I appreciate you, writer. You keep putting the dream to digital paper. And yeah, that's not how that works. People are way less concerned about you being An Asexual than lying about being asexual for fun and profit. Well, mostly just fun but still. If it were my kid, I think I would find that extremely concerning. Like way more concerning than just whether they were having sex. They don't make prophylactics for that kind of intimacy, and that is way too much to knowingly let an underage girl take on all by herself. Look here, sonny, you are not getting my blessing to use my daughter for emotional labor behind closed doors. That is simply not appropriate. It is a very adorable kind of comfort fantasy though.
The Riddle: "Why does everyone write this character incorrectly?" Spoiler: The answer Because the characterization and backstory I'm thinking of is entirely headcanon! There's like four versions of canon and I hobbled them together into someone that never existed!! I'm mad at fic authors for not reading my mind!!!
yeah but sometimes your headcanon is just objectively correct and those fic authors SHOULD have just read your mind to discover the Truth about that character
I'm so sick of the memey usage of "gay panic" in the current fandom of my heart. I realize The Youths have a different meaning for it, but my first association is, uh, very different from the "oh shit I love this guy so much I'm so gay" intended meaning in fic tags/Tumblr posts
+100 Some people using it claim it's a deliberate reclaimation of the phrase while other people using it have no idea it has any other meaning. And there are definitely members of The Youths who think homophobia is over in the US, and have no idea that gay panic defenses are still legal in most US states.
Oh huh. I just realized I have both understandings of what that phrase means that are so heavily contextual that I never noticed there was any clash. I was actually confused for a moment trying to understand what the conflict was. So that's interesting. I think maybe I wrote the fandom usage into my mind as a very wide possible range of both magnitude of harm and distance of action from actor? And also I think it pulled on my belief that people who try to excuse a hate crime by saying they panicked are liars and horrible people, but not because you couldn't feel a lot of panicked emotions about sexuality if you're already kinda brittle about it? I guess that's magnitude of harm and distance of action from actor too. Having an internal meltdown versus assaulting someone. (edit because hit post too soon)
My bilingual ass when the phrase "gay panic" has two different translations and one of them inherently contains the implication of the "gay panic" defense while the other just literally means "panicking in a gay way".
That's how it works for me. I've got both terms indexed and we pick the meaning based on the context. Primarily the definition being trended towards is the fandom definition. The default used to be gay panic defense definition, but it seems that the currently more common in my life variant has overwritten the other as the default. Brains are weird with words.
Man, I wish my first and overriding association with it wasn't homophobes and transphobes trying to get away with murder, that would make my fandom life so much easier :(
"Mike, do you know what gay bashing is?" "How could I? You fuckers never invite me." -Something*Positive
The super weird experience of yet another guy complaining to random women that he is uncomfortable with completely different random straight women having opinions about characters topping, that this is yet another case of gross and toxic fetishization of gay men by straight women, and stereotypes and shit. And some subsequent thing about how if it were a discussion among men only, it would surely be better and more complex. Also a weird off topic strawman about how it isn’t okay just because straight men fetishize lesbians since these things are the same. Holy crap, who are you, and never mind that, please fuck off at your earliest convenience. So much bullshit. So much. I’m so tired of every part of this. I’ve heard it all so many times, and it’s not getting better with age. First, how do you know the women were straight, dude? Did they all happen to just drop that in the conversation, or did you just realize that if you said “women” then the misogyny is a little too obvious? There is obviously nothing wrong with feeling uncomfortable about or really hating particular trends in fic. There’s nothing wrong with talking about how you feel they reflect toxic aspects of culture or repeat toxic ideas. That’s all totally cool. Or it would be if it weren’t coming from a sea lion. Why are there so many sea lions about this? I’m frequently very uncomfortable with men who aggressively berate women on the grounds that they believe that slash is fetishizing gay men and they don’t think the portrayal of gay men is accurate. Equating fanfic to real life sexual harassment is weird and inappropriate. Why are you? No one was talking about you. Showing up and soapboxing about other people’s sexual fantasies as if they’re about you is unwelcome. If you start explaining your own sex life directly at people who definitely did not ask because you need them to understand how wrong they are about gay men, I’m gonna win bingo. Why do people do this? Also I won, but at what cost? Ew. Maybe the reason it doesn’t resonate is because these people’s sexualities, straight women or otherwise, aren’t about you. It really genuinely sucks that a lot of fan stuff isn’t enjoyable to someone who wants to be able to engage with it, but people don’t owe you porn that suits your tastes. And why on earth would you expect porn by people you’re assuming are straight women to reflect the tastes and concerns of gay men? Oh, silly me. This isn’t about that. This is about taking the pain of one’s own oppression out on other people by saying misogynistic things in a way where it would be really difficult and emotionally costly for them to defend themselves. There’s plenty of ongoing discussions about stereotypes, especially regarding who is doing what in bed, including plenty of criticism. Things have already changed a lot over time. But maybe it’s relevant if the people writing what you see as uncomfortable stereotypes about gender conformity are women, a group of people more negatively affected by gender stereotypes than men. If women want to process suffocating, toxic stereotypes about gender in the porn they create for themselves and for people with similar interests and life experiences, what the hell right do you think you could possibly have to tell them they’re doing it wrong? The arrogant entitlement, fuck damn. And no, fandom and slash is not actually the same as male gaze and lesbians. That’s not how structural inequality works. But way to just run up out of nowhere and chuck men who think wlw is hot under the bus for no apparent reason. If they’re not hurting anyone by say, demanding that random women make their expressions of their sexuality more appealing to a male audience?? aggressively telling women about their own sexual preferences and history unasked, for the purpose of taking hostile control of a conversation??? then I don’t see what’s wrong with men who just enjoy porn about lesbians. That’s not tantamount to harassment either. There’s plenty of legit discussions and criticism by gay men out there, as well as useful information and personal accounts regarding sex and sexuality for writing research purposes, kindly presented in ways and places where people can read if and when they like. That’s really awesome. Fandom doing better together, as it should. It is a legitimate problem when fandom spaces are hostile to diversity, and that is absolutely a real thing that I wish I knew how to fix but don’t. But I do know that men who approach it like this are doing a misogyny, and some of them are also doing a sexual harassment. Sad bingo. Fuck those guys. They actually wanna do something about gross and toxic fandom problems? They could help immensely just by cleaning up their own acts.
F/F fandom on Ao3 appears to be declining. Not growing slowly or even going nowhere. But declining. I'm upset. People are already pulling shit like "Well there's not enough interesting women with interesting relationships with other women!" over this. There are enough. There's tons out there and if we're counting canon stuff much more than when I was younger. For whatever reason though those fandoms do not seem to result in a lot of fic.
pardon the hot take™️ but I think it’s because most of the people in fic-writing fandom are straight women, who either like mlm because it’s two men (twice as hot!) or m/f because they can more easily put themselves in the female character’s shoes. people write what they want to see, after all.
That's always been true, though, hasn't it? It wouldn't account for the decline unless the proportion of straight women in fandom was increasing. Also, if that were the cause, then you would expect M/M and M/F to both increase, and they haven't. M/F actually decreased by a few percentage points. Personally, the part of that comparison I find most interesting is the massive increase in genfic. It lines up with what I've observed in the past several years of fandom, which is that fewer new authors are writing shipfic at all, het or slash or femslash. In my current fandom almost all the fic is gen. I think this is down to the anti movement, honestly. There's been so much fighting over who is allowed to ship what and what kinds of ships make you an irredeemable monster that people are being scared off of shipping altogether (not to mention porn - I wonder what a similar graph showing trends in fic rating would look like? Because it really feels like there is so much less smutfic being written now than there was 5 or 10 years ago). Shipping culture used to be the backbone of fandom, and that's still more or less true, but it feels like it's becoming less so, especially among young authors. It is interesting that so much of that new genfic seems to have come out of the F/F and Other (presumably a lot of that is poly?) slice, leaving the M/M and M/F percentages relatively unaffected. Is that because the people who would have written those fics in the past are now doing all gal pals and platonic found family? Are there just proportionally less of them in fandom, period? Are those types of ships more likely to attract discourse and gain a bad reputation that drives fans away? Maybe some of all of the above?
...now i wonder if that (relatively? Recent? Or st least i didn't see it particularily often across my dash before) trend of 'uwu pure blushy wlw, no sex EVER because Sex Bad' Interpretation is playing into it and part of the reason why f/f has been particularly hit. I don't see this line *nearly* as often with m/m or f/m stuff. (Data point: straight woman here. atm, indeed less likely to write f/f because nit my cup of tea but also: have literally never been in a fannish space where 'straight woman' was the majority of content producers, i don't think)
hang on. I just took a closer look at those charts. Gen was holding steady until 2020, and then it increased sharply out of nowhere. This is my fucking fandom's fault lmao. Goddammit. My fandom came out of nowhere and became a brand new juggernaut by the end of 2020, and almost all our fic is genfic. I looked through the top 100 for the year, and almost all the "&" relationships on the list are DSMP. And there are almost no female characters so of course we hardly have any femslash (though of course, who knows if we would anyway). Edit: I don't think we're responsible for the decrease in femslash, just for the sudden increase in genfic which pushed both femslash, poly, and het to the side somewhat.
f/f fandoms got hit hardest by the anti plague in my experience i agree with @TheOwlet that the uwu blushy gal pals holding hands ONLY squad are a part of it
Yeah I was just thinking that as I read through and saw "VideoBlogger RPF" and went oh no. Oh no. Oh no it's DSMP and more specifically sleepytwt who did this. God damn it.
