Fujoshi = rotten girl Fudanshi = rotten boy The japanese term used by yaoi fans to describe themselves, it's an identifier that's surpassed the literal meaning, much like how 'Otaku' means 'Invested anime fan with slightly creepy connatations' instead of the literal 'respected house' Within a few months of the term Fujoshi being adopted by the western anime fandom on the internet, I saw it being used in a cartoon on probably somethingawful to describe 'ugly' girls (ie fat) who couldn't get dates. Many years later we've graduated from "liking yaoi because we can't get real men" to "icky cishet women who exploit gays". It reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, when everyone Alice meets insists that she's something else that fits more comfortably in their worldview. Let's discuss everything fujoshi and mlm shipping. The cringe, the stories, the backlash (how dare women objectify men! Gross!!), how did slash/yaoi get on your radar? And the nuts and bolts of why a person would be interested in romance or sex that doesn't involve their gender (or didn't, in the case of people who later discovered that they are trans).
Sometimes I wonder if my liking for mlm shit and gay porn is related to my trans thing. Especially given some of my specific tastes related to that. Like a great big "Yes this is the ultimate validation of my being a dude. Sexy gay sex times with the mens" wish fulfillment thing.
SAME HAT on basically every point, except it took like ten years for me to realize I was a dude and then suddenly things made so much more sense. These days I like to call myself a fudanshi :D
How baby me realised I was gay: I liked gay ships way more than hetero ones. You will take writing smutty fanfic about dudes from my cold dead hands
Oh no, I haven't heard of that term, I'm out of the loop. What does it mean? I think that's probably a huge thing, Most people are going to be drawn to porn / sexual fantasies that reflect how they see themselves or how they want to be? At least where gender is concerned. As for me, I'm a cis, bisexual women who has been rping almost exclusively guys for 14 - 15 years. I was also into yaoi in an embarrassing way when I was but a young thing on the internet in the early 2000s (let's hate the female love interests for getting in the way of our ships and fetishist gay friends yea!!!!) Romance has always been...weird for me. I enjoy being flirty and romantic with men but at the same time it just feels I'm putting on an act. It ends up being stressful and unwanted if I have to carry on too long. I think it boils down to not being comfortable with the role women are supposed to play in romantic relationships with guys. It's just not me. I've always had trouble with female gender roles anyway, it's an enormous list of rules that really messed me up when I was younger. It really didn't help that Japan is a much more conservative society, so the women I saw in anime were just stifled by their gender role (they had to be good, kind, selfless, supportive, saintly, forgiving and vulnerable at least 85 percent of the time and man could I not relate to most of them even a little bit).
I'm pansexual, I'm thirsty for any junk combo, I'M FETISHIZING EVERYONE But yeah, when my weeb ass got into romance manga, I was always so frustrated at how women were portrayed, especially if it was a sexier manga. But the BL stuff, when it wasn't casually flinging around rape as a plot device, seemed less frustrating to me. Years later I got into josei and suddenly the female characters didn't aggravate me as much, and I started to realize some legit criticism of yaoi as a genre, but... Here I am, still enjoying this shit. *thumbs up*
Also these were in the ancient days when the only way to find manga was to lurk in IRC chats. Now y'all get that shit in libraries like it ain't even a thing...
baby ryn tried shipping a little bit when younger, but didn't know any of the terms or get exposure to any mlm ships or ideas till i was like. highschool and even then didn't really understand it/explore it more till college age bc i was indeed living under a rock in a tiny town and had limited internet access for a lot of my formative years. ... and it just. clicked. it clicked so hard and affected me in a way none of the straight ships I'd toyed with prior had. i get that click occasionally with wlw ships as well, but it's not quite the same intensity of that first click. year later i realized 'oh, i'm a flavor of genderqueer. ok.' alongside 'oh no, everyone's hot' alongside a few more complicated thoughts about how i see myself and how i interact with the world around me. i love my problematic yaoi if the story and art's decent, same as i enjoy any other trashy fiction, but i don't think i've written a word of straight shipping fiction in over a decade, i still get stronger !!!!! reactions when they're my fav mlm ships in any number of genres. (I can't tell if its a !!!! because that's how i'm seeing myself while i make it and am reacting that way, or if it's just the general !!! happy feeling from the first time it clicked. i don't think i'll care in the end which it is if i ever find out, it just feels... right i guess.) so. ye. huge middle finger to folks using the latter definition, you can pry'em out of my cold dead hands.
Fudanshi is the same as fujoshi, but the male version! Men who like the same fujoshi content, basically. The kanji for fujoshi is 腐女子, which is literally something like "rotten female person". The kanji for fudanshi is 腐男子, which is exactly the same but with the "female" part replaced with "male". [/Japanese nerdery]
+1 former yaoi fangirl turned bi trans man I did feel like I was getting something different out of it from other fangirls I talked to, and yeah I probably was. I knew I was queer but always related to guys more. It made me feel really validated, in addition to being more arousing than anything else I'd seen Fake was my first exposure to healthy gay relationships in fiction so it forever has a really soft place in my heart. I carried volume 7, which I got from the library, with me everywhere I went for weeks so that my family couldn't possibly go through my stuff and find it. Is this an appropriate place to bitch about people derisively hurling the term "fujoshi" at Killing Stalking fans and the fact that it makes me dysphoric as fuck bc that's a thing
FAKE WAS SO GOOD OMG It and Gravitation were the only licensed yaoi stuff you could get when I was 14, and I put great effort into getting them because of that. Especially FAKE vol 7, because it was M-rated instead of T-rated and thus was rather harder for a 14-year-old to get their hands on. But TOTALLY WORTH IT when I did manage to get ahold of it.
I still don't really get why fujoshi are more bad/evil then other shippers. And they aren't talking about you unless you are a 'cishet women' which tumblr still considers evil ALSO OMG ME TOO! Fake was the only thing you could get that was closest to a normal relationship. I watched my vhs copy so many times of the oav. There was still some "lol consent is overrated I'm horny" moments for laughs but for Shonen ai one of the better titles. I still own all the volumes of the manga in Japanese and English.
Oh my god I loved FAKE so much. I need to get my hands on it again. (I will admit I laughed at Randy's name, because.... /Randy/. You named your yaoi manga character 'horny', basically. Especially when they went to England and no one laughed at him I was like, "This is the most unrealistic part of this manga.") I also loved Carol and Bikky and how the two dudes basically became Bikky's dads and it was so good omg.
oh m,y god, Randy, because he's randy, for the D, who is coincidentally named Dee, i read this series about 72 times and i never put this together,
thank u honestly i think a big part of it is mysoginy + anti-weeabo cringe culture, but i'm going to try and spitball to the best of my ability as to what's happening here i have seen people saying stuff about yoonbum/sangwoo that is really, really uncomfortable. like, unironically talking about shipping in a way that is really gross, completely ignoring that the story is, by design, seriously fucked up. this stuff exists, but it's just a tiny fraction of people, and i think that any response against it (besides, maybe, engaging in a private discussion with the person) to be disproportionate i think a lot of these people are probably younger, or haven't thought a ton about relationships? my favorite story for years was Koisuru Boukun, which is basically "Date Rape: The Saga." and my response to it was really gross. i wanted them to get together and be happy. i wrote and read fics where senpai stopped being so ~weird~ about it. and i think that because a lot of us were younger/not thinking about relationships when we were blossoming yaoi fans, 'fujoshi' got a reputation for uncritical and uncomfortable early examinations of relationships. so tl;dr: a lot of people act like fujoshi on the whole are young kids who are publicly stating their newly-formed, un-nuanced, and (i hate myself for saying this) problematic opinions on relationships, combined with weeaboo cringe stuff + culture of derisiveness towards teenage girls
what is dee's name in the japanese version? i need to know if Randy for the D(ee) could have possibly been intentional on matoh's part
