this post is about DC and Zelda fans actually
for DC, if you read the comics you’ll actually find that women are included a lot in the source material and even play pivotal roles in fan favorite storylines, and then strangely get left out more in fanon than canon. as sexist as DC is in canon, what with the frequent hyper sexualization and demonization of the women in this series …….. for the love of god at least women exist there. to many batfam writers it’s like the worlds population flipped from being a 50:50 gender ratio to being 99:1 and women are an endangered species being preserved in some conservatory somewhere.
women play a WAY bigger role in batman comics than most of you care to learn. huntress is pivotal in several arcs, so is catwoman, so is oracle. some fics will even specifically go out of their way to reference some of these arcs — and then leave out the women like they were never there! and it’s impolite to ask writers or artist where the missing women are so i just click out and move on, but like, seriously? every time? that’s not even counting the amount of AUs where by the writer’s full control, women who had been critically important to these men just straight up don’t exist.
you guys expect women to just be cool with being in fandoms that go out of their way to write us out of the narrative? you think we’re just going to have a fun time?
this was also about Zelda. the zelda series proper has countless pivotal, important, plot relevant, iconic women, and their presence and choices, particularly zelda, often genuinely impact the storyline of the game. sometimes in huge ways like, the story wouldn’t have happened at all without her. women were actually so central that a way bigger portion of all major NPCs tended to be women; 4 out of 5 of the sages you save in Ocarina of Time are women, and even Sheik is actually Zelda in disguise!
but fandom sexism has been around a long time in zelda too. an old popular theory had fans pretending sheik was a separate character to zelda entirely — to the point we had people in the fandom with this headcanon literally saying “ugh oot zelda was so boring she didn’t do anything” when she was literally sheik and had one of the MOST central, active zelda roles to not only the story but even the combat! people let a sexist headcanon make them forget what women actually did!!!!
but this criticism is more lobbied at a particular fan circle who have, truly a genuinely creative idea — what if all the links met? though they also weren’t the first to have the idea (in my earlier zelda fandom experience there was a similar AU), but this group has majorly popularized it. but this has led to a shocking amount of erasure of the women depicted in fan creations. in what was once a fandom that would reliably depict women in a meaningful and story central way…. now a huge portion of fan works are just …dudes. now the portion of fanworks about women are way smaller. and to see zelda play a meaningful role in a narrative it’s mostly some flavor of shippy. zelda fanworks have tilted from once being a pretty woman positive and woman centric fandom … to overwhelmingly ‘zelda & related works’ being about dudes and their relationship to other dudes, both platonic and romantic. and i can’t stress this enough, 90% of these guys never met in canon. writers are going out of their way to bolster relationships between fictional guys instead of exploring link’s relationship to the many women he’s known, or depicting the relationships between these women. thank god though this is still a better fandom than batman because at least there’s still an exceptional handful of writers still writing zelda epics where she’s the main character. whereas in DC, there is an extremely noteworthy absence of ANYTHING where women are the main character. i genuinely can’t remember the last time a girl was the central character of a narrative, let alone for a work that got extremely popular the way fics about men can. and at least in zelda, we can filter out most works relating to this AU (though it’s pretty tough to content filter as it’s only 2 letters long (LU) and there’s a whole lot of words that get filtered with it. &many on Ao3 don’t tag it properly)
this isn’t me saying “don’t make what inspires you” or me trying to force writers at gunpoint to write more women. it’s me saying like… make what speaks to you — but why does ‘what speaks to people’ usually mean large groups of men and no women? why is this dynamic invented even when women are there and important in canon? why is ‘what speaks to people’ the idea to diminish the roles of women in media specifically to prop up men instead?
in my experience, the source materials’ original authors DO usually include women.
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