Writing posts or tags about female characters being flawless and wonderfully and how they take no shit and all that, that’s good, that’s important, but at some point we have to produce fanwork about them. Like fic or meta or fanart or fanmixes or prompts or comments on stuff about them or rec lists or ANYTHING, because I’m not here to tell you how to do fandom (I say in a post where I’m telling you how to do fandom) but there’s just this gap that’s happening between the “yay ladies!” rhetoric that happens across fandoms (we’re not even gonna address the “boo ladies!” factions, we’ll have to save their souls in a different post) and the amount fic/meta/graphics produced for them.
And also the kinds of works produced for them—I’d rather have works centering on Pepper’s kidnaping and forcible injection of Extremis than another gifset of her fresh from the flames, not because I want to romanticize her pain or devalue her strength but because I’m wary of romanticizing her strength and devaluing her pain. Pain is how we connect to characters. Their suffering and their mistakes are what make them dynamic, and interacting with the difficulties of these characters’ lives is what creates a vibrant fandom. It’s like when suffragettes were agitating for votes and men were like, “but it would corrupt women to enter politics! You’re too flawless and pure to be tainted by the outside world!” And the ladies were out there marching and screaming, “Sometimes we want fucked up h/c about Natasha too!” Or something like that.
Supporting female chapters for being awesome and flawless queens something I’m so here for, especially for the kinds of women that fandom is so quick to demonize, but I’m not about this pedestal.