Hiya Mittens, I want to add my 2 cents about why Legacies, The Original spin-off, was approved instead of Wayward: Legacies will allow the network to parade beautiful scantily-dressed people as opposed to Wayward, with beatiful fully flannel-clad people. Thank you.
You know… earlier today I said almost exactly the same thing in a chattybubble to Mel:
the characters aren’t “glamorous” and sexually available to male characters so… >.>
I mean, in the larger conversation surrounding that out of context comment, discussing the “image” that the CW seems to be trying to cultivate of glossy eye candy, a show about six kickass monster-killing women who nevertheless lean on one another for real emotional support, and who don’t wear spandex superhero uniforms or prom dresses or whatever, but who live real lives outside of their monster hunting and deep personal traumas and personal losses associated with that… I mean…
We, the audience, have said that is exactly what WE want to see, but the network keeps trying to shove something else entirely at us. Kinda makes you wonder why…
Also, while we’re here, the Spite-O-Meter is up over 48k signatures and still climbing. Which is just… unheard of, I mean Wayward isn’t even its own *series* yet and nearly 50k people have voiced their wish to see it happen.
@postmodernmulticoloredcloak‘s tags (and yes Marghe, I know this was said tongue-in-cheek with a heavy side eye at Pedowitz, so I’ll elaborate):
I mean, Pedowitz has said that he wants to appeal to a broader female audience, and believed that Dynasty (DYNASTY?!) was the show to do that?! Like, I’m convinced he knows like four women, and they all miss watching Alexis Carrington Colby Dexter Colby (or whatever the heck her long list of names was it was a long damn time ago and I was mostly dazzled by everyone’s architectural shoulder pads okay? She got married and divorced A LOT. For a “powerful female character” she sure did go through husbands like tissues) prance around in evening wear and crush the patriarchy of international corporate culture or whatever the heck she did.
And it’s not just women who want to watch Wayward. It’s absolutely NOT useless for male consumption, though that may be what Pedowitz believes. I mean, this is the same dude that once referred to Tumblr as “the male Pinterest.” I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few days watching the Spite O Meter click up, and there are a lot of women’s names on that list… but there are a not-insignificant number of Toms, Dicks, and Harrys as well. (and one Mr. Mittens, who is crushed and angry that the show didn’t get picked up, and who’s well outside the network’s “target audience” of young adult women… and even young adult men. Then again, Mr. Mittens is the sort of dude who went to see Little Women in the theater in 1994 with two other dudes and the three of them got all weepy and loved it, so I admit he might’ve never really been part of the “average young adult male audience” even when he was a young adult male).
But the whole point of Wayward isn’t just about its potential to depict a wlw story, it’s to show the fact that WOMEN OVERALL have the same power to tell us their stories that men do. That stories about women don’t need to be filtered through men’s stories in order for men to be able to relate or enjoy those stories. It’s about representation, not just for LGBTQ, not just for PoC, not just for a specific target marginalized group, but for an entire diverse cast of women to tell us their stories, where any male character that might happen to come along would be secondary to the women’s stories and not become the focus of it.
I watched the last 20 or so names to sign scroll past, and at least a quarter of them were unambiguously male names (Todd, Alan, Dave, etc.). And honestly that’s REALLY encouraging to me. “Women’s stories” SHOULD be just as appealing to men, you know? Because they are HUMAN stories, and not “just for girls.” And they shouldn’t require the women in question to only appeal to a male audience by appearing scantily clad or sexually available to them.
Tumblr backup 