I can't even write the word womanpain with the same nonchalance I write I write manpain. There's a gravity that's just not as fun.

Does Faith have a bad fanon childhood?

Faith has a fanon bad childhood. She is one of the womanpain! exceptions in fandom such as I've noticed.

Well, Faith had a bad canon childhood too, didn't she? At least according to her. She's not exactly a reliable narrator.

Most of the bad fanon childhoods have roots in canon. I mean, we know Pa Vecchio was up there with Wyndam-Pryce pere in terms of dicktasticness.

Faith's bad childhood gets a nod in canon, a stronger (more explicit) nod in some grey canon (official tie-in books), and a HUGE nod in fanon.

Canon was that Faith's mother was an alcoholic and left her unsupervised a lot, right?

I think so, yeah.

Also, dead!

I think there were no women because, hey, MANPAIN. Fans find manpain appealing, but womanpain NSM.

There was Parker

They've walked a strange and delicate line with Parker--her childhood pain has been played both for real sadness and for absolute hysterics. I think that helps her get on that list. Having herself buried alive by friends in order to get over claustrophobia? Blowing up her house? That's the kind of childhood trauma I can get behind. Starbuck is much more raw.

I have a lot of tangled, difficult-to-voice feelings about the fetishization of manpain in fandom. I mean, I enjoy it myself, and the ability to distance myself from the suffering while enjoying the delicious angst is nice. Also, it can be kinda empowering to witness fictional manly man forced to show their emotional vulnerability. On the other hand, the whole manpain thing gets so much emphasis in fandom at the expense of female characters (sometimes at the literal expense -- as in female characters getting fridged to up the manpain quotient), I've become more reluctant to revel in it as I used to.

I've been wondering about the most recent major female death in Criminal Minds. Technically it fits all the criteria of a fridging--it's definitely an escalation of the Hotchangst for him to hear his wife killed over the phone by his nemesis. But somehow I think his pain resists the label manpain and her death resists the label fridging. Perhaps I'm biased because it's one of the shows I'm the most into, perhaps it was actually well handled. I'm not sure.

But not all male pain is manpain, and even though Hotch has a fanon bad childhood, I wouldn't offer him up as fodder for that list. It just has a different tenor. Same with Morgan, really. Reid--maybe.