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

[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.