also possible that theyre just straight and they dont want to put a ton of effort into writing pairings that they dont grok on a fundamental level. it's not how i approach writing personally but especially in a medium like fic where youre not being paid for it and its kind of just a work of passion, i could see someone just wanting to unwind with something theyre most comfortable with ngl, i understand this discussion on a system 1 level. seeing an all-het works page might make me a little bit wary of the writer. but i don't know how fair that is, because there could be any number of reasons for them doing that, and a lot of them are not nefarious. also it's really easy to just not engage with people or works that skeeve you out for whatever reason
This is me, p much--less so nowadays since more femslash options, but in some of my earlier fandoms I almost entirely shipped het because there weren't any good femslash ships and slash just...bored me because I Need My Ladies Dammit.
I didn't even mean there were no queer ships in that fic or that fandom- the fic was tagged hurt/comfort and didn't have any ships. It was only when the authors notes started saying stuff like "Oh this is Prompto/Iris but you can see it as platonic if you want" and stuff like that after having a bunch of male on male sexual assult that I checked through the authors profile and got skeeved, esp since in others they tagged gay pairings (with / not &) but in tags made sure to note that it was only "supposed" to be a bromance. I don't think they're homophobic, it just made me really uncomfortable. Like I said I don't think they're a bad person, I just have a hard time trusting it when I never know how its going to break. ....this is a fanfiction gripes thread, literally everything here is really easy to not engage with
yeah, uh, the entire point of this thread is Pointless Bitching Quarantine so you dont bother the actual writer
The only time (canon)'het-only shippers really make me uneasy is when they go hard on judging people who like non-canon ships. I've got a Tumblr acquaintance into classic lit fandoms, and they've reblogged a bunch of posts about how stupid it is that fandom is so into romance, why can't they stick to canon...when theyre plenty happy to enjoy canon (always het) romances. Like, I don't feel like it's too much of a stretch to understand why some fans would enjoy canon and ALSO want some queer content even if it's not 100% canon-compliant? Smells like "uncomfortable with lgb&c characters" to me And @Arxon that would make me uncomfortable too :/
what ever my preferred pairing/OTP ends up as is what I will read. If it's het, I'll read the authors that write that ship, and a lot of the authors that have an OTP will often write almost exclusively for that. That said, I do notice that het pairings have more of a chance to contain.... dubious shit that is not marked or flagged as such.
I'm like, I agree but also disagree? I think maybe it depends on the... content of the fandom. I see a lot of badly tagged, dubious things in m/m fic especially in some fandoms. Might depend on ship popularity or something, because I feel a lot of m/m material especially gets bad/unfiltered writing/content.
m/m Dubious Shit tends to be so bad and in your face its almost ridiculous while m/f dubious shit is like......more subtle? like a few lines of blink-and-youll-miss-it creepy shenanigans
Meanwhile M/M dubious stuff is omegaverse. Which gives us the untagged noncon/heteronormativity combo
I agree that weird m/f stuff tends to be more subtle in that it involves... Creepy characterization, weird expectations, small uncomfortable moments of not right things but. Man, bringing up this related feeling of frustration I have where... I know some ships that are big m/m ships that are abusive but literally never talked about as abusive though... Like damn, I wish fics wrote about the two characters having a genuinely abusive relationship like they do in canon but they just won't. So there's these off feeling fanfics about like... flower shops, where there's a wink and nudge about the character being a bad boy but. this character is Much More than a Bad Boy (im thinking of rhack, but probably there's other relationships this would apply to)
I've mentioned that a/b/o fic YOI Badfic Friend keeps updating me on which is tagged "consent is my kink" and had (among a lot of other dub- and noncon) unnegotiated, untagged somnophilia, right?
It's probably also partly informed by the nonfanfic media that the writers are involved with. A lot of really :/ shit in m/m can be traced back to shit like the rape-is-love narratives in early 00's yaoi, which informed a lot of fandom trends for a while. A/B/O is another one. The :/ shit I run into in m/f flies more under the radar for the same reason why bodice rippers and YA novels can have pretty fucked up romantic dynamics between leads without anyone batting an eye. Upfront misogyny shows up more too because... there's a female character in the spotlight which means that stuff gets highlighted. Especially if the author falls into exaggerated gender roles. It's sort of a tossup, honestly.
For me its like. In most het stuff theres just no reason for them to be together- that happens in slash too, but I feel less? Like its all the problems I have with most romance stories- its all the getting together, none of the making it work. I like fic where people's sharp edges rub against each other, and most of the time even in fandom most lady characters aren't allowed to have sharp edges, and if they do than usually the man is there to fix them or whatever. It rarely seems equal, in fic, and theres less thought to how these characters work together. It's what turned me off Sokai as a kid and NoctLuna now and its turned me off many other ships. Homestuck was one of the few fandoms where I could read het stuff that felt equal.
...Ya know thats basically why I can't read a lot of femslash too. Its all so sanded down and Sweet and Perfect Relationship-y. For a while I could read Vrisrezi and that was fic about two Fucked Up girls being Fucked Up together but then vrisrezi got really...uncomfortable for me in canon and I stopped. Most of the femslash I see is very "aw, isn't it sweet" fluffy stuff, and that is for some people! But it isn't for me. I want fics to really get into interpersonal issues and dynamics and have big, messy conflicts between people. I want to know how these characters tic and what makes them work for each other. ....I've complained about this like 1000 times before on this site.
yeah, het and/or gen is not bad and as i said before, it feeling the way it sometimes doesn't mean that it's homophobic. but reading it and the stuff the people who write it exclusively sometimes do/say (eg. that they dislike all romance but the canon couples, that romance is dumb and makes people act stupid, having extensive headcanons about how a species does romance and reproduction but acting like queerness doesn't exist, that fandom shouldn't be into romance) makes me uneasy and i can only handle it in small doses.
AMV rant; your OCs in magical fantasy battles are not served well by a soundtrack of "Sandy Fishnets", which is about Spoiler: CSA the murder of a child prostitute and far from subtle about same.
(Incidentally, random anxiety compels me to clarify: This isn't a "I'm, uh, keeping the terrible a/b/o for a friend" situation; I really, genuinely have a friend who sends me near-daily updates on their exploration of the depths of gay skating fanfic hell, often with quotes. )
