Couple of musings on Draco In Leather Pants and related ideas
First of all...anyone who implies that Draco in Leather Pants is something that only women do, or that only applies to male characters, needs a good kick in the face. In fact, one of the fics I plan to spork down the road is an absolutely obnoxious DILP work--with a male Mary Sue and a female DILP (and the fic was written by a man too). So yeah, they exist and they're every bit as obnoxious as the more common (or at least more commonly-cited) version with a female Mary Sue and male DILP.
Oh, and here's another thing: I strongly suspect (though have no evidence to prove, admittedly) that if you were to take the sum total of all instances of Draco in Leather Pants and Ron the Death Eater across all fandoms, you'd end up with fairly comparable numbers of each (based on my own experience, RTDE is WAY more common in the Pokemon fandom than DILP, to cite one example--granted, Cori Falls and her ilk notwithstanding). Yet DILP receives almost all the attention and condemnation from wankier fans. What's even more annoying is that a lot of these wankier fans think ANY interpretation of the character that doesn't make him out to be pure evil is DILP, no matter how well-thought out. Apparently you can make N, or Grimsley, or Dawn (yes, THAT Dawn--I once saw a fic of her as a psycho murderer) a mustache-twirlingly evil bastard and everyone's okay with it, but the moment you try to argue that Voldemort might have been a victim in his childhood at one point rather than being an innately evil monster, well, you're just a stupid brainless fangirl who is obviously too besotted with Voldiecakes to understand how evil he is.
And before anyone says, "But DILP is so HARMFUL because it glorifies the villains' antisocial behavior," well, RTDE has the potential to be every bit as harmful, because its logical extreme is character bashing. Which part of Cori Falls's work was more obnoxious, her declaration that Jessie and James were the real heroes or her insistence that Ash was pure evil and deserved to be abused both verbally and physically just for not liking Jessie and James? Both DILP and RTDE have the potential to glorify antisocial behavior if they go too far--it's all to do with context.
Oh, and here's another thing: I strongly suspect (though have no evidence to prove, admittedly) that if you were to take the sum total of all instances of Draco in Leather Pants and Ron the Death Eater across all fandoms, you'd end up with fairly comparable numbers of each (based on my own experience, RTDE is WAY more common in the Pokemon fandom than DILP, to cite one example--granted, Cori Falls and her ilk notwithstanding). Yet DILP receives almost all the attention and condemnation from wankier fans. What's even more annoying is that a lot of these wankier fans think ANY interpretation of the character that doesn't make him out to be pure evil is DILP, no matter how well-thought out. Apparently you can make N, or Grimsley, or Dawn (yes, THAT Dawn--I once saw a fic of her as a psycho murderer) a mustache-twirlingly evil bastard and everyone's okay with it, but the moment you try to argue that Voldemort might have been a victim in his childhood at one point rather than being an innately evil monster, well, you're just a stupid brainless fangirl who is obviously too besotted with Voldiecakes to understand how evil he is.
And before anyone says, "But DILP is so HARMFUL because it glorifies the villains' antisocial behavior," well, RTDE has the potential to be every bit as harmful, because its logical extreme is character bashing. Which part of Cori Falls's work was more obnoxious, her declaration that Jessie and James were the real heroes or her insistence that Ash was pure evil and deserved to be abused both verbally and physically just for not liking Jessie and James? Both DILP and RTDE have the potential to glorify antisocial behavior if they go too far--it's all to do with context.