via
http://ift.tt/2bEJ3Fe:
olderthannetfic:
dsudis:
heartofthemirror:
capfalc:
The female character hierarchy:
“she’s aro/ace uwu” = fan favorite female character who’s not an immediate threat to the popular m/m ship
“she’s a strong independent woman who doesn’t need a man!” = main heroine who clearly has chemistry with main hero, or any WoC
“I don’t hate her, but…” = impending threat to popular m/m ship, erased from the story/written out in fanworks
“She lied to this male character once, that means she’s abusive!!” = canon love interest, immediate threat to the popular m/m ship, gets all her hate tagged
This has a lot of good points but frankly….
I find the fact that there are comparatively few straight ships in fandom refreshing. Girls are raised to believe they get their happily ever after when they find their prince (or, to a lesser degree princess). Leaving aside the matter of gender/orientation there is still this huge stigma in western society about unattached women. They must be suffering. They must be cold bitches. They must be totally undesirable. They just need to meet the right man/woman and settle down etc.
I am so sick to death of these kinds of unspoken assumptions that people (and especially women) need relationships in order for their lives to have any meaning. That they’re pathetic if they’re “alone”.
And so what if the author is writing a girl as independent and unattached because she wants those two guys to bone without the lady “getting in the way”? Fuck authorial intent. Give me all the single ladies. Even the imperfectly constructed ones.
Also, personally, I’ve seen a lot more Lesbian/Bi-in-a-lesbian-relationship tropes for fan fav ladies than Ace ones. And there should be more LGBTQA+ ladies in fandom media and mainstream media, absolutely. But the A in that acronym stances for Ace/Aro not allies. So why is it objectionable to make a fan fav lady Ace but not Bi or Lesbian?
Not having sex is not a punishment. Wanting to see/write ladies who in any small fashion escape the rampant sexualization (and often OVER sexualization) of women’s bodies and daily lives isn’t necessarily un-feminist. More Queer representation of any kind is not necessarily a bad thing.
On a personal note I have always felt extremely judged based on my lack of romantic relationships. People honestly think I’m cursed when I tell them I’m Ace, I’m not interested, etc. And there is so little Ace representation, even inside fandom, even inside Queer spaces, that honestly I’ll take what I can get at this point. Part of the reason why I like m/m ships so much is because it fulfills my desire to consume works that portray a kind of emotional and physical intimacy while being very easy to keep at a remove from myself. Reading about women having sex is sometimes taxing in a way that reading about two men having sex is not.
Fandom tends to read a lot of things in a negative light I’ve noticed. Like obviously fandom has some issues with lady characters and how they’re represented but honestly, I’d never look at a reading of a lady as Ace (or celibate or single) and go “Oh Gosh why would you do that to her?” or immediately think it was a bad thing. Maybe that’s because I’m Ace. Maybe that’s because a lot of people seem to believe that being Ace (or celibate or single) is some kind of punishment.
It is (faintly) possible that this is a matter of sampling bias, because I like reading stories where people (mostly dudes, yes) get into romantic and/or sexual relationships, but…
The problem isn’t actually that a female character is headcanoned as ace/aro–it’s that that headcanon is usually as far as anyone takes the story. You might get a million tumblr posts celebrating Rey as a powerful ace Jedi princess, but you don’t get stories about her, about what her asexuality means to her, or just what her awesome life as an ace woman is all about. You get ace!Rey, or Strong Woman Who Don’t Need No Man Rey, briefly mentioned on the outskirts of a lovingly-crafted story about Poe and Finn getting it on. (And the exact same thing is prone to happen to, say, ace!Sam Wilson, or any other male character (usually a character of color!) who can be conveniently categorized as asexual to make him not an obstacle to the pairing the author wants; it’s just obscured by the fact that all male characters tend to get more stories and therefore a broader range of representation.)
I mean, look, as an author I can tell you: authors spend their words on what they care about, and what is important to them (and, to varying extents, what they believe their readers care about and value). So an author can proclaim that Rey is a wonderful strong ace badass until they’re blue in the face–but unless they are writing stories actually centered on Rey as a wonderful strong ace badass, it’s pretty damn obvious where their priorities actually lie. I agree that it’s great to explore and glorify women having other options than the heterosexual monogamous dream–but gesturing in that direction isn’t the same as exploring or glorifying, even if it’s more than we get in most other venues. As an asexual woman, I’m not super thrilled by “oh well she’s ace/aro/not interested in relationships” as a reason there are apparently no interesting stories to tell about a character.
And, you know, everybody has priorities! I’m an ace woman who’s written zero stories about ace women and vanishingly few, as a fraction of my work, that center on women of any description. The heart wants what it wants and there’s only so much writing time in a day. We’re all here to read and write the stuff we love, not (most of the time) to construct in our fiction a complete reflection of an ideal world.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth recognizing, and talking about, the pattern that emerges from the sum of fandom’s priorities. The fact is, in terms of the summed collective interests of fandom, the way to gauge how much a character is loved is to look at how often they are the star of the story–and most stories, and most long stories, and most popular stories–the kind that shape fandoms and headcanons–are concerned to some extent with sex and romance. So when women are ruled out of that, they are mostly ruled out of our stories.
There’s no quick fix to that–everybody’s gonna keep on reading and writing what they love even if we pony up a Lady Story now and again to keep the wolves of internalized misogyny from the door–but it’s still worth acknowledging.
“But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth recognizing, and talking about, the pattern that emerges from the sum of fandom’s priorities.”
A decade ago, I agreed with this view and posted things like this all the time. I think it’s a fair thing for any slash-loving fangirl to think about for herself at some point in her fannish life. But as a public discussion topic…
Its effect is to shame one set of women while erasing another.
Women are only ruled out of our stories if we’re looking at m/m slash fandom. Rey is not unpopular in romance fics. It’s just that those fics are Reylo, so people pretend they don’t count.
Canons that feature a central female wish fulfillment heroine often spawn fandoms that are the same. Many of the ships are about aspirational boyfriends or consent issues or fucked up people, just like you find in m/m fic.
Look at Twilight fandom! Het as far as the eye can see!
Look at Mortal Instruments fandom: On AO3, the canon gay ship has 4x the fic Clary does, but on FFN, she’s more tagged than either of those guys.
Star Wars prequel trilogy fandom spawned the massive Qui Gon/Obi Wan fandom. It also spawned a bazillion Padme/Anakin shippers who still make cheesy vids on Youtube. I see hundreds from the last month alone.
Female action heroes who fit the male mold get the same kind of fandom response their male counterparts do. The fandoms may be tiny or they may not be on AO3 or even FFN, but the fannish impulse is no different.
Sicario is about an angry, violent female woobie who eventually realizes that one of the older guys helping with their secret mission has a horrible hidden agenda, and her own side is using her. The fic is entirely dirtybadwrong with the two of them. I know because I left the theater with a powerful NEED, and I went looking. The internet provided.
That 2001 Tomb Raider movie spawned a bunch of femdom-y fic about action hero Angelina Jolie and her disposable love interest old flame Daniel Craig.
I haven’t watched Castle since around season 2, but the FFN fic was all about Beckett and her gruff TV cop dude-style issues. (Yeah, AO3 was full of the supporting character m/m pairing, but that was a tiny part of the fandom.)
Women even get the ascended cameo treatment like Hux does:
MCU’s Darcy owned an ipod and ogled Thor. That was enough to start the deluge of her as Loki’s babymama, the Avengers bicycle, and everybody’s self-insert SHIELD agent.
Femslash is smaller overall in fandom, but it’s big in exactly the fandoms I would expect: fandoms with multiple hot women dressed fabulously.
Such as fandoms with Nicole Haught’s tight little ass in her very tight uniform pants! You can see Waverly lose brain cells when Officer Hotass looks over her shoulder and puts on her hat in that swaggering cowboy way. (Congrats on your toaster, Nicole!)
I don’t watch OUAT, but the popularity there is no mystery: faaaabulous evil queen who is a total hottie has angry tension with another hottie. Look at those power suits: So much power, so much predatoriness. Tie me down and hurt me, mommy!
Mad scientist class clown with total lesbian hair? Ex friends who are still hung up on each other? Hello, Ghostbusters femslash!
Magical girl anime is not my thing, but I have yet to encounter one that wasn’t swimming with yuri ships because those canons are about women’s emotional relationships with each other–and often fucked up, contentious, rival relationships.
People of like tastes flock together. Wattpad is all Mary Sue meets 1D. FFN is full of canon-ish het. AO3 is m/m central. It may be hard to find a specific ship or specific trope with the specific female character one likes. A particular fandom may be tragically unpopular and no amount of trying will make Fetch happen. But…
It is not hard to find Lady Stories if you are looking.
We don’t need to pony up a Lady Story out of duty when so many people write them out of love. We just need to redefine who counts as an acceptable fan who is part of “us” instead of part of “them”.
Reylos and fanfiction.net: still “us”.
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