#iwtv#interview with the vampire#the vampire armand#assad zaman
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i love reading fics where two men are kissing each other with an innate carnal divine desire
I like your scars...
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pairing: Sanemi Shinazugawa x m! reader❤︎︎
c/w: M! reader, Fluff, Sanemi in denial, Maybe ooc!? 2 fruits, Sanemi being a cutie, Awkward reader, etc.
f/c = favorite color!
Fem aligned DNI!!
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Y'all I've got 4drafts for skz fics, PLSSSSS I need requestssss and I NEEDDD to be active I swear guys!! I can do all ur requests no matter how weird PLEASEEEE im begging.
"It's impossible to fetishize an MLM ship" says a woman who has done no research on the subject and consulted zero MLM people
why aren't lesbians more popular in fanfiction?
hello literally no one asked for this but i feel like i’ve seen a lot of discussion about the disparity between mlm and wlw fanfiction, and i simply. have thoughts about it lol. this is mostly focused on marauders fanfic bc that’s really the only fanfic community i’m plugged into, but i feel like it probably applies to others as well -- this is definitely gonna get long so if u don’t feel like reading a lil essay abt it then just scroll past :)
anyway! i do think the prevalence of gay ships in fanfic is a particularly interesting conundrum given that the vast majority of people who read + write fanfiction are women -- and, particularly in the marauders fandom, i’d guess that the majority of those women are queer. so i guess the question i find interesting can be boiled down to: why do so many gay women gravitate towards stories about gay men?
generally, i tend to see a mixture of three answers in conversations about this question.
1. there’s more canon info about male characters
essentially, i see a lot of people say something along the lines of, “well, it makes sense that there’s more fanfiction written about men, because in the stories these characters are originally from the male characters are main characters/much more developed than female characters.” and i think this answer makes sense, but i don’t necessarily think it’s a sufficient explanation on its own for two reasons:
fanfiction can branch quite drastically away from canon, and there are plenty of popular fics where canon is completely disregarded. even if writers have very little canon information about a character, that doesn’t necessarily mean the character won’t be loved in fandom spaces. which leads to the second reason...
in the marauders fandom specifically, male characters with almost no canon information have become very popular. i feel like i’ve especially seen this more recently with characters like barty crouch jr. and evan rosier, but even some of the bigger marauders characters -- peter, regulus, etc -- have very little information about their actual characters in canon. additionally, there are characters like lily evans, narcissa malfoy, andromeda tonks, etc, who, if we’re going based on the amount of canon information, seem like they should be more popular.
however, none of this is to say that certain characters should be more or less popular--this is just to point out that i don’t think “there’s more canon information” is a sufficient explanation on its own for why mlm fics are so much more popular than wlw fics. i certainly think it accounts for some of the disparity, but i also think there’s more going on!
2. “fetishization” of gay men
i’ve also seen a lot of people throw out the answer that “it’s because women are fetishizing gay men,” and i...just don’t really think this is the issue that some people say it is. honestly, i think that in most of the cases where i’ve seen people saying this, the term fetishization is being misused. in the marauders fandom, at least, i’d argue that the vast majority of fanfiction is not fetishizing gay men, in that it isn’t reducing gay men to sex objects--in fact, i think that oftentimes the opposite is true. even in heavily explicit fanfiction, the characters are often built out as well-rounded people, and there’s almost always an equal emphasis on the relationship and emotional dynamic between the two characters being shipped together.
i think when people talk about the fetishization of mlm couples, a lot of times the person they’re arguing about is this imaginary cishet woman who’s like foaming at the mouth to read about gay men fucking each other while simultaneously not really viewing gay men as real, complex people--and sure, maybe there are some women like that. but something that i think this straightforward answer of “fetishization” misses is that there is fanfiction catered specifically to straight women, and it often looks very different from queer fanfic. like, i can almost always tell when i’m reading fanfic whether it was written by a straight woman or not, because heterosexual desire and queer desire manifest in very different ways. and my impression is that the majority of queer fanfic is catered towards other queer people--even if straight women read it, too, i don’t really think they’re the main audience. i haven’t tried to research statistics on this or anything; it’s all just based on my impression of this one specific fandom space, and i’m not trying to claim otherwise. but in the marauders fandom, at least, it seems as though the majority of the readers are queer women; in fact, many writers, like myself, are actually lesbians who literally hold zero attraction to men. so why do we still love reading and writing about gay relationships?
3. *vague hand-waving* misogyny
once we get past these first two explanations, i typically see people saying something along the lines of, “well, of course mlm fics are more popular than wlw fics, because of misogyny!” and then just...leaving it at that. and it sort of drives me a little insane, because i’m always like, yes, but WHY??? that’s like someone asking why the sky is blue, and answering, “well, because of science.” like--okay, yes, but WHAT science? why?? what’s actually happening??
so, if you’ve made it this far into my little esay, here are some thoughts that have been marinating in my brain about some specific ways in which misogyny effects the popularity of gay vs lesbian fanfiction (and, in some ways, gay vs lesbian media more generally). essentially, there are two big things that it boils down to, in my mind:
the inherent alientation of womanhood
the universality of queer desire
and those two things kinda play off each other, but i’m gonnna take them one by one!
1. womanhood as a process of alienation
so, this is something that i’ve been turning over in my mind over the past few months. generally, i try to avoid broad generalizations about women/womanhood, because i think of gender much more as a socialized series of performances rather than any kind of fixed identity category, however! that being said, i do think that womanhood is, in many ways and for a majority of people, a gradual and unrelenting process of alienation from one’s own body, sexuality, and desires.
what i mean by that is that in a patriarchal society, becoming a woman means being taught constantly and consistently that you are meant to center men in your life (which is one reason that so many lesbians have such a complicated relationship to gender--because removing men from the equation essentially knocks out one of the pillars propping up “woman” as a gender category). teaching someone to be a woman means teaching them to ignore and suppress their own sexuality, physicality, and desires in favor of men’s. i think many people raised to be women learn to think of their own sexuality as an object of male desire; we are told that we should want to be wanted, but not that we should want. learning to be a woman oftentimes means learning to separate yourself from your own desires--women aren’t supposed to be hungry, or messy, or loud, or ugly, or ambitious, or sexual.
obviously, everyone raised in a misogynistic society internalizes that misogyny; so i think that for most people taught to be women, there’s this shared experience of alienation from your own body. we are systematically and purposely cut off from lesbian desire, from sapphic desire--from any kind of desire or sexuality where men are not a focal point. this makes it understandably difficult to envision rich, complex, sexual and romantic relationships between women, because anyone taught to be a woman has to spend a significant amount of time unlearning internalized misogyny in order to truly embrace queer desire.
so, yes; i think that mlm fics and gay ships are more popular at least in part because of misogyny. but i don’t think it’s this conscious, purposeful thing that queer women should be condemned for--in many ways, i think that gay fanfiction actually provides queer women (especially young queer women) a space to explore queer relationships and queer desire outside of the patriarchy that hangs like a specter over any relationship involving women. for queer women who are still working through internalized misogyny, who still struggle to envision romantic and sexual relationships between women that exist outside the bounds of patriarchal narratives, i think it’s understandable that gay relationships in fanfiction have become this sort of refuge. we are taught to center male desire and sexuality; we experience queer desire that we must learn to stop suppressing; when we look at these two ideas together, i don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the exploration of gay relationships in fanfiction is oftentimes a way for queer women to explore their own sapphic desire.
2. the universality of queer desire
this first point leads me directly into my second, which is that gay fanfiction can oftentimes provide a space to explore lesbian desire specifically because queer desire has a unique sort of universality--it is outside the boundaries of cishet norms and narratives, which often leads to different expressions of desire and different relationship dynamics. for example, as a lesbian, i feel that my lesbian relationships generally have much more in common with gay relationships than they do with straight women, simply because the dynamics of typical heterosexual relationships are so far removed from my own experiences with sex, romance, and dating.
something that strikes me is that, in many instances, these fanfictions about gay men read to me, a lesbian, as lesbian romances--i find myself reading about these characters and thinking that the way they relate to one another, the way they process emotion, etc, feels very much like a lesbian relationship. i think part of that is because many of them are written by queer women, but it’s also because of this overarching universality of queer desire.
anyway, i don’t really have a final point or conclusion that i set out to make with this. i guess i just think it would be nice to move the conversation a little further past “wlw fics are less popular because of misogyny!”, y’know? at the end of the day, i don’t think it’s inherently harmful that mlm fics/ships/media are so popular in queer spaces, and more often than not i think it’s actually an important medium for all kinds of queer people to explore desire + sexuality + gender + relationships through stories written by other queer people. however, i do think it simultaneously calls attention to the ways in which internalized misogyny and compulsory heternormativity can make it very, very difficult for people to envision lesbian desire and lesbian relationships, and i do think it’s important to like...do some soul-searching, y’know? like, just on an individual level, especially if you’re a queer person, and especially if you’re a queer woman--if you struggle to get into wlw fics/media the way you get into mlm fics/media, it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong, and it doesn’t make you a bad person, but it does mean that you should probably take some time to think about why that might be! what kinds of things did you learn to internalize that might be preventing you from embracing lesbian/sapphic/wlw (whatever u wanna call it) desire? and i say this as someone who had to spend years coming to terms with their own lesbian desire, who knows how difficult it can be to work through the layers of internalized misogyny, internalized homophobia, and compulsory heterosexuality. but at the end of the day, a lot of this fanfiction we’re reading is all tied together by the same elements of queer desire <3
this is by no means meant to be a comprehensive or even particularly academic analysis of the situation--i’ve just been thinking about these questions a lot lately and wanted to write down some thoughts to help me organize them. if u actually took the time to read all of this and have any thoughts or ideas to share i am clearly dying to discuss + my dms + ask box are always open :)
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since there's an influx of new people, there are ground rules for your profile if you interact with mlm fics:
you need your age in your bio if you're interacting with nsfw, this is not negotiable.
if you're fem aligned or you don't say what gender alignment you have in your bio, you will be blocked, we've had too many fem aligned people get their hands on our stuff
yes you can be gender fluid or non-binary or agender and interact with mlm fics, but that information needs to be readily available in your bio or you will be blocked
basically, just have basic information in your bio or writers will block you 👍
