#also had to change it from “the fujoshi” mostly cause I don’t like that and also cause it’s not as versatile as the other labels | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

soulvomit · 5 years

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per random-thought-depository: Like I think where fujoshi-hate comes from is the assumption that female erotic interest in gay male sex is coming from a place of shallow, exploitative voyeurism - and people absolutely make that assumption about men who are erotically interested in lesbian sex, probably even moreso, it's just wokescolds mostly don't bother going Don Quixote on all the men masturbating to lesbian porn, cause they know those men can and will mostly just ignore them.

Which gets to the elephant that I think a lot of these sorts of discussions touch: men tend to be less vulnerable to wokescolds because they're less dependent on feminist-adjacent social networks and spaces.

So, in response... I’ve kind of wanted to talk about this thing, anyway. I feel like there’s a context to what we used to just call “slash” that has changed between the 1980s (a period when it was largely circulated via zines) and now, I guess that also points to the changing nature of subcultures. In the 80s, it’s not like slash was ever going to get out of the subculture. It’s not like anyone in gay culture, let alone any other culture outside of specific groups of geeks (who were among the least visible), was ever going to read it. There was a degree to which you had to *look* for it. Nobody outside of geek space would know about it, and chances are, many people in wouldn’t even know about it. It’s almost like you had to know someone who knew someone to have even HEARD of it. You had to be part of con or in-person fan club culture. Or you’d have to be on the right BBS at the right time. Even LJ was a much more “closed” environment than later kinds of online spaces. I guess that slash was going to get judged at some point by the mainstream. Here’s the thing: 30 years ago, writing slash meant you were a weirdo, because writing fanfiction at all made you a weirdo. So this idea of trying to do respectability politics, just would have seemed... weird... in the 1980s, because ANY fanfic writer was a lolcow. As for your second point... This makes a lot of sense to me. I feel like women in creative spaces often get pressured into specific genres or into doing “cozy” work, where the judges will also be other women.

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isaaclaforeze-remade · 4 years

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i don't know final fantasy, what's wrong with crisis core :o

this is like 3 pages long

let’s see. where do i begin...

Shin-Ra’s wrongdoing is completely swept aside, ignored, and even sometimes outright erased in the games narrative. This is because the main character, Zack Fair, is someone you’re supposed to like but who works for Shin-Ra. Shin-Ra was one of the main villains of the entire original story. Its status as such was not unfounded - it’s guilty of causing climate change on Gaia, imperialism / colonialism against Wutai (as well as everywhere else, just a longer time ago), human experimentation, genocide, maintaining a dictatorship, and basically every war crime out there.

Aeris Gainsborough is depicted as weak and is mostly just there in the plot of Crisis Core for Zack to have a love interest, which is super shitty. She’s someone who grew up in the slums after escaping a Shin-Ra lab, so shes tough in her own way in canon (i.e. in the original game.) This is more disappointing because she’s a very interesting character and learning more about her upbringing would’ve been really interesting if it wasn’t all about a man in her life. Crisis Core was released for FF7′s 10th anniversary, as a prequel. It would’ve been far better had it focused on the actual characters of FF7, rather than humanizing Shin-Ra for no reason.

As I mentioned before, Aeris exists in Crisis Core only to be a love interest for Zack. Zack is largely an irrelevant character in FF7, only appearing in flashbacks and occasionally alluded to in dialogue. Said dialogue was left ambiguous as to whom it was talking about, making Zack even more obscure. So, who was Zack in FF7?

If he is to be a sympathetic character, it’s likely that he was drawn in as a child by Shin-Ra’s propaganda for the Wutai War, enlisting for SOLDIER in his early teens. It’s unlikely he would have known the scope of Shin-Ra’s crimes or even the reality of what killing a person is like. It’s not hard to imagine he would come to regret his enlistment into SOLDIER, however, there exists within Shin-Ra an entire department meant to blackmail and threaten others not to cross the company. It’s likely that his parents or possibly even his entire hometown could have been threatened should he express any desire to desert.

This would be a fairly complex character with interesting and compelling storytelling, which, of course, Square Enix is too lazy to go for.

Instead, Zack is an upbeat, hyperactive teenager who fight with a smile on his face. He’s entirely loyal to Shin-Ra. The game is very careful not to let you see or play as Zack killing actual people, even though that’s exactly what SOLDIER is for. It instead opts for having him kill “clones” of other SOLDIERS (which is still chilling if you’ve actually played the original game, since Cloud is revealed to be a failed clone of Sephiroth. Cloud is his own person with his own motivations and morals, as we’ve gotten to know throughout the game.)

Cloud is in this game, unfortunately. I do not say this is unfortunate lightly.

From the original game, we have implications in dialogue that Cloud was “always picking fights,” and from the water tower scene we know he feels ostracized from other people and maintains a sense of arrogance as a coping mechanism for this. You’d expect this to be how he’s depicted in Crisis Core, right? Abrasive, tough, though perhaps knocked down a notch or two from working in the military. But, no, he’s actually depicted as timid and weak. It’s a huge disappointment when that’s nothing like the asshole Cloud everybody learned to love.

There’s these two new SOLDIER 1st Class characters that were never in or mentioned in the original game. Their names are Angeal Hewley and Genesis Rhapsodos. Yes, those are really their names.

Genesis’ only lines, really, are him reciting this stupid poem / play they made up for the game. it’s the most pretentiously-written thing to have ever disgraced my eardrums and i hate him for repeating the same lines from it constantly. i hate this man with a rage so all-consuming and disgraceful that i feel actively demonic by how hateful he makes me feel. please do not talk to me about this man or i will stop being friends with you if i already am and i’m COMPLETELY serious when i say this

angeal is like.. all he ever talks about is honor, honor, honor. shut the fuck up dude, you sound like a scratched mulan CD. ultimately he turns into a monster because of the experiments shin-ra did on him and he kills himself by forcing zack to kill him, boo fucking hoo. you have the strength to snap your own neck don’t give your kid a guilt complex you pompous asshole

the nibelheim incident, a major plot point in the original game and a very chilling moment, is retconned so that genesis can be in it and look all important. the reason this was done was because gackt(?), a famous jrock star, played the mocap/voice acting for genesis, and square wanted as much gackt stan money as they could get. it was pathetic and an embarrassment then, and it’s pathetic and embarrassing now.

on top of all this, there’s weird gay-coding thrown in there in between zack and cloud to make zack’s death seem more tragic and get more fujo money. it worked.

did i mention angeal and genesis are also made conventionally attractive? also sephiroth isn’t an ugly little hojo-spawn like i prefer to imagine him as with the low polygon OG. so naturally there are a lot of fujoshis that ruin the fanbase experience for the original game by hijacking it with their libido for some irrelevant, poorly written cc characters. over the years this has just amplified my disappointment / embarrassment towards crisis core into active hatred, because as a trans gay man my experience being soured by the excessive amt of crazy fujoshis in the tag is suuuuuper damaging. doesn’t help that they love to write awful fetishy porn of cloud as a trans man and that makes it impossible for me to look for actual content of the headcanon which is disheartening.

i think thats it. thanks for reading

#asks #Anonymous

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