[ SECRET POST #4279 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4279 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.



__________________________________________________
























02. [SPOILERS for Killing Ground]



__________________________________________________


03. [SPOILERS for In Bruges]



__________________________________________________



04. [SPOILERS for The Babysitter]



__________________________________________________



05. [SPOILERS for Great British Menu series 7]

[Great British Menu series 7, Alan Murchison]


__________________________________________________



06. [WARNING for discussion of non-con]

























Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #612.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

01. https://i.imgur.com/Hmyxam8.png

Transcript by OP

[fscom]

I'm tired of m/m fic writers who feel the need to write a shit ton of scenes bashing female characters just to make sure it's clear that only m/m is valid. Or whatever else their motivation is to make female characters the evilest people to ever evil.

It's always taken to ludicrous degrees, and adds nothing to the appeal of the inevitable m/m buttsex. In fact, it actively detracts.

[(Anonymous)]

people still do this?? I don't know why I thought that trend would have died once we stopped having to put "warning: gay sex!" on our fics but I guess I did. think that, I mean. whew.

[(Anonymous)]

There's a lot less of it, but the old ones is still around.

Every time I encounter a sympathetic female in an epic slashfic I think of how it used to be and give the author a mental high-five.

[(Anonymous)]

Me too, anon.

[(Anonymous)]

I hate this too but why act like it's a thing only slash fans do? There's plenty of famous cases of bashing female characters by non-slash shippers too. Look at how Zutarians treat Mai or how Harmonians treat Ginny.

People bash the characters that get in the way of their ship.

[(Anonymous)]

Ugh, slashers are the worst. I get so sick of that "only m/m is valid" crap attitude.

[(Anonymous)]

Yep. It's lazy, crappy writing.

[(Anonymous)]

I genuinely stop reading because to me it says they can't write well if they choose to bash a beloved character in the name of their ship

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, it's misogynistic and biphobic as fuck. You don't gotta bash the women in their lives. Just write an AU where the m/f couple never got together or she married someone else. This vitriol is gross.

OP

[(Anonymous)]

Everyone who commented on this secret, thank you! I'm glad to see that other people who disagree with bashing female characters for the sake of m/m pairings. :')

It reminds me of Plato.

[(Anonymous)]

I remember reading something about Plato's views of love between men and how he thought of women and then later coming across this in slash. Look how far we've come :S

[ninety6tears]

That's still a thing?

[tabaqui]

I guess I'm lucky, because my fandoms just don't seem to have that at all.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm glad that I see a lot less of it nowadays-- whenever it does show up in like... one of my modern/current fandoms it feels so... not just eye-rollingly anti-feminist, but like... really DATED? I remember when every fic had to have a sidebar about why a canon love interest was really EVIL ALL ALONG, and I'm sure it still happens, but boy is it refreshing to see more and more 'they broke up and it was nobody's fault' or 'they were actually just friends and not in love' or 'and also she's a lesbian and lives happily ever after', like... Anything but the old 'she was terrible and bad'.

Even when a canon relationship is unhealthy there are ways of resolving it in fic without going there, and it feels like such lazy writing.

OP, I hope your fandoms also move away from that nonsense and that you can find good fic where female characters get to be respected and used well!

[(Anonymous)]

I hate that reaction picture.

[cakemage]

First off, I agree with this secret. Bashing female characters in slashfics just for the crime of being female is a shitty trend that should have died off years ago and it sucks that it still happens.

Second, and unrelatedly, that background image makes me anxious every time I see it because I've always had this mental image of people who look pretty much exactly like that watching everything I do with that exact same look of disgust and hatred. I'm not blaming you for this, OP, or saying that you shouldn't have used this picture, because it is an effective image to go along with this secret and this is my problem and no one else's. I guess I'm just giving everyone an entirely unnecessary look into my tendencies towards extreme self-loathing. Dunno why.

[(Anonymous)]

My fandoms get their female characters out of the way by deciding they're all canon lesbians -- especially if they need to be gotten out of the way because they're in love with one of the male characters, yes, that definitely makes sense for a canon lesbian -- shipping them with each other, calling everyone who ships them with the men a homophobe, and pretending they're Woke for it.

[dani_phantasma]

I hate all character bashing but especially bashing done for the sake of a ship, or for the authors' OC or for grimdark nonsense.

It's just so petty and childish.

[(Anonymous)]

I really haven't seen much of that these days. Especially now in the era of tumblr and twitter, there has been a really huge backlash against that sort of thing that you very rarely see it that much anymore.

[(Anonymous)]

I wish people would stop bashing ANY character for "getting in the way" of their ship. I remember one M/F fic I was reading actually beheaded the other male character and put his head on a spike... like WTF... how can you hate a fictional character that much?

[(Anonymous)]

Like a couple other people have already said, I didn't realize this was still a thing and it's pretty disappointing. Just make the female character not exist, be an ex, or just be a friend.

[des_pudels_kern]

I don't see much of this around anymore these days. Instead currently I have more of an issue with the opposite: The female characters' glorification into perfect goddesses adored by the male characters, constantly smirking knowingly (of course they know the hapless male characters' feelings better than they themselves), all the while pressuring and manipulating them for their own good and crossing serious boundaries while sassing everybody in their way. Usually with a side of everybody else doing as they say because they are scared of them, but in a good way, you know, badass rather than evil.

I understand that it's the counter-movement to what OP describes, idealization rather than demonization because we are all feminists now who love rather than bash women, but it's no less out of character, reducing female characters to tropes rather than letting them be people, and not calling them out on certain behaviour because they are superior queens that can do no wrong will only age marginally better than the previous habit of portraying them as evil harpies.

[(Anonymous)]

I feel like if we held the writers of canon to higher account (most of whom are white dudes, still) then this trend would lessen.

A ton of shows/books/movies still glorify the relationships between men (whether they're friendships or antagonistic) and insert women as tokenistic love interests who do the 'Go defeat the baddie, I'll be waiting in bed!' thing; or else are the mean shrew trope; and instead of recognising that we need more diversity from producers themselves, there's this obsession over what's the correct reaction to have to their same-y output (e.g. the endless arguments about fic representation - 'writing m/m is fetishistic', 'writing f/f is just to block your favourite m/m pair', or god forbid, the race aspect.)

When you get arguments over sexist fanfic writers when the text source is like, a MCU film or Supernatural or whatever; it seems like you're letting the canon itself off pretty easily.

[(Anonymous)]

Character bashing no matter what ship, whether it's m/m, m/f or f/f is annoying.