LEP 27.4.

[yvannairie]

I was gonna post this on Tumblr and decided it was too spicy but since I am once again moaning the lack of yaoi in my fandoms, even of characters whose ships I don't really even care about, I really do think that all the complaining about people's lack of attention to female characters and only focusing on ships that the dislikers of such things can characterise as "any two guys" ships means that there's just plain less art of any kind now.

Like I thought brainless seme/uke bishonen porn was an unavoidable scourge on fandom but my favourite character's tags are full of porn of them with the Hot Sexy Girl from their game/show, rather than them with any of the "low-hanging yaoi ships" everyone complains about. Pixiv had a total of twenty works crosstagged with both "BL" and "Xenoblade 3", for example.

I guess I'm glad the het fans are eating well. And, granted, I do also like those ships, I just think the porn is low quality and OOC for the most part. But there's not even low-quality OOC boy/boy porn available for me to be disappointed by.

Comments

[yvannairie]

Yeah I've been idly complaining about the sheer amount of... just, like, blatant homophobia I see in the Arcane fandom over a ship that I don't even really care about and that is immensely more supported in the text than any average ship of mine that I think strongly enhances the text. And it's such unmotivated homophobia too because Jayce and Viktor basically have no other relationships on paper and their entire narrative arcs revolve around each other. It's probably the most blatant example of this, people literally just deciding that because canonical representation is a possibility, there's something wrong with just shipping a thing.

I broadly agree with the thought that F/F is just a lot less controversial and a lot more tolerated, even if I find most F/F representation tepid and uninteresting and lacking in the kind of strong chemistry I want my ships to have. The wild part really is that even though fandom is a lot more open to writing F/F now, a lot of the F/F that gets written is equally tepid as the boring canon lesbians, which just goes further to strip all relationships of eroticism. Men are incapable of love unless a woman is present, but women also don't seem capable of eroticism or attraction without a man present. We've pidgeonholed ourselves into all acceptable shipping being straight.

And it's just so wild to me because again I have to ask -- are people just worse at reading now? Does the idea that "well they can put in canonical gay rep so we don't have to read between the lines" really dominate so much that even without supposedly more queer-friendly progressive mores around polyamoury and queer sex don't allow us to read all of that into the texts we're engaging with? Why is it that newer fandoms just plain have less shipping in them when supposedly more kinds of ships are acceptable now?

Who is having fun, living like this?

[grayestofghosts]

I think you're absolutely right. I mean this is part of why I've been getting into The Locked Tomb stuff because even though there really isn't anything explicit going on between the main characters yet there does feel like there's more of that intensity where a lot of other F/F feels tepid. But possibly it's easier to get there when the main plot is necromancy and literal cannibalism is on the table... though all things considered I've seen some remarkably tepid vampires.

I am trying to think why Vi/Cait felt tepid to me even though they're literally fucking on screen. I think Caitlyn as an object of desire doesn't make much sense to me. She may be physically attractive but she's just... I dunno, wooden, and Vi's arc of constantly pushing the same familial pain button for her got really boring and made her a flat character, to the point that their relationship felt like it had no payoff even though it's the ship upon which the whole show turns. Probably that the sex scene is in a really odd place narratively does not help. Which sucks. But possibly that's more a complaint about what a shitshow season 2 is than it being a particular example of tepid lesbians.

As for this

And it's just so wild to me because again I have to ask -- are people just worse at reading now? Does the idea that "well they can put in canonical gay rep so we don't have to read between the lines" really dominate so much that even without supposedly more queer-friendly progressive mores around polyamoury and queer sex don't allow us to read all of that into the texts we're engaging with?

I want to believe that the answer is 'yes' but I also think a big part of it is that there are actual straight people engaging with these stories. I mean how often do we see "oh they were really good friends and roommates"? I think that might be the answer to the second question, too. These spaces have been, in effect, "contaminated" by "normal" people who cannot see beyond what is spoonfed to them, and they have been given the bandwidth to broadcast their opinions into spaces that weren't overtaken by them, kind of like business school freshmen shouting down a literature professor's analysis and us being forced to take them in as "equally valid". I want to say people have gotten dumber but I think it may be more the idiots have broken down the gates because gatekeeping is out of vogue.

Anyway a big problem with the whole "now we can have explicit gay relationships" is that explicit relationships are often written very poorly and uninterestingly in general. If we keep using Arcane, the straights get so excited about Jinx/Ekko when there is literally no there there. Singed and Ambessa had more chemistry onscreen! To a really disturbing number of straight people a relationship is two characters, one you find attractive and one you can project yourself on, and put them next to each other and have some really contrived slapdash 'romance' plot tacked on and it becomes a love for the ages. What Sam and Frodo had was special -- who the fuck is Rosie Cotton? etc.

[yvannairie]

You might be right. I never considered how the heterosexual reality distortion field may be playing into this, but I've definitely seen a lot of people just relying on adhering to convention to point out chemistry -- Cait/Vi is actually a good example of this because Vi is ultimately just a female bad boy archetype and them both being women has almost nothing to do with their relationship being interesting (and their relationship isn't interesting because Cait just. Isn't interesting, lmao) -- and even kind of using the logic of "stories go like this!" to declare something as canon or as problematic when the story emphathetically did not even go like that. It's the kind of poor media literacy I expect from people who are new into fandom, but I never considered that it could also be the kind of bare minimum media literacy most straight normies need to interface with media, and that I'm just seeing opinions from people who don't actually want to be doing fandom.

A lot of the discussion seems.... very "mainstream from 2007", which would also check out with the idea that there are just a lot of brazenly uncritical people in the conversation not really trying to have a conversation as much as they're trying to have coffee break talk. It would also go a long way to explain why shipping noncanon ships gets called "terminally online" by even people who ostensibly like queer relationships.