[ SECRET POST #4559 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4559 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 37 secrets from Secret Submission Post #653.
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]

05. https://i.imgur.com/pNNXq78.jpg

[(Anonymous)]

I assume most people are straight and most people writing fic in fandom are female, so most of them are straight women who are interested in the men they find attractive for whatever reason... which is why they're telling you they're shallow

They literally gave you the reason. They're not randomly lying about it. IDK what more there is to understand about it, or why that's hard to understand

[(Anonymous)]

I believe OP is talking about people who say that the female characters are shallow, not that they themselves as fans are shallow. that's how I interpret "people say they can't like female characters because they're shallow" anyway

[(Anonymous)]

But why aren't there as many blatant female self inserts? Both dudes and ladies write more about dudes. Why?

[(Anonymous)]

"Shallow caricatures of women crafted by men"
This is very obviously talking about female characters
Who are shallow caricatures
And who are created by men


Read, then post.

[(Anonymous)]

On one hand, I generally agree: pretty hard to credit someone’s "Oh, I just got interested in this random character with three lines~" when somehow they never get so inspired for women (or non-white men *COUGH*).
On the other hand, look at how people talk about women writing fic focused on Darcy Lewis of the MCU. The unbridled scorn and vitreol are pretty unremarkable to me, but I have spent WAY too much time on the internet, so I tend to expect people to be jerks.

[(Anonymous)]

if a piece of media is centered on white men the argument is: oh but they're the focus and they have all the development, it's only natural that we care about them the most and the women/poc just aren't written well enough for me to care.

if a piece of media is centered on a woman/character of color and there happens to be one or two white male side-characters the argument is: oh but they're the perfect blank slate, we can be as creative as we want! there's no limit for our imaginations!

[(Anonymous)]

People were pretty vitriolic about the massive amounts of Clint/Coulson from the same movie, too!

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting female characters in relationship with a male character that I ship with another male character is the worst. I was so confused about Strange and Norell, because I I'm a slasher and I wanted to slash but I liked Arabella and her dynamics with Jonathan.
I never had this problem with John Watson's wife.

[(Anonymous)]

I loved Arabella and Jonathan as well.

(There are some good possibilities for slash in JS&MN, though; Stephen and the Gentleman is dripping with subtext, and Childermass has chemistry with nearly everyone.)

[(Anonymous)]

I'm sort of the same, from a slightly different angle. I'm normally a het or slash shipper, and yes, Jonathan and Arabella are so lovely and adorable together, so that was fine, and I completely wasn't expecting JS&MN to give me one of my few genuine femslash ships after the scenes in Lost Hope with Emma/Arabella. So the show took a swerve on me too.

That being said, it was definitely just one of those fandoms where I multishipped in general.

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting female characters in relationship with a male character that I ship with another male character is the worst.

As someone who finds the MCU's Pepper Potts an eminently respectable, likable character, and an extremely good partner to Tony Stark, I feel your pain. Because of course I ship him with one of the other (male) characters.

I also never had this problem with John Watson's wife, lol.

[(Anonymous)]

If the people who stan and ship minor male characters are the same people who ignore and criticize almost all female characters for lacking depth, then I agree with you. I do.

But in a lot of cases, the people doing the former might not be the same people who do the latter.

There are a lot of reasons why someone might ship primarily M/M. Not liking how most female characters are written is just one reason out of many.

Personally, I think there are quite a few well-written female characters out there, and I'm a big fan of a lot of them. However, I rarely like how M/F dynamics are written in canon. So I stan plenty of female characters, but I ship mainly M/M. *shrugs* Plus, I have a bunch of other, complicated, interconnected reasons for being drawn to M/M, all of which would take forever to unpack.

[silverr]

Yeah, I agree, but I also think that there's not much overlap between the subset of fans who choose to embroider shallow 2D male characters and the subset of fans complaining about shallow 2D female characters.

[sparklywalls]

I feel like there's a few things feeding into this. I agree that in terms of indulging fantasy scenarios (and not just porn) people are gonna be drawn to what they're attracted to overall.

But might this just be because a lot of works of fiction, especially in visual media, don't reflect the real world and there's way more men than women? Sometimes you're lucky to get more than two women speak in a single film for example. And any woman or women are usually there to prop up the main guy's plot in some way. I wonder if it's easier for people to imagine a Rando Man in the background having his own life and personality because we're more used to seeing male characters getting storylines that aren't tied to another character in the way a lot of female characters get lumbered with.

Or maybe I'm overthinking this.

I do get the frustration though. But I don't think a lot of the "I stan this Rando Man" people are maliciously overlooking female characters. Agree with other comments saying it's probably not the same group.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm primarily a M/M shipper so I always gravitate to potential M/M ships. I do love background characters, but there has to be something to spark my interest, even if it's theoretical like the rare character has a job where it's likely he'll have to cross paths with my fave and that possible interaction is interesting to me. And, the two being hot is certainly enough for me to ship them, but I can't see that being a shippable reason for a female character since I'm not attracted to women.

For me, I think it boils down mostly to the fact that the media I consume has way more men than women. There is more chance that whatever small thing I need is going to happen with a male character just because there are more of them.

Which isn't to say that it can't happen with a female character. I've gotten big into Star Wars lately, and as I've dived deeper into the real obscure comics and books, I've found several background one-off female characters that I adore and ship with my faves. I still find way more male characters just because there are so many more of them in Star Wars, but it solidifies in my mind that the more kinds of female characters are present, the more chance that whatever something I need will be present and I'll find a new tiny M/F or F/F ship.

[nightscale]

I just heavily disagree with the notion that there are no well-written female characters anywhere ever, there's plenty, and if the media you're consuming doesn't have them and that frustrates you then... look for media that does(and maybe stop looking for media recs from m/m fandoms that largely ignore canons like that).

Also even if some female characters are a little shallow and one-note, so what? That doesn't stop them from being fun, why is there this insistence that female characters gotta be better than men to simply be 'acceptable'?

Hmm.

[(Anonymous)]

I am kind of wondering what side characters you're specifically thinking of because most of the big m/m ships I can think of are with main characters and/or supporting ones with a fair amount of backstory. There are absolutely ships with side characters, but I feel like a lot of those tend to be rarepairs. Maybe there are just more in fandoms I'm not in.

Anyway, I've read a lot of romance novels in life and watched a lot of movies and TV and so any m/f I want is covered. I don't really read fic focused on any canon ships, though it's fine in the background, except if it's made a threesome (or moresome) by adding another person not in the ship into it. (Though I have read Will/Hannibal, and given how Hannibal ended, it might count as a canon ship... or it might not. And I did actually ship it, in all of its very twisted, gory glory, before the TV show, from Red Dragon, where they were definitely not canon.) I really like m/m in my fic when I'm looking for romance or porn there and it's not because I don't like the female characters or don't think they are well-written, I just like it. I have read and enjoyed m/f fic for non-canon ships. I would probably read more threesome (or moresome) fic if there were more of it. And I love a good gen fic if my favorite character plays a significant part in it. But none of those are my go-to.

[(Anonymous)]

I think it’s a little bit of column A, little bit of column B situation. Certainly fandom on the whole favors male characters over female characters, but there’s also the fact that a lot of the shallow female characters tend to be shallow in the same way, whereas shallow male characters get more variety in their defining traits, and there are just more of them in general.

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm... this is a paraphrase from tumblr.

https://whetstonefires.tumblr.com/post/185793877230/i-know-i-know-i-knooowww-i-knowww-that-women-in

Here was the reply I reblogged by whetstonefires:

The thing is–and I’m speaking here as someone who does do the later a fair amount–that it really is a different kind of work.

Building up the shallow side man into someone relatable is like applying layers of paint, and usually you’re working with a good set of stencils when you do so. It’s walking over to a receptive-looking smooth blank surface and doing something you’ve been trained to do and have all kinds of models for. You can just start. People do it automatically.

It doesn’t usually even feel like work; it’s like…rolling downhill.

Rethinking the female characters designed as objects, or intended as actual characters but with all kinds of misogyny baked in, is a vastly more complicated process.

First of all, and this is a huge barrier, you generally have to get past your own feelings of repulsion. They might be strong ones about how dehumanized her whole canon design makes you feel by association, or subtle ones about how viciously passive-aggressive all her dialogue is, or a sense of personal anxiety or shame about being judged for wanting to spotlight her and preparing to defend this choice, or anything, but it tends to be there. That turns the project into walking uphill right from the get-go.

The surface you’re decorating here is much less smooth and firm. The mortar is flaking, or it’s already painted with a hydrophobic texture that makes liquid paints tend to run and drip rather than adhering, and of course it’s covered in inconvenient holes and protrusions that draw the eye and will intrude themselves into whatever art you put on top.

And then you have to think about it, the art you’re composing, because you aren’t being handed the scripts you need for this, most of the time. You do not have a robust stencil set to address this need, and when you try to apply ones from the other set it often turns out awkward and blurred, because the wall you’re painting has all those bumps and dips so you can’t press the stencil flat.

There are stencil sets shaped for this, though they may only be usable if you do some masonry work first in some cases, but anyway they usually don’t match the project goals, and if you do give in and use them even though they’re not really what you were going for you’re liable to wind up feeling almost as alienated from your own art as you did from what you were seeking to amend, so it was all for nothing.

So to get the same level of comfortable ownership and sense of depth and desired themes out of a majority of the shallow caricature women that people do out of the bland background men, it generally requires two to ten times the mental effort, much of it spent in a negative emotional state as one confronts the factors causing this woman to be difficult to empathize with, digs under what’s there, and brings out what could be.

And after all of that, you know perfectly well the whole time, a minority of the fandom will even be willing to care, and the odds of drawing hostility specifically for presenting this person in a good light are generally much higher. (This also means you’re more likely to have spent the whole work process in isolation, incidentally, rather than in the cheerful glow of group-brainstorming.)

And because this is a hobby people do in their free time, often specifically for self-soothing purposes, of course the easy version with more community and positive feedback waiting at the end is what most of us go for.

It’s like, when you get home from work and you can either have a microwave burrito or start chopping the whole vegetables in your crisper, some of which are kind of old, to make a salad. Most people don’t have it in them to go for the salad most days, and I can’t really blame them.

[(Anonymous)]

The reason I don't like a lot of female characters is that I'm not interested in women. I don't care about fleshing them out, or shipping them, or whatever. I can count on one hand the amount of female characters I care about. I'm just interested in the men.

It's that simple.

[(Anonymous)]

Filling in a blank slate character is a completely different thing from rewriting a character who's already got lots of canon personality that just happens to be horrible and stereotyped. People project onto blank slate female characters and make them their darlings too, it's not just a phenomenon that happens with the men.

[(Anonymous)]

GO OFF OP! come through with this tea

[tabaqui]

I'm a bisexual woman who writes predominantly m/m because I have zero interest in writing about women having sex. I am a woman. I have had sex, with men *and* women. Been there, done that, am happy to be divorced and *not* doing it anymore.

I don't want to be the woman in the movie/show/fic; I want to be the outside observer. I don't want to read about m/f sex *or* f/f sex, because i have no interest and don't want to do it in rl *at all* - reading about it is the last thing I want to do.

M/m sex (and relationships that actually involve emotive emotions and whatnot) are simply more interesting to me. I don't bash, shun, or remove women characters, they just aren't my focus.

[(Anonymous)]

Why do I feel like I've just read this, phrased in exactly this way.