An unnecessarily thorough response to the New York Magazine article
Like many other fans, I too have spent a significant portion of the last few days thinking about that one New York Magazine article (or here if you’d like to read it without the paywall). It all started with me consuming it through other people’s reactions to it: TikToks flooding my FYP telling me how problematic it was, how judgemental it was, how disrespectful it was. I finally decided it was time for me to read it for myself and give the journalist a chance to redeem themselves from a crime I wasn’t even sure they had committed.
I’m glad I did.
My goal with this is to share my review of what stood out to me in the article, in the hope that we can have a productive conversation about it instead of just gut reactions.
It was revealed to us readers quite late in the article that the journalist is a gay man, an information that I thought should’ve been brought to our attention sooner, because it helped frame the piece. I will apply my own advice and lay my cards face up in front of you now, so you know whose perspective you’re going to read about (and I stress it: it’s my perspective. I am not a journalist, this is not going to be particularly factual, I am not trying to educate anyone). If you’re not interested in this introduction, skip to the section titled "What I didn't love". Who am I?
I am a cis queer woman, I am married to someone of the same sex, we’ve been together more than 10 years, which is approximately the same amount of time I’ve known to be queer. I am also demisexual, and somewhat closer to the asexual side of that spectrum than the middle. The way that manifests for me is that I think some people are beautiful in the same way art is: I want to stare at it all day, but I’m not attracted to it.
I am also a fangirl, I’ve lived in fandom spaces for longer than I’ve known to be queer. I usually think of the year I turned 15 (that’s 17 years ago) as my official entry point into fandom culture, but only because it marked the start of my online participation in it. I’ve been a fangirl for longer than that, probably since the day I watched that one Powerpuff Girls episode where the girls drink a potion that ages them up to be teenagers, and I was inspired to draw my own Powerpuff Girls comics. If the show could explore alternate realities (AUs, one might argue) within its canon, I could too.
I am also a fujoshi. At some point years ago, and I don’t remember if it was SuperWhoLock (when I was only in the Lock of it all, but of course extremely aware of the SuperWho we shared the spotlight with) or Larry Stylinson or the Shadowhunters and Glee fandoms giving us top tier queer ships, I shifted my attention from the straight ships to the queer ones, with a significant attention to the M/M pairings, a path that eventually opened the doors to all forms of BL.
This is the lens through which you should read this piece. And, to further prove that I too am an Ao3 citizen, I will add a disclaimer that English is not my first language, so I don’t know if this will be as eloquent or coherent as I’d like it to be. What I didn't love
The article (that I read on Vulture) was already edited by the time I got to it, and the link to Ao3 that caused so much distress on TikTok was already gone, making me question if I was even reading the same article everyone was talking about. In addition to that, I didn’t think the article was offensive at all, in fact, I found some sections of it to be extremely nourishing food for thought.
The first part does come off as a little inflammatory, I’ll admit that. There’s no need to call the Heated Rivalry phenomenon a “mass-psychosis event”. I get that it can get a little out of hand, but I don’t like how quick society always is to call any female-centric phenomenon a “hysteria”, a “mania”, when male sports fans habitually go around displaying violent group behavior at many sports events and we only occasionally call them out for it. We should never judge an entire community based on its most problematic representatives, albeit they do tend to be the loudest.
The rest of that first part, the one that focused on the history of BL and fujoshi, was also in general the weakest. That’s ultimately my biggest critique of the piece: as a gay man, the author has every right to marvel at this phenomenon since it’s seemingly about his community, but the piece is missing the fandom participation aspect. I cannot tell, from reading the piece, what kinds of fandoms he participates in, and how. He has a nice section about affirmational versus transformational fans (if you have not read the article, the point is that affirmational fans are the ones who obsess primarily over the details of the canon, whereas the transformational ones find the cracks in the text an opportunity for participation, and the two groups do overlap, but the separation is usually gender-based), but we don’t know how much of each he is, assuming he is a fan at all.
The lack of fan perspective in this context is crucial, because it’s what makes the piece come off as condescending to some. It’s one thing to joke about a community when you’re part of it, and a whole different thing to do when you’re just an observer, and not a particularly well informed one either.
The history of BL/yaoi and its popularity reads like a quick and a little clumsy retelling from someone who maybe watched a couple of YouTube videos on the topic or has a friend who’s really into it and is recapping their own experience. Some very important milestones being only mentioned in passing (“The 2016 anime Yuri!!! on Ice, about a male figure skater and his coach, became a crossover hit” - I’m sorry but the kiss episode in this show broke barriers when it came out, it was not “just” a hit!) and some very specific examples of toxic fandom cited (the BrightWin backlash after the Thai actor Bright Vachirawit announced he was in a relationship with an actress) when much bigger controversies went unmentioned (the 227 Xiao Zhan incident was right there!) sounded to me like the product of a quick Google search rather than the best example of unhinged fan behavior, probably due to Google’s recency bias. Yes, Bright Vachirawit did get backlash from fans for announcing he had a girlfriend, but so do all idols, whether they are shipped with another male celebrity or not. When Chinese singer and actor Luhan announced his relationship in 2017, the reaction (much of it backlash) of his fans crashed Weibo, and this happened three years after he had left EXO and was shipped with some of its members.
That whole section was also probably what gave some readers the impression that the piece is presenting this phenomenon as something new when it very much isn’t. The juggling of the old Star Trek fandom’s influence on fandoms and shippers to come versus the explanation of the yaoi phenomenon in Asia could use some polishing. What I did love
The rest of the article was very interesting. The paragraph about affirmational versus transformational fans that I already mentioned was interesting to me, if only for the fact that it made me think about how yes, a fan can in fact be both, but the fandoms that have a 50/50 split are rare, and the two halves have traditionally resided in different online neighborhoods.
Back when fandoms existed in more private spaces like forums, it was pretty easy to be completely unaware of what a different portion of a fandom than one’s own was saying. Now that we live in algorithm-driven spaces like TikTok and Twitter, and that traditionally niche media is more accessible to all, we are suddenly aware of each other’s presence.
It was only when I went to see the Haikyuu!! movie in theaters (twice) that I realized straight dudes are also consuming it. It’s only now that I see the two factions of the Jujutsu Kaisen fandom getting at each other’s throats about Gojo and Geto that the cohabitation feels forced (with the one exception, maybe, of Chainsaw Man, where anime boobs enjoyers and the “I want to see a man in pink lingerie” crowds are equally satisfied - and perhaps overlap?). Years ago, the Haikyuu!! movie would’ve only been available to international fans online in 144p, 16 parts and fansubs explaining what an onigiri is, and I wouldn’t have known who else was in the audience. Jujutsu Kaisen bros would’ve been on a dedicated forum talking about whether they thought Gojo could beat Goku in a fight, and us fujos on our forum posting pretty much the same things we do now but with lesser video quality and agreeing over the fact that Gojo is, in fact, a bottom.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the article was, for me, the following:
“I’d like to propose a writ of reconciliation. Gay men and fujoshi have more in common than not as persecuted sexual minorities. We have similar animating interests. Gay critiques of M/M romance and BL are reminiscent of early critiques of drag that said the art form was mocking women. In both instances, the subjective I is key; the BL writer is not writing about gay men but herself, just as the drag queen is creating a female persona for himself. Playing with the semiotics of the “other” gender is a way to explore those aspects within oneself that social norms have prohibited (hence why many M/M writers and drag queens are nonbinary and trans). When the critic believes themself to be the target of derision or fetishization, the reality is that it may not be about them at all.”
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. And more yes.
See, I have a friend who is a gay man, and he only discovered the popularity of M/M in female spaces through Red, White and Royal Blue (mentioned in the article, where its author, Casey McQuiston, is often cited). During his discovery journey, he would often text me and express his perplexity about this phenomenon. “If men started writing about lesbian romances, it would be perceived as problematic,” he wrote to me once. “It would be problematic,” I thought when I read that. “Moreover, I would argue that BL, despite being about male same sex relationships, has nothing to do with being gay”.
I feel like when I say this, I sound crazy, because how can seeing two men in a relationship not be about men? Heck, some people think that lesbians who consume M/M content suffer from internalised misogyny, because what can be more misogynistic than a world where women are almost non-existent? And yet somehow, for some people, myself included, BL stories are some of the few out there that are not about men at all, and they are certainly not about being gay. When I want to consume a story about LGBTQ+ experiences, I certainly don’t turn to BL (or GL, for that matter).
There’s this section in the article that I found very funny, about how unrealistic the sex in BL is. “The word slit (the front, not the back) appears nine times — each one a jump scare for this gay male reader — such as ‘tonguing the slit’ or ‘sliding his thumb over his slit’ (ouch).” I laughed out loud here, as I did when other gay men have expressed how unrealistic the prep for anal sex is in these books, because as someone with female parts, I know what your body being misrepresented in fiction is like. In fact, I’ll tell you what: I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the amount of sex scenes involving a person with female genitals in any media out there that sounded and/or looked pleasurable.
For every “one finger, two fingers, three fingers, dick” in slash fics and adjacent works, there’s a hundred “kiss, kiss, kiss, dick” in straight sex. Pick a movie, any movie you can think of that has at least one sex scene involving a dick and a vagina in it, and think of the scene, and let me know if it does not have the “kiss, woman moans at absolutely no stimulation at all, dick in, 3-4 slams in, they both orgasm” trope. Around 20% of vagina owners can reach orgasm through penetration alone but somehow they make for 100% of the ones represented in movies (with the one exception of Lily from Sex Education, representing us vaginismus girlies). It’s exhausting (and I admit, a little funny once you start noticing it, because how can I even complain about queer sex representation in fiction when the straights haven’t even figured out how they’re supposed to do it?). Yes, the vagina, unlike the anus, self-lubricates, but the amount of moisture required to stick a dick in it is a little more than what a sloppy makeout session of 10 seconds can induce.
I have many reasons for consuming BL over other options, all of them absolutely baffling to a lesbian friend of mine who cannot understand this interest at all (she’s not a fan of anything though, so she finds many of my fandom-related passions to be a little quirky), but arguably maybe understandable to the gay men in the audience? I found the comparison with drag culture to be spot on. I will use it as an example in my future discussions with friends on the topic from now on because of how accurate it is, and I do ultimately invite everyone to reconcile and bond over the common ground that unites us. We can laugh at the absurdity of the sex scenes (no human body out there can take some of those dick sizes, let’s be honest), agree that the top/bottom dynamic could be more versatile, discuss about how good Connor Storrie’s acting was in Heated Rivalry, holy cow. The underlying understanding is, though, that the reasons for consuming this type of content are inherently very different. And that’s okay. Where are we going from here?
My last comment on the article will be about its existence in the first place, and to get to that I have to share one important piece of information, which should’ve maybe been shared sooner, but alas: I did not care that much about Heated Rivalry. I never read the books - I don’t think I will, I don’t usually read romance novels - and I thought the show was very good, but it doesn’t even crack the top 10 of my favourite M/M works ever.
In part it’s because their romance is canon, and I tend to gravitate towards the very non-canonical ships in non-BL works. In fact, the fastest way to make me lose interest in a ship is to make it canon. The ship I’m most feral about and have been for the past 5 or so years is Soukoku (Dazai and Chuuya from Bungo Stray Dogs) and the fact that I’m pretty sure, given the conventions of the genre, that they will never be together, is what keeps me hooked and clawing at my seat.
In part, it’s also that Heated Rivalry is live action. If it was an animated show, I would’ve been on my 15th rewatch right now instead of writing this.
Am I happy that it’s popular? Well… to be perfectly honest with myself, not so much. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good show and if it makes a difference in the way gay hockey players can present themselves, that’s great (unfortunately, it doesn't look like that’s happening). But the sudden attention to the topic reminded me a bit of the discourse around the first season of Bridgerton, which is to say a condescending hyperfocus on what’s reduced to “girls can be horny too, but aren’t they horny in a silly way?”. The mainstream attention will not give us better products to follow, in fact it will spawn a series of copycats that try to replicate the Heated Rivalry success while missing all of the points that made it popular to begin with. Heated Rivalry is running so that other similar products can walk.
Heated Rivalry fans can live their experience in the light of day, but omegaverse writers and consumers won’t suddenly be accepted in mainstream spaces. I can go to work and ask my colleagues if they’ve finished watching Heated Rivalry (some of them are watching it), but when asked about what I’m reading right now I cannot say “Oh it’s an omegaverse manhwa about a dominant alpha who cannot sense omega pheromones”. Media exposure to the more hidden parts of fandom like fanfiction are not going to lead us to the hobby being validated as a legitimate way of expression, it’s simply going to drag more publishers to scrape works off of Ao3 to repackage them as original work, reselling us the same exact product that we’re used to consuming for free.
If it was not Heated Rivalry, it would’ve been a different show or movie or book or comic. Something would have eventually filled this gap, so I do not fault this particular product for having initiated this. But the New York Magazine article, Mamdani mentioning Heated Rivalry during the snowstorm in New York, articles over articles about what book will be the next Heated Rivalry are just accelerating the process, and I’m not ready for it yet.
And this is why I have returned to tumblr, the only surviving space for fans that lives outside of the all-seeing eye of the mainstream, to share my thoughts.
