fanthropologist: meronym: trololololollo: ...

Monday, February 20, 2012

meronym:

trololololollo:

#HEY REMEMBER PEOPLE EXPLAINING WHY FANDOM LOVES KARL SO MUCH. #BECAUSE NOT ONLY WAS HE A TRAGIC ROMANCE #BUT A QUEER TRAGIC ROMANCE #woops leliana’s song did it first and wow #i am SHOCKED that no one pays attention to them

Ikr? People not paying attention to ladies in DA/video-game fandom is just so expected now that I didn’t really notice it. It’s not a real gay romance if there’s no dudes involved, amirite?

~~I just wish Marjolaine didn’t have the worst fake French accent I’ve ever heard.~~

People not paying attention to ladies is the norm in most fandoms. Dragon Age fandom is one of the better ones in that regard - there’s a quite a bit of love, art and meta about female characters, although most smutty fic is still slash slash slash.

And I know everything slash-related has been discussed to death, but I’ve been thinking about this, about how I feel about it, about the way it sounds when people bring it up and the underlying implications of glaring at the slasher part of fandom in annoyance because of it.

I mean, I used to be irrationally butthurt over how little attention women get in fics. I have the misfortune of preferring femslash, tolerating het, and having no interest whatsoever in slash (though, if I like a pairing I’ll ship it regardless of genders involved, but generally speaking these are my preferences). My current favourite pairing is Miranda/Jack. There’s all together a dozen fics of these two, and most are ficlets. Now, can you imagine how fucking popular the pairing would be if they were both male? Whoa. It’d be bigger than Fenders. So, yeah, I was butthurt.

I don’t have a problem with Fenders being popular, with male!Hawke/Anders or Fenris being far more popular than fem!Hawke, with Karl or Cullen or any very minor male character having a lot of fic writen about them. I have a problem with people not admitting that certain characters or pairings are popular just because they’re male.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying everyone who ships Karl/Anders or likes Cullen is doing it just because cock cock cock cock. Just like I care about Tela Vesir even though she was there for just 20 minutes, I know there are people who like Cullen because of reasons other than cock cock cock. But the difference is that there’s no fic of Tela, and there’s a sea of fic of Cullen or Karl. Most of the people who care about Cullen or Karl wouldn’t care (or wouldn’t care nearly as much) if they were women. And that is completely ok. Completely. Completely completely completely.

I hate how a lot of slashers feel the need to excuse their love for a pairing by arguing that it has nothing to do with them being guys. And it’s mostly the fault of those of us who’ve been tossing around these passive-agressive, yet very PC sounding phrases about how horrible it is that “fandom” (as if fandom is not just a bunch of actual people, and as if what you’re saying isn’t directed at them) doesn’t pay enough attention to women and such, making them feel like they’re doing something wrong, maybe even mysogynistic, for which they should better have a damn good excuse.

People ship what they ship, find arousing what they find arousing. To expect people to spend their fandom time (which is usually the time for escapism and pleasure) reading and writing smut they don’t find hot because of some SJ, feminist cause just seems so… ironic considering that what you’re doing is telling a bunch of people (most of whom are women who’ve been told their entire lives what they should do and what desires they should have) that they should think, write and read about something else than what they are thinking/writing/reading about in their own free, escapism and porn reserved time.

I wouldn’t ship Miranda and Jack if they were guys. I wouldn’t appreciate being made to feel like I have to read slash in my private, alone time for the good of some SJ cause or I’m subconsciously homophobic and a man-hater. I have my doing-things-I-don’t-enjoy-for-activism time, and it damn well isn’t the same time as my smut reading time.

I agree… to an extent. To be honest, I think the reason there hasn’t been much Marjolaine/Leliana is because their relationships is damned dark. Especially if you have played Leliana’s Song. At least, that’s my reason… I find it fascinating, but it’s way too twisted for me to feel comfortable writing about.

I actually haven’t played Leliana’s Song yet (I have 3 ongoing playthroughs of DA:O, but I haven’t actually finished any of them and I haven’t played DLCs yet. I’m getting there though).

But, of course, I don’t mean to say that anyone who doesn’t write a pairing that’s not m/m is not writing it because it’s not m/m. As I said, I haven’t played Leliana’s Song, but I’m willing to bet that, were they both male, while there would be people who still wouldn’t write it, there would be quite a bit of people writing the pairing.

And it’s not a bad thing, it’s just something that should be acknowledged. On a bigger level, when you have a situation that in fandom at large there are fics upon fics of male pairings of all kinds and not so much m/f and especially f/f of any kind, we collectively need to acknowledge a) that the popularity of men and m/m has something to do with them being men (I mean, how many times have I heard people trying to argue that slash is popular because female characters are usually badly written, or because male characters have better written dynamics in canon, all while there are fics upon fics of all kinds of random guys that appeared for 5 minutes and spoke 3 lines) and b) that there is nothing wrong with the fact that m/m is popular because it’s about men having sex with men.

(Source: samanthatraynor)