Your Guide To Fandom Ships and New Characters That Interfere With Them

[obsession_inc]

Some times, when one main character and another main character keep looking at each other intensely, and get scared for each other's safety, and each finds the other's company and opinions more valuable than anyone else's, and both main characters are pretty hot and they have chemistry like WHOA, a ship is born.  And shippers board this ship and

Comments

[swordygardener]

It's interesting what happens when you examine similar things happening with F/F fandoms.

Examples:
-Xena(male sidecharacter threatens main F/F ship, gets bashed a lot)
-Aria the Origination(faceless, nameless male character marries one of the two characters in the main F/F pairing. Loathing for him started immediately. No similar loathing exists for other possible F/F ships involving the married woman)
-Nanoha fandom(a minor male character sometimes gets minor romantic scenes with one character of the main F/F ship of the leads. Ferret is one of the nicest nicknames he gets, some fans declared their wish to set him on fire)
-Girlfriends (there was a male character who is used by one of the girls as a 'boyfriend' to prove her supposed straightness. When the chapter this happened in came out, vocal hate for him was rampant, while the girl got excused. There were a ton of theories that he wanted to abuse her, was a horrible monster, and such. Until it turned out that she dropped him shortly after, after which fandom completely forgot about his existance and returned to the F/F shipping. Her using him as a beard and dropping him was mostly ignored, or excused)
-Prunus girl (the funniest example. The main character is a guy, who may or may not be falling for a male crossdresser. Later on, a lesbian character who knew the main guy appears, and, after having several girlfriends, starts hitting on a few other female side characters. F/F fandom response? Hate for the main male character, simply because there is the slight possibility that the lesbian character could be written to love him (Based on a throwaway line where she mentions she likes him as a friend and rival for the affection of girls).
-Sasameki Koto. Main Karate girl has, aside her potential girlfriend, three possible admirers. A closeted fangirl, another girl who likes karate, and a male crossdresser. Guess who gets hated? The poor male crossdresser. Granted, him trying to win her over by dressing female wasn't clever. Meanwhile, the two possible female admirers don't face much scorn (except when one utters a stupid homophobic line she didn't even really mean)

Interesting, isn't it? These aren't fandoms about porn of women having sex with women for guys, enjoyed only by drooling fanboys.
These fandoms have large, even majorly female populations. And yet, it's the male characters who get bashed.

Maybe it's not always about who threatens the female watcher. Maybe it is about some female watchers genuinely liking same-sex couples, and hating to see yet another same-sex couple getting broken up, to end with the usual, generic opposite-sex couples we always get.

Just wondering. I know this is true for F/F couples (until 2004 or so I barely had any canon F/F couple that ended up together, so I was VERY pissed when another story broke up the F/F couple in the last second). So I suspect it's also true for many M/M fans, which also explains why a male character threatening to break the main M/M couple isn't facing that much scorn: It's still same-sex.

I am not saying that the "omg female character threatens me!" never happens. Far from it. But I don't think all, or most of it, is just misogyny.

[zahrawithaz]

Despite the similarities you describe, I think there's a different dynamic in these f/f ships. The bashing of the male characters may be problematic in a variety of ways, but it doesn't mesh with a larger cultural message that women are worth less than men, and so it doesn't do the same types of damage.

Commentators above talk about how the massive fan hatred for female characters on Supernatural increased the misogyny on the show. Whether the showrunners actually went in a more misogynistic direction because of fan input or were just given cover to enact misogynistic ideas they already had is irrelevent; it affects the images of women that are put out into the media, and so the cycle continues...

FWIW, I haven't been part of the fandoms you describe; I have been part of fandoms, like the L Word, in which the appearance of a male character who threatens a f/f ship results in the bashing of the main female character who shows interest in the man.

[swordygardener]

I never claimed for the bashing to be particularly problematic when it hit the male characters, please do not put arguments in my mouth. :P
I think it is understandable, in fact. I myself reacted very badly to one of the cases - breaking up almost-canon F/F couples with a random male is one of my biggest pet peeves.

As for Supernatural increasing the misogyny - I haven't seen that, and am unsure how that would be possible. From everything I saw of the show, it started with heavy misogyny and never got better. The whole show essentially was based on fridging the important female characters to get the plot going. That was in the pilot! And then there was the dismissing of female characters, who were, naturally, pretty unimportant. If a show starts like that, I don't see how one can expect something more than misogyny.

As for L-Word - haven't seen it, since the concept of the series did not interest me in the slightest.
In the F/F fandoms I am in - of which there are various, since I am mainly a fan of F/F and a bit of M/M at the side - the female characters simply do not get bashed in such cases.

L-Word might simply be a rather special case, probably due to the connections to media fandom, which seems to have more problems with bashing female characters recently than other fandoms. Not that other fandoms are perfect and flawless.

[zahrawithaz]

Um, I didn't think you did say that. I thought your point was that the same dynamic noted in the post re m/m fandoms was happening with f/f fandoms, and my point was simply that yes, they may be similar, but I also think there's a difference.

Re Supernatural, I can well believe the show couldn't get more misogynistic, but I think the point about coverage still stands--that this is a case where creator and fan misogyny reinforce each other.

I can't comment on media fandoms v. other ones, but I would argue that with the L Word the difference is more likely to be the overlap between lesbian and bisexual women's communities and the fandom and problems with biphobia and the policing of lesbian identity within communities.