• JayTreeman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 month ago

      It’s unfair to judge her as a girlfriend when it’s a bad relationship. Mark’s got priorities, and she isn’t one. It’s on both of them to advocate for themselves, and she was better than Mark at it. Yours?

      • REgon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 month ago

        I like yours. I think she’s a bad girlfriend and that he’s a bad boyfriend, but the shows writers create a universe that only acknowledges one half of this and makes Mark out to be unreasonable when he responds to her poor treatment of him (which is a reaction to his poor treatment of her and so on and so on.).

        This has made some people see only her as an issue, some people to see the issue with the metatext and some people just hate women, but these three get lumped together (I swear I’m going somewhere with this) which has then resulted in valid criticisms of Amber being treated like misogyny, because there’s a lot of misogynists criticizing Amber, which has then further inflamed what is really just a question of perspective into a larger issue, which the writers then tried to deal with in season 2, but not super well. (Trying to bring it back) Amber ends up being better at advocating for herself and Mark does get his say, but the wider text still treats Mark as the sole bad partner and Amber as the recipient of a bad partner (don’t wanna use the word victim because it does not victimize her). Even Marks close relations who knows how they treated each other, treats him as the only person who is at fault. This issue was really the root of the issue for a large group of people who took issue with Amber, so the cycle continues.
        I like to call this the “female Ghostbusters” dynamic.

        On the other hand I never finished season 2, so I don’t know the whole of it.

        TL;dr they’re both bad, but the meta text treats Amber as not being bad, which has made an interesting relationship dynamic result in online discussions being inflammatory.