First Post

[hoisinsauce]

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!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Comments

Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...

[(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.

Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...

[(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

Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...

[(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.

Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...

[(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.

Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...

[(Anonymous)]

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

Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...

[(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.

Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...

[(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.

Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...

[(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.

Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...

[(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).

Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...

[(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.

Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...

[(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.