Still cranky...

[lyssie]

Fandom is why we can't have nice things. Like strong female characters.

Fandom loves cock. Fandom does not like girly bits or women... Fandom claims to like women, and yet, when female characters appear, they're dissected down to their bones and called all sorts of things from 'boring' to 'unrealistic' to 'Mary Sue'.One of the things the recent

Comments

[thekatebeyond]

I'm glad you brought this up. This really made me stop and take stock. I was happy, looking back, to find that a lot of my fic - maybe 50%, maybe not quite - is from the female perspective, and I think (I think) that while my women may be f-d up, they are generally strong, or at least spunky.

But what I haven't done is fill in the blanks that canon leaves. There are a lot of female characters that don't get the full canon treatment. We don't get the quality of backstory on a lot of female characters that we get on their male counterparts. I think it's just been more intriguing to me to get inside a man's head, because it's harder to figure out what's going on in there. But developing the backstory, more fully fleshing out the character, is definitely a challenge when it comes to female characters because we're often given less to work with.

[lyssie]

All I can think of is that if producers/people in charge take a 'pulse of fandom' type thing, they're going to look at the fic and the meta and find that people don't talk about the women. They talk about the boys, they talk about them constantly. But they rarely talk about the women. And that's the sort of message that the guys in charge are going to read as, "ok, we don't need women" hell, look at Supernatural! There's not a single recurring female character on that show, and fandom LOVES IT.

...er, which is more ranting. Sorry.

Look.

[kali921]

Look, clearly, the answer is for us both to get into real person RPing and slash Margaret Thatcher with Madeline Allbright. THAT'S THE ONLY SANE ANSWER.

So, here's what I think of this: if you're a female fic-writer, and you object to women as sex objects? Stop writing about men. Write about women. Make them real, give them lives, fill out their pasts and their futures.

Otherwise, you know what? You are fucking full of shit.

Nearly forty years of fanfic fandom, and still, the female characters are a minority.Well, honestly, hon, you know the pseudotheory answers you are going to get; they'll be talk about wanting to "explore access to male privilege" by writing male characters as a visceral, cathartic exercise in de-oppresionizing the women of the world via slash

Re: Look.

[lyssie]

Look, clearly, the answer is for us both to get into real person RPing and slash Margaret Thatcher with Madeline Allbright. THAT'S THE ONLY SANE ANSWER.

*falls over dead from laughter*

Oh, clearly. Clearly, that is the only way! ;)

When does it stop being "explore access to pointless academic phrases" and yet another excuse not to write female characters?

There's less female hate in comics fandom, because there are more men in comics fandom. Men? Are not going to sit around all day with their thumbs in their asses, picking apart the female characters (they might, however, write sappy love poetry, if the stuff I've heard about the male Rose fans on Outpost Gallifrey is anything to go by.)

Re: Look.

[kali921]

Well, I think one of the reasons I tend to stay in comics fandom is that when someone tells me that their primary fandom for RP and fic is, say, Grey's Anatomy and says "OMG, I write Meredith/Derek fic and my Meredith is so cool, she's a DOCTOR!" I can say "Cool! My character is Jen Walters, and she's one of the best lawyers on the East Coast AND she can lift ninety tons AND she can stop an alien armada by flashing, and she does all of this without WHINING all the time, unlike Meredith!"

Also, on the side, who the fuck makes their primary fandom and character obsessions the people from Grey's Anatomy?

MADDIE AND MAGGIE. YOU AND ME, BABY. RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW!

[edana_ni_emer]

...

If I have a hard time connecting or becoming interested in female characters, I'm not allowed to be unhappy about them being treated as sex objects? It's really damned hard to say "I'm going to start liking XYZ, even though it runs counter to what I prefer if given my druthers, just so I can complain about how they're treated." Either you're interested in the character, or you're not.

Take that for what it's worth from a raging slash-whore; there are damn few female characters I get into. I don't bitch about them for the most part, or slam them or bash them or whatever. It's just that there have only been so many female characters I've been able to read at all without sort of going 'meh'. Kaoru from Kenshin, Scully from X-Files, Elizabeth from PotC, and Willow from Buffy. And I've even kind of gone off of Willow a bit.

*shrug* I like what I like, and get annoyed when I want to get annoyed. The two don't necessarily have to be connected, and my tastes in fiction don't have to decide my politics.

[lyssie]

Yup. Of course, you actually listed female characters you like, so I suppose you actually like some of them.

[edana_ni_emer]

Well, yeah. I've never had a prejudice *against* them, but I've had very clear preferences for a long time, and you seem to be saying in your original post that if I have those preferences I'm not allowed to get irritated by blatant sexism in the media I enjoy.

Which honestly, hon I love you to death and you know it, is bullshit.

[lilacsigil]

I often wonder this! Ficathons like femgenficathon and femslash07 bring out lots of terrific work, and there are a lot of femslash communities like saffic, but there seems to be a real dearth of communities centered around a female character - for every tonkslove there are a million Remus/Sirius communities, though I don't find the imbalance so extreme in X-Men fic

[lyssie]

I remember, a while back, when the Doctor Who fans on lj realized that there was NO community for Rose Tyler. There was the ship comm, but there wasn't a community just for her. The people who realized this? They were the people WHO HATE ROSE. So, really, some good can come from not liking a character, I suppose.

And, in the end, I do know it isn't all about gender--really. It's just that it gets tiring to watch them worship the almight cock and then complain about how there are no female characters and/or the women are sexualized. And meanwhile, they're not actually writing the women.

[lilacsigil]

No Rose community? WTF? I like both Martha and Rose (and many other companions), and I stay at the very, very edges of Doctor Who fandom. Poking at it, warily, with a long stick.

You're right - as individual viewers, our character likes and dislikes are not all about gender. But, added up, there's a big, disturbing pattern, and a lot of women standing around saying "You write it first." "No, after you."

[lyssie]

It's funny to me, that you brought up comics earlier. I think anyone who came from the comics fandom (well, at least from five years ago or so, I'm not sure about now) had more exposure to fic with the women in it simply because there are more men writing over there. Not to mention that you can't throw a rock without hitting a female character in comics.

There are Rose comms now, and Martha comms, too. Which is good.

[hergrace]

This opens up an interesting stream of thought for me. I have never been a big fan of slash. I prefer a nice, hot, het-sex fic myself. And when I write fan fic, it tends to be that. The other thing I find myself grinding my teeth over is the fact that, with many fics, as soon as the action starts to get hot and heavy, SHE is just rarring at the bit to give HIM a blow job. Does he return the favour? Does his compliment her on the beauty of her c*nt? hell, no. If she stops before he comes, he just hefts her up on the nearest handy surface and starts banging away. If she helps him come up, she's just pleased as punch to gobble up all that "yummy" semen. *FEH

[lyssie]

HAH. And you know, as lucyparavel once pointed out to me, I tend to not even remember blowjobs. otoh, I'm all about the cunilingus in het fic. I suspect it's a mostly conscious bias against men getting lots of attention. Hrm.

It's funny, I wasn't thinking about this in terms of femslash. It actually stemmed from catching a comment from someone saying Elizabeth in Pirates was a Mary Sue, followed by fandoms hatred of Gwen from Torchwood. And they're not the first female characters I've seen tarred and feathered for not being some perfect ideal (which, if they were perfect, would STILL get them tarred and feathered) of womanhood that female fans want.

[lyssie]

*nods* And the thing is, if we want equality and balanced portrayals, we need to have the stupid women and the happy women and the sappy women and the dumb women and the egotistical women and the ones you want to slap before they even open their mouths, too. They can't all be ball-busting feminists, because, I'm sorry to say, they aren't in real life.

And you're right, though. Because if a woman is actually all of those things, she'll still get nailed--Sam Carter, from SG-1 has this problem. Now, a part of that was because the writers only had her for a canvas, so they painted her with broad strokes and tried to make everyone happy.