fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6106 ]

[ SECRET POST #6106 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6106 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 40 secrets from Secret Submission Post #873.
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.

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02. https://i.imgur.com/FnOJYMc.png

Oh same OP. Years ago when I got into my first m/m ship I wandered into some absolutely insane wank over who should top or bottom, when my stance on that has always been: do whatever you have fun writing but otherwise it doesn't matter and I've stuck to that ever since.

I do have a few m/m ships where I have more of a fixed preference(literally just shallow reasons for this, it's that deep), but I'll never get to the point of actually arguing about it, or trying to shame people for liking the opposite to my preference. If I'm that put off by it I just don't read it, it's that easy. It's just not worth any time fighting over and it's dumb as hell.

I've been an m/m fan for 20+ years and have NEVER cared about "who tops"... as long as everyone gets an orgasm, it's all good! These arguments have always baffled me, too.

Comment OP here and "as long as everyone gets an orgasm, it's all good!" made me laugh, and sums up my thoughts too.

Same here. A lot of it stems from Japanese anime/manga where there were/are unspoken rules about how tops and bottoms are portrayed (the top has to be the more masculine one, bigger, stronger, older, and the bottom more feminine, shorter, quieter, younger, etc).

Thankfully that is changing somewhat, but it's still the norm that the guy who is perceived as being more masculine is usually going to be assumed to be the top.

There was a Thai BL series last year where in one episode the character who was assumed to be the bottom actually topped, and some people just couldn't deal with it. It was kind of funny to see the mental gymnastics some of them went through to try to explain it as anything other than what it obviously was.

Top/bottom discourse being a thing at all confuses the Heck out of me tbqh, and I'm at least 75% sure it's not entirely because I'm asexual.

At this point I think it's a form of obligatory bullying.

In my case, it's because I legit did not know that was even a debate or topic of discussion before entering fandom spaces years ago, and even now, with all I have read and learned about the topic, I still don't feel like I have enough proper knowledge or understanding of the topic to really have a strong opinion one way or another. I've no problem with people having preferences or not having preferences, but yeah, I still just stay out of the debates simply 'cause I just don't care one way or another.

Plus, I also agree with the whole obvious thing of it being fiction and it's not that deep and people should do what they personally want with their fics and all that, too.

Comment OP here and I'm asexual but I still like written smut, so I don't think my confusion on this has anything to do with my lack of rl sexual attraction to anyone.

And I get that well-written smut can show a lot about characters, but I don't think what body parts go where in sex shows anything but what positions a character enjoys (or not.)

I have very strong preferences for all my ships, but that's a me problem. I don't understand people getting all het up about what other people write. Just move on.

Thanks for turning my comment into a secret, OP!

THIS THIS THIS.
I wish for more tagging for this, too, but - yeah, how to tag?

I guess in my brain, everybody is a switch all the time, and if they lean a little more one way or another, that does NOT define them in any other way than...sexually during the act.

'Helpless baby bunny', omg. HATE.

Comment OP here and I don't necessarily think everyone, or all the characters I ship, are switches.

I'd only insist on it if the entire fandom for my m/m OTP or another of my m/m ships calcified into insisting that A/B was totally canon and B/A was blasphemous.

There's probably at least a couple authors I read who always write my current OTP with the same top/bottom configuration, but I don't notice because they don't make a huge deal in the fics themselves or their notes about it.

And luckily the fandom for my OTP doesn't march in lockstep about how our faves fuck, lol.

The authors and readers that make a big deal about it are more likely to conflate top/bottom and dom/sub and replace canon personalities with stock characters, at least, from the fic I've read so far.

Authors who wrote my fave het ships by throwing out canon characterization and using stock romantic leads instead was bad enough.

And there wasn't a whole lot of anal, but what there was tended to be cis women pegging cis dudes. Not a whole lot of cishet couples going for dick in ass anal.

Only fics I can think of involved cis women in historical fics who really, really didn't want to get pregnant but still wanted penetration, or poly ships with the cis woman as the filling in a cis dude sandwich.

I never saw hetshippers flip their shit about "character A would never go for anal" but presumably if they were reading het anal it was because they wanted to, "surprise buttsex" without tags wasn't a thing.

I just wish fewer authors defaulted to stock smut, whatever the gender identities involved, but at least I never saw so much fighting about sex positions when I only read het smut.

(no subject)

tabaqui - 2023-09-25 13:28 (UTC) - Expand

I remember the Sherlock BBC wars as the absolute worst of this - the people who liked John topping declared that the other way around was pedophilia because John was "child coded". Yes, really. This was important enough to attack real life abuse survivors in person.

https://fanlore.org/wiki/221B_Con (scroll down to the 2015 section)

Oh, Jesus fucking Christ...*Facepalms*

Some people really should just not have internet access, I swear...

... If John were 'child coded', it'd be pedophilic regardless who was topping...

I have a big thing for stronger/more physically intimidating characters (think the brawn side of the classic brains/brawns ship) bottoming, but it's mostly because I think the contrast between being a hulking warrior who can destroy you in combat and being super subby in bed is really appealing to me. Literally just very base level porn appeal to me lmao

Am I misreading this or are you doing the bottoming=subbing thing on a post about how annoying that thing is

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2023-09-25 05:32 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2023-09-25 07:32 (UTC) - Expand

I have very hard-set preferences on who tops and who bottoms, I even admit that character personality plays on the preference. But it's so obviously a personal preference/id thing that people who fight over it still look stupid.

Someone who has the opposite preference to me can't help it just as I can't help it.

As a bisexual man, I always find this debate somewhere between painfully naive and straight up homophobic, lol. First off, anal sex is not even that common in the first place (since you have to prep in advance) and it often feels like the assumption that penetrative sex is "real" sex is coming from a very heteronormative place. But it also kind of just feels like "who's the woman?" which... yeah, no. There's definitely some association among MSM between gender roles and bottoming, but it's nowhere near that simple, so I'm just gonna assume no one who talks like that has ever met any MSM in their life.

Yeah, I don't have your lived experience, but it's a whole other pet peeve when male characters in fic are *always* down for anal on a moment's notice, no matter the situation.

Most of your other points I'll give you, more or less. But complaining that porn logic is in place in smut is just silly. It's like complaining that people in fantasy and Sci-Fi novels don't go for extended bathroom breaks that are described in detail every few pages.

While I do have a t/b preference for just about all ships I ship, the vitriol with which some people tend to fight anyone who doesn't like their personal preference is baffling. However, I will say that there are some fandoms where I've come to actively dislike certain characters being the designated top or bottom because it very often goes hand in hand with that character being portrayed in an incredibly OOC way.

I don't have a preference who tops when it comes to vanilla sex, even when it's anal. I do have strong preferences for who doms and who subs when it comes to D/s. Unfortunately, a sizeable portion of fandom seems to equate "bottoming" with "submissive" and I hate that.

I'm asexual but I do read smut sometimes, I never realized it was SUCH a big deal until recently myself. Now I have a friend who legit gags whenever they mention something that "goes against their preference" and I just sit there baffled, because... um. Hm. Ok! Seems weird to me, but whatever.

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