I've been thinking about this post for months, and there's no easy way to say it. It's born out of a lot of thinky thoughts on women, fandom,
rape culture, and basically all the things I've been posting about lately.
In January, I made this post about
gay subtext, and I was overwhelmed at the response it had. Then I made another post about
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Of course, talking isn't the same as taking action, and taking action can be a lot harder, especially when so much energy gets built up around these m/m pairings and that's where the interest and investment is, and it becomes like "yes, wow, it's awful that women are being ignored, but these male characters are the characters I'm already in love with." And detaching a bit and re-attaching to a fandom or pairing that is more female-friendly can be hard. Especially when those female-friendly pairings tend to have a lot less action happening around them. I mean, even with a writing challenge to write female characters, it's a bunch of scattered female characters rather than one strong fandom. It's like the big m/m pairings are these rivers with grand currents that will sweep you up and take you places, and in ( ... )
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I completely agree with you about a lot of this. For me, personally, it all comes back to last year and Racefail, because for me, personally, watching people go through that and stand up and speak about it means that I can't continue to be passive--like, it is the very least I can do to make up for all the crap those fans and writers had to go through, to not just keep on writing and pursuing the status quo. And once you start thinking about changing it's like your eyes just keep being re-opened to how much more work there is to do. But you can't stop--I can't just go back, like you were saying, to that place where everything was comfortable and easy. Because now I know what kind of things I'm empowering by doing that, and I can't go back to that place of ignorance. I mean, I could, but I'd be doing so with full awareness of what kind of harmful system I'm enabling.
Regarding the grand rivers v/s the tiny streams -- this is actually one reason why I really love a) The Devil Wears Prada fandom and b) femslash_today. Because in both cases you ( ... )
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femslash_today looks cool, but I am generally happier following recs or authors I already know than browsing through fics (because I tend to feel compelled to finish stories even when they're not very good, so I try to only start ones that I have reason to believe will be good.) I suppose I should go looking for het or femslash reclists. Do you know of any good ones?
I did just recall one great het-and-femslash podfic I listened to, so my contribution to recs is that. And there's a lot of OT3 stuff I've found and loved with two men and a woman, but I feel like, while that's a step in the right direction, it's not as far a step as I'd like to be taking. It is nice that it's out there, though. I'd say that's how I have mostly satisfied my RAWR WANT MORE LADIES feelings about fanfic thus far.
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Fandom-dependent; in my current fandom (Avatar: the Last Airbender), the biggest pairings with some of the most emotional investment I've ever experienced are both het.
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Also, I loved Avatar. What a wonderful show <3
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AtLA really is. Especially with having lots of strong characters, both male and female, and showing complexities in the different cultures - not all the "good" cultures are actually good, not all the "bad" culture is actually bad. ("The Waterbending Master", "The Avatar and the Firelord", the Ba Sing Se arc, early S3.)
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