN CHUCK. I'm just saying.)

[musesfool]

I feel like if people really want slash from this movie, Stacker/Herc is the way to go. SINGLE HOT DADS WHO DRIFT TOGETHER. And it totally explains Chuck's antipathy towards Mako if she was the perceived favorite in their little blended family.

[rthstewart]

Yes. and as you both said, if you're going to slash it up, Stacker/Herc Hot Dads makes so much sense with Chuck and Mako having some sort of complex history themselves. I love that weird family dynamic and there would be such terrific backstory. I do get a little sad when I see women rub other women right out of the story.

[niqaeli]

Yeah I saw some of that on the AO3 and was genuinely bewildered. I mean, I don't actually ship Raleigh and Mako sexually (platonically, yeah, and mmmaybe romantically, but -- anyway) and one of the amazing things was the fact that they didn't feel the need to canonise it the way Hollywood always does by ending the film with a kiss, they just let it be whatever.

But I also have zero interest in pairing Raleigh with anyone else, so.

And, really, if you were gonna slash him with anyone, wouldn't it be his brother? (I mean, I don't, but -- Yancy's the only person I can even come up with as an obvious choice.)

I mean, and if you really need your white dude slash that much? There's a pair of white dudes in the film who are at least interesting and extremely relevant to the plot who do some pretty creative and incredibly key things who are respectively: aneurotypical, and physically disabled. And they have a lot of -- well, I wouldn't exactly say positive interaction, but the angry bickering is pretty much fan-nip and it's still vastly more interaction -- good, bad or indifferent -- than Chuck and Raleigh had. Oh yeah and then they drifted together.

I mean, I fucking squeed at Dr. Gottlieb's entire screen presence, not gonna lie. (I mean, I recast him in my head to Alexander Siddig because I am fucking over white dudes in general, but.) It was a marvel to have a character with a mobility impairment go around being mobility impaired and it's just a thing that is and is seen. No one comments on it, it's not a plot, it's not something that gets delved into as a source of deep angst, it's just a fucking thing, like Mako's blue hair. And, yeah, somebody somewhere had a notion of some of the effects living with chronic pain and a chronic condition can have on you, on your personality, but they didn't spell any of it out, it's all just there. Sketched in with a single stroke, the same as all the other characters. (Seriously, there was some absolutely masterful character work in this film.)

So, yeah, I don't -- I really don't get it. You're right, if you do really want to unkill someone to slash Raleigh with, honestly... Stacker makes marginally more *sense*. Stacker he had an adversarial relationship with, but also respect and, and. Yeah. Anyway!

[plasmoids]

Not to mention disappearing Mako, specifically, not only marginalizes a woman, but also a person of color, for a white dude who I initially thought WAS Raleigh when he first see him on a television screen. Until he talked, I honestly thought Raleigh was watching a newscast of himself, that's how alike they look to me. Might as well just call it self-cest, too.