leproblematique:

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.

janiedean:

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’).

shinelikethunder:

fiction-is-not-reality:

smallswingshoes:

rhodanum:

lvxiuwendono:

fangasmagorical:

lvxiuwendono:

profujoshi:

comes from a place of sexism. I mentioned how people are accustomed to the imagery of men in dark, violent situations; male characters go through this stuff all the time! (Not just in m/m) In contrast, female characters generally aren’t allowed to go through disturbing situations and are certainly not allowed to be the cause of them. It comes back to girls being sweet, soft, and innocent in a way that tumblr often misguidedly perpetuates. (cont.)

The fact is, women are just as dark and disturbing as men bc all our minds work in the same way, and there ARE women abusers and women rapists and, yes, EVEN f/f rape and abuse. It exists in real life, so I think the fact that there is practically NO fictional media portraying it is far more telling than the fact that m/m rape fic exists. In fact, I hate to pull out the survivor card or, but I was raped and abused brutally by another girl as a young teen. I want to read manga & stuff (cont.)

about similar situations, because everyone enjoys reading about characters they can relate to. It was completely disheartening when I was younger to not be able to EVER find a similar situation portrayed. It made me feel like I was some extreme statistical outlier. However, I wasn’t. It is simply that media & fandom & society doesn’t like to show violent, disturbing girls; it’s a way of keeping girls ‘palatable’. If you’ve ever read/watched any f/f content (I’ve read a LOT tbh), a lot of (cont.)

the characters are the same worn-out stereotypes doing the same worn-out things, because variety is not encouraged when it comes to women. It’s literary same-face syndrome. Anyway, I’ve ranted quite a bit. My final point is: social awareness has no law over fiction. However, if you really want to play the social issues card, at least understand what it is you’re talking about. Thanks for putting up with all the asks! -fop.

I don’t have much to add to this because you’ve covered everything so thoroughly. Speaking just from a media standpoint, it’s a shame that we see so few female villains and even when we do, they are usually objectified or their character traits all revolve around seduction and sex. There’s just no variety. 

And in the real world, ofc, denying that women can be horrible or punishing them less than men for the same crime is just doing them a disservice. Putting women on a pedestal is harmful too and is especially horrible for the people who suffer abuse at the hands of a woman. 

Huh? It may be a generational or cultural thing,  but ever since I started getting involved in femslash fandom rape and violence has been the favourite plots,  be it subtle,  character driven portrayals like Shoujo Kakumei Utena or explicit rape fantasy fanservice like Cross Ange or Valkyrie Drive.  Like,  favourite plots of porny Sailor Moon fiction is “Sailor Soldiers raped by female villians”. Slash and femslash are exactly the same. 

So far as I can tell, it is generational. Femslash used to be very much the same as mslash in the nineties and early 2000s, in terms of darkness and villainy.

However, the recent reactionary backswing to purity politics in fandom which is only just now reaching mslash, completely wiped out all concept of female villains in fandom years ago. 

First, let’s look at, as you mentioned, Sailor Moon. Specifically, I am thinking of the once immensely popular (though now rather less so) shipping of Chibi-usa and Hotaru’s villainous forms. Although the villain x villain version of the ship lives on, as does the good x good version, I remember very clearly how popular Mistress 9 x Chibi-Usa fics, art, and fandom activity were. 

And in those pairings of a villain and a protagonist, there were extensive studies- both fetishistic and not- of rape, abuse, manipulation, grooming. It was dark, it was violent, it was all over the place. 

And we knew, of course, that it was bad. We were shipping villains, after all. We knew what was going on was horrible. BUt it was also engaging, interesting, and in my case, proof that people like me (abuse and rape victims) existed. 

These fics were some of the ways I found comfort and catharsis after I was raped, which is why the memory of them sticks so much. And why the stark absence of newer works in the same vein is so easy for me to see.

Fast forward a couple of decades and look at another prominent magical girl series that is rife with opportunity to explore horrible subjects: Madoka Magica.

Here we have a set up that begs for the same treatment: a dark haired, purple themed girl who does horrible, dangerous things out of a misguided, manipulative, dangerous love for a pretty pink innocent. 

And yet, any time art and fiction in that vein bubbled up in the (female dominated parts of) the fandom, it led to immense harassment campaigns. People being driven off their sites and rings for daring to suggest that the all-too-canon obsession and pain Homura experiences, and the total lack of consequence for her any action, might lead to the inevitable abuse that, somewhat ironically, was itself canonized in the final movie.

The fights were immense, and they were brief. Within a few months, the shift was well and truly complete. Discussing the dangerous, villainous aspects of Homura’s character was all but illegal. The only way it was acceptable was if you were decrying the entire show as “abuse porn.” Certainly you could not make fic or art on the subject.

It happened with other fandoms too, nearly simultaneously. I remember, for example, the entire Vriska debate in homestuck: another character who was openly and unapologetically awful, and whose awfulness it was not acceptable to explore unless you were spending twice as much energy decrying- loudly, aggressively- how bad she was and how anyone who enjoyed her was also criminally violent.

Personally, I assume it was a manifestation of the increasing social awareness of fandom and tumblr, taking an unfortunate turn.

This purity-obsessed backlash never really hit on male characters, and male/male ships.

Until now.

With female characters and female ships having been driven into submission almost uniformly these days, what’s left is male characters and ships.

Which is where modern anti-shippers come in, screaming not only about how good (how obedient, how cleansed) f/f ships are (because any trace of villainy has been stripped form them for almost a decade), but how anyone who ships filthy, dirty m/m is dangerous and criminal too. 

Which is odd, for a group claiming to be socially just, since they… habitually refer to queer ships and criminal and disgusting. 

BUt homophobia is cool when you’re using it to punish women authors/artists for not conforming to ever-tightening restrictions on what they are allowed to do and create.

Ah, such a gread addition.  @rhodanum, @andarthas-web

This touches on a TON of my issues with fandom. In order: 

I noticed the cleansing of femslash of any ‘impure’ elements over the years. The end-result can be seen clearly on Tumblr, where you see femslash ships and dynamics constantly being referred to in soft, gentle, twee, pastel terms, again and again and again, no matter the ship. More power to people who enjoy that, but the problem is that it’s usually the only sort of presentation you run into because it’s the only sort of presentation allowed to exist without some sort of backlash. Same thing about people going on and on about how ‘perfect’ and how ‘pure’ femslash ships are. It just sets my teeth on edge, not just because it’s a classical manifestation of purity culture in action, but because perfection and purity as tropes bore me to absolute death! 

Give me female villain/heroine ships with absolutely nothing gentle about them! Give me female anti-heroines that are as flawed and filled with mistakes and jagged edges as the archetypal male Byronic Heroes, who constantly fuck up and wreck their relationships, because they can’t deal appropriately with emotional intimacy! Give me middle-aged, hard-faced, ruthless lady Generals who have short-term, no-strings-attached relationships with woman after woman after woman in the Legions, because they lost their great love years ago and nothing else comes close. Give me femslash ships with faults, with sharpness, with cruelty, with control, with Stockholm Syndrome, with irredeemable mistakes. Don’t spend all your time trying to cram anodyne flower-crown fluff down my throat, because all it’ll do is just make me tell you to go piss up a rope. 

The fact that purity bullshit moved to M/M ships after the F/F contingent was suitably ‘tamed’ isn’t any surprise to me at all. You can see it right now, with the constant shouting about what people are ‘allowed’ to write in the slash fics. Brutality? Violence? Sexual violence? Dark kinks? All of it right out. Until what you’re left with is the same thing as with femslash – an endless parade of ‘this ship is so pure uwuuuu’ and ‘this ship is so healthy uwuuuu’ and ‘this ship is so balanced uwuuuu’ with almost nothing else, unless you’re willing to open yourself to some heavy-duty harassment and denigration. To be clear, my issue isn’t the existence of healthy, balanced ships – I believe in variety being what gives meaning to life and variety also being what makes fandoms interesting. Meaning Cinnamon Roll ships co-existing with much darker ones, without a constant trend to make the latter disappear, by any means necessary, until the former dominates across fandoms. 

oh my god… this actually explain so much for me??? about me???

like, i kinda felt like a bad queer for not finding as much enjoyment from f/f fanfics but… this is why. i have trouble finding anything with suitably angtsy/dark/complex/anything other than fluffy content. wow.

A perfect explanation on why I can count on the fingers of one hand the f/f stories that I really like

This reminds me, anyone got any recs for Root/Shaw being a fucked-up, violent, four-alarm dumpster fire? Like, not even talking abuse here. Just fic that revels in them being maladjusted human disasters who enjoy shooting people just a little too much, and spend their first meeting smirking and flirting through an entirely nonconsensual torture scenario.

I mean. Canon alone gets them into so much wild-ass shit. It’d be a shame if fandom didn’t match and surpass it.