[ SECRET POST #5908 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5908 ⌋

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


01.



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02.
[Tombstone - Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer]



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03.
[The Other Boleyn Girl]



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04.
[Mass Effect]



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05.



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06.



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07.



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08. [SPOILERS for Iron Widow]




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09. [WARNING for inevitable JKR wank]




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10. [WARNING for discussion of antisemitism]




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11. [WARNING for possible discussion of sexual abuse]


































Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #845.
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)]

Yeah, people use the word "fetishize" so broadly and incorrectly, and there's a very vocal subgroup that does this with m/m in particular, that my first assumption about this secret was that someone was uncomfy because women were gushing about how sweet/hot the ships were. See, that's considered "fetishizing" because women aren't gay men, so if they enjoy m/m then it's bad.

[(Anonymous)]

Right - but at the same time it also is absolutely possible that people are being shitty about it! It's just tough to know.

[(Anonymous)]

I so rarely see m/m shippers fetishizing mlm relationships in the true sense (to be clear, you cannot "fetishize" a ship itself), and so often see false accusations of it, that I am totally assuming the OP is the one being shitty until I have concrete accounts of the fans being literal fetishizers.

[deleted_scenes]

You absolutely can fetishize a ship. Is not woobiefication a form of fetishization?
Isn't the very act of writing porn about two characters in a relationship literally fetishizing that ship?

[(Anonymous)]

Nope! Fetishizing is to dehumanize in a sexual manner. You can write porn without dehumanizing the characters, and woobification is just making someone OOC.

[(Anonymous)]

Woobification seems pretty dehumanising to me?

It stops being about the character as written and more about a blob of traits that strokes the ff-writer's id.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

If anything, it's the opposite. It's extra-humanizing. Giving a male character who's a stereotypical stoic macho guy some vulnerability and a wider range of emotions than the canon shows is making him more three-dimensional, not less.

[(Anonymous)]

...stoic macho guys are not the only guys woobified, idk why this is so focusing on that specifically. Any and all male characters including perfectly normal ones with personalities and emotions get woobified and turned into things that desperately need healing cock or whatever for the authors id

Like can we not pretend that isn't a thing, or that this is done for some weird selfless reason?

[(Anonymous)]

There's a difference between 'this character has a range of emotions and reacts to pain in a realistic manner' and 'this sponge full of tears'.

I'm talking about tear-sponges. Flattening a character's entire emotional range into a tear-sponge is dehumanising.

[(Anonymous)]

Woobies are the opposite of three-dimensional lmao

[(Anonymous)]

Honestly I don't know that there's much to choose between Manly Stoic McHugedick and Limpid Tears FitzBottom.

I've read plenty of fic that expanded on characters' emotional inner lives without woobifying anyone.

Up until recently my OTPs were all het, and it was still really obvious when a fic flew past "expand emotional range" and smacked into "fetishizing doe-eyed incompetence."

[(Anonymous)]

no, no it's not lmao, who on earth are you trying to fool? stop trying to make this out like some grand crusade because it just fucking isn't, good god.

[(Anonymous)]

+100

I see a lot of people using "fetishizing" to just mean "being turned on by" or "writing smut about" and that is not even remotely what it means. "Fetishizing" means focusing on one specific trait to the extent of denying someone's humanity. It also goes with stereotyping a lot of the time, like fetishing Asian women as ultra-feminine and submissive for example.

[(Anonymous)]

Woobiefication can be a form of fetishization if it's always the bottom that's the woobie and they're always made more short / more slender / more feminine in general / totally helpless and on and on. Which happens a loooot in m/m lol

Whether it's "dehumanizing" to totally ignore a characters canon personality and shoehorn them into your preferred personal kink dynamics is arguable, but when authors follow the same heteronormative formula in all their gay ships, forcing it when necessary, it's certainly worth a side-eye and an eye roll

"so and so is such a bottom XDDddddddd my pretty gay boi" maximum cringe

[(Anonymous)]

"so and so is such a bottom XDDddddddd my pretty gay boi" maximum cringe strawman

[(Anonymous)]

Oh my sweet summer child you have clearly not seen the fandoms I have seen

Take a brisk walk through any big animanga fandom

[(Anonymous)]

+1

[(Anonymous)]

If it's just a thing someone is doing to characters they just like to make the bottom extra weepy and what not for some kind of emotional or sexual kink then whatever honestly, not my thing but you do you and all that. But applying the same 'woobie' standards to real gay men? Yeah that I consider fetishizing along with being incredibly innapropriate and fucking weird and unfortuantly I have seen m/m fans do this, not most I'd say, but certainly more than I'd like and it's never anything less than extremely uncomfortable.

[(Anonymous)]

+1 it's definitely something that drifts over into real life more times than it should.

[(Anonymous)]

Woobiefication is annoying but harmless, imo, and I get you didn't imply it is but I'll already say it isn't fetishization. Most of making the ship "heteronormative" seems to come from relating to/self-inserting through the character they decide are the bottom anyway.

Also, yeah, that quote is very strawman-ish, animanga fandom in the 2012's? maybe, but fandom in general in 2020 and forward? nope, especially not in fandoms like Mass Effect.

[(Anonymous)]

Tell me you haven't been in BL comment sections without telling me you haven't been in BL comment sections

Also the post was not about Mass Effect, it was addressing a comment about something else

[(Anonymous)]

Tell me you haven't been in BL comment sections without telling me that. Tell me you don't even like BL and get all your knowledge about it through memes about how bad it is without telling me that.

[(Anonymous)]

I just replied to another comment in this thread that up until recently all my OTPs were het, and woobification was still really, really obvious when it kicked in.

There was an author in my previous fandom who had such an obvious kink for making the guy half of the m/f ship just a, idk, tear-firehose it was kind of funny, alongside a kind of weird ott helplessness that if he'd displayed in canon he would have died young.

And the canon character wasn't at all a stoic manly man, but this was something else.

[(Anonymous)]

No, and no. This is exactly the kind of incorrect use of "fetishizing" that's making people skeptical of the secret.