tonight's ramble: most fans are boring, this post will be boring too

[philippos42]

Here, have a nice video. I'm going to say some harsh things about fandom, & thus most likely about you. So I'll start with something positive, and it makes a good soundtrack.
(thanks to Yamino)

Click to view

I long ago got sick of the sort of fan (consistently male) whose fandom conversation substantially exists of proclamations of how badass his particular

Comments

[janegray]

I find it completely understandable if some het person fantasizes about turning Northstar straight. That makes sense to me on some level--the character, just "improved" to be more like a certain ideal. It doesn't even have to be a girl fantasizing that he's her (or her proxy character's) boyfriend. It can just be a matter of trying to tie a character you like to something in your personal identity or ideals. Reimagining Wonder Woman as a Christian? Sure, I can see where that comes from.
So by analogy I understand someone using fic to turn a character gay.

Dude, sorry but I have to be blunt: that's bullshit.

You seriously believe that yaoi fans ship two supposedly-straight (more on this later) guys together because they idealize homosexuality? What the fuck?

No. No, the vast majority of yaoi fans ship two supposedly straight guys together because there are no canon gay couples. So, if you happen to like a little variety, you have no choice but to make it yourself.

Notice that in series that do have canon gay couples, yaoi fans only ship them. Take the Young Avengers, for example: Teddy/Billy is an extremely popular pairing, but Jonas is almost exclusively paired with Cassie, and Eli and Tommy are almost exclusively paired with Kate. I think, among bazillions of Jonas/Cassie and Eli/Kate and Tommy/Kate fanfictions, I've seen maybe one Eli/Tommy fanfiction, and it was a snippet at that. Variety has been provided in canon, so fans aren't forced to create their own.

Sure, there are yaoi fans who act as if het pairings were inherently inferior to yaoi ones. But they are just a loud minority, and even then the attitude has less to do with idealization and more to do with backlash. If people feel that something is being forced on them, they are likely to start hating it. See the "pink stinks" movement: it's not that pink is a bad colour, per se, but because virtually all stuff for little girls is pink, people who would have otherwise simply not preferred pink end up loathing it.

And that's if you are a straight yaoi fan, and your only wish is a little variety. Gay and bisexual fans don't just wish for a little variety, but for characters they can identify with.

The vast, vast, vast, VAST majority of canon couples in fiction is straight. Is it really that hard to understand that some people may find that a tad limiting, and ship two supposedly-straight guys together simply because it's different than the standard or because it reflects their own lives in ways canon never will? How the hell is that even remotely comparable to making one of the very few canonically gay characters straight?

Seriously, what the fuck?

Also, I keep saying supposedly-straight. That's because, while some characters are undoubtly 100% straight (frankly, is Batman weren't straight, I think we would have got some indication of it in his 70 years of canon stories), for many characters the assumption is simply "he doesn't act stereotypically gay, therefore he must be straight!"

Northstar was claimed to be straight, until he came out. Midnighter and Apollo, Rictor and Shatterstar, Mystique, Willow Rosenberg, Albus Dumbledore, etc. The outing of Dumbledore in particular was met with a ridiculous controversy, with journalists going in denial and stating that "Ms. Rowling may think of Dumbledore as gay, but there is no reason why anyone else should!"

I repeat: the author of the story and creator of the character outright stated that Dumbledore is gay, but because he doesn't have on-page explicit gay sex in the story and never says "by the way, Harry, I like the cock!", they refuse to believe that he isn't 100% straight.

Even the assumpion that "he likes girls, therefore he must be 100% straight!" is flawed. There is such a thing as the Kinsey scale.

[philippos42]

You're not wrong.

Of course, I know that Midnighter/Apollo, Mystique/Destiny, Dumbledore, and especially Northstar were always meant to be gay (Northstar was originally written as closeted). Some fans didn't get it, or didn't approve.

I didn't expand on this in my post, I'll let your response do that because I think you cover it better than I could.

What I meant was that fans often impose what they want to see on the text. And that can be trying to norm characters to a moral or normative standard, or trying to force deviation from such a standard. And fanfic by nature is additive/transformative of character where it's not very straight pastiche.

It's usually poorly done, & I find fandom pretty boring for the most part.
And sometimes it's so haphazard that it's comical.

As for insisting that You Gotta Have Gays, I think that's the same kind of silliness as You Gotta Have Jews. Not every team is going to have a queer pairing, & creating new queer ships often leads to conflict with existing straight ships, and what do you get then? Shipwrecks?

But you raise good points.

[janegray]

What I meant was that fans often impose what they want to see on the text. And that can be trying to norm characters to a moral or normative standard, or trying to force deviation from such a standard.

But the point is that the motivation is completely different.

If 99,99% is X, and a fan gets tired of that and decides to turn some of that X into Y, the motivation is a simple and harmless desire for variety.

If 99,99% is X, and a fan decides to turn the 0,01% Y into X so that it's 100% X, the motivation is hatred for anything that's different.

This is why your statement that "so by analogy I understand someone using fic to turn a character gay" rubs me off the wrong way. The analogy doesn't work at all. When the VAST majority of characters in fiction are straight, then turning a straight character gay is NOT the same thing as turning a gay character straight. You are comparing an innocent desire for variety with homophobia.

As for insisting that You Gotta Have Gays, I think that's the same kind of silliness as You Gotta Have Jews.

Read the link again.

"For a minority forming less than one quarter of one percent of the world's population, Jews are massively disproportionately represented in the media both as characters and creatives." (emphasis mine)

You Gotta Have Jews is about a minority that, proportionately, is much more present in the media than it is in real life.

Do you seriously believe that gays and bisexuals are massively disproportionately represented in the media?

Admittedly comics are much better in this than any other media (for example, I've been playing many, many, many videogames for nearly 20 years, and among countless characters I've seen maybe four canonically gay characters, all of them single, and two of them comic relief), but even then, the number is just more or less adequate, it's most certainly not massively disproportionate.

creating new queer ships often leads to conflict with existing straight ships, and what do you get then? Shipwrecks?

Shipping pairings that conflict with existing canon pairings is older than dirt, and it's certainly not exclusive to yaoi fans.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FanPreferredCouple

In any case, it seems to me that you are ignoring the elephant in the room: a lot of fanfiction is porn.

Do you expect porn to justify why the married lady is having sex with the pizza guy she met two minutes ago?

Some people ship two supposedly-straight guys together because they honestly believe that there is valid subtext in canon that supports the ship. And some people ship two guys together because it's hot.