So much win for this post, in all ways. Every single thing you said hit it on the nail for me, including not taking rants about our free pr0n too seriously. :)
The thing that puzzles me the most -- even while I understand it -- is the great emphasis on m/m slash by people who aren't m/m.
I'm all for stretching boundaries and writing characters not like yourself. Fanfic is escapism. And writers who can only write characters like themselves are limited. But slash seems to be the new (or old) black.
Which, as far as I can tell, is because it's written by (often, young) straight women fantasizing about men.
Some of it is well done. A lot of it is execrable.
It just puzzles me at how little het there is, with (I assume?) so many het writers out there. Vanilla het relationships are, honestly, rather common in the real world. I'd expect a greater representation of them in fic, because that's what so many people know and enjoy. Nothing wrong with that, any more than there's something wrong with food that uses butter, since a great many people like butter. It's only problematic when folks assume it's normal, and anything else is a deviation. (I'm talking to YOU, AFF slashers, who filled out a survey saying you all wrote m/m, and all strongly disapproved of gay marriage!)
There are troubling heterosexual assumptions and power dynamics in a lot of erotic fiction, and it is sometimes a very good thing to seek and examine those assumptions.
But an awful lot of people poking at problematic gender and power dynamics -- including me, as I'm painfully aware -- are, in an odd way, reducing them to stereotypes, in the way that tasha_mac above demonstrates with the character of Aeris, which people deride and belittle as weak and insipid, by seeing her as weak and insipid.
The same sort of reduction/loss-of-nuance can happen when people start discussing "vanilla" "kinks" "penetration", and so on.
The thing that puzzles me the most -- even while I understand it -- is the great emphasis on m/m slash by people who aren't m/m.
I'm all for stretching boundaries and writing characters not like yourself. Fanfic is escapism. And writers who can only write characters like themselves are limited. But slash seems to be the new (or old) black.
Which, as far as I can tell, is because it's written by (often, young) straight women fantasizing about men.
Some of it is well done. A lot of it is execrable.
It just puzzles me at how little het there is, with (I assume?) so many het writers out there. Vanilla het relationships are, honestly, rather common in the real world. I'd expect a greater representation of them in fic, because that's what so many people know and enjoy. Nothing wrong with that, any more than there's something wrong with food that uses butter, since a great many people like butter. It's only problematic when folks assume it's normal, and anything else is a deviation. (I'm talking to YOU, AFF slashers, who filled out a survey saying you all wrote m/m, and all strongly disapproved of gay marriage!)
There are troubling heterosexual assumptions and power dynamics in a lot of erotic fiction, and it is sometimes a very good thing to seek and examine those assumptions.
But an awful lot of people poking at problematic gender and power dynamics -- including me, as I'm painfully aware -- are, in an odd way, reducing them to stereotypes, in the way that tasha_mac above demonstrates with the character of Aeris, which people deride and belittle as weak and insipid, by seeing her as weak and insipid.
The same sort of reduction/loss-of-nuance can happen when people start discussing "vanilla" "kinks" "penetration", and so on.
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But other than that, seconding the word.
Also biting down on my tongue really hard to not do my Aeris Characterization Rant (TM), since I'm sure everybody's heard it enough times.
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