A bitch is a woman that you don't like
Or, "Oh god, I don't want to end up on Fanfic Rants."
Early in my fandom life, I read a lot of terribly written yaoi. It wasn't that even back then I liked to mock badfic, it was just that I was too young and romantically inexperienced to know that it was bad. Uke A falling tragically into Seme B's arms after they chose to die together because the world (which probably showed no signs of being like this in canon) refused to accept their love? Well, I hadn't ever been on a date when I was 13, so to younger, smaller me, it didn't seem that unrealistic I guess perhaps maybe who knows. Could be that I just wanted a relationship-fixated uke of my own and didn't want to question whether people in reality actually did things like that.
In a lot of this bad yaoi, one of the guys involved canonically had a girl who he hung out with a lot. Maybe they were actually a thing. Maybe they had a bunch of subtext between them (like Sora and Kairi so far) but weren't ever confirmed to get together. Either way, the writers of bad yaoi decided that this was not acceptable. The "bitch" has to go.
There's a lot of different ways in bad yaoi to get that bitch out of the way. Most common is the Characterization About Face. This involves making the bitch as unlikable to the yaoi guys as she is to the writer. A pleasant, caring, blandly selfess kind of girl becomes jealous, possessive, hateful, and violent. In other words, she is now SUPER BITCH. If she's such an awful person, well, you can't blame the yaoi guys for ditching her and gettin' it on with each other, right?
Also on the list is the Relationship Flip! I couldn't really come up with a good name for it, but basically it's when the guys, who used to like the bitch a lot, suddenly hate her to the point they want nothing to do with her, think it's funny when humiliating and/or painful things happen to her, or even try to harm her themselves. Somehow, in the mind of the bad yaoi writer, this is a rational conclusion to realizing somebody is the wrong gender for you, even if you have a strong friendship with them outside of whatever romantic stuff might be going on. Also somehow belittling or attacking a girl who you previously had a strong friendship with (and, if physical violence is involved, there's a good chance the girl is a noncombatant being attacked by seasoned fighters) doesn't make the guys less likeable. I wonder how that is supposed to work.
Sometimes, the writer doesn't want to be accused of character bashing, and takes a more subtle approach I call the Self Disposing Bitch. In this version, she is kind enough, despite being the bitch, to get herself out of the way. Maybe, at the start of the fanfic, she decides she's fallen in love with another man. Sometimes she herself is gay, and the "other man" is not actually a man. Sometimes her family moves away (if she's young enough) or her job transfers her out of the area (if she's not). Sometimes she discovers that the yaoi guys are... well, yaoi guys, and decides that (in troper talk) she Wants Her Beloved To Be Happy. These aren't necessarily marks of bad yaoi, because they CAN be done well, they just... often aren't. Events like these should impact the protagonist emotionally. Even if he wasn't really into women to begin with, the bitch had been an important part of his life. Maybe even if now he's free to date guys, he misses her as a friend. Maybe he really IS glad she's gone... but if he's the type with a conscience, he wouldn't exactly feel good about thinking that. And if he's not, then unless he's using his relationship with her for something, then why on earth would he have stayed with her this long to begin with?
But in badfic, those emotions are often totally neglected. Once the girl's out of the way, she is totally forgotten about. The guys can have sex now. They are happy. Everyone wins! Except the girl, but she's not really a real character anyway.
Finally there's just throwing caution to the wind and killing the bitch off. Her boyfriend will be sad, but once he gets a dose of the healing cock he'll feel better (insert joke about how it's a medicine best taken by suppository). Death combined with the Characterization About Face and the Relationship flip is like the trifecta of bitch bashing. First she turns into an evil shrew, then the yaoi guys hate her, then she dies. You can't really fit that much more vitriol into a fanfic, unless the yaoi guys make out on her grave. I don't recall ever seeing somebody write that happening, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's out there.
I could go into gender politics and stuff. I could say how it's skeevy that some women (the vast majority of the people writing these things) have so much hate for female characters pretty much only because those characters are female (and have the attention of men). I could also say that a lot of these female characters, being written mostly by guys for guys, often don't have any female friends, any lives outside of the men, or any drive to do anything that isn't directly related to the guys. Maybe that's part of what makes the yaoi girls hate them. Maybe the writers can't relate to a girl who's barely even a person, can't stand those traits being portrayed as "cute" rather than "unhealthy", can't accept the portrayal of a girl without a self as someone the guy could possibly hold an interest in. Maybe it's not really black or white. I know that as a kid, reading Sora/Riku slash fic helped me deal with the fact that I was attracted to my best friend, even though they were guys and we were girls.
But that's not the point. The point here is, that fanfic readers for the most part have come to accept that treating a female canon love interest as a bitch to be gotten rid of is BAD WRITING. And it's not just a problem with yaoi, either, even though that's where I've seen it the most. And they judge fic based on that. Which is a good thing, for the most part. But it puts a burden on the people who write fic. If A/B is canon, but we want to write a fic about A/C, then we have to treat B fairly, even if we're manuevering her out of the way. It's sort of like a game of Operation. The goal is to get the bone out of the little plastic man, but there are rules you have to play by. You have to get it out delicately, without touching the sides and making the buzzer go off, and once it's out, instead of throwing it in the trash can in anger and disgust, you put it back in the box with the rest of the pieces and let it go off and live merrily with the broken heart and the butterfly. B is that bone. And it's totally fair that we shouldn't forget her characterization and emotions and relationships with other characters just because we want to make room for A and C to make out. It does, however, make the job harder for the rest of us.
Specifically, I'm wondering, is there a right way to kill a character off? Is it not bashing B if A has strong feelings about her, and the grief affects A throughout the story? Is it not bashing if it arises from a canon situation where it was very very likely that B would end up dead? Is it not bashing as long as everyone's kept in character and the death is treated like a sad event? Is it not bashing if I really, really, really don't want it to be?
I have never had such a blatantly canon-defying pairing, and while I really want to write fic for it, I don't want to come off as someone immature enough to character bash. So now I don't know what to do.
Also, fuck you, character C, and your impossible-to-draw hair. You are not making it easy for me to fanart you. D:<