There's a lot of tl;dr here that you may already know, because you might have asked a rhetorical question:
I don't know that she's hated, per se, but she's often overlooked, I think. In part it's the Nate problem, in that she's paired with him from the start in canon, and fandom is pretty tired of guys like Nate. (To be fair, I find Nate starts out as a self-righteous ass who gets enough development to realize that he's been a self-righteous ass, and who moderates his behavior a bit, but primarily he changes in a way that's based on his original characterization. Which I find realistic and mostly sympathetic, but I feel like my life would shred apart and I would turn into an ass if something that terrible happened to my kid too.)
So there are also lots of people in fandom who like to hew to canon, and Sophie/Natie is the canon, and most of the people who love Sophie enough to write about her are either the het shippers who gravitate towards the mom/dad pairing. You do have the femslashers who are like, "You can pair her with Parker or any of the major recurring female characters!" The ones who can ignore canon, that is, though I find a lot of femslashers are surprisingly canon-based when there's so little canon femslash out there. But the femslashers are a minority in Leverage fandom.
(I am definitely in the non-canon-compliant femslash category as a Sophie fan, primarily, with a side order of, "Sophie wants Nate, and Sophie deserves to have what she wants.")
I think also fandom prefers action girls, which Parker is. And I love Parker! She's amazing and the character development she got over five years is unbelievable. And I love her relationship with Hardison and Eliot. (And Sophie. Oh, I do love her relationship with Sophie.) But women who focus on feelings and relationships the way Sophie does kind of get shorter shrift, or so I think, in a lot of fandom spaces.
(This took so long to reply to because I've been busy planning a birthday party, a game, and prep for being out for three days at work. Blargh. It has been a busy couple of weeks.)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2016-08-08 02:09 pm (UTC)I don't know that she's hated, per se, but she's often overlooked, I think. In part it's the Nate problem, in that she's paired with him from the start in canon, and fandom is pretty tired of guys like Nate. (To be fair, I find Nate starts out as a self-righteous ass who gets enough development to realize that he's been a self-righteous ass, and who moderates his behavior a bit, but primarily he changes in a way that's based on his original characterization. Which I find realistic and mostly sympathetic, but I feel like my life would shred apart and I would turn into an ass if something that terrible happened to my kid too.)
So there are also lots of people in fandom who like to hew to canon, and Sophie/Natie is the canon, and most of the people who love Sophie enough to write about her are either the het shippers who gravitate towards the mom/dad pairing. You do have the femslashers who are like, "You can pair her with Parker or any of the major recurring female characters!" The ones who can ignore canon, that is, though I find a lot of femslashers are surprisingly canon-based when there's so little canon femslash out there. But the femslashers are a minority in Leverage fandom.
(I am definitely in the non-canon-compliant femslash category as a Sophie fan, primarily, with a side order of, "Sophie wants Nate, and Sophie deserves to have what she wants.")
I think also fandom prefers action girls, which Parker is. And I love Parker! She's amazing and the character development she got over five years is unbelievable. And I love her relationship with Hardison and Eliot. (And Sophie. Oh, I do love her relationship with Sophie.) But women who focus on feelings and relationships the way Sophie does kind of get shorter shrift, or so I think, in a lot of fandom spaces.
(This took so long to reply to because I've been busy planning a birthday party, a game, and prep for being out for three days at work. Blargh. It has been a busy couple of weeks.)