Cata's mess @atinylittlebird - Tumblr Blog

og trio

sometimes when im feeling sad i draw them (ignoring the seventeen sbg actor au requests sitting in my inbox bc im a procrastinator)

WOAH I just hit 1k on my post for the first time i'm very honoured thanks guys

suitfer

bella: where are your fangs?

yingfernart

“I want to take someone back to the cloud recesses… take him back and hide him.”

📖 Mdzs | Wangxian

katballesteros

“Hey, Inuyasha, give me a ride”

“Eh? Tired, already?”

“Pleeeaaaase”

“…ugh”

miyakuli

** Permission to post it was granted by the artist Do not repost/edit the art without permission Please, support the artist on their pages too **

Artist : KOGA桑

Source

zelkams-art

I still am.

jayceart

Their reunion was just *chefs kiss*

miralleqro

why did japanese women for decades read boys’ love manga and never believed to be men but white girls watch shadowhunters and read destiel fanfics and suddenly they think they are mlm

sterileandferal-deactivated2022

The answer is a wider gender gap, the recognition of fantasy vs reality, and recent internet politics in the west magnifying narcissistic behavior online. 1. Japanese culture is horribly misogynistic. You really don’t need to look further than recent olympics scandals to get an idea. In the US, we like to buy into the “sexism is over” narrative. Sexism is only okay in the US when it’s more subtle. But outright sexism is normal in Japan….thus resulting in olympics scandals where Japanese men don’t understand what they gaffed and why people from other countries are so appalled by it. This wider gap means it’s very difficult to be confused about what it means to “be a woman” because the reality of the differences between the sexes both physically and socially are clear as day.

2. There’s a couple of theories out there but I’m going to go for the low hanging fruit and point to the classic “honne” and “tatemae” aspect of Japanese culture. It’s considered not just normal, but also critical to keeping the peace by separating your public facade from your actual feelings and opinions. This results in a psychological understanding that many parts of life are a type of constructed fantasy, separate from reality. The separation between fantasy and reality is also applied to media in Japan. No one worries about kids imitating the violence they read about in comics and see in video games, because it’s all just pretend. This approach to media and clear divide between fantasy and reality is considered to be more extreme for “otaku” and by extension “fujoshi” subcultures, to which most women reading BL in Japan belong. If anything the appeal of BL for women is in reading a fantasy that they could never obtain in reality. Just because you like detective stories, doesn’t make you a detective and reading erotica about men doesn’t mean you must be male. Why would it? It’s all just pretend after all.

3. By contrast in the US, young girls are now constantly plugged into social media where they are navigating things like post-modernism, identity politics, and political correctness. There’s a huge emphasis now in English speaking fandom spaces on identifying with fictional characters and enjoying media in the correct fashion. The first is about projecting your being onto the characters you consume, thus blurring the line between reality, fiction and self. The second is about only consuming and producing things that are similar to you so as not to offend. Young women that find enjoyment in gay fan fiction are trying to figure out how they can incorporate these creeds into their identity and online personas in way that people will laud them for on a moral level. Many conclude the best way to do this is to opt into the label of a gay/bisexual man. It’s an extreme case of “you are what you eat” or in this case what you read. Young women writing star trek fic before the new millennium didn’t seem to have this same issue, and neither do the women enjoying it in Japan now. The pressures to perform, pander, identify into, and politicize your erotic fiction hobby are a new movement that seems to have started in the US within the past decade.

revived-ophelia

Point 3 is that picture that went

“Tumblr Model of Identity Politics:

Tolerance ->

Glorification ->

Fetishization ->

Appropriation ->

Intolerance of original marginalized group”

joaniecash-deactivated20230309

When you also explore the theory of “teenage girls read yaoi as escapism from misogyny in male/female relationships” it makes more sense. Japan is, as mentioned above, a notoriously misogynistic country and perhaps Japanese teenage girls feel that divide more deeply than American teenage girls, hence making their experiences of escapism through yaoi much more literal and present. You also have to consider that Japan isn’t a particularly LGBT friendly place either which probably makes gay relationships seem mythical to yaoi readers, compounding the feeling that “it’s all fantasy”.