[ SECRET POST #5125 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5125 ⌋

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


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 31 secrets from Secret Submission Post #734.
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

[(Anonymous)]

Nobody is even remotely saying that there's anything wrong with liking het. Pretending that's the issue here is dumb. If OP had a secret about liking a het ship, no one would give a shit, except maybe to ask why it was even a secret at all.

You don't necessarily have to think that there's a problem with taking a slash ship and making it het. But like... let's be honest about what we're talking about, at least. Nobody is objecting in the slightest to someone having a preference for het in general.

[(Anonymous)]

To my knowledge the Good Omens ship isn't "canon" i.e. they have a vaguely defined relationship to begin with. I struggle to see an issue with someone thinking "ah, this duo is cute but I'd connect to it even more if one of them were a woman". They're not writing emails to Neil Gaiman demanding to rewrite the book nor are they trying to remove the literally thousands of slashfics that already exist of it

[(Anonymous)]

You can think one thing or the other about whether making the ship M/F is homophobic - I'm not even arguing one way or the other about that.

I'm just saying that simply having a preference for het over slash is absolutely not what anyone at all is objecting to. So saying something like "is it a phobia to have a preference" does not address the situation as it stands. It's not relevant.

[(Anonymous)]

I struggle to see an issue with someone thinking "ah, this duo is cute but I'd connect to it even more if one of them were a woman".

This.

[(Anonymous)]

Go find a het ship then?

[(Anonymous)]

Why? And should all the slash fans refrain from participating in any fandoms that lack canon slash ships?

[(Anonymous)]

Are you going to tell all the shippers who ship two canonically straight guys to find a canonically slash ship instead?

[(Anonymous)]

Christ I'm queer myself and this take makes me kinda wanna stand with the "thats heterophobic!" crowd.

[(Anonymous)]

There's degrees of homophobia, and not all of them are "Evil Person Hates The Gays". Sometimes it is as simple as "I'd rather this gay couple be het so that I personally can relate to it more"--it's just a sign of living in a heterosexist society, where gay stories are fewer in number to start with, not the mark of the devil or something.

DA

[(Anonymous)]

I'm cishet and I find f/f MUCH easier to read than m/m precisely because I find female characters and female sexuality more intuitive to understand. I'm gonna say it's way more internal than societal the effects that determine which ships appeal to a person.

Re: DA

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT societal affects the internal, though.

NAYRT

[(Anonymous)]

Like I'm queer as fuck, and have better things to do than to trawl through social media or AO3 for things that make my eyes roll. That's a bottomless churn of stupid.

On the other hand, I reserve the right to criticize stereotypical treatment and assumptions, especially when they start making their way to mass media attention. And I really wish the knee-jerk "it's just my PrEfErEnCe" brigade would dial it back a bit. Because it's not really about you or your AO3 bookmarks, it's about how those stereotypes get amplified, internalized, and performed.

[(Anonymous)]

Eh, I don't know. For smut, I get it, you gotta write what gets you hot. But once you start getting into genderswapping to *connect* with a character, you open up a whole other can of worms, especially if you're still primarily doing it for shipping purposes. Suddenly, it seems less like it's genderswapping to explore new potentials for a character, and more like you just want to write a more heteronormative relationship.

[(Anonymous)]

as if a lot of slash isn't written in incredibly hetronormative ways.

[(Anonymous)]

This is deflection. That's those writers' problem, yes, but it doesn't erase this one.

[(Anonymous)]

+1

[(Anonymous)]

Most slash fans don't write slash for some noble woke reason like "explore new potentials", they write slash because they're uncomfortable shipping women

[(Anonymous)]

I am dubious

[(Anonymous)]

Oh boy. I mean, what did you think you were going to accomplish pulling out this dumbass argument?

[(Anonymous)]

As someone who is into het but not slash or femslash so much, i think the majority of slash fans write and read slash because it turns them on. Some of them write slash because het and/or common het tropes turn them off/freak them out. Some of them are uncomfortable shipping women, but I doubt that's the case with most of them.

[(Anonymous)]

Erm... How is it?
As a cis female who is mostly homoromantic I don't feel comfortable WRITING m/m even though I pretty much only read m/m. Because I can't relate at all. I feel like I'm invading someone else's space. I do that for fanfiction occasionally, because the characters' subjectivities are predetermined to an extent, but originals? I just feel like I'm forcing it terribly, my own cis female subjectivity onto those poor characters. Some people are okay doing it but, for me, nah. I really don't get what's homophobic about going "I am a cis female and I don't feel comfortable writing m/m" like, at all.

SA

[(Anonymous)]

I would like to add that I'm asexual so "writing what gets you hot IRL" is like, a moot point, for me. Then I wouldn't write smut at all...? But I occasionally try my hand at it anyway because it "sells".

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, at that point, how do you feel comfortable writing, say, a cishet man=? Maybe you date them but it's not like your cis female subjectivity can substitute for their experience either. Only reading m/m but can't relating to m/m is some weird cognitive dissonance, too. There's definitely mental gymnastics here. It's a human relationship. What's there not to relate?

At the end of the day, characters aren't real people and can't be hurt by what our imaginations do to them. And you don't have to write m/m if you don't feel that way, here we're specifically talking about genderbending to make a character more relatable. And I don't get that. At all. If I couldn't relate to the character in their original offering, I wouldn't want to write about them in the first place.

[(Anonymous)]

Is it really genderswapping when the characters are canonically nonbinary and only sometimes presenting as swishy gay men to avoid freaking out the humans?

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah that's what I keep coming back to. Aziraphale and Crowley are canonically genderless. I don't see the issue here. You want Aziraphale to make an Effort to be female-presenting and use she/her pronouns, go to town it doesn't make either character less queer. That's one of the reasons I've enjoyed the Good Omens fandom so much is the variety of interpretations for this pairing. m/m, m/f, f/f, they/them, genderfluid, ace, demi, gay and any all combinations there in. It's all wonderful. it's not all wonderfully written of course this is still fandom after all, but I love seeing so many people encouraged to explore orientation and gender expression.