[ SECRET POST #2606 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2606 ⌋

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

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07. [repeat]


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.


__________________________________________________



10.


__________________________________________________



11.


__________________________________________________



12.


__________________________________________________



13.


__________________________________________________



14.


__________________________________________________



15.















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 021 secrets from Secret Submission Post #372.
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

Re: "Woobie" characters and OOC stuff in general

[(Anonymous)]

I'm in a corner of my fandom that ships one particular het pairing. The male half of said pairing does a lot of stuff that is definitely not traditionally masculine; his motivations, his strengths and weaknesses, his emotional responses, his relationship with his kid and his significant other, the way he interacts with men versus the way he acts around women, and his talents all tend towards things traditionally seen as feminine. But he's not *weak* for it. He cries easily, he flirts in 'girly' ways, he plays up the ways in which he's not traditionally masculine to keep people off guard, was raised by a pair of lesbians, and practiced a traditionally feminine trade while raising his kid as a single father in a place where that was seen as women's work. He wins fights by manipulating other people more often than by physical force. But he's not weak for any of that, any more than a woman would be strong for doing traditionally masculine things (or weak for conforming to gender norms.)

I can't stand when fanfic writers push all that aside and write a manly man domineering macho romance novel hero in his place. On the other hand, there's a small group of fans of the pairing that --well, I was never a yaoi manga reader, but basically they make him into an uke, with lots of crying and worship of his love interest while she pets him and calls him baby and introduces him to the wonders of orgasms. It's like he and his love interest are in a skewed, weird, 24/7 Domme/Sub relationship. I've got no problems with fics that explore that dynamic when that's actually what they're doing, but most of the time it's not.

The writer who popularized this interpretation, who really, really loves writing the characters this way, got some anon crit/hate that their writing had started to all sound the same and was edging towards OOC, and stopped posting for awhile, which I thought was a shame. They came back, which I was glad to see. I don't like their stuff, but lots of people do, and I don't understand hating someone's work so much that you'd try and shame them off the internet, at least not for something as harmless as this stuff.

The thing that weirds me out is all the people who read it and love it and think it's totally in character and freak out when someone suggests otherwise, because this went straight past the canon characterization of a not-traditionally-masculine guy and into almost infantilization. He's old, he's got a grandkid, he lived a big long stretch of his life alone and managed not to starve/blow himself up/explode from not knowing how to jack off, he's not helpless or ignorant. But for this one subset of fandom, that exaggerated helplessness is an enormous kink. Kinks are cool and all, but this one's not canon, except you can't tell them that.

Re: "Woobie" characters and OOC stuff in general

[(Anonymous)]

What fandom/character is this?

Re: "Woobie" characters and OOC stuff in general

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT-anon below you guessed!

Re: "Woobie" characters and OOC stuff in general

[(Anonymous)]

Up until the 'raised by lesbians' part, I was thinking this was Rumplestiltskin, from Once Upon A Time? (And Rumbelle the pairing?) Everything you've described fits perfectly, but I didn't think it was canon that the spinsters were a couple? Though you could easily see them as that, I just didn't think the show'd actually gone and said it.

Re: "Woobie" characters and OOC stuff in general

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT--Yeah, you got it. And the spinsters being a couple is... sort of canon. The writers like to throw around a lot of word of god info on twitter, and apparently somebody official said the spinsters were together. But since it wasn't mentioned on the show itself I guess it's kinda up for grabs.