Comments | briar_pipe: An open forum for discussion on homosexuality and fandom

briar_pipe

An open forum for discussion on homosexuality and fandom

Jul 11, 2011 19:29

Lots of people left interesting comments while I was doing laundry, so what do you say we just talk about this? I will make this post public on DW and LJ both, and will keep it that way for as long as I feel personally safe.

I'm not going to start with my thoughts, because they're jumbled. Instead, I'll link to the original post of neo_prodigy's, How To ( Read more... )

dear fandom

Comments 25

woldy July 12 2011, 01:57:43 UTC

Every time I see this assumption that people who write m/m slash are all het women it pisses me off, because as far as I can tell a lot of slash authors are queer women. Fandom is way queerer than the stereotype, and yet I've seen versions of this argument about gay male appropriation several times based on the same false, over-simplistic assumptions. *sigh ( ... )

petronia July 12 2011, 02:31:09 UTC

I can't dredge up a link, but IIRC the last time anyone tried to do a real survey, slash fandom was self-reportedly majority queer. So yeah.

One thing that has happened to slash fandom as a result of the Internet (parallel to, well, pretty much every other form of cultural production) is a splintering of styles and genres and approaches. This argument could have flown with me even in the 90s, but now it just feels outdated because... well, some fanficcers are writing gay male characters this way. Quite a few, I am sure, are writing gay male characters neo_prodigy would find realistic. (I'm trying to remember the last time I read a slash fic in which some dude cried in bed, and I am 150% sure it was less recently than the last time I read a slash fic that was about domination and powerplay. Also, I am trying to remember if I ever found crying in bed more compelling than powerplay, regardless of the gender of the characters involved, and I would like to report that that has never been the case. Last time I checked, I still have boobs.) This is ( ... )

FTR petronia July 12 2011, 03:03:44 UTC

Where I'm coming from on this, in case the discussion takes off and anyone asks: I read Western slash and yaoi (pretty much the same thing now - recently I saw someone say on Tumblr "the thing I hate about slash is the whole obsession with seme/uke" which brought a 4REALZ single tear of rapt joy to my jaundiced eye), het and gen, Japanese BL (pro and amateur), occasional Chinese-language fanfic for both Western and Asian fandoms, and used to run an English-language m/m original fiction zine which got a lot of international submissions. I read pro gay erotica and pro straight erotica and romance of the sort you can get in bookstores. I watch BL anime, hentai anime, straight porn, and gay porn (m/m 4 m, m/f 4 m, f/f 4 m, m/f 4 f and f/f 4 f if it's at all findable), of pretty much any variety you can name short of illegality. I don't say I can't commit fail, I'm an awkward person and fail all the time, but I have a strong suspicion I know from online porn more than most ppl who complain about some subcategory of it. I haven't had m/m ( ... )

briar_pipe July 12 2011, 05:17:56 UTC

I agree, I think neo_prodigy has experienced a very limited set of slash, most of it the published erotica variety, which, in my brief experience as a reviewer, is pretty awful. I wonder if he does have a point that said pretty terrible erotica is somewhat demeaning? Then again, I know where not to look for my lesbian porn, so perhaps I just have better self-preservation instincts ( ... )

Thread 9

srin July 12 2011, 19:17:39 UTC

It's definitely a problem when straight cis fangirls who have no other connection to or interaction with lgbtqietc. people or issues hold themselves up as paragons of activism just because they like to read about the buttsex; that's probably the one thing in his post that I agree with without needing any qualifiers. So there's that ( ... )

briar_pipe July 13 2011, 06:20:45 UTC

I've been mulling your comment over, and I think a lot of the discomfort I felt reading his post stems from this - the sense that so much nuance is completely lost in that rant, especially the very nuance he demands: that gay men be real people. You can't have real people if there is only one way to be gay, only one way to be male. We can't expect realism in all fiction, but we also can't expect that replacing one stereotype with another will solve all our problems.

I have no idea where femdom fits into his narrow worldview, but I'm pretty sure it would weird him out.

Those sorts of stories aren't accurate representations of most heterosexual couples any more than they're accurate representations of most male homosexual couples.Agreed. You're right, that these stories are broadly based and exist in almost every genre of romance. I've read poly stories like that too. And laughed my ass off before going to find things I liked better. The issue really is whether the stereotypes themselves remain unexamined or not, and in fandom we have ( ... )

repost for bad threading chicago_ruth July 12 2011, 23:12:14 UTC

No time to go in-depth re: my thoughts on slash, but I thought the original creator of Utena was a woman? The anime is based on the manga by Chiho Saito, and she's female. (As long as the internet isn't lying to me.)

Re: repost for bad threading briar_pipe July 13 2011, 00:46:16 UTC

Iirc, the manga was created after the anime concept was already being either developed or airing. It's been forever, but of the central core of developers of that storyline, I only remember there being two women, and neither was the mastermind. I'll go look it back up again to make sure, of course, because it's been 10 years since I last even thought about the topic. Brain fail!

Re: repost for bad threading chicago_ruth July 13 2011, 00:56:24 UTC

... Oh, you're right. I just looked it up. Reading comprehension fail. Looks like Chiho Saito was mostly just the artist? And the Bepapas team did most of the writing.

Re: repost for bad threading petronia July 13 2011, 01:58:35 UTC

I'll add that Ikuhara Kunihiko has collaborated with a few shoujo and even BL mangaka over the year - the anime he's currently(!) directing has character designs by Hoshino Lily.

Thread 6

WHY CAN I NEVER BE SUCCINCT PT 1 mrinalinee July 13 2011, 06:27:23 UTC

Preface: Hi Mei, hi! ILU and miss you!

Okay, my thoughts about this are a little disordered and confused, so forgive me if it comes out that way and/or if it gets a little too personal.

There was a time when I was probably 16-18 or 19 when there was a certain type of narrative which - at the time, and to my perception, at least - seemed very prevalent in slash fandom (and less in femslash circles, for whatever reason), you know the coming out story, complete with my-out-and-proud-boyfriend-has-perfect-parents-also-mine-are-religious-nutjobs that I hated and thought, what the heck, no queer person would ever write this because queer people would know it's never as simple as that. And I thought, why are you using this; why can't you get your UST and h/c somewhere else? And this was after I'd been in slash fandom at least a couple of years! Then eventually I came around to the realization that there are other people in the world than me (this sounds bitchy, but I swear it is actually what happened) and that sometimes queer people ( ... )

PT 2 OF THE LONGEST EVER THOUGHTS ON YAOI mrinalinee July 13 2011, 06:27:47 UTC

And I get why that happens! I get this feeling sometimes that the whole world intends itself for straight dudes and that's why things pass without comment that are objectively really fucked-up, like action movies that have shots of women's bodies without including their faces, and horror movies where naked women get chopped up all the time. No one would raise their eyebrows at a straight guy liking those things offline, so it makes sense that fandom, which is a largely queer and largely female, people do raise their eyebrows at things that might also seem fucked up. But I think that very quickly runs from "let us critique these things that are fucked up" to "tell me why you like these fucked up things" to "you haven't the right to like this if you don't meet this criteria." And I think that's sort of what's happening here, where neo-prodigy is saying "listen up slashers; you are doing queerness wrong" and ignores slash writers who are queer and slash readers who are queer (obviously they're not discrete categories at all, but I am ( ... )

Re: PT 2 OF THE LONGEST EVER THOUGHTS ON YAOI briar_pipe July 14 2011, 00:17:57 UTC

Hi Mrin! I'm so glad you're alive! ♥

I am fascinated by your analysis and will comment properly in the morning. Right now I've had 4 hours of sleep every night this week, so I'm going to bed early. -_-;;

Re: PT 2 OF THE LONGEST EVER THOUGHTS ON YAOI briar_pipe July 14 2011, 16:24:14 UTC

Ok, now I have had 12 hours of sleep and feel like I can properly appreciate your points.

First of all, let me say that I really appreciate your points. You are starting to get at the heart of the problem for me. We've had a lot of discussions that have moved beyond scratching the surface in the past few days, but you're getting deeper into the id mess that surrounds my feelings on the subject (obviously, everyone's id mess is going to be different ( ... )

Thread 5

chicago_ruth July 13 2011, 14:45:09 UTC

I'll try to keep it brief, but basically... I understand the need to look at problematic issues in slash fandom, but that is so not the way to go about it.

I've found that a lot of negative reactions to slash ends up being about either bad fanfiction (yeah, people recognize it as bad) or about bad yaoi manga. There's a lot of bad yaoi manga.* I've read a lot of it, and yes, the same themes and tropes are found over and over and over again. I also find it a little bit... idk, dishonest, inappropriate, to judge western fandom by the works of a completely different culture. There are definite problems in yaoi manga and I've lost my taste for it, but a lot of the problematic issues exist because of perceptions in Japanese society/culture, which are not necessarily present in Western writing ( ... )

briar_pipe July 15 2011, 03:30:12 UTC

I definitely agree that bad creative works tend to indulge in stereotypes and skeevy, unexamined tropes. Most of the examples neo_prodigy brought up seemed to fall into that category, though of course I can't be sure because he didn't point to specific stories (which is frankly a blessing - what this wank does not need is specific authors being dragged into the fray ( ... )

chicago_ruth July 15 2011, 04:59:45 UTC

I've thought about it a bit since I typed up my response, and I agree that BL manga has changed in recent years and that you see more variety now than when the genre was in its earlier stages. I was part of a scanlation group for a while though, and used to regularly download (heck, I still have like 12 gigs of the stuff on my external harddrive, and that's only the stuff that I enjoyed enough to keep) so I feel that at least to a certain extent, there are tropes present in yaoi manga that you won't find as much in western fandom. On the flipside, there are tropes in western fandom that won't be found in BL manga/or anime fandom in general? If that makes sense ( ... )