possibly swinging a bat at the hornets nest and am curious have you ever mused why is fandom so "bottom" sexual position centric? I see people talk about their ships and it's almost always people making a case for a character bottoming and never topping.
(if i'm being uncharitable there's some anti-kink waters in this given how people associate gender with t/b roles even the ones who swear up and down they don't, and especially on that last part it always feels like the proud self-identified switch shippers are the ones who are constantly over-obsessed with mixing gender roles with top/btom position, in the desire to "fix it" which also feeds back into my uncharitable explanation of it being a lot of anti-kink talking points covered under this)
firstly, i do think we have to be honest with ourselves about one thing which is that while the feminist and sex-positive position is that topping and bottoming has nothing to do with gender roles, we very much do live in a culture that is saturated with cultural and contextual meaning around what it means to be penetrated and what it means to penetrate someone sexually, and that these meanings are very heavily weighted with gendered meanings. frankly, if you pick up a book on history of sexuality from any period of time in the european era you will find these ideas heavily contextualising who could have sex with who, in what configurations and at what point did certain forms of sexual desire go from being socially sanctioned to unacceptably transgressive and again, so much of this is weighted with gender anxieties.
so it is a bit ridiculous, honestly, for us to sit here piously and claim that this has no bearing on the erotic life and imaginary of people. it exists in the same way that rape fantasies, incest fantasies, humiliation fantasies, cuckolding fantasies, various genderplay fantasies ranging from forcefem to forcemasc fantasies and all this whole range of sexual fantasies around various human anxieties, obsessions and taboos exist. we are up against a nearly thousand year history of penetration being associated with domination & power and power & domination being associated with masculinity and the ability to enforce feminisation or subservience on the gender hierarchy. of course there are anxieties over who gets penetrated, who penetrates, who is allowed to want either of these - and of course these anxieties are going to be eroticised. that's what people do lmao.
secondly, if people on tumblr fandom spaces are borrowing the language of anti-kink to describe any of this in our endless battles of ship wars, that is because we have decades of r*dfem ideology infecting our vocabulary and our ways of thinking about feminist sex or whatever. the obsession with switching as the most feminist praxis derives from this position. like, most people on this website are swimming in this language and structure of thinking and i would say its the rare person who is an exception to this mode of thinking rather than vice versa. i'm not saying this in an exculpatory way, but rather to suggest that it is really just a microcosm of the phenomenon above i.e. Living In A Society (in this case, one culturally dominated by a specific kind of thinking, which in turn is a response to the other kind of thinking outlined above).
as for why people focus on bottom headcanons: well. i mean, just sort of asking about "what kind of society do we live in" should answer that question. for one, at a surface level, the kind of "feminism" (and more broadly, social justice) that became popular on this website came with a suspicion of sexual desire, conflated power & agency and especially all three in combination with the above. it is safe to imagine xyz character bottoming and receiving sexual pleasure from bottoming because they are not "doing" sex to someone else - and therefore there is no chance of them being dangerous or predatory. in fact on some level, this is the erotic limit of the fantasy, because topping or dominating comes with the threat of exerting power over someone and therefore, of having responsibility (nevermind whether or not a bottom has sexual responsibility towards their partner).
at a deeper level tho, i mean honestly, beyond the disavowal of desire and the fear of the erotic potential of exerting power - even through the medium of fiction - i do think there's a lot to be said just in terms of the demographics of fic fandom: we are mostly the proverbial girls, gays and theys you know? women (cis and trans), trans guys, cis gay guys, enbies are the larger part of the demographic with a heavily "bottom" oriented erotic and cis straight guys i think are the rare rare exception rather than the rule. which again, going back to the "we live in a society" of it all, if bottoming = being penetrated = squishy gender feelings that are reinforced through the social world in which we move in for the most part - from the very ways in which we talk about being sexually penetrated / penetrating, even joke about it, rely on visual imagery around it, see it in our media, receive it as subtle guidance from parents or peers or care providers - its not really surprising that this demographic would be highly oriented towards eroticising this you know? we all have varying degrees of experience of it being either expected of us, or enforced on us as a process of degradation and humiliation, or denied to us as another process of degradation and humiliation, opening up vistas of gender affirmation, denying gender affirmation, complicating gender affirmation... there's so much going on, of course its fodder for erotic fantasy and mediation through one's favourite fictional characters. bc like, if you look closely at what is happening in fics where a character bottoms - the bottom is not actually about sex in itself per se, but a broader fantasy of sex that is also accompanied with emotional and physical care and indulgence. its a fantasy of full personhood, love and support - not just about the erotic pleasures of being pleased and taken care of by a loving top.
which is not to say that its natural or expected or even inevitable. its just that there is a complex push and pull of what hidden needs and desires are being met via fiction and that there are certain grooves that cause this predisposition in fandom and it says less about fandom than it does about the social structures of our world on the whole. perhaps there are limits to erotic imaginaries! perhaps its also that this has a powerful pull on the erotic imaginary! perhaps there aren't enough scripts for what topping looks like outside of the penetration = power framework, or perhaps what that looks like isn't compelling enough to overpower the fantasy of the bottom achieving full personhood while still in a position that demands passivity and submission from them (which would ordinary constrain their selfhood). perhaps there is a point at which this need will be met and they will move on to other erotic need-meeting imaginaries. perhaps there is a gendered pleasure and thrill to it that can't easily be met by writing about a fave topping.
either way i think its more useful to understand what's going on by asking what it means to people, rather than purely leaping to judgement or accusation. and by asking i don't mean like, asking directly because in many cases this is all operating at a subconscious level. a lot of it is something you can pick up by observation about how people are writing about their faves bottoming (not just the act, but the context within which the act is taking place) or talking about it / posting about it. be curious about people, i say, while being frustrated at the incuriosity of my fellow fans and also you know, the mysteries of why people prefer boring safe options over thrilling and dangerous and fucked up ones in fiction.
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