My friend isn’t a Misha girl, but thinks it’s the best battle cry there is. She has requested to hear/see it at least twice now.

In all seriousness…yes, despite last night’s drunken post, I actually have a serious commentary to make on the way things went down today. It’s only my second convention, but I definitely know why people go to them again and again - they’re fun, a good place to allow your silly, nerdy self to be free and feel no shame, you get a chance to interact with the actors…in theory it’s great.

And then people get stupid.

My first convention in LA was amazing. To my memory there were only two seriously fail incidents - and a stop was quickly to put to those. The first day of this convention was awesome (obviously…drunken karaoke - come on) and the first portion of the second went well. I don’t really know what went wrong, but it was pretty fucking stupid.

Misha interrupted Sebastian’s panel - he had to, in order to get his own under way (because let’s face it - Sebastian is a proud attention whore, and we love it). Sebastian’s panel was pretty raunchy - I’m sure there’s videos, but I don’t have them. In any case - Misha came on, a couple more naughty jokes were traded before Sebastian went off, and then Misha settled into his panel. For some reason, a lot of the questions were sexually suggestive in nature. Misha made a joke about dealing with the crowd after Sebastian’s panel, but I didn’t see anything that makes me think that the mood was actually shaped by Sebastian’s. Sebastian was instigating everything in his panel - none of the questions asked of him were like the ones asked of Misha, not that I saw/heard. It was like the maturity level plummeted the moment Misha took over the stage, and it was unfortunate, for a couple of reasons.

1) Though he didn’t react overtly, it seemed to me that there was a certain amount of discomfort displayed on Misha’s part. He definitely noticed and mentioned the fact that so many questions were sexually suggestive, and the way he responded, compared to how he responds to legitimate questions with friendly banter, seemed to me to show that he was not enthused with the way it was going. He really enjoyed the questions that weren’t suggestive, going back and forth with the askers, having a good ol’ Misha time. His responses to those suggestive questions seemed to become short and, on occasion, curt - which, to me, displayed the discomfort I’m trying to describe.

2) On a very simple level it’s disrespectful. Just because the guy is an actor doesn’t make it OK to speak to him like that - do you make it practice to make comments like that to people you pass on the street who you find attractive? Do you enjoy it when people you don’t know make comments like that to you when you’re just trying to do your job? I know I don’t, and I know it makes me terribly uncomfortable when people throw those kinds of comments my way when I’m just taking a stroll. There is a name for behavior like that: sexual harassment. Let me repeat: just because he’s an actor does not make it OK to make those comments off the cuff. Just because he’s an actor, it doesn’t mean that making those comments isn’t sexual harassment.

3) The guys (all of them, not just Misha) don’t have to do these conventions. I know there seems to be a rather noisy minority who think it’s the boys’ responsibility to do the conventions, and that we somehow have some sort of right to them. We really don’t have any right to them at all - no one has any innate right to another human being, be it a person on the street, a spouse, or an actor in a favorite television show. We really should be grateful that they come to interact with us, that they chose to come to these conventions despite the absolute morons that show up and literally harass them from time to time. Misha doesn’t have to put up with those comments, especially if they make him uncomfortable. He could decide to quit the conventions all together, and I wouldn’t blame him, because if I had been in his shoes today, I certainly wouldn’t want to continue going to these conventions.

4) Let’s talk about respect one more time. If we’re claiming to like the actors, how the fuck does it make any sense that we would disrespect them like that? Misha is married with a child, and comments like the ones I heard today extend beyond disrespecting him - they disrespect his family and his relationship to them as well. Which, as far as I’m concerned, goes contrary to the claims these people make of liking and/or loving the man, for whatever reason they make like and/or love him. Maybe it’s expecting an awful lot of people to understand this concept of behaving respectfully towards people we like/love, and by extension respecting their relationships, and doing so by simply considering what our words mean and how those words will make the person on the receiving end feel, but…I don’t know, it seems pretty simple to me.

5) I want to reiterate the “they choose to come to these conventions to interact with us - they don’t have to, but they do.” Misha (all of the actors and actresses) are sacrificing their time to so. That’s time that he could be spending with his wife and little boy, time he could be spending with Random Acts.

To wrap this up…when we were walking out of the theater, I saw Misha step off of the stage and begin speaking to one of the Creation people. A girl who ended up right behind me on the escalator had passed by him to get out of the theater. She said she overheard him telling the Creation guy that he didn’t know how to draw the line (I didn’t hear this personally, just this girl’s report of having heard this). But, unfortunately, that would be hard, because the same people who make those comments and ask those questions are going to villainize him if he overtly tries to put a stop to it, besides which, no one wants to be viewed as the “downer” or as the one making people uncomfortable. It’s an unfortunate truth about things like sexual harassment - if you’re the one experiencing it, it is terribly hard to actually address it due to the social stigma involved, especially the idea that talking about it makes other people uncomfortable (because it definitely makes sense to sacrifice your personal mental/emotional and potentially physical safety just because other people might be made uncomfortable by the subject matter…societal conditioning fail). Imagine how much worse that feeling is made by being in front of a couple hundred people at the time.

And now to conclude this: Misha is an awesome person. Not that I’ve had a whole hell of a lot of interaction with him, but those interactions I have had have been wholly positive. Yeah, I find him undeniably and ridiculously attractive, in addition to being a talented actor. But I also have a tremendous amount of respect for him, for the way that he keeps up a continuous friendly, creative, and playful interaction with his fans and for his part in getting Random Acts started and all of the good he has done via Random Acts. As far as I’m concerned, he is one of those genuinely awesome people, and a good one to boot. He deserves nothing less than to be treated with respect, and this would hold true even if he weren’t so goddamn amazing.