one of these days the formula 1 fandom (the part that creates rpf art and fics etc, specifically) will have to explain why they’re obsessed with always depicting lewis hamilton as a completely mischaracterised dominant top and his partner as a sweet submissive innocent person who knows lewis will always protect them.
i might sound very strange and “taking rpf way too seriously” saying this if you’re not much into analysing the subtext and implications of certain ships, but i’ll try to explain.
let me use an example. the most popular lewis ship is brocedes. personally, not a big fan of this ship, nor of rosberg himself, but i’m gonna put my bias aside for this.
now, brocedes is fairly popular, and the lore is definitely very intriguing, and there’s a lot of material to pick apart. it’s complex, and both parties hurt each other (and dare i say nico hurt lewis more, but that’s a conversation for another time). that much is obvious when you have basic comprehension skills.
i’m gonna be very blunt here for a moment — there is a large portion of the fandom whose brains are so rotted by the same old bland cookie-cutter yaoi tropes that usually involve two white men whose biggest conflict is a broken heart at a coffee date. now, i do not judge what kind of media strangers consume. my problem is when they try to apply these hyper-romanticised fictional concepts on two real people, in a real, cutthroat sport.
and more than that — they do not know how to handle a black man in their yaoi ship. a black man whom everyone conveniently seems to believe does not have emotions, and therefore, was not affected by the silver war, and THEREFORE, is the aggressive, jealous instigator of the two of them, and nico the innocent angel.
this is not just blatantly racist towards lewis, but utterly dehumanising for nico, too. for example, did you know that nico doesn’t actually love being called ‘britney’? did you know that it was webber who coined that name first, after nico went into the wall in brazil 2006? webber, who is anyway, quite transphobic? do you think calling a man ‘britney’ in the 2000s, when everyone was casually misogynistic, was a ‘haha slay moment’?
naturally, now people have someone to blame — lewis! because of course, nico is, at the end, really just a pink princess baddie that lewis fumbled, and not a formidable (and sometimes dirty) driver on his own who pushed lewis the whole season, who had to scrape off the paint off his helmet for just an extra tenth, because of how desperate he was to win a title against his teammate.
now, how does this all come back to the topic of ‘top lewis’? it’s really less about the porn and more about people’s blatantly racist perception of a black man, especially the only black man in a sport that still continues to have a majority of white people.
lewis is a sweetheart off-track. he cares deeply about other people. he loves wearing stylish, beautiful clothes. he loves wearing pretty tops and wide, flowy trousers. he adores jewellery. he’s tried tons of hairstyles. (one of my favorites, the pigtails). in a way, he sounds like the poster boy for the stereotypical bottom in a ship.
yet you are far more likely to see a white driver — someone who wouldn’t be caught dead with an earring — being written or drawn as an omega or a bottom and so on.
the issue becomes obvious — the hypermasculinisation of black men, and people’s refusal to accept or believe that a black man can be on the receiving end, a princess, someone to be taken care, someone to buy flowers for and watch them turn red. it might sound like a non-issue to some ignorant people, but you do not realise that these inherently racist perceptions you have can easily bleed out to real life, and can affect how to interact with or think of real people in your life.
it’s always jokes like — ‘nico is the mother to kimi’ or ‘sebastian was lewis’s mistress’ or ‘lewis loves snow bunnies’
think. think about how strange you sound. and please reevaluate yourself.
(and for the sake of the world, let’s add more fics to the bottom lewis tag)