A Man’s World
I generally follow Metafandom, where a found this post. From the blurb on Metafandom I concluded that the poster in question meant something like “female writers shouldn’t write male characters”, which naturally enraged me. (If we all just wrote about what we know, how boring would literature be…) So, I checked out the post itself and found that I agreed with everything the person said. Actually, it pretty much sums up my problem with fanfiction, and not just slash.
I’ve reached a point where I feel that women writing about male characters, even nominally straight male characters in a homosexual relationship, is a way we are participating in our own erasure.
Yes. I would go further and erase the slash connotations from this quote to generalize this for all fanfiction. Because exactly that bit is what has been bothering me in LOTR and LotRPS for years. I think in both fandoms, it’s very easy to fall into that trap, because both feature mainly male characters.
I don’t mind at all when Aragorn and Legolas go off traipsing all over Middle Earth to get beaten up by orcs. I don’t mind that not every story includes a female character. But when I get the impression that a female character (Arwen, most prominently) gets erased from a story, from a setting or from a plot simply because she would upset the manly malebonding, then this leaves me vaguely uncomfortable.
This trend is visible in LOTR genfic, but it gets worse when we get to the slash. When I started reading Aragorn/Legolas, most of the things I found where highly dramatic stories where they both had to find one another against all odds while evil!Arwen had Aragorn bespelled or had married him for political gain or some such. Of course, when you want to pair a male character, who is definitely heterosexual (hey, married to a beautiful elf lady - it can’t get more obvious than that) with another male character you have to come up with certain literary pirouettes to make things work. But is it really asking too much to be a little more inventive than totally change around Arwen? and “rape” her character?
Or, my absolute pet peeve in slash fiction: writing a cast of about ten to fifteen male characters and making them all gay. I’m sorry, I’m a big slash fan, but even I need at least a little reality in the stuff I read to find enjoyment in it. I find these types of stories the most problematic in terms of what miera_c is describing, because they seem to totally erase the female perspective from a story pretending the world truly only consists of gay men. And when I read something like that I automatically ask myself: What kind of message is the author in question sending me here? And what is the story telling me about the author? In truth, I don’t like the answers to those questions. I do realize that most authors probably don’t think that far when they plot a story (using the “the more the merrier” rule), but that doesn’t stop me from making my own rather unflattering assumptions.
Things aren’t improved by the fact that LOTR fandom as a whole is so very afraid of Mary Sues. To write a female character (or even write an OFC *gasp*) in LOTR fandom takes a lot of guts, because someone somewhere will surely cry Mary Sue. So, to make things easier for yourself, you just avoid the female characters alltogether. Tolkien didn’t bother with them overly much, so as a fanfiction author you’re in good company.
Unfortunately, I don’t think we can do more than making people aware of these issues. It’s impossible to make these problems vanish - especially in a fandom where 90% of the characters are male. That makes it very easy to concentrate on the male perspective. It’s interesting that in fandoms with a strong female lead these problems aren’t so near to the surface. I never got the impression this was a huge problem in BtVS (though, I admit back then I was new to fandom and probably missed most of the meta discussions). Being involved in Blood Ties fandom right now, I can’t say I’m seeing this trend there. The show’s protagonist is a tough woman.
So, of course I’m not saying: Woman, write only female characters because that’s what you know. But I wish female writers would be a little more courageous and realize than women do have a place in fanfiction - yes, even in Middle Earth. If anything, it will make your story look more balanced.
Originally published at Unspoken. You can comment here or there.