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Why do I read yaoi fanfiction? I really don't know. I don't have the fetishistic obsession with gay sex that seems to define so many fangirls, and I don't agree with 90% of the pairings described in said stories. There are a few pairings I do find plausible and even likely, but they're few and far between, and it seems that some part of me takes an unhealthy interest in bearing witness to the wealth of idiocy which the human mind is capable of cultivating. 1. Just because Japanese fans are doing it does not mean it's good. I'll be completely honest here: m/m pairings are fine, I have no objection to them, but I can't stand the way the vast majority of Japanese fangirls do yaoi in most other respects. I am sick and tired of the approximately 7000 FF7 doujinshi in which Cloud appears to be a 12-year-old girl being molested by a huge-jawed Sephiroth. Just because "the art is pretty" (and I'll admit it often is) does not mean it's good to draw the uke as a simpering, uber-effeminate little kid with eyes the size of bowling balls. I don't care how pretty it is, it looks nothing like the damn character. I've seen some doujinshi "men" who make Sailor Moon look buff and ripped. I want to look at pictures of characters I know, not of some femmy preteen drawn vaguely in their image. I'll also say flat out that I'm sick of the seme/uke dynamic too. Let me also take the time to say that the height rule is really freaking stupid. Why is it that the idea of a big manly man being the one grunting underneath (to steal a phrase from a friend) sends so many fangirls into howling spasms of denial? I mean, good Christ, people, it's not like it never happens in real life. Growth hormone does not instill an instant desire in one's mind to force small femmy guys with pencil wrists into compromising positions. Heck, I've heard from gay guys IRL that there are plenty of big muscular men who like being bottoms. Exactly what kind of problem do fangirls have with this? Which brings us to number 2 on my bitch list, which is: 2. "But I have the RIGHT to write whatever I want!" This seems to be the eternal rallying cry of fangirls confronted with the fact that their stories are hopelessly OOC, completely ignore established story facts, anatomically improbable, and/or just plain stupid. Sure. You have the right to write what you want. I've never denied that. I certainly believe in an ethic of free speech for everyone (as opposed to "free speech, but only for people whose views agree with ours"-- which is how the majority of Americans seem to interpret free speech these days). But here's a question. If what you're writing is purely a self-gratifying little masturbatory fantasy, why bother putting it online in the first place? Correct me if I'm abnormal in this regard, but as a writer, I was always under the impression that other writers appreciate having their stories enjoyed by a fairly wide audience, even within a genre of limited popularity. Why bother posting up your little wank-fest when it's going to be appreciated only by the one or two other people who happen to share your fantasy? Yes, there are places online (*coughfanfiction.netcough*) where people will throw you decent reviews merely for being able to put your hands on a keyboard and producing something more coherent than what would result from randomly pounding your skull against it. Who would you rather have reading and enjoying your fanfic, though: someone whose most intelligent comment is "OMG LOL write more plz!!!!!1" or someone literate enough to actually produce a decent commentary upon it? More to the point, is it actually abnormal these days to care if you have more people thinking your story is a worthless piece of shit than people who actually enjoy it, no matter what kind of brainless fawning reviews the latter may be able to supplicate you with? Oh, and while I'm at it, let me also touch briefly (pun possibly intended) upon the subject of anatomy. Sure, you have the right to write about a world in which all men cheerfully have frictionless, painless anal sex without benefit of lubricant. Sure, it's all fantasy and doesn't have to be realistic. Male authors also have the right to write stories in which women's vaginas get ripped and torn during sex and they enjoy it. However, being that I enjoy reading hetero stories as well as yaoi/yuri, I also very much appreciate male authors who bother to do research on my own sex and don't blithely write about acts which would in real life be so painful that I'm moved to wince and cross my legs as I write. I don't care if it's fantasy-- it still pisses me off. And I will also assume that the males I know who enjoy yaoi appreciate it similarly when female authors respect their physical limitations. (Just for a minute, imagine having a huge sausage stuffed up your arse with no lubrication whatsoever. Are you wincing yet? Good. Men do not differ anatomically from women in the fact that this causes them great pain.) No rant about yaoi anatomy, of course, would be complete without a mention of mpreg. Let me just say that while it sure as hell doesn't float my boat-- in fact, it takes a pickaxe and hacks big holes in the bottom of it-- I don't care if it's what you get off on. That's fine with me. That's your life, your tastes. However, kindly do not try to convince me that writing stories about men getting pregnant and giving birth out their ass is a liberated feminist act, and that if I can't 'appreciate' it, I must be less liberated than thou. First off, it's not like I'm exactly planning on ever having children anyway, and I don't start thinking "Ha ha ha, take that, chauvinist scum!" when I run across a story about men magically getting knocked up. If I ever, for God knows what reason, get it into my head to raise a human being, I'll damn well adopt one-- the world has enough people breeding rabidly without me needing to chip in my part. As a matter of fact, it seems to me that 98% of mpreg is actually the author projecting her baby fantasies onto a hapless male character, so she can enact her little dream of having a cutesy wutesy woo-woo widdle baby through him-- which is, I guess, in the long run, better than her actually going out and getting pregnant herself. Especially since the thought of some of these people breeding gives me spasms. That, and some of the anatomical justifications which mpreg authors engage in are enough to make me snort donuts out my nose laughing. If a man, for whatever god-forsaken reason, has a functional uterus, he will not go his entire life without knowing it. It will not be connected to his rectum. Human beings are not meant to shit out babies. Also, it is not possible to incubate a fetus in any part of one's digestive tract. Your mom didn't mean it literally when she told you babies grow in Mommy's stomach. And that's all I have to say about that. And as far as stuff which floats your boat, here's the one I've been building up to all week: 3. Rape fics. Now, folks, I understand that just because I don't like rape fics does not mean I'm going to be able to dissuade others from wanting to write or read them. I'm not saying people can't write or like them. I'll even admit they can be well-done within certain contexts-- if the rape and its aftermath are handled realistically, if it's not just treated as a cheap sexual thrill or a gratuitous angst vehicle, if it doesn't necessitate making characters flamingly OOC just so you can get your buttrape fix du jour. See, like I said, while they're not something I enjoy, I don't object to them on principle if they're done in a believable manner. The problem is that what I see far too damn often is fangirls taking apparently random characters and making them into brutal rapists, no matter how far off base it is from established characterization, because they needed someone to be the perpetrator to their whining little uke. I mean, for the love of God, if you're just going to pin the roles of rapist and victim onto characters so randomly, you might as well be pasting their pictures onto inflatable dolls. Hell, that's pretty much what the majority of yaoi authors do-- randomly paste the character's likeness onto some cardboard cutout who bears no resemblance to the person depicted in the original source material, just because they want to see them fucking. It makes me wonder why they feel compelled to use these characters in the first place if they're going to manipulate the personalities so arbitrarily. I also feel compelled to note that "but it's an AU" is not an excuse 99.5% of the time. "But what -if- X character was a rapist and Y character was his victim?" Yeah, what if? What if X character had four nipples and a third arm growing out of his ass? What if Y character was actually an ostrich with no feet? What if the characters bore no resemblance whatsoever to their original incarnations except for the name and face? What if monkeys flew out my butt? After you dick with the characters' personalities past a certain point, I find myself compelled to wonder why exactly you're bothering to label this thing as a fanfic any more, inasmuch as it bears no resemblance to the original source material except for the names. Why not just go all the way and make the damn thing an original story? Rape is not a way for you to force a few chapters of cheap hackneyed angst on characters. It is not an excuse for hurt-comfort fics in which the trauma of the rape is magically taken away by the power of another character's Healing Cock. Part of me is inclined to think that fans (of any genre) who write shitty rape fics should be forced to serve mandatory duty at a rape crisis center so they can see firsthand what rape actually does to people, and why it is completely fucking unrealistic for everything to be happy-go-lucky between the rapist and victim by the end of the story. That said, yes, I'll admit there are some contexts, some characters, for which rape fics can be made believable and appropriate. The key word here is believable. I'm damned sick of seeing honorable characters depicted as vicious Dahmer-esque sociopaths, pigeonholed into the position of rapist upon the incredibly tenuous premise that "they don't like X character." Yeah, there are some characters who can believably be put into such a role. Sephiroth, yes. Luca Blight, yes. Citan Uzuki, no. The character has to be depicted with obvious violent and sadistic tendancies before I'm going to buy the concept that they'd violate another person in such a manner. (And to bring this whole rant full circle, let me also add that I strongly dislike the seme/uke dynamic because it disallows for any kind of relationship between equals, regardless of "who's on top." No, it always has to be the aggressor chasing the unwilling victim, which necessitates making perfectly nice characters into drooling lechers. I honestly don't understand the appeal of that particular fantasy, even when it acknowledges itself as such.) The End. That's it. G'wan, go home. There's nothing more to see here. |