elumish:
elumish:
Sometimes reading fanfiction, but especially big crossover fanfiction, is so funny to me, because it’s like 12 men and that one woman who’s either the nasty faux-romantic rival or whose enire job it is to cheer on the men’s relationship, and the author will just be like “see? I don’t only write about white gay/bi cis men, I also” *checks notes* “mention lesbians that one time in the context of saying that they can manage a magic soulbond despite it otherwise requiring penetrative sex”.
But also the way that women are written in a lot of fanfiction, especially women who are canon love interests for one of the men involved in a ship, is just so unbelievably misogynist. So many female characters in slash fiction basically get reduced down to:
- Never mentioned
- Conniving and/or gold-digging romantic attempted-rival
- Hyper-competent but in no way romantically interesting/interested in anyone (bonus points if they are hyper-positive and child-like)
- Overly invested in the main slash pairing, to the point where that is their primary/only character trait
- Overly inflexible rule-following government/organizational drone
I’ve been thinking about this, and I think I know why this happens so often in fandom - a common (albeit tired) romance trope is to make it clear the romantic rival is wrong for the main character, and often that means making them a monster in some way to show how bad of a match that would be. These depictions tend to be already laced with misogyny, so when a fanfic writer engages in this trope, it’s already built-in to throw the female characters under the bus.
I’d like to be hopeful that this is something newer writers know to avoid, but honestly it’s just something you have to purposely learn to outgrow. I see it pointlessly pop up in professional fiction, so it’s an uphill battle. That’s never an easy thing to combat.