I fully admit to having leaned towards option B time and again and I am really trying to stop because I know it is untrue and not cool. Though I am also the person who really does wish it was possible for the media to keep pointless/creepy hetero relationships out of everything and actually present the possibility of male and female characters being able to be friends together without the need to hook up because it is in fact much more common than you'd think. Hell I would just love to find a series or something that didn't focus on relationships or hooking up in any matter because gdit.
yeah defs the only people who get to be MEANINGFULLY FRIENDSHIPPED in any capacity in the vast majority of mainstream media is DUDES, because ladies only exist for romance and their only interactions with one another involve CAT FIGHTS amirite!!! no way could they get on, they're too busy COMPETING! for the ATTENTION! of DUDES!
BUT YEAH mostly rn I am annoyed by people using the fact that poorly-done slash exists as an excuse to justify their internalised homophobia. BECAUSE BOY DOES IT COME UP A LOT
Unless the msm decides that it is time to APPEAL TO LADYWALLETS and so they manufacture LADY FRIENDSHIPS that never existed before, because fleshing out the few friendships between ladies that already existed would be too hard or something.
And then the LADY CHARACTERS can be FRIENDS and SUPPORT EACH OTHER through such ladytravails as BREAST CANCER and BAD BREAK-UPS. Oh yeah.
Sorry, am I giving the impression that I'm bitter? I'm totally not bitter. /lies
I agree with you on that second part of your comment - though for me, it's more often the case with books. For example, I was reading a Thriller with both a male and a female protagonist once and was really enjoying it until they threw a totally unfitting romance subplot into it. I think I didn't even finish it because I was so annoyed...
I am way too drained to say much more than I AGREE WHOLEHEARTEDLY I think we may have discussed this briefly before actually.
Also it never stops weirding me out when they swap out a dude/girl broship for AND NOW THEY HAVE UST/ARE IN LOVE/BONING because THAT IS THE ONLY THING THAT COULD HAPPEN EVER UNLESS ONE OF THEM IS GAY OR THE GIRL (ALWAYS THE GIRL) IS FRIGID AND/OR INSECURE. Also I really fucking hate the word "frigid" hdfsjfkld.
As an aside I think I am going to add "DECONSTRUCT A ROMCOM" to my list of film projects. Where the pursuer goes through most of the typical steps to net a ladyfriend and the pursuee is like "no seriously there is something wrong with you what made you think this wasn't weird and creepy?"
idk I think the world has an adequate quantity of dude-bromance goggles, dudes are allowed to be frands all the time - because men are real humans who don't exist solely as love interests duh
ladies are allowed to be friends with people of any kind ALL OF NEVER though so I am all for platonicgoggling them right the fuck up
ladies are allowed to be friends with people of any kind ALL OF NEVER though so I am all for platonicgoggling them right the fuck up
with my eyes
this is what made me kind of sad about Iron Man 2
idk if you or random passersby have seen that movie so um SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
Tony and Pepper had such a perfect BFFs-with-a-stunning-lack-of-sexual-chemistry thing going on in the first movie and I was so impressed with the fact that they were not and clearly would never be boinking, and then noooooooo, not even Pepper Potts can resist Tony Stark's electromagnetic penis. :((((((
Like, their relationship is actually fucking awesome. But their friendship would've been better.
ON THE OTHER HAND I did really like how you thought they were gonna do that LADIES COMPETING thing with Pepper and BW but then they were friends and Tony was like WAIT WHAT
also your last paragraph is why I try to write dudeslash as a dudeperson
not that there is really a practical difference most of the time between writing as a dudeperson and writing as a ladyperson and writing as an inbetweenishperson for me
I mean, when I write dudes, I'm writing as a dude because I'm... writing a dude
but there is a subtle thing going on where there is a difference between appreciating slash as a fangirl and appreciating it as a fanboy? I mean, I wish there wasn't, but there kind of is. So as a gender-multivalent fancreature I end up doing both and, I dunno, it seems to me that there is enough of the first in the world and maybe we could use more of the second.
I mean, someone writing about members of a group of people that they are not a part of, especially when that group is a marginalised one, is always going to be different to someone writing about a group of people that they do belong to
but I do also think it's kinda hard to look at that difference objectively when we are so inclined, as a society, to view women's contributions to and thoughts on anything as lesser than men's
but idk if I am actually enough of a mental contortionist to inflate/deflate the value of my own thoughts depending on the rather fluid metric of how dudely I was feeling at the time
actually I think I go the other way around and feel more dudely when I am more confident that I am not completely fucking everything up forever :(
anyway more fandom meta and less of Pyth's mental problems
yeah the kyriarchical dynamic of the yaoi fangirl's place in fandom society is really tangled up and weird
but there is barely even a place at all for the yaoi fanboy
I wonder why that is
besides the overwhelming femininity of fandom I guess
I don't know, people totally inflate and deflate the validity of their own thoughts according to whether they think they are lady thoughts or dude thoughts ALL OF THE TIME - although that is usually more to do with whether they think the thoughts themselves are masculine or feminine ...... idk
I'm not sure if I'd say that it's so much that it's tangled up and weird as just that yaoi fangirlery is a particularly clear example of a group of people exerting privilege in one direction and suffering a lack of privilege in another? Which I guess can be confusing because AAAH WHAT DO WE DO WHEN WE CAN'T JUST PUT THINGS IN A NEAT PRIVILEGE LADDER but yeah idk
aaaaand yeah I mean it's not like there aren't significantly sized MAN FANDOMS floating around, they're just ... different to lady-dominated fandom circles and they don't cross over all that much. And of course while lady fandom is very okay with queer ladies of various descriptions, man fandom does not open its arms so widely to queer mans.
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the only people who get to be MEANINGFULLY FRIENDSHIPPED in any capacity in the vast majority of mainstream media is DUDES, because ladies only exist for romance and their only interactions with one another involve CAT FIGHTS amirite!!! no way could they get on, they're too busy COMPETING! for the ATTENTION! of DUDES!
BUT YEAH mostly rn I am annoyed by people using the fact that poorly-done slash exists as an excuse to justify their internalised homophobia. BECAUSE BOY DOES IT COME UP A LOT
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And then the LADY CHARACTERS can be FRIENDS and SUPPORT EACH OTHER through such ladytravails as BREAST CANCER and BAD BREAK-UPS. Oh yeah.
Sorry, am I giving the impression that I'm bitter? I'm totally not bitter. /lies
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Also it never stops weirding me out when they swap out a dude/girl broship for AND NOW THEY HAVE UST/ARE IN LOVE/BONING because THAT IS THE ONLY THING THAT COULD HAPPEN EVER UNLESS ONE OF THEM IS GAY OR THE GIRL (ALWAYS THE GIRL) IS FRIGID AND/OR INSECURE. Also I really fucking hate the word "frigid" hdfsjfkld.
As an aside I think I am going to add "DECONSTRUCT A ROMCOM" to my list of film projects. Where the pursuer goes through most of the typical steps to net a ladyfriend and the pursuee is like "no seriously there is something wrong with you what made you think this wasn't weird and creepy?"
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this is a topic that gets my goat FAIRLY OFTEN I GUESS
oh but you can fix lady insecurities by boning them SIMONE DIDN'T YOU KNOW THAT
I approve of this
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(The comment has been removed)
ladies are allowed to be friends with people of any kind ALL OF NEVER though so I am all for platonicgoggling them right the fuck up
with my eyes
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with my eyes
this is what made me kind of sad about Iron Man 2
idk if you or random passersby have seen that movie so um SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
Tony and Pepper had such a perfect BFFs-with-a-stunning-lack-of-sexual-chemistry thing going on in the first movie and I was so impressed with the fact that they were not and clearly would never be boinking, and then noooooooo, not even Pepper Potts can resist Tony Stark's electromagnetic penis. :((((((
Like, their relationship is actually fucking awesome. But their friendship would've been better.
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that was pretty good.
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not that there is really a practical difference most of the time between writing as a dudeperson and writing as a ladyperson and writing as an inbetweenishperson for me
I mean, when I write dudes, I'm writing as a dude because I'm... writing a dude
but there is a subtle thing going on where there is a difference between appreciating slash as a fangirl and appreciating it as a fanboy? I mean, I wish there wasn't, but there kind of is. So as a gender-multivalent fancreature I end up doing both and, I dunno, it seems to me that there is enough of the first in the world and maybe we could use more of the second.
idk what the point of this comment is really
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I mean, someone writing about members of a group of people that they are not a part of, especially when that group is a marginalised one, is always going to be different to someone writing about a group of people that they do belong to
but I do also think it's kinda hard to look at that difference objectively when we are so inclined, as a society, to view women's contributions to and thoughts on anything as lesser than men's
Reply
but idk if I am actually enough of a mental contortionist to inflate/deflate the value of my own thoughts depending on the rather fluid metric of how dudely I was feeling at the time
actually I think I go the other way around and feel more dudely when I am more confident that I am not completely fucking everything up forever :(
anyway more fandom meta and less of Pyth's mental problems
yeah the kyriarchical dynamic of the yaoi fangirl's place in fandom society is really tangled up and weird
but there is barely even a place at all for the yaoi fanboy
I wonder why that is
besides the overwhelming femininity of fandom I guess
of course now I'm wondering why that is
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I'm not sure if I'd say that it's so much that it's tangled up and weird as just that yaoi fangirlery is a particularly clear example of a group of people exerting privilege in one direction and suffering a lack of privilege in another? Which I guess can be confusing because AAAH WHAT DO WE DO WHEN WE CAN'T JUST PUT THINGS IN A NEAT PRIVILEGE LADDER but yeah idk
aaaaand yeah I mean it's not like there aren't significantly sized MAN FANDOMS floating around, they're just ... different to lady-dominated fandom circles and they don't cross over all that much. And of course while lady fandom is very okay with queer ladies of various descriptions, man fandom does not open its arms so widely to queer mans.
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