A few thoughts on victimhood...

Every fandom has one. The character who always gets it, the one who's more often than not in peril or injured so that the other(s) can rescue him. It's a staple of h/c and always has been. Whether it's Daniel Jackson or Illya Kuryakin (or Obi Wan Kenobi, Harper, Blair Sandburg... the list is endless), there's always one character who gets to be 'the designated victim' more often than not. Often much more often than not.

What puzzles me is how much making those characters any kind of victim, with all the passivity that implies and requires, takes a warping of what we see onscreen beyond all reason. What most of us like about those characters in the first place is their strength of character (call it stubbornness if you like, sometimes that's a more accurate description) and yet writers apparently think nothing of utterly stripping characters of that so that they can be victimised with impunity.

In the worst examples, said victim is tied to the metaphorical railtracks like a silent movie heroine while the manly hero (every fandom has one of those as well, it seems) rescues them. It's bizarre. Because, frankly, you could whump Illya Kuryakin or Daniel Jackson till doomsday and neither of them would just lie there and take it - they'd both be trying to escape under their own steam, snarking at their captors while they did so. They'd suffer the consequences, of course, but neither of them would let a little thing like more pain stop them from trying to do what they could. It's in their nature.

Is there a fandom out there where the risks experienced by the characters are more evenly spread? One where there isn't a designated victim who has to be written OOC in order to play that part effectively? If there is, I'd love to hear about it.