fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2241 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2241 ⌋

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

so this is kind of weird...but...i think there is a trend more and more lately that i've noticed, where a majority of the characters in the fic i'm reading are gay, bi, or something else besides 100% heterosexual. and i'm finding myself being really put off a fic when that's the case. now, i'm not 100% heterosexual myself, but it's not something i go around sharing, and of all the people i have met in any capacity where sexuality has come up, the overwhelming majority insist that they are heterosexual (even if in reality they might by bi, or questioning, or whatever). so i feel like it's incredibly unrealistic when i read a fic and every character (or even every other character) is gay, bi, or willing to bend. especially when everyone readily admits it, AND everyone else readily accepts it. but there are other unrealistic things that don't bother me as much, i think. i can't figure out why this puts me off so much.

I'm kind of with you on this. In Law & Order fic there seems to be a tendency to make ALL the female characters gay and sleeping together. All of them. Which, okay, Serena came out in canon (in the worst possible way), and Alex/Olivia is one of the most popular ships in the fandom, but then there's Abbie and Casey and Melinda Warner and Liz Donnelly and jfc they can't all be lesbians.

This is why I don't read SVU fic. I can't stand how OOC most of the femslash fics are. And I'm not an E/O shipper, in fact I don't ship anyone. That leaves me with exactly zero SVU fics to read.

It's an escape fantasy.

Idk if you're gay or not but sometimes it seems like everyone around you is straight and there already a lot of stories where all the couples are hetero, and sometimes it's nice to pretend that it's the opposite.

However, I've read a couple of those fics and they were pretty badly written.

This use to be my biggest peeve with Yugioh fanfics way back when. It was the same pairings every time too in every single fic and everyone was gay and female characters were also gay and/or didn't exist and everything was happy. It did get really annoying after it popped up in every fic.

That's a trope, and it bothers a lot of people. There's even a TV tropes page about it (given below). It's pretty much the mark of either bad fanfiction or someone trying to check all their inclusion boxes.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EveryoneIsGay

It's not exactly rare or unheard of, though, as people tend to be drawn to people like them, and that includes sexuality. I'm gay and half my friends are gay. I'm a trans guy and I end up befriending a lot of other trans guys (by accident, I swear - I'm like a magnet for them). My social circle is full of non-heteronormative, non-sexually normative, and non-gender normative folks.

Yes, the overwhelming majority of the population is straight, and realistically, on average, there aren't going to be that many non-heterosexual people in a given group of friends. But at the same time, all those straight people? Get to read a whole slew of stories where everybody is straight, regardless of how unrealistic that is, so why shouldn't non-straight folks get to read stories where everybody is some shade of not-straight? Seems fair enough to me.

I mean, yeah, with a huge cast of characters, it is sort of ridiculous when like the 30 people mentioned are gay and just happen to be paired up with each other, but I think that stems more from the author having a few too many ships they want to focus on/mention/shoehorn into the story rather than anything else.

Yeah, this. You said it better than me.

I get what you mean, which is why this trope doesn't bother me...when we're talking about groups of friends. But when, say, all the Avengers and all of S.H.I.E.L.D. are gay, I start to smell just a little bit of unbelievable bullshit.

/shrug

So, if it bugs you, don't read it? Plenty of people are bothered by certain ubiquitous fic tropes, but at the end of the day, some people actually like those tropes, so you're just better off finding something else to read. There's not much you can do about it because the moment you start complaining about too many gay characters, somebody is gonna jump down your throat for it.

Yeah, I get that, but there's really nothing wrong with discussing it. And if people want to call somebody homophobic because they don't like OOC homosexuality, well, that's their own lack of insight at work.

Groups of friends are different than people randomly thrown together, though. I can buy that the majority of a group of friends would be gay (I mean, I've seen that IRL), but to use the example below, if all the Avengers are gay or bi in a fic, it's just unbelievable and at least on some level OOC. I wouldn't have a problem with it if it were original fic and not fanfic.

Granted, I'm a lot pickier than many when it comes to fanfic. I have a hard time reading anything that seems like a deviation from the source material, especially when it's unexplained.

if all the Avengers are gay or bi in a fic, it's...at least on some level OOC.

Why? If it's not OOC to have two or three non-heterosexual characters at random, why is it suddenly OOC for the whole cast to be? Ridiculous and unrealistic, I'll get behind, but I don't understand how the orientational makeup of a group somehow throws the entire group out of character.

I said it's "on some level OOC", not that it's completely OOC. And while a lot of people are pretty forgiving of small amounts of OOC-ness, I can't really get past it.

And OOC doesn't have anything to do with any amount of non-heterosexual characters being thrown together at random. It has to do with those specific characters not being non-heterosexual. And when, in canon, all characters display only heterosexual preferences, it's pretty much impossible for me to allow that all of them would have bisexual leanings that they just happen to ignore for the entirety of canon. One or two of them? Maybe, depending on the characters. But beyond that...it's just a deviation from canon in my mind.

Oddly enough, I'm not bothered by fic that has all of the Avengers being non-heterosexual -- though I get picky about devaluing canon relationships -- but I am put off by fic that has the entire cast of, say, a random crime show being entirely non-heterosexual. I'm not sure why this is.

Because comics is full of so much hoyay that everyone seems a little bi?

Yeah, this. I guess it's unrealistic, but it's nice to be able to read about characters I can identify with rather than the like 90+% of stuff that's out there about traditional hetero couples.

I remember being criminally old and reading fics where absolutely everyone was gay (and when someone wasn't, they were thoroughly bashed). So it's not a new trend.

[ SECRET POST #2241 ]

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