fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2086 ]

[ SECRET POST #2086 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2086 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 060 secrets from Secret Submission Post #298.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - posted twice ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Femalash is so tiny in most of my fandoms. Why is this f!s?

Eh, a lot of people just aren't into femslash (and many fanfic writers are straight women who don't really care for writing f/f romance. Not to say that there isn't femslash written by straight women or m/m written by lesbians though). It's the same way we have some fandoms that are obviously het dominated or m/m dominated or how some fandoms have a lacking of them.

There are a few fandoms where femslash either reigns supreme or at least outweighs m/m. I know grey's anatomy had a pretty loyal femslash following (though it didn't outnumber the het). And Rizzoli and Isles is crawling with femslash. There are a couple of other fandoms too but I can't think of them atm. The pairing Kim/Shego from Kim Possible was pretty popular too and definitely overtook any m/m the fandom had

The Good Wife is another where I'd say there's a significant f/f fandom, or at least what there is of fandom is at least 50% femslash focused.

ayrt

This greatly intrigues me...

Is the show itself pretty good?

I think so? But you kind of have to like procedural and/or law shows. It features Kalinda Sharma, though, who is, like, one of the most amazing characters on network television. She's canonically bisexual, Indian, and has a fascinating relationship with the show's main character, Alicia Florrick, wherein they kind of become Best Friends and are badasses together, but then stuff happens and they have to work their way around to being friends again, and it's all slow and sad but ultimately (I thought) worth it.

But yeah. I deeply enjoy the show. And the fandom seems to deeply enjoy Alicia/Kalinda fic, which I actually am not a huge fan of, but I do get the appeal.

because misogyny?

Not caring about femmslash =/= misogyny as much as you want to believe that.

absolutely true. But media with poorly written female characters combined with fandoms made up of women with a tendency to be overly critical of same might result in a pattern of fans who would otherwise be all about the femslash just not being too interested.

ftr I am totally open to being convinced otherwise, I was just aware of that as a possible explanation.

-ayrt

Different person than the anon above, but this explanation is way more nuanced and reasonable than what I thought you were going to say- a lot of the time when I see someone cite 'misogyny' as a reason for not writing femslash, they mean it in the 'If you're a women who doesn't write femslash obviously you just hate your own vagina' sense. Which is... inflammatory, and might be what anon above thought you meant with that.

lol well tbh I hadn't thought much about it until after I posted

It's really crazy to me that anyone would ever say that, about women hating their own vaginas (by which I assume you mean general womanhood). Because that kind of makes it seem like reading Het is some kind of inherently Vagina-Positive act, which is... weird?
And it really sucks as well, because I honestly think that at least for some young women part of the appeal of slash is the escape from the discomfort with their own sexuality. And discomfort isn't the same as hate or misogyny, at least imo, so trying to shame young women for liking certain kinds of erotica just sounds generally shitty.

In fairness, I'm faaairly certain I've only heard the idea stated so directly when I'm discussing it with people in anon spaces, which allows for a certain amount of trolling and/or hyperbole. But I've been a lurker on femslash comms for a while now and read a lot of femslash meta on LJ & DW, and there's this odd sort of... undercurrent to a lot of it, I suppose? that really feels that way to me. Very few of the pieces I've read are really blatant about it, but there's definitely a trend there imo.

To me, there's two 'types' of femslash communities: femslash subcommunities within fandoms and panfandom femslash comms. Between what I mentioned above and a lot of other politics and hypocrisy that really frustrate me in the panfandom femslash places (Holy TV and Movie-centricness, Batman! and lots of policing over what kind of femslash is 'right'), I definitely prefer the latter to the former these days, even if they tend to be a lot smaller. (Though I will say it's not all that way, and there are some genuinely awesome people who are active there.)

(And yeah, I do mean general womanhood there. I should probably pick a better expression to convey that- I don't even remember where I picked that turn of phrase up.)

da

ia with this, especially the first part. Many times women don't really interact with women as much as men do with men (or women with men).

But I do think that there's more than one factor and all.

failing the bechdel test! yeah, that too! (though lbr, slash ships have sailed on less than plenty of women get in canon)

So it's probably pretty complex. Basically I wanted to point out that "because fandom is mostly women and women like mostly dudes" may be part of the story, but not the whole story.

-ayrt

nayrt but yeah, this. obvs it varies from fandom to fandom, but some fandoms are dominated by male characters and the female chars are really crap.

Except it often is...no matter how well written a female character is, most fans won't like her. And that's not even talking about shipping her with anyone.

See: Elena Fisher and Chloe Frazer from Uncharted.

I would say it depends on the fandom?

Like...my current fandom has like no women who I feel comfortable shipping together (too young/related/one could only be noncon...) I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same about it.

But other fandoms probably have different reasons.

In general: shipping is usually closely related to being attracted to at least one of the characters involved. The majority of people involved in fandom are more attracted to dudes than they are to women. Ergo, they are much less likely to be into a ship that involves two women.

Obviously neither of these things is an absolute, and there are probably other causes as well, but I think that's broadly the explanation.

...Because most fandoms are made up of straight girls and most straight girls like men?

Well, what fandoms are you in? A lot of times the source material can go a long way in whether or not people feel encouraged to write femslash- not just in the amount of women in the source, but how they're portrayed, do they get relationships of their own, etc.

Oh, and sometimes it helps to check places you wouldn't expect- if they're not Western fandoms, for example, most of the femslash comms on LJ or DW will have no fic or next to no fic. :( It's frustrating, but if you poke around some you can often find femslash fic in odd places.

Generally, I find that fandoms with a large number of male characters in the cast tend to get more popular than those with a large number of females, and that naturally results in less femslash.

Personally, it is the straight female thing. I have a few femslash ships, but I very rarely look for smut with them. And a femslash ship has to really grab me to keep me interested. And I don't tend to have femslash goggles and see femslash in canon for noncanon pairings. Most of my femslash ships are canon (Callie/Arizona is amazing).

When Fandom had a chance, it took it. See Xena. But mostly you don't get such hard-core subtext of femslash. You get guys doing the Xena/Gabby thing all the damn time, and OF COURSE they get shipped! We joke about slash goggles, but honestly, a lot of the most popular couples are basically platonic life partners (or worst enemies. Fandom's weird). How often do you get two women like that in media?

I know, it seems ridiculous to blame it on the source material, but here's the thing. Imagine your favorite slash ship as exactly the same people, but female (always been--visit AU land with me). Are they still incredibly interesting to you? Would you femslash the fuck out of them?

I femslash my favorite characters twice as hard as I slash them.

I've never had a femslash ship. Well, until last month, anyway. It never stood out to me. Even when I got over my teenage homophobia, I didn't care for it, though I slowly started to see chemistry between guy characters and had no problem if my friends shipped femslash.

I think though that one, it's my own wiring (despite having a girlcrush or two), that I'm more interested in guys, and stories about guys for that matter. But also that I never really found any believable chemistry between girl characters. But watching Glass Mask, I really can't help but ship the girls in it. I don't know why. I love them way more than any of the guy pairings in that show.

For myself, I don't like writing or drawing what I enjoy personally. Which encompasses all of femslash.

It's too personal for me.

Most fanauthors are women, and most women are straight, would be my guess. Thus the object of lust is going to be a dude (though many lesbians I've met in fandom like m/m because of its foreignness as well).

That said, as others have pointed out, there are whole fandoms were f/f is the most popular form of shipping by a long shot, like BSSM, Xena, and Marimite.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #2086 ]

Why is femslash so small in most fandoms?

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