daredevilkink | Discussion/Off-Topic Post #2

(I promise this post is not as inflammatory as the title suggests, lol. Bear with me).

I was just thinking the other day about how, when I was younger, all my favourite characters (whether it be from TV, movie, or book) were female. All my favourite toys were female.

Now, this may be because I'm a cis girl and identified pretty strongly with feminine things (and later grew up to be attracted to women). Basically, if it had pretty hair and a pretty dress, I loved it.

Until I started reading slash fic.

The internet became a Thing when I was 10, and I discovered fanfic when I was about 12-13. And then I discovered "yaoi." And I don't know if it was just an anime fandom thing, or if this was typical of ALL fandoms at the time, but there was a pretty strong culture of hating any and all female characters that interfered with ones otp. Which was then carried forward 100x over when it came to female OCs (Mary Sues). Pretty soon all of my favourite characters were men.

Fast forward over a decade later, and I'm in my 30s kind of re-learning how to like and identify with female characters.

This was really ramble-y and not well thought out, sorry. I was just wondering if anyone else might have the same experience.

Cis female here too, early 20's (for context).

I... totally get what you're saying here. I never actually stopped to think about it but yes, as a kid I was very much all about female characters. My younger brother and I always used to play games where we acted out shows or movies and I was always the girl because girls were way cooler. We had many shared Pokemon games and we always played as the girl because I wanted that and he was nice enough/didn't care enough to not argue. It's not that I actively sort out female characters, just that I was always looking for the girl to identify with and be my favourite in whatever I watched/read. Everything was female back then - even my dog, despite the fact he was male...

But yeah, by the time I started getting into the internet and fanfiction at about the same time as you (12-13) I definitely had a major preference for male characters, though it took a few more years before I got into Slash fic (romance just wasn't my thing until I did). I got scared off OCs within a year or so - they were always Mary Sues if female and totally evil and stupid and a sign of a bad writer; I didn't want to be a bad writer - to the point where I'm only now starting to write OCs that aren't villains/male. A part of me wants to argue that I was just going to the characters with more interesting story lines and characterisation but I was in the NCIS fandom for a while at that point - and Ziva in that show is a Mossad agent with family demons and such that I'd be all over if she was male but I preferred to write about her male coworker McGee...

I'm not sure why the swap but maybe a huge part of it was that these were the characters people were writing about so I followed suit? Even now, aware that I have a tendency to write male characters and ignore female ones, I find that 90% of my Daredevil works are from the POV of Matt or Foggy and the others split between minor/crossover characters' POV and the rare Karen POV (and none of them about her if I think about it, they could mostly be seen as me just using her as an outside POV on Matt...)

Also ramble-y but tl;dr; I get what you're saying and it's not just your experience.

I'm also a femme cis girl predominantly attracted to women, and I never started to hate female characters unless they interfered with my ship in a way I didn't approve of (I'm cool with some canon het ships, but I hate others, and in those I tend to hate the female), but I know what you mean. Definitely I also went from female characters being my favourite to them falling off my radar after I got into slash fic.

I definitely associate a part of it with the aother anon's idea that male/male ships were where fandom was at. In those early days, I remember desperately trying to find good f/f fic and failing over and over and over to find the sort of quality and content that was gripping and immersive the way m/m fandoms were (and are). Somewhere along the way, I gave up and just stuck to m/m ever since, but I've also been rediscovering how to identify with female characters as well.

I think another part of it might be that a lot of our media - especially the blowing-up-with-popularity-ones - tend to be very male-cast-centric outside of a handful of shows. Supernatural is mostly men. Avengers is mostly men. DC stuff is mostly men. Teen Wolf is mostly men. Star Trek is mostly men. Hannibal is mostly men. Harry Potter has a lot of female characters, but the big pivotal ones (Harry, Ron, the Marauders, Snape, most of the identified characters from his rival house, etc.) are also all men. As they wind up being the characters we follow, the characters who get fleshed out canonically, they're also the characters we as a general fandom population fall in love with and want to write about.

There's also, despite plenty of deeply ingrained misogyny in American media (I can't speak with confidence about media in other countries - most of the Korean and Japanese shows I watched were very strong-female-centric, but there could be a selection bias there), more general acceptance for girls who run the spectrum of tomboy to girly-girly. (Disclaimer: There's still less general acceptance for crossing over into being particularly masculine/"butch", at which point we get into ingrained homophobia.) So female characters (and girls in real life) can be stoic or cold or emotional or rough, they can be soft or hard, they can be maternal or career-driven, they can wear lacy dresses or practical trousers, and nobody really bats an eye. They can be any and all of the above in any combination, and it's nothing new or exciting. On the other hand, male characters tend to have more particular parameters of "I'm a man and this is what men are like and this is what men do or are not comfortable doing," so it's more fun for women to push those boundaries in fandom. We can write about Matt in lacy panties and Foggy/Frank/Karen getting off on it instead of being weirded out by it like most people are in real life.

For fans who enjoy physical intimacy with male bodies, there's also the whole idea of being able to shape sex the way we want it. Most straight/pan/bi women I know have been predominantly with male partners who are not very good at pleasing them in bed and tend to jump from point A to point Z, whereas in fandom we can rewrite things out with the longer foreplay, the emotional build-up, the characters who actually do know how to read each other's bodies.

Anyway, these are just my two cents on the topic based on my personal experiences of gender and relationships in the particular areas that I've lived in and discussions with the predominantly non-cishet friends I've had. :)

This question seriously haunts me. A lot.

Because I know that it happened to me. For years, I was an X-Files fan and adored Scully. And it was only when became an X-Phile and got into the fandom that I switched to loving Mulder, because that was just what you did. And I do suspect that fanfiction's super emphasis on male characters, but also on romance and sex between male characters, does heavily influence a lot of people's ideas about male vs. female characters, especially because most people come to fic at a time when a lot of their thoughts on that stuff are still taking shape.

Shameless plug for a moment: http://otpodcast.tumblr.com/post/131100829706/so-episode-2-of-the-otpodcast-is-now-live-dusty

I have a podcast where we actually talked about some of this, but not the question of when female character hate actually starts for people specifically.

I won't lie, I get really frustrated sometimes by how completely shamelessly fandom often erases actual female characters and experiences from the narratives while simultaneously exploring those experiences through men. I was recently talking to a friend in fandom about A/B/O and how sometimes it really bothers me. Because I love it. But from a certain perspective, A/B/O as an entire system sort of relies upon the assumption of a one gender society to even work? Like, the trope only makes sense if you initially erase women. And so most A/B/O fics either don't feature any female characters because then they would have to explain and justify women's existence as a gender, or they really muddy the waters about it. And some A/B/O fics are written in a way where not only are women erased, but essentially the person obviously really wanted to write about the experiences of heterosexual penetrative sex but resisted the idea of actually writing that. To me, if it was a "I like this character better and there are no well-written female characters" thing, I feel like we would see a lot more genderswap fic than we do instead of things like A/B/O. It's very, very odd to me.

And I think that some of it is just that it's safer for women to explore sexuality from a distance that way. Because a lot of non-con, dubcon or power dynamics explored in fic would probably be very uncomfortable for women to explore without that separation. And it goes also into ideas about women finding gay men sometimes... I wanna say "safer" than straight men? So having that erasure of female characters from the narratives also allows you to erase things like rape culture, objectification, misogyny, and other things women live with and internalize in their day to day and create a kind of fantasy world to play in where those things no longer matter and actual equality is possible.

So if you're moving from having the innocence of a child to love those female characters without understanding the baggage and enjoying characters in a relatively sexless way to suddenly coming into that awareness at the same time you discover fic and starting to be really sexually oriented in what you're looking for in a story or why you like a character, I kinda get why that shift away from female characters might happen.

Sidebar: I think this shift results in a lot of people in fandom headcanoning male characters to the point where they lose sight of the ways those male characters function within the problematic system we have and are "male" still and are not cinnamon roll muffins who are adorable. We sometimes make male characters a very distorted "safe" for our consumption while wildly distorting the female characters' characterizations, and then defending things we shouldn't while objecting to things that don't make sense. But that's a whole other thing.

NAYRT

I'm nodding my head at the majority of your thoughts, especially being able to explore rape etc. while maintaining a distance from the reality of rape culture in our everyday lives, but I actually see a/b/o in a different way! Rather than erasing gender to become a "one gender" society, I find it a way to separate gender from reproduction. So much of the identity of being a female romantic partner in real life is one way or another related to reproductive capability, so I feel that a/b/o allows fans to make a distinction between "This character is female and is obviously still female, but because she isn't an omega (or carrying-capable beta) she can be her and still have the respect of an alpha." I'm not usually a big a/b/o fan outside of specific dynamics, because it's typically a little too carnal for my tastes, but being able to explore relationship dynamics and society and gender apart from reproduction is interesting to me.

A lot of adult media does this really dumb thing where there's only one or two women in a large cast of men. So while men get to be nuanced individuals, because there are so many of them and the writers can spread defining character traits around, the token woman* in the cast represents all women. Which 99.9% of the time fails to resonate with female viewers, surprise surprise.

Because yeah, a character who is sexy and confident and can kill someone with her thighs is amazeballs. But what's not amazeballs is when she's the only type of female character in the entire cast.

*see also: token black person, token asian person, token LGBT+ person, etc.

So.

I dipped my toe in Sailor Moon fic when I was eleven, but I didn't really get going until I was 12 and started watching Gundam Wing.

When I got into GW, I was a big fan of Relena and Dorothy (main female character and minor-ish female antagonist), particularly paired with their most commonly chosen male counterparts. To this day, I distinctly remember my twelve-year-old self telling some other (older) fans that I was firmly 'non-yaoi.' Their reaction: "LOL. You'll grow out of that."

...they were right. Soon after that I finally took the plunge and started reading slash. I never looked back.

But here's the thing - I also never stopped liking Relena and Dorothy. They were still my favorites in the show. It's just that after a while, I found I wasn't drawn to read fic about them. Admittedly, this is at least partly due to the fact that 90% of the fic featuring them butchered their characters. GW fandom was, ah, not known for it's canon compliance.

So do I like seeing female characters in fic? Hell yes, more please. Will I read fics based solely around a female character? Sure, if I like 'em. I've always loved watching/reading about awesome female characters. Katara and Toph and Azula in A:tLA? LOVE THEM. Teyla in SGA, Hermione in HP? Amazing. CLAIRE TEMPLE? omg. I could go on and on.

But the fact of the matter is this - they are not what draw me to fanfiction, even though I adore them in their source canons. Because at the end of the day, I am solely here for the m/m romance. That is what fandom provides that keeps me coming back. Of course I read and enjoy other stuff, plotty gen and het and character pieces, but tbh, those are more like surprise treats than the main course.

Fandom fills a niche not to be found anywhere else. By which I mean it provides me with character-based, ridiculously schmoopy gay porn. And honestly? I'm okay with that. My money goes to the canons that feature great female characters. My kudos go to the best m/m fics on AO3. Different mediums fill different needs, and I give heart-eyes to both.

HIGH FIVE FOR FELLOW GUNDAM WING GATEWAY DRUG INTO YAOI/SLASH! Dorothy is bae. Love Une.

NAYRT: Oh my god, I've spent years and years in different fandoms and have never came across anyone else who was into Gundam Wing let alone it was their first slash/yaoi fandom, too. It was my second fandom ever, and the first one I participated in. The first fic I ever wrote, the first ship war I ever accidentally got into, my first (and last) time mod'ing. Amazing.

I came to it via the yaoi first, and that ended up coloring everything. I never disliked Dorothy or Relena, and I never got why people were so vicious about them, but they were not my priority. I went from being completely obsessed with a female character in my first fandom to suddenly putting them at a very low priority for years and years.

Excited AYRT

GROUP GUNDAM HUG

It was my first fandom in almost every way - first time reading fic, first time writing fic based off canon characters, first smut, first intro to the concept of a fandom, first slash, first femmeslash, like you said - first ship war. ;D etc. I did hate Relena a little in that she was a bit boring to me and perpetually in the way, but I saw her as too disinteresting to be worth my hate LOL. Man, that show was so good.

I would ask you which of the rival email lists you were on but I can't remember the names anymore. I get so embarrassed about my part in the ship war. I'm just glad I got that behavior out of my system early.

da -

I remember being part of a gang of pretentious teenaged assholes on ff.net who made it our job to hunt down and flame any fics with ~Mary Sues~ in them in the 90's, heh. I don't know what the current comment culture is like on ff.net, but I'm glad shit like that doesn't happen on Ao3 (that I've seen).

On that note, the new trend of unabashed female fantasy /Reader-fic fascinates me.

Excited Anon

I can't remember, either! I wasn't big on listservs, although I was on a couple for a time, because they got confusing and I would be impatient, so I was mostly fanning on FFNet (made friends with various 1x2x1/1+2 authors and artists) and LJ and such. I met my best friend through Gundam Wing, and our pets still have Gundam names! And I think the ship wars back then were still mostly in good fun, without the vitriol ship hate seems to have now. xD At least within the circles I was a part of, ship wars weren't taken personally and never got super mean...

There are still a couple of Heero and Duo blogs on Tumblr and writers on AO3 (I go back into a GW kick like once a year, and still have a very seldomly updated GW blog)! We're a small community, but a persistent one!

OP -

Oh my god, yes. Gundam Wing was my first online fandom. Poor, poor Relena. XD

The overly excited GW fanatic high fiver/hugger -

Yeah, the extreme hate for Relena was always weird to me. I'd enjoy mocking her a bit, like all the characters, but hey, she was am ambitious, dedicated teenager. Respect, yo.

I don't hate female characters, but I don't enjoy them as much as I enjoy the male characters, and since fic writing is about enjoyment (I don't get paid for it!), I write what I enjoy.

I'm atracted to men. I like reading about them, writing about them, and I especially enjoy creating fantasy stories where the men are exactly as I like them to be. My fics are basically wish fulfillment. I want men to be strong, but vulnerable. I want them to care deeply about the people and situations around them, and to be respectful of the women in their lives.

So that's what I write. Women may exist in my stories, but they're not the focus because I don't care as much about them. I don't hate women, but I do love men. :)

I feel like this is such a layered thing. Just writing this I realized like two or three more layers to why I'm here, writing slash in my 30s.

So my particular context is I'm a cis bisexual woman. So when I found slash the thrill I felt was pretty layered. The one a lot articles point out was definitely reading about not one but two male characters I found attractive. But I also found I liked reading about male desire more than a lot of the depictions of female desire I had read at the time (bad romance novels, internet erotica that a 13 year old could find).

And I was also thrilled because it was about same sex relationships. In the late 90s early 00s a lot of the fic I read spent a chunk of time dealing with external and internalized homophobia, coming out, things like that. I was so into it. It was like trying on the ideas but from this very, very safe distance of two grown men who could handle bullies, and in most cases their first foray into a same sex relationship was 100% fulfilling and successful. (I read slash for maybe two years before coming out to even myself as bi.)

The thing is I'm not sure what would have happened if there was a similar amount of f/f stories to read. Because as I mentioned when I read stories about a woman in erotic situations I just couldn't connect. In retrospect, duh, that was probably because I was 13 and reading about a grown woman's experience/desires. I wasn't there yet. But by reading about men I could kind of suspend my disbelief I guess? I could sort of nod my head at a character marveling at how hard he was since I can never know what an erection feels like. I could just project what my own teenage horniness on to that and keep reading. I don't (and can't) know if reading f/f written by other teenagers would have had that same effect.

So I kind of found a lane, and then I ended up staying in it forever. Now in my 30s I feel like it's time to expand too but the habits are so, so ingrained.

But there's another reason I'm not sure how much I would have enjoyed either f/f or m/f fic, and that's exactly what you're getting at. There weren't a lot of female characters I enjoyed. I never really spent a lot of time hating characters, but I definitely ignored female characters in general. I did hold them to a higher standard, too. But I think that standard was me being able to identify with them? And I'm not sure that was on me or you as consumers at the time?

Like I do blame a part of my overlooking female characters to just not digging a lot of the ways they were written. What gets me excited about female characters is not kicking butt and for so long, so long it felt like the only female characters I saw in media were ass kicking vixens, or ass kicking tom boys. It felt like so often women had to be so, so overwhelmingly competent or so annoyingly incompetent. I find I get passionate about women who are loving but flawed? And strong in what might be thought of as traditionally feminine ways. That's just what does it for me. It was the same for a lot of the male characters I sought out, actually. "Feelers" with a capital F. There were just so many more of those kinds of male characters because there were so many more male characters.

It's changing now, though, I think female characters are getting more thoughtful and diverse. There's just still such a huge deficit because of how media is skewed. So it'll take more time and more characters, and I'm not sure I'm ever going to make up the difference. Like I'm 30+ and I can write the long and varied fantasy m/m sex (not real gay sex, a stylized version a lot of us have ascribed to) and I can't get through any of the m/f sex scenes I've tried to write. I identify with more female characters, but I don't know what to do with them! Beyond cast them in supporting roles to the same stories I've always written.

Cis-mostly?/questioning? Idk, female in her early 20s here, and I am right there with you on this: "It was like trying on the ideas but from this very, very safe distance of two grown men who could handle bullies, and in most cases their first foray into a same sex relationship was 100% fulfilling and successful. (I read slash for maybe two years before coming out to even myself as bi.)" except it took me even longer to realize I was bi lol.

I'm also coming at this from a super writerly standpoint. I'm literally going to school for screenwriting, and one of the things that inspired me to go on this career path is how few nuanced characters there are in film and television. I WANT to ship more f/f, but it's really difficult because even when they're are super complex (tm) women I really love, they don't have the dynamics I like in m/m. I tend to go for m/m relationships that start out pretty antogonistic (Matt/Frank shipper here) but with the key element of respect, and I find there's 1) an overall lack of women characters, which 2) obviously creates a lack of f/f pairing possibilities.

Example: I ship Karen & Elektra because I can imagine how great they'd be together, but problem: they don't have any scenes together. It's kinda difficult to find fodder for a pairing and build a fan base for them when they literally never talk to each other or so much as exchange a glance. :/

I'm tired and on my phone and late to the conversation, so I hope this kinda made sense.

(ARYT) I'm glad I thought of the meme today, I might not have seen this otherwise! Anyway, I see a lot of things on tumblr about how fandom isn't activism and I agree so much, it's really not. But at the same time, as a bisexual girl it actually really did help put a framework to what I was feeling, so I'm grateful for it. I would have figured it out eventually, but it helped me connect to the idea that maybe I was more intense about girls I was friends with than other girls might be.

Godspeed on your quest to get better female characters on the screen! I really think that's a huge chunk of the problem. I mean there are internal and external factors to why a large chunk of women would want to write almost exclusively about male characters, but the more women there are on screen and in media the more chances for someone to connect to a character. (You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, so to speak.) The more women, the more they interact, and again, a chance for someone to connect to that absolutely.

Unattached but still sensual women would be nice, too. Some of the female characters I've enjoyed the most are paired with a dude. And often I really enjoy the relationship! I'm completely invested in it. But it kind of constricts your imagination sometimes. Women characters don't spend as much time in romantic limbo as a lot of male protagonists. Mostly they get introduced as love interests, they stay as long as that's a possibility, they die or leave. Or they're from some category of non-sexual (child, old woman, widow, etc.)

(Karen & Elektra ever even speaking to each other would be amazing. Or Karen & Claire? It would really perk up the series.)

(Late 20s, female)
i think about that topic alot. I read all kinds of ships hetero and homo. I don't hate all female characters, but charakters I hate are mostly female. I think that is because a lot of female charakters are badly written and that effects me. Most of (genre) fiction is about the main hero and his best friend/enemy/frenemy, so they get the most attention and do the most stuff. They are interessting. If someone is interessting I ship them... with another interessting person.
If the female charakter is just a damsel, which only gives lovey-dovey speeches about moral, while riding on their high horse, I nope out. (Sorry,kinda random, Iknow... I just watched an episode of The Flash...Iris West...aargh! Deep breaths, think about Melinda May...Ah, much better.)
I have been through a lot of shipping wars. I enjoy a good fight.

"Deep breaths, think about Melinda May" --- A+

Discussion/Off-Topic Post #2

When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?

Re: When did you start hating female characters?