You've been reblogging more stuff about female characters getting ignored by fandoms recently and I would be really curious to hear your full views on the topic.
The thing is that... look. I get it. Many fandoms do not have very many women in their canon, many of those women are treated pretty poorly by the canon or aren't given as much depth as their male peers, and if you're at all picky the pickings are kind of slim (I would love to be a fan of c!Niki, if I were able to watch six-hour vods, which I am not). It is not wrong that most works with large fandoms are really, really sexist, and the problem is not just in the fanbase!
But come the fuck on. It is not an accident that the DSMP and the MCU and BNHA, all of which are vast-majority male and the female characters are treated terribly, are megafandoms, and Revolutionary Girl Utena is eligible for yuletide. It is not wrong that if you want to see more female-character-focused fanwork you should go to Sailor Moon and not The Untamed, but it is also kind of missing the point to say that and not look at the difference in size between those fandoms. People can say "it's because the male characters are so often more interesting and have more meaningful interactions," and like, sometimes that's even true, I will be the first to tell you that quackbur has more to it than tinarose, but please compare the Clint/Coulson tag to the Utena/Anthy tag and look me in the eye and tell me that's the only thing driving the trend. With a straight face.
And even more there's a thing where— so, I was a mod in the @ao3topshipsbracket bracket. And femslash ships, once they were in the bracket, did really well. Like, absurdly well, like 80% of the f/f ships entered got to the top 16, and the last one was against blackbonnet which was never gonna lose in round 1. You might notice something about that number, though, which is that there were only five of them entered total, because people love to vote for femslash but they absolutely will not write it. And they won't say anything about it either! I was watching the activity feed the entire tournament, and I can tell you, for all of the "let's go lesbians" that populated our notes, nobody would say anything that was actually about the specific characters who made up their ship. I learned a lot about Naruto fandom, modding that bracket; I still know nothing about CW Supergirl, because the only thing anyone would say about it is "it has women in it". Because women are interchangeable. Because women are avatars of Being A Good Feminist. Because clicking a button is easy, and actually thinking about any specific woman and her traits and her internality is hard.
The thing is that guilt over misogyny does not actually fix misogyny. It gets you a lot of people who vote for women in polls, and who say "he's like a woman to me" about their male faves but notably don't have any canonically female characters they talk about, and who say that the only thing they care about in a fic is if it has women in it but will not ever actually say anything about any specific woman, and who never shut up about yuri but apparently yuri is everything and anything except women who have feelings about one another.
I'm tired! I'm very tired. I want people to actually give a shit about specific women and their specific traits, which do not begin and end with "woman". And, also, to stop treating women exclusively as the wingmen, advice-givers, mom figures, and accessories of men.
