Well, I know that for me my affection for certain male characters is absolutely, 100% fictional crushdom. My raging, over-twenty-years-and-still-going crush on Darcy is the best example. :D But the idea that I would ever denigrate Lizzie and claim that she is a poorly written character simply because I find Darcy more intriguing is ludicrous.

I think it's yet another symptom of the human tendency (fueled by internet fandoms) to consider his/her own opinion as FACT. If someone doesn't like any female characters in X series it must be because the characters are poorly written, period, end of sentence. In HP fandom, in particular, this can also be closely connected with the idea that the author got "it" wrong.

*shrugs* I'll never understand these tendencies, no matter how much I ponder or discuss. It truly defies explanation.

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I think it depends on critical thinking and sense, really. You're sensible, so you can see that your liking for Darcy is because of a fictional crush and not because Lizzie is flat. Someone else might go, "Huh, why do I like Darcy and Bingley more than Lizzie and Jane? Clearly, Austen's female characters are boring!" You've got to know when a crush is because of a characteristic or characteristics that appeal to you specifically and not because the character is inherently better.

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It might also be because those people put so much high standards on the female characters out of a misguided sense of "feminism"; because women have been treated so poorly in fiction historically, anything less than perfectly characterized in a way that defies all traditional expectations is "buying into unfeminist stereotypes" and thus the character is poorly written and uninteresting.

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You are so right. This is why, when Hermione did something "typical" of a teenaged girl--got pissed off about the guy she liked, Ron, kissing another girl, Lavender--the immediate reaction was that her character had been "destroyed" and no longer existed as the pure, untrammeled Hermione of the first five books.

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I think that's definitely true, I'm just trying to make a Unified Theory that includes Pstibbons - and similarly to the way that the fangirls who love one or two guys so much that they can only be slashed, Pstibbons seems to prefer writing Hermione with Parvati, of all people, in preference to having another guy in there.

The way I see it, you get three possible fic-reactions to the crushes. The crush gets an OC (widely derided), a canon character who has been made more like the author, or slashed (either with seemingly random people or with the author's secondary crush).

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