whys combat and military gear always got to look so fucking cool when the people wearing them just objectively arent. thats unfair
this goes for like, all of time. knights are serving the KING? the fucking KING?
you cant serve cunt and the government at the same time come on now pick the right side i know you have it in you
Jesus said this. Matthew 6:24
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. :)
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.
When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.
Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.
If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…
And then we will ship an OT3.
I’m going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.
As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.
In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.
And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.
And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.
When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.
And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.
It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.
They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.
And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, that’s where the shipping goes.
Yeah I don’t really ship but I do write a fair amount of fanfic, and in most franchises working with the female characters is a chore.
You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.
The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.
That you don’t have to unearth and piece together like some sort of volunteer archeologist coming up with theories way more complex than the available artifacts truly support.
Guys read this this is an amazing breakdown of it
ALWAYS reblog.
And then you can compare it to a show that has actually well written female characters and
Huh. First three spots are taken by F/F, M/M and F/M in descending order. Afterwards are platonic ships.
Just so we have the stats, what are the top 10 most written characters?
Wow. A perfect split, five to five. And the top three are women. (By about 200 fics to Jayce and Viktor, the runner ups, might I add)
That’s out of 29,590 works.
So about third of those (very roughly) are CaitVi.
Just so we have the
stats, what are the top 10 most
written characters?
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
A very nice cat just greeted me like an old friend and escorted me from the bus stop to the shop while meowing conversationally and keeping perfect pace with me the whole way which was already incredibly charming but then it also waited on the corner by the shop, shouted to get my attention when I got out, and then chattered away while walking me back to the bus stop and demanded 5 minutes of little cheek scritches before wandering off into the night?? Who was he. Missed connections me 25M you cat of indeterminate age or gender interests nighttime walks do you wanna hang out again some time
Oat milk is made by milking goats and then putting the milk through a fine filter to extract all the "G"s
I heard thats where they get the "G"s for cell phone service
truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.
The Plagues song in Prince of Egypt goes so hard
Somebody: *annoys me slightly*
Me in my head: I send a pestilence and plague. Into your house, into your bed. Into your streams, into your streets. Into your drink, into your bread. Upon your cattle, on your sheep. Upon your oxen in your field. Into your dreams, into your sleep. Until you break, until you yield!
colorblind pride flag just dropped
everyone make sure to set out cheese & crackers for neil tonight <3
we really didn't deserve The Good Place. a bizarrely high-budget sitcom telling a longform, highly conceptual story that you need to have been watching from episode one, which was allowed to play out at its own pace and wrap things up when it intended to, and it didn't even lose steam over its four seasons. that's practically proof of the existence of a loving god
one profession that does need better gatekeeping is people who write or translate subtitles. brother that is not what was said.
un proffesiwn sydd wir angen ei ddidoli'n well yw pobl sy'n ysgrifennu neu'n cyfieithu isdeitlau. fy mrawd nid dyna'r hyn a ddywedwyd.
this post is now available in: english, welsh
Gairm ina bhfuil geatóireacht níos fearr de dhíth uirthi ná daoine a scríobhann nó a n-aistríonn fotheidil. A mhic ní hé sin an rud a dúradh.
@latinare would you please work your magic
negotium unum vere adstrictius costodiendum est subtitulos scribentium vel reddentium. frater hoc haud est quid dicitur
(@oldenglishtextposts can you make my nerdy dreams come true)
Ein Beruf, der ein besseres Auswahlverfahren benötigt, sind Leute, die Untertitel schreiben oder übersetzen. Bruder, das ist nicht, was gesagt wurde.
They’re lowkey growing on me
