Last night wrapped up the first season of Ryan Murphy's newest addiction worthy show,
American Horror Story. A few articles ago, I spoke very highly of the new series and marked it as the show that may have saved horror themed television series. The Golden Globe nominated series has been a thrill ride every week and deserves all of the praise it has been receiving. The character that seems to have taken the world by storm, however, is Evan Peters' portrayal of every teenager's heartthrob ghost, Tate. Now, I'll be honest with you when I say I was totally a Tate fan-girl at the beginning. Evan Peters is a total babe and his character was so evil and yet remarkably charming. He has the surfer hair with the "boy next door" looks encompassed by a sense of danger. Although a total bad ass, he's extremely romantic and seems to know exactly what to say at all the right moments. What girl under the age of 25 wouldn't be cast under his spell?
The relationship between Tate and living girl, Violet became the newest fictional couple to be "shipped" all over the internet and was given the name "Violate". If you just type "violate" or "tate langdon" on the tumblr search bar, you'll be bombarded with hundreds of thousands of images of the two that have been created by fans of the show. Okay, so he had a couple of selfless acts, he got her a flower, told her he loved her, and protected her a bit. That's really endearing and I will not take that away from him. He really did genuinely care about the girl and it was actually sort of nice to see a character trying so hard to make someone else happy. But...
This is a huge but here, let's be honest when I say this...he's a fucking psychopath. To quote the character directly "
In 1994 I set my mom's boyfriend on fire and then I shot fifteen kids at Westfield High. I murdered the gay couple who lived here before you and I raped your wife". Wow. Let's add that up to the fact he's a compulsive liar, manipulative, let the demon in the basement tear apart a girl's face, almost killed a kid who had been there for one night because Violet made eyes at him, and talks shit to his mother? Wow. This is marriage material right here. Yet all it takes is for him to let the water works flow and to stammer out an "I love you" and girls everywhere are dropping their panties.
Are you fucking kidding me? This kid is a psychotic nut job and yet he just needs to pout his lips and suddenly all is forgiven. I have been doing a bit of trolling on the fandom message boards just to find out what the hell these girls are thinking, and the results are quite horrifying. "He’s twisted, he’s an imbecile for what he has done. But are we perfect? You are hiding yourself behind a grey face [this means posted anonymously]. I can easily say that you are a coward. I can say that I had my ”fucked up” boyfriends. And I haven’t said that “if treats me ok I’ll love him” No. I said that I love his way of loving Violet. There is difference." But are we perfect?! I'm sorry. I'm not perfect in the slightest but I'm also not running around raping my girlfriend's mother or shooting up the school. You can love someone as much as you want, but if you're a bad person...you're a bad person. No amount of compassion you show towards another person will ever change that.
Oh! Oh! But he loves her sooo much and he protects her! Yeah, so does the police department, but I'm not writing fanfics about that, now am I?
"I think you can tell Tate has changed though, because he asks Gabe not to look at him when he was about to kill him, and he wasn’t killing him to hurt anyone, he was doing it to make Violet happy. Which is sick and twisted, but so adorable and cute. Idk man, I just hope that Violet in the next series gets to see the difference in Tate, and that her Dad tells her that he accepts what he has done." Wait, what? Does this girl realize that she's essentially saying that she would accept people like The Columbine Shooters, or The men who killed Matthew Shepard or I don't know, PEOPLE WHO RAPE THEIR GIRLFRIEND'S MOMS because "they've changed?" This is just demented. Sick. And. Demented.
I blame Edward Cullen for this. That god damn franchise made it okay for girls to "fall in love" with complete lunatics and society made it cool for women to worship the grounds of men who deserve prison time. At least Violet had the mind to leave his crazy ass, even in the afterlife.
/endrant.
25 comment(s):
Afraid of the answer, I will blast out my ignorance...who is Edward Cullen?
Before there was Edward Cullen, there was Angel the "Vampire with a soul" and Spike-the Sid Vicious wanna-be that rained mayhem and destruction all around him before getting neutered first by a chip, then by his feelings for a certain vampire slayer.
Sharply observed my friend - though I would say maybe what works about it is the very real Jungian archetypal parallels going on with the 'ghost' lovers like Edward and Tate, and the wolf in little red riding hood, or Bluebeard, the beast, Prince Erick, or any other signifier of 'the onset of adulthood' - the animus, or daimonic ego of the archetypal unconscious.
In a sense all women have their own ghost demon lovers just as men have their ghost demon female lovers, anima - the succubi and vampire queens. The difference is, men don't tangle with theirs until much later in life, while the girls meet theirs earlier - around the onset of mensturation, more proof women are more mature than men... especially since they nearly always get the upper hand over the animuseses, in the fairy tale which siginifes the union of the conscious and unconscious mind via the wedding ceremony. The men, often as not, let their anima win.
Girls "fall in love" with complete lunatics all the time, and vice versa. Shouldn't we be thanking Edward and Bella for bringing this reality to sparkling light? ;)
I'd really hate to break it to you, but it's a show.. The way you make it seem is like it's a reality show. Tate's a character, as is the rest of the cast. Girl's love him, but those are simply tiny celebrity crushes that they'll get over once he's no longer around. No girl is actually going to go around falling in love with a ghost who is a psychopath that kills everyone that walks into the home he's trapped in and who rapes their mother. It really seems like you're bugging out over nothing.. You're honestly sitting here wasting your time freaking out over a show. It's a fictional story with actors.
PREACH. i love this show and this actor SO SO much and i think its such an amazing testament to what a good job they're all doing that it makes girls want to love psychopaths. but at the same time, its making girls want to love psychopaths :/ this is the world we live in. and i think the power of violet saying "go away tate" quietly speaks volumes to how we are ultimately in control of what happens to us in terms of what influences we allow around us. <3
@RahneFan- Don't be ashamed. It's the main lad from Twilight. I'm proud of you for not knowing!
@Mike-I agree with you wholeheartedly, but thanks to things like tumblr, the art of fan worship has gotten out of control and these girls FULLY believe in these characters and look for their traits in their possible suitors.
@Erich-Preach. Preach. Preach.
@Erik-I will never support that franchise in ANYTHING.
@Anonymous-Here's the thing. These girls actually believe that they are meant to be with people who share the same attributes as these characters. They talk about naming their first sons "Tate" and giving him the childhood Constance never gave him...THAT IS FUCKED UP. People DO take this shit seriously. That's the horrifying factor. There are countless amounts of people that cannot draw the line between reality and fantasy.
@Sbort-I agree. It's giving women this sense of wanting to "fix" these men to make them better. So they're actually LOOKING for insane people. It's scary. It's really, really scary.
its just a show. girls fall in love with characters all the time and this one happens to be amazingly charming, funny, dangerous, etc. all the elements for a teen heartthrob. Now if someone in real life raped my mother and killed people, i would never give them the time of day. But its a fictional show, with fake characters so its not a big deal.
I need to get onboard with this show :-)
Sadly, it is not just fictional psychopat characters who get the girls dreaming. There must be something about truly dangerous men that trigs an attraction.
Anders Breivik - the massmurdere who killed more than 70 young people in Norway - is getting loveletters in jail. A lot of them.
It is bizarre.
Uh - and merry Christmas everyone :)
There are lots of girls out there that fall for Tate because they are too young and/or naive to understand the nuances of what he's done. Many will try to argue that what he did wasn't "REALLY rape." This, of course, is wrong. But it's pure ignorance on their part. Our culture as a whole seems to perpetuate the belief that unless the woman is shown struggling and screaming 'no', it can't possibly be rape. Basically, these girls don't know any better yet, and often they're too young to have any point of reference or experience to draw from. Most of the Tate tumblrs I've come across are run by 13 year olds, sadly. They need to be educated, not attacked or mocked.
But the fact is, Tate is a complex and fascinating character. He speaks to the darker part that may not be in all of us, but is definitely present in many. He is almost like an extreme metaphor for it. I like Tate because I feel like I can relate to him in many ways, even some ways that I have never and would never actually explore to the level that he has. Maybe it's easy to tell yourself that anyone who commits evil acts (such as the Columbine kids, as you've referenced) are just "bad people," but absolutely nobody is that black and white. There are shades of grey in everyone.
I personally believe that you can't possibly truly understand what is good, light, or compassionate in this world without at least trying to understand the bad. If you write people or fictional characters off as simply crazy, psychopaths (which, btw, CAN be helped - at least, when they don't have therapists who were as crap as Ben Harmon), bad, or evil, you are missing out on understanding and learning about a huge part of the human experience.
He sounds like a much more interesting character than Edward Cullen, and certainly more than one woman in real life has fallen for a charming sociopath. But you are right in my eyes that this does symbolize a bit of a bad trend and the lust for Edward "Stalker" Cullen may have triggered it. Hell, this guy makes the dorkwads I chose in my youth look like prime quality specimens of manhood!
I like Erich's analysis too about the Jungian archetypes and the allegories about the dangers of becoming a woman, beginning menstruation, falling in love, losing one's virginity, and very potentially getting hurt. Very savvy!
Why do people relish so much in judging other people and putting them down? Seriously, it's just a fictional character and girls are only fantasizing to pass the dumbass boring day away, there's nothing wrong with that. No one is actually saying what he did is right or that they condone it, Jesus H Christ, they just like the actor and how he's portraying the kid. Get over your perfect self-righteous self.
Yeah but how come no one bats an effin eyelid when men wank over Uma Thurman in Kill Bill or any other hottie killing and maiming everyone in sight?
Because everyone realizes it's just a fantasy and lets them jerk off in peace.
But when girls do the same - fall for a badass goodlooking psychopath - everyone is outraged. Double standards much.
Since someone pointed out to me (I haven't read Twilight) the deeper issues of the male character breaking into girl's bedrooms and being a 300 year old pedophile, I've put some thought into the differences between he and Angel from Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
In Buffy, vampires had to be invited in, and anyone acting tacky either got 'uninvited' through a magic spell or... staked. Buffy had no hesitation in staking Angel when he acted up. She didn't swoon or prostrate herself before abuse.
I think you're thinking too much into this. Personally, I don't give two shits about Edward Cullen, and I love Tate.
The same way I loved Draco Malfoy, Spike, The Master, Nathan Drake, etc.
I just like the badness of fictional characters and I happen to always "fall in love" with the bad eggs.
If I met these people in person, I wouldn't go near them because they're assholes and I don't generally associate with assholes.
This shit isn't real and people are allowed to indulge in their fantasies with bad eggs, because that's all they are: fantasy.
Christ on a cracker, Tate fangirls are just as defensive as Team Edward. I'm allowed my opinion, too :)
That was hilarious, I love the end blaming Edward Cullen. I love Tate though, not gonna lie. I don't even care if he's a bad person, i'll accept it and Violet should too. I mean...shit she's already dead.
Am I really going to be the ONLY commenter to suggest that MOST girls probably only ACTUALLY like Tate because, and I quote, "Evan Peters is a total babe and his character was so evil and yet remarkably charming," while the rest simply want to feel "dangerous" for liking the guy that they aren't supposed to for one reason or another?
Seriously...people...it's a show. I, like almost everyone else, can say that Evan Peters did an amazing job, and that he is definitely sexy in that unique way. I will also acknowledge that Edward Cullen, when examined...is kind of a creeper. Not to mention that there does seem to be a problem with young girls thinking that "scary" or "sadistic" somehow translates into sexy, and thrilling. But, at the end of the day, it's an actor playing a part that they are ACTUALLY into.
P.S. BJ-C should definitely be allowed to rant. What is our world coming to when people can't rant about things that need ranting?! I mean, really people!
Wow, I guess I'm about to show my age because I have no idea what this show even is. LOL Learn something new everyday, but if it's basically like Twilight written using a ghost hue and palette, I'll pass.
I agree with one of the comments. I love Tate, and I use to love the bad characters on TV and movies, because they're not real! The girls who love this kind of character (repeat: CHARACTER) aren't crazy! And I'm sure that if I meet a real psycopath, even he's good looking, I'll run from him! Like the rest of the world!
Instead, if men like the bad girls on TV, everybody is agree. We're in a new case of sexism in society...
Really? You're hating on Tate Langdon?
I'm guessing you haven't even watched the whole season, because you sat there writing how he didn't change?! Bitch please, He raped Viven for Noar, (?), To give her want she always wanted but when he knew what he was feeling towards Violet was real, he confessed his sin, and told Noar, (Once again, ?), That he couldn't take away Violets brother because he loved her and he wanted Violet to be happy.
Tate has changed, and as much as the haters of this show won't say he has, Well, flip to the next page, He has.
And we, the fandom, (Watch out, a fangirl ;o) thing that Tate is "cute". "hot", "sexy", "caring", ect, because of the way he has shown himself during the season. Yeah, I know, it's all because of the writers, but you want to know something? Evan Peters does a really, REALLY good job at acting as Tate.
So, I'm sorry for hating on your little blog here, but I just needed to say these things. And plus he's twisted, he's crazy, ect, but did you ever found out why? Found out what his back story is? MAYBE THE HOUSE SENT HIM CRAZY? JUST LIKE IT WAS SENDING BEN CRAZY! k? K!
@Anon-Excuse me, I DID see the entire season and I absolutely loved the show. It's possible to love the show without worshipping the ground that Evan Peters walked on. If you must, I was an Evan Peters fangirl BEFORE this show. You're absolutely right, he did a remarkable job portraying the epitome of an anti-hero, but as Patrick Star on Spongebob states "hero worship is unhealthy".
I don't care WHY he raped Vivien...HE STILL RAPED HER. I don't care why he did any of the things he did, because it's still what he did. This show made it seem okay for women to forgive rapists and murderers. A sign of an incredible writer, but also a very dangerous power as well.
And my blog isn't little. Thankyouverymuch. Go back to tumblr and leave your hate somewhere else.
I watched AHS solely on your recommendation! And I really like the show in all it's absurdity and over-the-top-ness.
And, of course, I love Tate.
But, I agree on him truly being a psychopath. And if Violet, love her too, was my child I wouldn't want her any where near him. (Beeing close to middleaged myself might help with that mindset.)
Still, I cannot help thinking that being dead for the rest of eternity might give an altered perspective on things & cannot let go of the thought of them together.
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