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blackstarising · 3 years

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coming back to this post i made again to elaborate - especially as the ted lasso fandom is discussing sam/rebecca and fandom racism in general. there are takes that are important to make that i had failed to previously, but there's also a growing amount of takes that i have to, As A Black Person™, respectfully disagree with.

tl;dr for the essay below sam being infantilized and the sam/rebecca relationship are not the same issue and discussing the former one doesn't mean excusing the latter. and we've reached the glen of the Dark Forest where we sit down and talk about fandom racism.

i should have elaborated this in my last post about sam/rebecca, but i didn't. i'll say it now - i personally don't support sam and rebecca getting together for real. i believe what people are saying is entirely correct, even though sam is an adult legally, he and rebecca are, at the very least, two wildly different stages of life. for americans, he's at the equivalent of being a junior in college. there are things he hasn't gotten the chance to experience and there are areas he needs to grow in. when i was younger, i didn't understand the significance of these age gaps, i just thought it would be fine if it was legal, but as someone who is now a little older than sam in universe, i understand fully. we can't downplay this. whether or not you think sam works for rebecca or not, even despite the gender inversion of the Older Man Younger Woman trope, whether or not he is a legal adult, i don't think at this point in time, their relationship would work. i think it's an interesting narrative device, but i don't want to see it play out in reality.

that being said!

what's worrying me is that two discussions are being conflated here that shouldn't be. sam having agency and being a little more grown™ than he's perceived to be does not suddenly make his relationship with rebecca justified. i had decided to bring it up because sam was being brought into the spotlight again and i was starting to realizing that his infantilization was more common than i felt comfortable with.

sam's infantilization (and i will continue to call it that), is a microaggression. it's is in the range of microaggressions that i would categorize as 'fandom overcompensation'. we have a prominent character of color that exhibits traits that aren't stereotypical, and we don't want to appear racist or stereotypical, so we lean hard in the other direction. they're not aggressive, they're a Sweet Baby, they're not world weary, they're now a little naive. they're not cold and distant, they're so nice and sweet that there's no one that wouldn't want approach them, and yeah, on their face, these new traits are a departure and, on their face, they seem they look really good.

but at a certain point, it reaches an inflection point, and, like the aftertaste of a diet coke, that alleged sweetness veers into something a lot less sweet. it veers into a lack of agency for the character. it veers into an innocence that appears to indicate that the person can't even take care of themselves. it veers into a one-dimensional characterization that doesn't allow for any depth or negative emotion.

it's not kind anymore. it's not a nice departure from negative stereotypes. it's not compensating for anything.

it's patronizing.

it is important that we emphasize that characters of color are more than the toxic stereotypes we lay on them, yes, but we make a mistake in thinking that the solution is overcorrection. for one thing, people of color can usually tell. don't get it twisted, it's actually pretty obvious. for another, it just shifts from one dimension to another. people of color are still supposed to be Only One Character Trait while white people can contain multitudes. ted, who is pretty much as pollyanna as they come, can be at once innocent and naive and deep and troubled and funny and scared. jamie can be a prick and sexy and also lonely and also a victim of abuse. sam, however, even though he was bullied (by jamie, no less), is thousands of miles away from home, and has led a protest on his team, is usually just characterized as human sunshine with much less acknowledgement of any other traits beyond that.

and that's why i cringe when fandom calls sam a Sweet Baby Boy without any sense of irony. is that all we're taking away? after all this time? even for a comedy, sam has received a substantive of screen time over two whole seasons, and we've seen a range of emotions from him. so as a black person it's hurtful that it's boiled down to Sweet Baby Boy.

that's the problem. we need to subvert stereotypes, but more importantly, we need to understand that people of color are not props, or pieces of cardboard for their white counterparts. they are full and actualized and have agency in their own right and they can have other emotions than Angry and Mean or Sweet and Bubbly without any nuance between the two. i think the show actually does a relatively good job of giving sam depth (relatively, always room for improvement, mind you), especially holding it in tension with his youth, but the fandom, i worry, does not.

it's the same reason why finn from star wars started out as the next male protagonist in the sequel trilogy but by the third movie was just running around yelling for REY!! it's the same reason why when people make Phase 4 Is the Phase For Therapy gifsets for the mcu and show wanda maximoff, loki, and bucky barnes crying and being sad but purposefully exclude sam wilson who had an entire show to tell us how difficult his life is, because people find out if pee oh sees are also complex, they'll tell the church.

and the reason why i picked up on this very early on is because i am an organic, certified fresh, 100% homegrown, non-gmo, a little ashy, indigenous sub saharan African black person. the ghanaian tribes i'm descended from have told me so, my black ass parents have told me so, and the nurses at the hospital in [insert asian country here] that started freaking out about how curly my hair was as my mother was mid pushing me out told me so!

and this stuff has real life implications. listen: being patronized as a black person sucks. do you know how many times i was patted on the back for doing quite honestly, the bare minimum in school? do you know how many times i was told how 'well spoken' or 'eloquent' i was because i just happen to have a white accent or use three syllable words? do you know how many times i've been cooed over by white women who couldn't get over how sweet i was just because i wasn't confrontational or rude like they wrongly expected me to be?

that's why they're called microaggressions. it's not a cross on your lawn or having the n-word spat in your face, but it cuts you down little by little until you're completely drained.

so that's the nuance. that's the subversion. the overcompensation is not a good thing. and people of color (and i suspect, even white people) have picked up on, in general, the different ways fandom treats sam and dani and even nate. what all of these discussions are converging on is fandom racism, which is not the diet form of racism, but another place for racism to reveal itself. and yeah, it's uncomfortable. it can seem out of left field. you may want to defend yourself. you may want to explain it away. but let me tap the sign on the proverbial bus:

if you are a white person, or a person of color who is not part of that racial group, even, you do not get to decide what is not racist for someone. full stop. there are no exceptions. there is no exit clause for you. there is no 'but, actually-'. that right wasn't even yours to cede or waive.

(it's also important to note that people of color also have the right to disagree on whether something is racist, but that doesn't necessarily negate the racism - it just means there's more to discuss and they can still leave with different interpretations)

people don't just whip out accusations of racism like a blue eyes white dragon in a yu-gi-oh duel. it's not fun for us. it's not something we like to do to muzzle people we don't want to engage with. and we're not concerned with making someone feel bad or ashamed. we're exposing something painful that we have to live with and, even worse, process literally everything we experience through. we can't turn it off. we can't be 'less sensitive' or 'less nitpicky'. we are literally the primary resources, we are the proverbial wikipedia articles with 3,000 sources when it comes to racism. who else would know more than us?

what 2020 has shown us very clearly is that racism is systemic. it's not always a bunch of Evil White Men rubbing their hands together in a dark room wondering how they're going to use the 'n-word' today. it's systemic. it's the way you call that one neighborhood 'sketchy'. it's how you use 'ratchet' and 'ghetto' when describing something bad. it's how you implicitly the assume the intelligence of your friend of color. it's the way you turned up your nose and your friend's food and bullied them for it in middle school but go to restaurants run by white people who have 'uplifted' it with inauthentic ingredients. it's telling someone how Well Spoken and Eloquent they are even though you've both gone to the same schools and work at the same workplace. it's the way you look down at some people of color for having a different body type than you because they've been redlined to neighborhoods where certain foods and resources are inaccessible, and yet mock up the racial features that appeal to you either through makeup or plastic surgery.

it's how when a person of color behaves badly, they're irredeemable, but a white person performing the same act or something similar is 'having a bad day' or 'isn't normally like this' or 'has room to grow' and we can't 'wait for their redemption arc', and yes, i'm not going to cover it in detail in this post but yes this is very much about nate. other people have also brought up the nuances in his arc and compared them to other white characters so i won't do it here.

these behaviors and reactions aren't planned. they aren't orchestrated. they're quite literally unconscious because they've been lovingly baked into western society for centuries. you can't wake up and be rid of it. whether you intended it or not, it can still be racist.

and it's actually quite hurtful and unfair to imply that concerns about racism in the TL fandom are unfounded or lacking any depth or simply meant to be sensational because you simply don't agree with it. i wish it was different, but it doesn't work that way. i'm not raising this up to 'call out' or shame people, but i'm adding to this discussion because, through how we talk about sam, and even dani and nate, i'm yet again seeing a pattern that has shortchanged people of color and made them feel unwelcome in fandom for far too long.

coach beard said it best: we need to do better.

#ted lasso #sam obisanya #ted lasso spoilers #fandom racism

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gg-astrology · 5 years

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hey what abt an aqua sun and a scorpio moon? this coil be interesting 🤔😂😂😂

I’ll do my best?? 💕💕💕

[Below Cut: Aquarius Sun - Scorpio Moon 🦇]

Your sense of perception is way off the charts, and most of the time you aren’t afraid to use them

Although you do have a modicum of self-preservation to you, you can’t help but be intrigued by others and how they work, how things tick, how things work out

Quieter than most of your other Aquarius Suns counterparts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re shy. You’re more of an observer, and analyst than you are of someone who wields your power carelessly. Because you are careful (or try to be) in everything you do sometimes

Careful in how you treat people, thoughtful with respect. Careful with how you treat knowledge, information about people/stuff. Because you know it can hold a great weight to it if you let the impact be known to people.

Although you’re quite daring and aren’t shy, you don’t like to exactly bring attention to yourself if you can’t help it. It doesn’t help with like-- all the sneaky investigative stuff that you do, if too many people catches on or judge you-- then it’ll compromise the amount of things/interests you can do/take bc then you’ll have to be wary of keeping up a front/keeping things morally right.

You just-- don’t wanna waste your time with reassuring those who get easy spooked or startled y know, you don’t want to put a disclaimer every time like ‘its ok, there’s nothing bad or wrong or dangerous’ and you don’t want to go through like-- ALL the steps by steps explanation EVERY SINGLE TIME someone freaks out about something that could’ve been easily dispelled through a simple search/genuine curiosity and open-mindedness to the subject y know.

You just...maybe everyone should do their research before they ask you/accuse you of stuff sometimes, judge you too easily for your interests/personality bc like?? what’s so wrong with a lil morbidity y know??

Not that you’re naturally a morbid person but just that-- you try to be open minded to these kind of stuff. Not too restricted and kinda rebellious to what society deem as ‘normal’

I think in a way--- your Aquarius side shows more in a way that you don’t often follow what’s ‘hip’ with people-- some of the stuff you find interests in definitely will stir up some ‘controversy’ and you sneakily feel good about that kinda-- hidden excitement (oh boy whats their reaction gonna be-- kinda feel)

trust me if it doesn’t involve a lil bit of dare to it u won’t be motivated/interested

you only let people see you/look at you a certain way bc you’re always another, like you’re more than just what they see and u know that. That’s why you let them see you/assume stuff about you--- bc you can always show them a different personality/dimensionality to it and ‘surprise’ them y know

Reactions...u live for reactions even when u dont recognize it. Other people’s surprise, unexpected reaction gives u the giggly/life more than u realize

Aquarius/Scorpio are fixed -- and the combination of this makes for someone who’s so powerfully compelled by their own autonomy, their independence and desire that they can in turn be very very stubborn

To the point where advices are seen as just waste of breaths, bc you’ll ultimately do your own thing. Your frustration stems from others not being “open minded” enough to accept the unconventional-- when you work so hard to understand it, bring it to light, want it to be more acceptable part of society

Notice sometimes that you rarely compromise, rather than listening to someone else and being like ‘ ok i’ll change’ you’d rather break completely than take it the easy way-- and this is not So Good For You

you can be obstinate and jealous, insecure without realizing. And most of all that is when you lash out to others for your own weaknesses/fault.

Please try to listen, or learn how to take a deep breath and bend instead of break. You’re too prideful for your own good sometimes, and no one wants to see you suffer-- but you’d rather dare them to put you on a cross than change your ways, and that’s not a way to live by.

Try to listen, or atleast grow to learn through other people-- that you do and can learn how to be flexible. Use your waters correctly, and not to harm yourself/others around you. You do more harm than good if you never learn how to compromise.

Thanks for listening 💕💕💕 I hope you have a great day!! 💕💕

#aquarius sun #scorpio moon #aquarius-scorpio #aquarius #scorpio #oany13 #asks

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blacknovelist · 7 years

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Since you appreciated my kidnappning ask, I'll go ahead and ask you another: What if, when the two universes try to be split apart again, instead of sending Ageswap!Class 1-A back to their own universe, they and their canon counterparts gets taken into a Villain AU? (You know the drill, the heroes are villain and the heroes are villains) How do you think everyone would react to finding themselves in a world like that?

…..hmmmm. That’s something to think about.

This Villain AU is gonna be based on canon - as in Toshinori is the mentor and Izuku is the student, just so we know and are all clear on that. Also I’m gonna call it Role Reversal or something because it just seems like a nice name.

Also, I have no idea how coherent anything I’m about to say is because it’s been maybe a few hours since my wisdom teeth came out so, if I am, indeed, an incoherent mess, I apologize! I’ll come back to fix it eventually if that’s the case as long as you let me know, haha.

But anyway, both 1-A’s suddenly appearing in a twisty opposite world where their enemies are their friends and vice versa.... in a word? It’s bizarre. And not the same kind of bizarre as when Ageswap first met canon, when suddenly their teachers were kids and all that, a more unnerving and negative kind of bizarre, I think. On all sides, frankly, the fact that these people wearing your arch-nemesis’ faces are actually your allies (and getting used to the fact that there’s a universe out there were you’re the bad guy) takes a helluva lot of getting used to.

Like before, I assume the two 1-A’s (and their associated teachers and friends that happen to be there bc you bet your ass ageswap nao and nana and gran and inko would be hanging out w/ the 1-A’s) would land on the UA campus bc like, I think it’s one of the constants between all the universes anyway (though randomly getting transported elsewhere would make for some interesting plot shit that’s for sure) and, like. No one’s really sure how to respond on either side tbh

Everyone is as high strung as you can get the moment canon and Ageswap 1-A start recognizing faces, especially Shigaraki’s. But that same wariness - as all the villain-turned-heroes start coming towards them to investigate - keeps them from making any moves until someone recognizes canon 1-A’s faces and starts yelling about villains. Which really all just snowballs because someone’s going to ask about what’s going on, there’ll be something about “don’t play with us, you know who you are”, which turns into everyone accusing everyone else of playing tricks and shit, and in the end it’s probably the Izuku’s (both ageswap and canon) that help bring in the diplomacy, because they’ll be inclined not to make enemies when they’ve been shunted off to YET ANOTHER UNIVERSE (someone’s gotta fix the inter-dimensional fabric man, there’s so many holes in that thing now)

After a great deal of yelling, squinting, and insults flying around, eventually both sides get a proper introduction and explanation, and someone (likely Role Reversal’s principal, which may or may not be All for One) decides these guys should stay as “guests”, but an eye will be kept on them just in case (because you never know).

I really do think though, once they’ve all settled down and figured something out, however temporary, that on Ageswap 1-A’s side, it’s a little better. That’s ‘cause like, this is, uh, it’s the kind of thing that affects canon 1-A more since it’s canon 1-A that’ve been reversed into villains and not Ageswap, you know? Though it’s still hecka damn weird, of course, but it’s a bit like when they first got sent to canonverse for them, so it’s not so bad.

For canon 1-A though, there’s a lot of jumpiness and wariness. Well, to be fair, everyone is on guard for the first few weeks of all this, because no one’s certain as to what’s going on and if the other side can be trusted fully or anything, but, for canon 1-A and Role Reversal 1-A, the other side is... a perfect carbon copy of their enemies as heroes and it’s really unnerving tbh. The teachers refuse to leave the student’s sights and vice versa. canon 1-A, they’re cordial to the Role Reversal guys because really, it’s good of them to let them stay! But it’s just, they can’t really let go of their instincts concerning each other either.

Paranoia runs rampant, and it’s only the calmer of canon 1-A and the presence of Ageswap 1-A that help keep things from boiling over. Until the Role Reversal villains attack, of course, which means canon 1-A gets to meet their villain versions, freak the fuck out, maybe get into a fight and help Role Reversal 1-A, and all that stuff.

Tensions would be better after that, but it’d be slow going because you can’t really just... ditch those tense feelings and that so easily. Chances are everyone would want to go back to their universes sooner rather than later, and they still need to figure out why the Mega Verse suddenly split and dumped them into a third alternate dimension (”I bet we’ll be the most well-traveled heroes as far as alternate universes go by the time we graduate!”) but for the most part........ a lot of ageswap and canon dealing with being dumped in the villain au is just a long waiting game - wait to see who will break first, or show their true colors, or betray someone, or just, for something to finally happen.

I give it a few months before canon Toshinori and Aizawa even start to consider letting the kids outta their sight, and it’s the same number of months before the Role Reversal teachers consider lightening their watch too because, well, they suppose these alternates aren’t so bad. Just short of a few months for Ageswap Deku and Todoroki to start considering, though, because they’re just as wary, sure, but they’ve got a bit of a different perspective on this than the canon guys and might willing to let their kids be as long as they’re careful (and as long as everyone’s aware they won’t hesitate to burn the campus to the ground if they’ve got so much as a bruise on them.)

#boku no hero academia #bnha #my hero academia #mha #Ageswap AU #Novelist Answers #Anonymous #I appreciate all asks at all times bc it means someone out there kind of enjoys my talking and it's a nice feeling #you make me want to think about and flesh out a full roleswap Villain AU where the good guys are the bad and vice versa thanks a lot anon #u just love mashin' all the AU's together don't you? it's some fun mind-bendy stuff that's for sure #the actual lowering of guards on the teacher's sides doesn't happen for a real long time tho #and the same goes for the kids bc as hard as they try you can't just lose those memories of ppl wearing those faces and hurting you. y'know?#anyway I think that's everything I was gonna say about this for now sso! here i go!

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femslashrevolution · 7 years

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On Experience and Scarcity

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

First and foremost: the subject of this essay has been banging around my mind for a long time, but trying to put it into words turned out to be difficult. It wasn’t until I read Holyfant’s’s excellent essay, towards a “darker” femslash, that I found my starting point. Even so, I often struggle to find the right terms and language to describe my own personal experience, so I’m going to ask for a little leeway here.

Holyfant’s essay mentions three main reasons why people hesitate to write femslash. If I can (roughly) paraphrase: the first reason is the fact that compared to M/M fic, F/F is a niche fandom with relatively little feedback opportunities; the second is a lack of interesting female characters and F/F relationships in canon; and the third is the feeling of responsibility that comes with writing less-than-perfect women. Holyfant focuses on the third point, which is an issue all of its own (and one that’s also echoed in havingbeenbreathedout’s “On the personal as normal; on the normal as political”.) But personally, I’ve always felt like I’ve been more influenced by the second reason. The consequences of what we write, the fear of the way we write a character having widespread consequences – that’s something I am, in a way, already a little used to. I’ve written a lot of what I’d call dubious shit; I’m used to dealing with the fear of consequences of writing things that could be generalised. Whether it’s women who are less than perfect or relationships seriously veering into the abusive, I’m always of the opinion that my audience is smart enough to see nuance and not to generalise. My own main problem isn’t really the political repercussions of writing femslash, if you can put it that way.

My problem is the canon material.

I’m speaking from my own experience here– I have no way of knowing how widespread this particular problem is. On the other hand, I’ve seen enough people write musings and reactions about similar issues to suspect I’m not just the only person struggling with this.

Anyway. Let’s start with my backlog of fic. AO3 tells me that right now, I have twice the amount of M/M fics compared to F/F fics. Looking at it by wordcount, it gets even worse. The longer ones, the intense ones, are always inevitably male/male ships.

This used to annoy me a lot. I couldn’t understand why I kept going for the male pairings. Had I really internalised this kind of misogyny so badly, that I couldn’t see the potential of female characters? Was I a Bad Feminist for ignoring the stories about women and focusing on men? I was a little disturbed at this clear trend in my own writing, yet I couldn’t really find a way to fix it – because I couldn’t find any femslash pairing that really inspired me enough to write about in great depth. But why? Why did female pairings fail to intrigue me? Was this really just internalised sexism?

Well, maybe. But there were other factors at play here too, ones that took me a while two discover. Two things helped me find them.

The first was genderswapping. The second was Person of Interest.

Genderswapping – shorthand in this context for taking a canon cis male character and creating a cis female version of him, also known as spectrumslide – is something that I find really interesting. I know there are a lot of people who are opposed, who see it as a way to drive out actual canon women in favour of male characters, never mind the gender change. But for me, there is no better tool to challenge the way you think about gender and personality and relationships, and how they’re all subconsciously intertwined.

When I read genderswapped stories, I often got annoyed at how far the female versions were from their male counterparts. Traits that I enjoyed were changed, or warped, or erased altogether. These stories didn’t appeal to me at all. On the other hand, some other writers created characters that did appeal to me, massively. Because they weren’t like others I’d read about before, because they possessed the same traits that attracted me to their male counterparts. Genderswapping offered me female characters unlike any I’d seen before in mainstream fiction. Rough around the edges. Unemotional. Violent. Aggressively sexual. Bitterly sarcastic. Nasty women, if you will. Women that seem to be the opposite of everything that’s traditionally associated with femininity.

(It’s probably important to note at this point that my type of character tends to be a villain, or at the very least somewhat of an anti-hero. Relatedly, the relationships I get inspired by are invariably damaging, unhealthy, possessive, power-unbalanced or twisted – relationships that almost seem non-existent between fictional women. But I’ll come back to that later.)

It got me thinking. In my head I started playing around with character stereotypes. A hard-drinking emotionally blunt promiscuous violent man as James Bond, for example. What do you get when you take those characteristics and put them in a cis woman? The hardboiled noir detective, the knight in shining armour… Can those exist in female versions? While keeping the essence of their character, their personality intact?

I started to challenge my own views on gender, feminity, and masculinity. What do I associate with “woman” as an abstract concept? When I create OC’s as side characters, why do I choose to give them one gender and not another one? Why do I automatically give a character this or that trait just because of their gender?

There were a whole lot of ugly subconscious connections I laid bare like this, and I found it was pretty confrontational. It’s not fun, discovering how biased you really are.

So, the logical next step was to try my own hand at genderswapping. Pure hypothesis-testing, that: if it really were just the characters’ personality and interpersonal dynamics that attract me, that should work just as well if I swapped out one gender for another one, right? And I suppose it did. But it took some work.

Like Holyfant mentions in her excellent essay: it’s very easy to fall into stereotyping when writing women. You’d think that taking a male character’s personality as a starting point might be a solution to that, but it isn’t quite that easy. For example: what is unnerving and aggressive sexuality in a man can become, in a woman, that boring old cliché of the femme fatale – if you don’t pay attention, that is. This isn’t made easier by the fact that there aren’t many examples of fictional women like the ones I want to write. To create something on your own, without a blueprint to fall back on… It’s tricky.

Then there’s the fact that you can’t just transpose characteristics from men to women. Mind you, I’m not saying that women are fundamentally different than men or any shite like that. But the way society looks at women and men - here there are radical differences. On the whole, society’s reaction to certain traits is vastly different depending on if it’s a man or a woman doing it, which also means that the character themselves is going to look differently at that. A physically strong, violent woman is considered an anomaly, a freak; a physically strong, violent man is an action hero. Or, the other way around: a gentle, caring man is considered weak, while a gentle, caring woman is an example of traditional womanhood. So if you write a woman who’s violent, you’re going to have to take into account that society as a whole tends to condemn that. And if a whole society condemns a character’s personality, that’s going to have an effect on the way a character sees herself, too. it really is a bit more complicated than just swapping around the pronouns and calling it a day.

It takes work, it takes practice. That much had become painfully obvious to me. If I reread my first attempts at genderswapping now, I cringe a little. Not that they’re bad, per se. It’s just that they’re not exactly original. There’s a giggling lipstick-wearing short-skirted seductress, there’s lean-but-not-muscular assassins for hire… It isn’t what I’d call groundbreaking – and even at the time, it wasn’t quite what I wanted either. I just didn’t know how to make what I wanted, at first. It took a pretty long while before I finally had my first genderswapped character that actually felt like a real, original, complex flesh-and-blood woman.

So. What I learned by genderswapping is 1) it’s bloody difficult to write a female version as nuanced and complex and original as the male original, 2) clichés are always lurking, ready to pounce, but 3) in the end it really is someone’s personality and relationship that makes me interested.

Those points can just as easily be applied to non-genderswapped female characters: for me, at least, women are harder to write interestingly than men, at first. It’s less practiced. But – the positive thing I’d learned – I really do have a type regardless of gender. Meaning that if I wanted to write more (non-genderswapped) femslash, I merely had to look for two or more fictional women with the same traits as the male characters I enjoyed, and then squish ‘em together.

Problem was… They didn’t really seem to exist?

Most relationships between fictional women, if they’re explicit, are shown to be soft! And gentle! And good and pure! Tara and Willow in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, for example – oh, there was a lot of fucked-upness going on there but the essence of their relationship was tenderness and open, honest love and mutual support. Which is great! But not what I want to write about. Even a pairing like Black Sails’ Max and Anne – both morally ambiguous, three-dimensional, and in Anne Bonny’s case stereotype-defying – are portrayed as essentially a gentle, healing, deeply caring relationship. Those unhealthy relationships I like to write about, the mutually destructive ones… They didn’t seem to show up in fiction.

Then I started watching Person of Interest.

Person of Interest has Root, a major villain-later-turned-hero. As far as female characters go, she’s sort of midway. She’s still flirty and seductive, and later openly emotional and caring – far more traditionally female than any of the male characters in the series. But she’s a hacker, she’s aggressive, she’s independent, and her plotlines give her agency. She’s original. She’s got an edge beyond the stereotype.

Person of Interest also has Shaw. And this is where things get very, very interesting.

Shaw is blunt. She’s unemotional. She’s aggressive, likes guns, likes violence. She avoids romantic relationships – not because of some painful deep trauma that gets healed in the end by the ‘right person’, just because that’s who she is. She’s sexual, but in a rather forthright, dominant, taking-what-she-wants-without-complications way you tend to only see in men. And right from the start, her interactions with Root are decidedly sexual. Their very first interaction is laced with BDSM-implications, and when they start interacting more – once Root has come over to the good side –, every exchange between them is full of barbs and barely-concealed aggression and power play. When Shaw at a later point describes a potential relationship between her and Root as a four alarm fire at an oil refinery, she isn’t lying. And when they finally end up having sex (it’s a dream, sort of, but shush) it looks more like a wrestling match than like “making love”, each one tearing at the other one and refusing to back down, not afraid to use punches or kicks in between the kisses. Miles away from the smiling-laughing-cuddling-vanilla sex Tara and Willow have.

It still doesn’t quite work for me, on the whole. Root, although Amy Acker does her damn best to give her life, still fits the traditional model too much for me to connect. She feels more like an idealised version of a woman than a real one. Especially in the later seasons her reactions are far more emotional, sentimental, than I’d really expect or want from her – again, traditionally feminine (in contrast to Shaw, who remains her gruff self). And of course Root and Shaw (spoiler alert) don’t really end up together. It’s very much implied that they would end up together, but then – in fine queer fictional woman tradition – Root goes and dies before they can get there. It’s a shame, because flirting is one thing, but an actual relationship between those two would’ve been something I’d kill to see.

Still. Here was an example of the dynamic I like, but between two women. It does exist, it is possible. And seeing that gave me a starting point, a sort of blueprint to use for my own writing.

So. Where does that leave me, and my 2:1 ratio of M/M versus F/F fics?

The way I see it, there’s a dual responsibility. Part of the lack of interesting, flawed, complex, ugly female characters in fiction has to do with the lack of material in canon – not just that there are very few female characters to start with, but also that this trend means fanfic writers have so few examples we can base our own work on. We still have to carve out our own model, here.

But another part is my own responsibility. Writing flawed women, unsympathetic women, women with ugly personalities or traits – that takes more work and effort. It doesn’t come quite naturally to me yet, which means it’s harder to write, which means I tend to avoid it in favour of easier things – which in turn, means there’s fewer ‘dark’ femslash in the word, and thus lesser examples to work from.

It’s a vicious self-perpetuating circle. But it’s starting to get its dents. In the form of Root and Shaw, of Gillian Anderson’s fingerlickingly complex Stella Gibson, in everything Sally Wainwright has written. And in our own work, of course. Story by story, we chip away at the block and create images and thoughts about the full complexity in relationships between women.

About the author

Pasiphile is a fanfiction author who mainly writes for Sherlock, but their work also includes Discworld, Attack on Titan, Luther and a heap of other fandoms. They have also co-edited two anthologies of original erotica under the name of Alex Freeman. You can find them on tumblr and AO3.

#pasiphile #I Am Femslash #Type: Meta #Femslash February #Femslash February 2017 #submission

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