(no subject) : comments [zeegoeshere]

yes yes yes yes yes. worlds of yes. WORLDS of yes.

I think bandom's race issues are twofold 1) most people consider the majority of folks white even when they are not white 2) we are either villainizing or just plain ignoring folks of color.

Gabe gets cast as villain a ridiculous amount and GCH gets ignored despite Travis and William's dynamic being one of the slashiest dynamics out there and it's ridiculous.

People in bandom tend to pretend we are issue free and it's really really dangerous. We do have race issues (and plenty of other issues), and by not talking about them, like, ever we are pretty much ensuring we always will.

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The Gabe=villain thing isn't something I'd necessarily connect with race issues, personally. I think much of it has to do with 'basement' as a song, and to a lesser extent some of the songs off the new album. Gabe is far more confessional about things he's done to hurt other people than most of the other bandom lyricists and singers, both imaginary wrongs and the actual shit that comes with relationships. This makes him, by his own actions, 'canonically' morally greyer than the dudes who limit their confessions of wrongdoing to 'I confess I messed up' and 'I just made her more interesting'.

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I don't know that I buy that at all. Pete has some pretty awful lyrics. Fuck, Fever is basically an entire album of misogyny.

I do think that the Gabe-as-villain thing is horribly connected to race, though often unintentionally. Men of color (particularly Latino/Chicano men and black men) in the US are stereotyped as rapists, as villains, as "bad guys." It's not incidental that the character most likely to be a villain (beyond Bert McCracken, possibly) is also a Latino man. And really, the lack of intention isn't very surprising - that's kind of how racism works.

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Fuck, Fever is basically an entire album of misogyny.

But it doesn't own its fucking shit like Gabe's lyrics do.

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Pete never wrote a song about locking up a woman in a basement because he never wants to let her go and filming her as she cries, though. Like, Gabe deliberately created a character in a song who is a villain and presented it in the first-person, and and when fandom didn't know much more about him than SoaP and the When the City Sleeps album (I think back when villain!Gabe was rampant, fandom might not even have known that he was Latino) he was a convenient villain. Especially since Pete and Travis are more obvious minorities, I'd think if the villain-thing was race-related, they would more often be cast as the villains.

For my own part, when I wrote Gabe as the villain (well, relatively the villain) in the first cultverse story, I knew nothing about him except a) he sang the SoaP song, b) he'd just has a huge falling out with Elisa, who made all sorts of cryptic allegations about him, and c) he talked about his teenaged drummer living in his basement, and there were a bunch of jokes in fandom about his basement. I didn't know he was Latino.

I'm not saying bandom writers don't have race issues, I just don't think that's particularly a manifestation of them. Our race issues tend to not manifest, actually--meaning, as

ficbyzee says, the cocs just don't have much fic written about them.

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the cocs just don't have much fic written about them.

totally read that as: the COCKS just don't have much fic written about them. and i was all wondering what fandom you were in.

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Exactly. It drives me crazy that PoC are more often cast as villains and sexual predators (even Travis gets hit with the sexually predatory label), there's a history of the Latin Lover and the Black Buck, and yet when men of color are written this way, it's a coincidence.

Also, Pete doesn't get it and the man was with a 15 year old when he was in his twenties. Personally, though I think it's fairly obvious, I think it's because he's read as white by so many people and Asians don't have the same "animal sexuality" attached to them that Latinos and blacks do.

Edited Date: 2008-04-27 05:53 am (UTC)

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wow, your argument is really making me reconsider my own storytelling practices -- i have very little interest in bandom and its tropes, so i ended up making gabe sort of an ass just because i hated midtown back in the day, but i wonder if on some level, i wasn't acting on those stereotypes.

also, watch who you call misogynist -- them's fightin' words to some people. i expect the cavalry of wentz-fenders might ride in pretty soon. ;)

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Hey, I love me some Pete Wentz and find Fever heartbreakingly catchy, but ... woman-hate is still woman-hate, you know? Which isn't to say that Gabe hasn't said some shit that makes me cringe, but I have to say that I really think that it has to do with him being a man of color (particularly a Latino man, as opposed to the racial implications that have to do with being Hawai'ian) in terms of how people have that frame him out.

It's not conscious, or rarely is, anyway. But I do think it's an easy-ass trap to fall into, you know?

I'd agree that a lot of bandom's race issues fall into the "ignoring race" and occasionally "fetishizing race", but I definitely see some unconscious mirroring of racial stereotypes, too.

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I disagree. I think there is an abundance of Gabe as a serial killer fic because bandom likes readymade characters and that's what Gabe gave us with Basement. A lot of the early Cobra imagery was heavy on the sexy villain/cult theme and the whole band was portrayed as shady regardless of race.

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lol, i think Gabe being cast as the villain is just a case of a bandom cliche gone overboard. Like the sex-kitten!Billiam or pedo!Pete, somethings are just never going to go away.

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zeegoeshere

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OT

second verse, same as the first. i remember this conversation from somewhere...

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February