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A space to chat fandom! Anon!

Got a WIP you're excited about? Want to rave about your fave? Or is your fandom absolutely in love with a character who detracts from every scene they bumble into, and you need somewhere to vent? You're in the right place!

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From: (Anonymous)

Hah, hadn't seen that actually but just image searched and WOW that is PINK. xD Is it good? But yeah I think a draw of anime for me was that there were a lot where everyone looked feminine, the art was *pretty*, the stories were often really dark and it feels like there were wayyy more female creators around than with western comics. I was into CLAMP and stuff. (well, as much as I could be, given I couldn't find it ANYWHERE growing up :P But I like that combo of beautiful art and fabulous costumes; I'm a sucker for stuff where the characters get a new costume every episode! And I also like dark storylines... I feel quite alienated in radfem spaces over this because they seem to really like family-friendly stuff and generally it's not my thing. suppose I should make an anime thread...)

From: (Anonymous)

AYRT

Precure is kinda confusing to get into, since it's a bunch of different magical girl shows all under the Pretty Cure name. But it's aimed at kids, girls especially, and so you don't get all the creepy fanservice. I've only seen a few seasons (it's loooong) but they're sweet and cheerful (until everybody almost dies at the end of the world, LOL) and very femslash friendly. Maho Girls Precure is my favorite season - the main two girls are THIS CLOSE to canon, and it's got kind of a Harry Potter vibe.

Yeah, I love radfem spaces but I don't really feel comfortable talking about, say...Hannigram there, LOL.

From: (Anonymous)

ayrt

Cool, may check it out! :)

Yeahhhh, I get on well with the women who *create* the spaces, and I like a lot of the women who are very visible in the movement, but it seems like the people who post the most on radfem online boards are... not people I'd hang out with. :P So I'm currently using those spaces for keeping tabs on political stuff, but I miss having spaces where I can just hang out and chat about stuff I like (or mock stuff I dislike without feeling like it's going to encourage a pile-on), and joke, etc. I always felt very at home in geek spaces and it's just a different crowd that I click better with. BUT geekdom's on the hate-JKR train at the moment so I've lost those spaces. Sucks, man.

From: (Anonymous)

DA

I feel this. Fandom people were always the people I clicked with. There are people in the radfem world I really like, but very few that I have clicked with like that (the one I like most is someone I have known for decades outside of media fandom, but we met at a con in the first place, long before either of us had the beliefs we have now) or would like to hang out with. I have missed just talking casually about fandom.

I mean, as someone who's a big fan of many things that get tagged with dead dove do not eat, there is no way in hell I would talk about my fannish interests in radfem spaces. I bite my tongue about enough stuff in them as it is.

From: (Anonymous)

ayrt

Yes. Same. I like my fic dark, and it especially pisses me off when I'm getting lectured by some kid who's learned radfem theory from a book. Fuck off, I've lived it, I got away, I have lovely supportive personal relationships as it happens, you are a child.

My people are fans, hackers, women who write; the subcultures that are getting fucking RAVAGED by gender bullshit (*because* we don't conform to those norms! *because* we were always out of place, and were more likely to find people we clicked with online!) because it took advantage of the same qualities that make those communities so much fun, and now I feel like I'm waiting out a virus.

From: (Anonymous)

AYRT

::high fives::

I keep HTP fic and Dworkin side-by-side on my Kindle. I feel no shame in that. Even with the madness going on right now, I am always going to feel protective of fandom, and I am always going to be frustrated by the simplistic outsider POV of what’s going on right now. (No, slash didn’t cause this, FFS. No, it’s not just straight girls fetishizing m/m. Half my friends are old enough to have been from the ‘zine days. Many of them are lesbians or have been in serious same-sex relationships. Most of them strongly prefer m/m. Curiously, none of them have been hit with a case of the genders, even though they’re pretty much all down with the BS.)

From: (Anonymous)

ayrt

Yeah, also something I found lurking on ffa was that... most of the people there are still pretty sane, they just have no idea what's going on and are trying to be nice. Of those identifying as nb, many are in the 'don't realise that nonbinary isn't going to work politically and don't realise that all their media is lying to them' camp. Fairly recently there was a thread where some tra mentioned they hated keira bell and everyone else was like 'who is keira bell?'; the tra tried to bullshit but didn't really get the response they wanted. I actually think the pro-TRA stuff on there is mostly a couple of loud anons who spam... but people are still trying to be nice and haven't twigged that it's not a legit civil rights movement yet. And I completely understand fandom women feeling ill-at-ease in what tend to get marketed as women-only spaces, when they tend to have a culture that is totally alien to those of us with geeky interests... and I totally get thinking 'there is a difference between those women and me'. There being a difference doesn't mean you're a man. But they're not imagining that they do not click with these women.

And yeah, anyone who uses the term 'fetishising gay relationships' goes on my red flag list, lol. It's a completely different dynamic to men fetishising lesbians to the point where r/lesbians is a porn sub for men and lesbians can't get a space without it being banned by men who want to be them. I think slash is going to contribute inasmuch as it's encouraging girls to imagine themselves as men (IN A CULTURE WHERE THEY ARE BEING TOLD THEY CAN BE MEN THAT IS THE IMPORTANT BIT) but it's like, 'have you thought about where this line of thought leads? you want to ban people from imagining being someone else? do you want to ban fiction?' -- And that's exactly the same attitude as the extreme socjus stuff that's like 'you may not write this unless you have lived it, and then it must be ~responsible~. Just, fuck off, all'o'ya. It's not feminism, it is the very same bullshit mindset that's causing these problems in the first place. And plus we all know it's because they, personally, do not like slash, and they can't handle the idea that morality doesn't have to map 1:1 with whatever they personally like and dislike. They'd have all been homophobes a few years back because they think their kneejerk reactions are a god-given guide to what's right.

Well, that's my rant.

From: (Anonymous)

DA

Counterpoint: I like some slash, I like some yaoi, I have geeky interests, but I am absolutely turned off by the extreme focus on m/m in fandom. I don't understand why there isn't more decent m/f, and I think the focus on m/m relationships is less healthy and interesting than writing good, dynamic m/f relationships. I'm not out to ban anything, people can like what they like, but the focus on m/m has made me shy away from fandoms where I like the source material. I'm not going to stand out there and preach to anyone about their personal fandoms or fic, but if we're having meta discussions about fandom, overfocus on m/m IS a huge red flag to me.

From: (Anonymous)

ayrt

I find it a bit funny that I end up arguing for slash and yaoi so much because I personally cannot stand yaoi, I think it is based on a lot of sexist tropes, and slash generally bores me. I don't like men's bodies and don't much want to picture them. I mostly write gen. So I suspect I recognise the feelings that are motivating those who are stridently against it, but to me the issues with yaoi are a symptom of deeper cultural issues, and those who treat it as the *cause* are just displacing anger they should be directing at men onto other women. And I'm very very glad I didn't fall into that trap because I could see past-teen-me going along with it because it matched up with my personal tastes. And I'm glad I met women who liked it so I got to find out that some people just like it, instead of wasting time psychoanalysing how they had acquired their preferences or assuming they couldn't think critically. :P

From: (Anonymous)

AYRT

I don't think should slash be blamed for transing people without looking at the general culture, and liking dark fic doesn't make you degenerate, but... man, I've seen fic writers go down a path: start out writing slash that's only remarkable because it's higher quality than usual, start including more non-con, then some incest, fast forward and everything is bdsm or piss fetishes or similar. I don't know, maybe you can keep a Chinese wall between that and the rest of your life, I don't know these writers offline, but that's a progression that does make me worried/concerned, and I've never seen it go the OTHER direction.

From: (Anonymous)

Huh, I've not seen that yet (I've seen people write more extreme stuff over time, but not to the exclusion of other work). There's a big difference between what I like in fantasy and what I do irl, so I'd assume they're just desensitised to fictional stuff by default, or expressing things they were thinking about but scared to share earlier. I'm more concerned about people assuming that what they read'll be fun to try out, and I think that's where people really suffer atm because those conversations can't happen when people are so polarised. You can't say 'be careful; irl bdsm scene does not match up with what you're reading' when the camps are 'liking bdsm in fiction means you need therapy' and 'IT'S ALL GOOD NOTHING TO SEE HERE'. So then you get dodgy men false-teaming with women who enjoy fucked up fantasy, and I don't think that leads anywhere good.

From: (Anonymous)

(meant to say 'forced-teaming' but false-teaming works too, I suppose)

From: (Anonymous)

I write a lot of dark, nasty stuff (usually drawerfic) and I promise, I am a very boring person in real life. I just have an overactive imagination and a lifelong fascination with how awful people can be to each other.

I have also been in dark fic Discords and have seen that writing progression. It’s generally a case of like-minded people egging each other on like a bunch of edgelords, though you have enough people in fandom who are also in the kink scene that there’s bleedover from that when they realize there’s an audience for writing what they know, but in the latter case, the kink scene involvement is usually preexisting and the writing (or at least the author’s notes) is usually a lot preachier.

From: (Anonymous)

DA I find it funny that I defend it as much as I do, too. I haven’t been interested in writing it for years, mostly write het, femslash, and gen, but like you, I see the issues as reflecting deeper cultural issues. Yaoi feels like it is a coping mechanism, not a cause.

From: (Anonymous)

Yes. I think for some it's a coping mechanism, and some people just like it because people are strange. :P I think the people who get unhealthily obsessed would do so with anything, and it just happens that that's what was in front of them at the right time, and/or offered them community when they struggled to make friends otherwise, etc. I find it funny because I stumbled across my first explicit m/m when I was 12, and went "wtaf", wandered off, then got involved in fandom years later via a totally different route, and yaoi was of course super popular. So I'd try to read it because, hey, if you wanted lots of fic, that's where it was! It was a big part of the culture! But I couldn't stand it. Non-yaoi m/m was slightly better but it was more that I enjoyed everything but the m/m aspect and could look past it. It was obvious that I wasn't getting from it what other women in my fandom were getting from it. But also, they were normal people (well, geek-normal :p); they were always pleasant to talk to and they weren't glomping strangers or hitting them with paddles or some shit. Whereas, I've met that type. There are pre-existing personality disorders. Going after the art they like isn't going to resolve that.

From: (Anonymous)

NA

Have any of you guys read the manga My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness? There's this part where she's trying to figure out sex with a woman, but suddenly realizes that all of the porn she's read has been about the "yaoi hole" - that she kind of hid her fear about sex by reading m/m that had no relation to the real world or real bodies at all. It freaked me out when I read it, because that's pretty much exactly how I got into m/m - when I first read m/m, it grossed me out! I hate penises! But I got into it, and eventually found it hot. Only I realized that it was hot to me as men-who-were-basically-women, written by women. Slash ended up basically being a coping mechanism for me so I didn't have to think about RL sexuality, in a way. I mostly ship f/f now and it feels more natural to me (just wish there was all the fic and porn that m/m got, LOL).

From: (Anonymous)

Interesting! I haven't read it.

I tend to fantasise about het but I can't tell if that's cultural conditioning or not, since I find men's bodies kind of repulsive visually and prefer to look at women, and I don't feel attracted to anyone. I don't read much f/f but again idk how much of that is conditioning. When I fantasise, I've noticed I put myself in the shoes of one of the women in f/f scenarios whereas I watch f/m scenarios from the outside. I can occasionally make myself fantasise about m/m but it's a struggle. Like, two men, why would I wanna look at that? There's nothing to look at! Whereas I absolutely *know* what kind of dynamics I like, scenario-wise, emotion-wise. So I wonder if I just put men in them because those are the characters who are depicted as having certain emotions and it's hard to imagine a female version that isn't a dorky created-by-a-man implausible kind of thing. And then it's not like fandom is rushing to supply good f/f/. It's interesting seeing how different different people's experiences are.

From: (Anonymous)

AYRT

It's fantastic and brutally honest. I feel like I might get backlash if I recced it in radfem spaces because the author talks about hiring an escort and that's obviously a hot topic.

I feel the same way about dynamics influencing your ships. It's so hard to find what I want in f/f, and genderswap doesn't work for me. Once I started really searching out canons with a ton of female characters, though, it got a bit easier.

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