I had to dig a bit to find it, but here’s a long-ass thread to which I offered my own input (as @rhodanum, my old username) on how the fandom dynamics of F/F changed in the last few years and how purity crusaders hit F/F hard, before moving with all their shouting to M/M (with M/F being either ignored because ‘ewwwww het’ or condemned wholesale for ‘pushing heteronormativity’).
The unyielding influence of purity culture on F/F, particularly on here, is probably the main reason why I ship so very little femslash to begin with, despite being sexually and emotionally attracted to women. To put it bluntly, I’m not interested in the slightest in anodyne, flower-crown fluff or ‘soft lesbian pastel queens of Westeros’, as the OP put it so well (because this is a dynamic that can be seen across all fandoms, not just GoT/ASoIaF). To be clear, I’ve got no issue with people for whom that’s enjoyable, like and produce whatever content floats your boat, you’ll never get any grief from me on that account. My problem is that all too often, this is the only kind of F/F content permitted to exist, with anything else attacked mercilessly. That’s a sure-fire way to drive people away and tank the numbers of F/F fanworks, which is exactly what we’re seeing now.
As for ‘problematic’ F/F suddenly being presented as sparkles and rainbows… I suspect this is a natural consequence of purity culture and of people being dragged through the mud if their fave characters and ships are in any way unacceptable on here. In this context, people can either abandon their ships, keep on shopping them the same as before (not as easy as someone older, like me, makes it sound, particularly for young people whose entire social circles might be subscribing to purity culture) OR warp the characters and ship to such an extent that they fit Tumblr’s definition of ‘pure.’ Often, this is nothing more than a coat of thin pastel-paint that people slap on so they can be left the bloody hell alone.
The problem with this, as @janiedean pointed out above, is that you end up in the ludicrous situation where something you know is fucked-up in some way or other, is now getting presented as soft and twee and as if there’s nothing wrong whatsoever. Mind, I’m not approaching this from the purity angle, where my issue is that the content is problematic to begin with. My issue is that purity culture and its peddlers are creating the genuinely unhealthy situation where people are sweeping the problematic aspects of something under a paper-thin carpet, instead of working head-on with them and acknowledging them as such. The consensus when I was coming of age in fandom was that you could write and read and enjoy whatever messed-up content you damn well pleased, so long as you never lied to yourself or others about it being messed-up and tried to pass it off as ‘twu-wub’ or whatever else. That is an infinitely more healthy and less dangerous approach to complicated and messy topics than the ‘100% Pure or 100% Problematic’ approach I see these days, with one getting lionized and the other used as an excuse for harassment campaigns. It’s the same principle that’s led to another fandom consensus (tagging appropriately) starting to break down, with people now afraid to tag their works as ‘incest’ or whatever else applicable, because there are individuals trawling those tags looking for creators to harass.
going to talk about Tumblr’s vision of Margaery/Sansa. That stuff could be a very good badwrong ship with Margaery emotionnaly abusive Sansa and all we get is unicorns and rainbows!
HHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH ANON AHAHAHAHAHAHAH 100% AGREED I mean I’m not even gonna touch the juvie show which has the exact same problem in the sense that the ff canon ship is EVERYTHING BUT UNPROBLEMATIC but people are all like UNICORNS AND RAINBOWS about it (ew) and that’s why I don’t touch it with a ten foot pole, but the fact that marg/sansa is seen as OMG THE SOFT LESBIAN PASTEL QUEENS OF WESTEROS and then their fans used to go tell sandor/sansa shippers that we sucked because we ship sansa with a guy who abuses her (????)….. hahahaha. god. I think it’s in the top three asoiaf/got notps more for that than for anything else, because usually I’d just dislike it and be done with it but the fact that they’re sold as this amazingly perfect healthy ship just irks me to really, really bad degrees.
and the fun thing is that the one f/f ship I have is **canon** and it’s actually fairly healthy/somewhat fluff (I mean for its canon) but since it’s in DEADWOOD and no one cares about deadwood and according to tumblr it’d be the most problematic show in existence even if I went and wrote them content NO ONE WOULD GIVE A FUCK so I mean… IF ONLY THESE PEOPLE AT LEAST WATCHED CONTENT WITH F/F CANON SHIPS but naaaaaah. *shrug* and the fun thing of all this dumbass debate is that the aforementioned f/f ship has *one* explicit fic on ao3 and *I* wrote it (and it most likely isn’t the best lesbian sex you ever read but hey I tried because those two are my dynamic and I love them) and someone actually podficced it BECAUSE IT WAS THE ONLY ONE so I actually most probably did more for the canon f/f ship than any of the people on that post, but hey, I’m a horrid straight person who only has fetishes and has committed the heinous crime of preferring m/m. whatever.
IF ONLY THESE PEOPLE AT LEAST WATCHED CONTENT WITH F/F CANON SHIPS but naaaaaah
Or they’ll watch content with canon F/F and then howl all the way to the moon about age-gaps or ‘power-imbalances’ or whatever the hell else it’s popular to howl about, because there’s always something that can be problematized, if given enough time and creativity (no, I will never stop being a salty queer European over the shitshow that was CMBYN ‘discourse’).
I think another big problem on Tblr is that the content of f/f they accept HAS TO BE soft, pastel shit. If you write dark f/f, abusive f/f or just very sexual/kinky f/f you get yelled at too, no matter your gender or sexual orientation. You need to fall in line with what they want and produce the perfect pure (boring to death) content they want. Like can anyone tell me about ONE f/f pairing with a rougher/darker dynamic that is widely accepted on this goddamn website? (And I’m not even (cont)
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