My thoughts on yaoi, let me show you them
I'm really not a slash fan, never have been. My opinion on it is firmly Your Kink Is Not My Kink But Your Kink Is Okay - not, I hasten to say, that I think slash is a kink (I'm so not stepping onto that minefield), just in the sense that people have varying tastes. I love het. And I actually kind of like femmeslash, it's just m/m that doesn't do it for me.
(Incidentally, I believe in warning for slash. But I also believe in warning for het, and I don't distinguish between warning and labelling. A pairing label serves that purpose fine. I just think people should be able to know as much as possible what they're getting into.)
Since I joined ffrants, I've noticed a lot of discussion, sometimes veering into wank territory, of the subject in general. In particular there was a rant fairly recently where someone was given an explicit slashfic to beta without any warnings on it and was upset at being surprise buttsex'd but worded the rant poorly and so got jumped all over for saying slash needs to be warned for. Since that discussion, I've been thinking about and trying to figure out why I'm so off on an entire genre. (There should be a better word for that. Fantasy, mystery, romance, thriller, those are genres. I don't have to explain why I do or don't like those. Het vs. slash vs. femmeslash is a totally different thing.)
One of the classic arguments is, of course, "if you don't like slash you're a homophobe." But I've been in Gay Straight Alliance for three years, and been president of it for a year and a half of that. I have a number of GLBT friends, and I'm bi myself. GLBT rights are the political cause I'm most passionate about. When I write original fic, I have a tendency to, without thinking about it, make the societies extremely tolerant of homosexuality. Plus I like femmeslash. I'm not making excuses here; with the amount of homophobia engrained in our society, it's possible, even easy, to be subconciously or unconciously homophobic. But I'm racking my brain and I honestly don't think that's it. But if I'm so cool with it in real life, why don't I like reading about it?
It's a combination of three major factors, I think.
First off, I'm just very picky about my pairings in general. And my pairings tend to be the canon's official pairings. I like to joke that my subtext goggles got lost in the mail. Tell me people are enemies, or Heterosexual Life Partners, or Like Brother And Sister, or something like that, and I take it at face value; I'm utterly oblivious to what most fanpeople see as subtext. To make me ship it, they have to be actually together in canon, have Will They Or Won't They so strong it's acknowledged by others in canon, or the subtext has to be nearly to that level. Only very rarely will I ship something outside those conditions. This goes equally for het and slash. Thing is, most canon couples are het, so I have a lot more het ships than slash or femmeslash ones. I do actually ship Aziraphale/Crowley from Good Omens, and although I wouldn't consider Remus/Sirius from Harry Potter to be in my interpretation of canon (it messes with the way I see the Marauders' dynamics), I see where the shippers are coming from well enough to buy it as an alternate canon interpretation. But outside of rare cases like that, the author of a fic has to either convince me in-story of the plausibility of the pairing or just be such a damn good writer as to make me stop caring about shipping (and again, this goes for any pairing I don't ship, het or slash). I'm open-minded enough to try other things now and then, but since I'm not only a shipper but an OTPer, I have some pretty strong prejudices to get over. (Unless it's crackfic, I'll read anything if it's crackfic.) Which is not to say it can't be done - in fact, there's some writers, take the lovely thistlerose for example, who I'll read anything by, not only if it's not my ship but even if it's not really one of my fandoms - but it's rare, and it makes me a hell of a lot less likely to pick up a fic in the first place.
Secondly, there's a number of plot elements/clichés/whatever that are all over slash writing. The fixation with anal, for one. Slash isn't a kink, but buttsex is, and buttsex is ever so very much Not My Kink. Which turns me off from reading any explicit slash most of the time even when I do like the pairing. Another thing is seme/uke dynamics, prevalent even in Western fandoms. I don't like that kind of power dynamics in het (nearly all my OTPs are matches of two alpha types), I don't want it in slash either. I'll stop here, but those aren't the only things. And I know they're not in every slash fic (the rare fics I like tend to avoid them) and if a fic is good enough I may like it despite those things, but their prevalence is a factor that dissuades me from looking in the first place a lot of the time.
Finally, I am, to use a phrase I heard a poster on ffrants use once, a woman-oriented woman. I like me my kick-ass heroines, and I simply identify so much more with female characters. Honestly, it's strong enough that I tend to have trouble writing male characters (which is a failing, I am well aware, and I'm working on it. My dad teases me mercilessly about the fact that guys are often entirely absent in my original fiction). Just the fact that there's, by default, going to be less focus on the girls of the cast in slash makes me marginally less interested, but it's not a big deal. However, the fact that female characters are often either completely ignored or outright villified is a major turn off. There's a sickening amount of misogyny in fandom, and it's by no means just a slash problem, but slash is one of the worse offenders. Plus, I don't want to read about the pretty boys doing other pretty boys, I want to read about the pretty boys (or pretty girls, in the case of femmeslash) doing someone I can live vicariously through.
So there you have it: my thoughts on yaoi.
(Incidentally, I believe in warning for slash. But I also believe in warning for het, and I don't distinguish between warning and labelling. A pairing label serves that purpose fine. I just think people should be able to know as much as possible what they're getting into.)
Since I joined ffrants, I've noticed a lot of discussion, sometimes veering into wank territory, of the subject in general. In particular there was a rant fairly recently where someone was given an explicit slashfic to beta without any warnings on it and was upset at being surprise buttsex'd but worded the rant poorly and so got jumped all over for saying slash needs to be warned for. Since that discussion, I've been thinking about and trying to figure out why I'm so off on an entire genre. (There should be a better word for that. Fantasy, mystery, romance, thriller, those are genres. I don't have to explain why I do or don't like those. Het vs. slash vs. femmeslash is a totally different thing.)
One of the classic arguments is, of course, "if you don't like slash you're a homophobe." But I've been in Gay Straight Alliance for three years, and been president of it for a year and a half of that. I have a number of GLBT friends, and I'm bi myself. GLBT rights are the political cause I'm most passionate about. When I write original fic, I have a tendency to, without thinking about it, make the societies extremely tolerant of homosexuality. Plus I like femmeslash. I'm not making excuses here; with the amount of homophobia engrained in our society, it's possible, even easy, to be subconciously or unconciously homophobic. But I'm racking my brain and I honestly don't think that's it. But if I'm so cool with it in real life, why don't I like reading about it?
It's a combination of three major factors, I think.
First off, I'm just very picky about my pairings in general. And my pairings tend to be the canon's official pairings. I like to joke that my subtext goggles got lost in the mail. Tell me people are enemies, or Heterosexual Life Partners, or Like Brother And Sister, or something like that, and I take it at face value; I'm utterly oblivious to what most fanpeople see as subtext. To make me ship it, they have to be actually together in canon, have Will They Or Won't They so strong it's acknowledged by others in canon, or the subtext has to be nearly to that level. Only very rarely will I ship something outside those conditions. This goes equally for het and slash. Thing is, most canon couples are het, so I have a lot more het ships than slash or femmeslash ones. I do actually ship Aziraphale/Crowley from Good Omens, and although I wouldn't consider Remus/Sirius from Harry Potter to be in my interpretation of canon (it messes with the way I see the Marauders' dynamics), I see where the shippers are coming from well enough to buy it as an alternate canon interpretation. But outside of rare cases like that, the author of a fic has to either convince me in-story of the plausibility of the pairing or just be such a damn good writer as to make me stop caring about shipping (and again, this goes for any pairing I don't ship, het or slash). I'm open-minded enough to try other things now and then, but since I'm not only a shipper but an OTPer, I have some pretty strong prejudices to get over. (Unless it's crackfic, I'll read anything if it's crackfic.) Which is not to say it can't be done - in fact, there's some writers, take the lovely thistlerose for example, who I'll read anything by, not only if it's not my ship but even if it's not really one of my fandoms - but it's rare, and it makes me a hell of a lot less likely to pick up a fic in the first place.
Secondly, there's a number of plot elements/clichés/whatever that are all over slash writing. The fixation with anal, for one. Slash isn't a kink, but buttsex is, and buttsex is ever so very much Not My Kink. Which turns me off from reading any explicit slash most of the time even when I do like the pairing. Another thing is seme/uke dynamics, prevalent even in Western fandoms. I don't like that kind of power dynamics in het (nearly all my OTPs are matches of two alpha types), I don't want it in slash either. I'll stop here, but those aren't the only things. And I know they're not in every slash fic (the rare fics I like tend to avoid them) and if a fic is good enough I may like it despite those things, but their prevalence is a factor that dissuades me from looking in the first place a lot of the time.
Finally, I am, to use a phrase I heard a poster on ffrants use once, a woman-oriented woman. I like me my kick-ass heroines, and I simply identify so much more with female characters. Honestly, it's strong enough that I tend to have trouble writing male characters (which is a failing, I am well aware, and I'm working on it. My dad teases me mercilessly about the fact that guys are often entirely absent in my original fiction). Just the fact that there's, by default, going to be less focus on the girls of the cast in slash makes me marginally less interested, but it's not a big deal. However, the fact that female characters are often either completely ignored or outright villified is a major turn off. There's a sickening amount of misogyny in fandom, and it's by no means just a slash problem, but slash is one of the worse offenders. Plus, I don't want to read about the pretty boys doing other pretty boys, I want to read about the pretty boys (or pretty girls, in the case of femmeslash) doing someone I can live vicariously through.
So there you have it: my thoughts on yaoi.