Tag: because there’s like a male character

gayfanficprivilege:

alogicals:

vulcangirlfriend:

one of the worst things about current fandom is the weird eat-your-veggies attitude surrounding femslash and female characters

in general

like obviously i want people promoting their faves and shipping more gay women but because fandom has to turn everything into sj it becomes “if you don’t devote x amount of time to f/f or laydeez you’re Bad And Sexist”

but you can’t force yourself to love characters so you get people cranking out soulless cookie-cutter f/f content where the women braid each other’s hair and are Two Strong Gals In Love

in order to get back to talking about whatever it is they actually like

and for some reason this is supposed to be better because yay more f/f and laydeez laydeez laydeez uwuwuw ❤ but in reality all that happens is you have to wade through endless scores of bad, emotionally sterile f/f written by people who were only seeking the stamp of fandom approval and don’t actually give a shit about the ship

yeah fandom can be sexist but the solution is not putting out femslash quotas bc that will not get you the kind of thoughtful content you want

i’d rather have less f/f content if it means less slogging through performative garbage like this

#this heavily overlaps with fandom purity politics ime so you get this super narrow range of Acceptable F/F Content#which sucks when you want morally gray interesting f/f or anything with conflict#i don’t care about ~~soft girls i want fucked up women same as the other characters i like 

tbh i think about this a lot. i think it’s partly benevolent sexism like you said, where the only thing women are allowed to be is Awesome Ladies™, because people react to media’s history of badly written female characters who are flawed in sexist, misogynist ways by instead writing women who don’t have any flaws at all, with no regard for the fact that this doesn’t make for an interesting character that you can get emotionally invested in. it’s also partly the fact that media often gives women no personality at all beyond flat cutouts of character tropes, and instead of filling those out properly people instead default to another flat cutout. and this is seen as good, because people have mistakenly internalized the idea, even if just subconsciously, that women being flawed is a bad thing, because they overwhelmingly only have sexist and misogynist writing to point to. but it doesn’t have to be!

i have no interest in spending time getting into the inner life of a character who doesn’t have one and just exists to say snappy lines, manage everyone else’s emotions with their superior Lady Senses and maybe beat people up. women need to be allowed to be flawed and emotional and awful in the way men are, because all those qualities make up three-dimensional human beings. people just have to find a way to write those flaws in ways that aren’t gendered. which is hard and takes work! it’s certainly harder than writing every female character with the same cookie cutter Awesome Ladies personality. but it’s work that’s worth it, and i wish more people went to the trouble.

putting all women on some sort of pedestal is just another way of being sexist and just serves to alienate the real, actual, breathing women who need real, actual fictional women to relate to even more. i’m certainly very alienated from a lot of f/f content these days, which makes me genuinely sad.

but i think it’s also the fact that people are following an eat your veggie quota in the first place at times. after all, why put the effort into properly developing a character if you don’t actually have any interest in them beyond the performative? just writing a generic Awesome Lady will make you look good without having to put actual work into it lmao. it’s an ouroboros, the narrow line of what’s Allowed to be written about women reinforcing itself constantly because everyone models their behaviour on each other.

this is why i wish people would just forget about worrying what other people think of them when it comes to the content they enjoy, and write what they love and have the motivation to genuinely invest in, and it’s why i wish we could go back to an atmosphere in which people don’t constantly fear judgement for every small misstep. how are you supposed to figure out what works for you and what doesn’t if you don’t feel like you’re allowed to fail? it’s also why i wish we could stop seeing all content as a one size fits all that needs to cater to everyone equally and start realizing that sometimes it’s fine if things are meaningful to you personally without having to have some sort of wider societal impact on everyone around you.

for god’s sake, fandom should be fun. if you start thinking of it as a chore, there’s a high chance you’re doing it wrong.

(also as an aside, i find the “eating your veggies” attitude to femslash downright insulting because the insinuation is always “this is unpleasant and no one would bother if it didn’t have some Nebulous Good Effect” like? fuck you? i love both vegetables and femslash, i am the vegetarian lesbian your mother warned you about. bite me.)

I also think the thought stream that goes “well Ladies are good, so F/F is the best and most progressive…. but m/f has a lady so it’s the second best and progressive” is so stupid and homophobic and I’m tired of it 

anyway I grew up eating whole heads of broccoli and shipping niche anime f/f so screw that