Meta: Sort of. Lots of pointless rambling, bits of snark.
There's been lots of meta regarding femslash, recently. Here, here, here, and here. If not more places I haven't seen yet. (also, to derail a moment, Femme_fic is hosting a poll about which fandoms to include this year)
And there's been a few bits and pieces I ended up chewing over at work, and thus, felt the need to then regurgitate (*murders analogy*). It's long. And possibly pointless.
One of the things that stuck out and struck me was the comment that boyslashers notice the lack of women more. To which I say: bullshit.
I can't count the number of times boyslashers have told me to my face that the female characters just don't interest them. That the canon spends no time on them so why should they?
To bring up ancient history, I'm sure some of you remember the gaytopia debates of Pegasus B. I'm sure more of you remember how those icky women started getting written into the universe. And some of you, iirc, were gleeful about writing them in, too. tsk.
Which is not to say they aren't noticing. But I think things like writing genre identity to be pretentious are a bit harder to pin down these days with so many of us wearing different hats.
A ton of you are going to look at my lj and conclude I'm a het-writer. And I suppose I am. I ship Kara Thrace/Sam Anders like it's going out of style (pls, no). But I write het and femslash and gen (and read whatever hits my fancy). If you looked at havocthecat, you'd give up, because she's scary, and she writes anything under the sun. Between the two of us, we've got boyslashers and girlslashers and hetshippers and threesome fans and gen writers galore; and some are female-oriented, and some aren't.
The lines are blurring more and more, because fandom is bigger and expansive and everyone has different kinks and ideas about what they want to write and read. The more you're exposed to variety, the more you shift and change--not that there aren't people locked into a certain pairing/genre/place. But that's far less common these days, and it usually ends up being people who are newer to fandom--give them time, and they shift. Sure, there are people who self-identify as 'primarily this' or 'primarily that', but almost all of them dabble in anything and everything.
And let's be clear, here: there is no section of fandom that has a better grasp on female characterization than any other. They all suffer from ingrained and learned traits ascribed to women, from what the media tells us, from what the canon tells us (or what it doesn't tell us, which is usually more likely these days). There is no utopia of characterization. There are excellent writers out there, who fail spectacularly at breaking those molds, and there are awful writers who come up with ridiculous concepts, but sparkling characterizations.
What I'm getting at is that it doesn't matter who 'notices' this trend more (though, I dare anyone to read the last several BSG posts from me and tell me I'm not noticing). What matters is what they're doing about it. Are they writing meta about the female characters? Female-centric fic? Are they poking their femslash friends into writing more with feedback and encouragement? Are they making women a central part of their boyslash epics? Or is everyone paying lip service to this idea of "gosh, the women are under-written in canon, that's so sad" and leaving it there, as though that's a solution all on its own?
It is hard to constantly write one gender or the other (and that's leaving out everything in-between, I suppose, which is also hard to write just one of). Sometimes, you just don't want to.
There have been 'fuck you, she's awesome' memes (I think it only went around once, though); and a 'which female characters have you written' list (which I started). We had a 'because we are awesome' fic challenge, and there's galpalficathon and femme_fic and femslash ficathons (06, 07, 08, 09...), and more that I'm quite honestly forgetting. There are, about every six months, femslash ficlet battles on fslash_today.
Do we need more? Less? Is something different required to sucker seduce new writers and old?
Another comment I noted said that the person liked writing women, but they always had to fill in the backstory canon didn't give them, and I'm a bit surprised. (for one thing, I've seen male characters with no lines turned into half of an otp with extensive backstory and fanon)
Is it really that hard to write a backstory? To fill in where canon has only given us scraps? rose_griffes wrote a fabulous character piece all about Jean Barolay, a woman who's had a total of twenty lines (if that).
Something prozacpark said recently has also stuck with me. So often, fic and media talks about women through the eyes of a man. They're the gateway drug and women are sort of the after-shock.
And, yes, that has changed. But not enough. Not to the point where I can look for a female action hero and easily find one (Iron Man, Batman, James Bond... where's the big-screen action-packed adventures of a woman? [note: please do not take this as license to proceed to bash things like Sex and the City, pls]).
Sure, we have Sarah Connor and Cameron, Kara Thrace and Sharon Agathon, Sarah Walker, Olivia Benson, Mary Shannon, Temperance Brennan, Catherine Willows, Dani Reese, Ziva David.... But they're usually an exception, and most of them don't get to run around blowing things up and shooting things. Mostly.
(I, ah, got side-tracked. Oops. Ahem.)
For female characters, and femslash, written or feedbacked in fandom, what it ends up coming down to is sheer numbers.
Take a look at the porn battle--on the whole, while femslash has a slight presence (BSG femslash having a slight edge over SG (there's just more women), and I'm not sure on the rest of them), it's still buried in amongst metric tons of boyslash and het. And I imagine if you added up the femslash and het, you'd still come short to equaling the sheer number of boyslash prompts.
And that doesn't even touch how many people feedback which pairings. Nor does it touch how many fic challenges and ficathons go under or fall by the wayside due to a lack of interest.
Yes, it's true: popular pairings are going to get more feedback. That still doesn't mean it isn't annoying as hell to see really badly-written boyslash (or het or femslash) getting lavish praise while something that's slightly different, or simply just better, is ignored.
But that's true all the time, really, and isn't endemic to differences between femslash, boyslash, gen and het.
And there's been a few bits and pieces I ended up chewing over at work, and thus, felt the need to then regurgitate (*murders analogy*). It's long. And possibly pointless.
One of the things that stuck out and struck me was the comment that boyslashers notice the lack of women more. To which I say: bullshit.
I can't count the number of times boyslashers have told me to my face that the female characters just don't interest them. That the canon spends no time on them so why should they?
To bring up ancient history, I'm sure some of you remember the gaytopia debates of Pegasus B. I'm sure more of you remember how those icky women started getting written into the universe. And some of you, iirc, were gleeful about writing them in, too. tsk.
Which is not to say they aren't noticing. But I think things like writing genre identity to be pretentious are a bit harder to pin down these days with so many of us wearing different hats.
A ton of you are going to look at my lj and conclude I'm a het-writer. And I suppose I am. I ship Kara Thrace/Sam Anders like it's going out of style (pls, no). But I write het and femslash and gen (and read whatever hits my fancy). If you looked at havocthecat, you'd give up, because she's scary, and she writes anything under the sun. Between the two of us, we've got boyslashers and girlslashers and hetshippers and threesome fans and gen writers galore; and some are female-oriented, and some aren't.
The lines are blurring more and more, because fandom is bigger and expansive and everyone has different kinks and ideas about what they want to write and read. The more you're exposed to variety, the more you shift and change--not that there aren't people locked into a certain pairing/genre/place. But that's far less common these days, and it usually ends up being people who are newer to fandom--give them time, and they shift. Sure, there are people who self-identify as 'primarily this' or 'primarily that', but almost all of them dabble in anything and everything.
And let's be clear, here: there is no section of fandom that has a better grasp on female characterization than any other. They all suffer from ingrained and learned traits ascribed to women, from what the media tells us, from what the canon tells us (or what it doesn't tell us, which is usually more likely these days). There is no utopia of characterization. There are excellent writers out there, who fail spectacularly at breaking those molds, and there are awful writers who come up with ridiculous concepts, but sparkling characterizations.
What I'm getting at is that it doesn't matter who 'notices' this trend more (though, I dare anyone to read the last several BSG posts from me and tell me I'm not noticing). What matters is what they're doing about it. Are they writing meta about the female characters? Female-centric fic? Are they poking their femslash friends into writing more with feedback and encouragement? Are they making women a central part of their boyslash epics? Or is everyone paying lip service to this idea of "gosh, the women are under-written in canon, that's so sad" and leaving it there, as though that's a solution all on its own?
It is hard to constantly write one gender or the other (and that's leaving out everything in-between, I suppose, which is also hard to write just one of). Sometimes, you just don't want to.
There have been 'fuck you, she's awesome' memes (I think it only went around once, though); and a 'which female characters have you written' list (which I started). We had a 'because we are awesome' fic challenge, and there's galpalficathon and femme_fic and femslash ficathons (06, 07, 08, 09...), and more that I'm quite honestly forgetting. There are, about every six months, femslash ficlet battles on fslash_today.
Do we need more? Less? Is something different required to sucker seduce new writers and old?
Another comment I noted said that the person liked writing women, but they always had to fill in the backstory canon didn't give them, and I'm a bit surprised. (for one thing, I've seen male characters with no lines turned into half of an otp with extensive backstory and fanon)
Is it really that hard to write a backstory? To fill in where canon has only given us scraps? rose_griffes wrote a fabulous character piece all about Jean Barolay, a woman who's had a total of twenty lines (if that).
Something prozacpark said recently has also stuck with me. So often, fic and media talks about women through the eyes of a man. They're the gateway drug and women are sort of the after-shock.
And, yes, that has changed. But not enough. Not to the point where I can look for a female action hero and easily find one (Iron Man, Batman, James Bond... where's the big-screen action-packed adventures of a woman? [note: please do not take this as license to proceed to bash things like Sex and the City, pls]).
Sure, we have Sarah Connor and Cameron, Kara Thrace and Sharon Agathon, Sarah Walker, Olivia Benson, Mary Shannon, Temperance Brennan, Catherine Willows, Dani Reese, Ziva David.... But they're usually an exception, and most of them don't get to run around blowing things up and shooting things. Mostly.
(I, ah, got side-tracked. Oops. Ahem.)
For female characters, and femslash, written or feedbacked in fandom, what it ends up coming down to is sheer numbers.
Take a look at the porn battle--on the whole, while femslash has a slight presence (BSG femslash having a slight edge over SG (there's just more women), and I'm not sure on the rest of them), it's still buried in amongst metric tons of boyslash and het. And I imagine if you added up the femslash and het, you'd still come short to equaling the sheer number of boyslash prompts.
And that doesn't even touch how many people feedback which pairings. Nor does it touch how many fic challenges and ficathons go under or fall by the wayside due to a lack of interest.
Yes, it's true: popular pairings are going to get more feedback. That still doesn't mean it isn't annoying as hell to see really badly-written boyslash (or het or femslash) getting lavish praise while something that's slightly different, or simply just better, is ignored.
But that's true all the time, really, and isn't endemic to differences between femslash, boyslash, gen and het.