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tarobytez · 3 years

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disability in the Six Of Crows Duology; an analysis of Kaz Brekker, Wylan Van Eck, and the fandom’s treatment of them.

****Note: I originally wrote this for a tiktok series, which im still going to do, but i wanted to post here as well bc tumblr is major contributor to what im going to talk about

CW: ableism, filicide, abuse

In the Six of Crows duology, Leigh Bardugo delicately subverts and melds harmful disability tropes into her narrative, unpacking them in a way that I, as a disabled person, found immensely refreshing and…. just brilliant.

But what did you all do with that? Well, you fucked it up. Instead of critically looking at the characters, y’all just chose to be ableist.

For the next few videos paragraphs im going to unpack disability theory (largely the stuff surrounding media, for obvious reasons) and how it relates to Six Of Crows and the characterization of Kaz Brekker and Wylan Van Eck, then how, despite their brilliant writing, y’all completely overlooked the actual text and continuously revert them to ableist cariactures.

Disclaimer: 1. Shocker - i am disabled. I have also extensively researched disability theory and am very active in the disabled community. Basically, I know my shit. 2. im going to be mad in these videos this analysis. Because the way y’all have been acting has been going on for a long ass time and im fuckin sick of it. I don’t give a shit about non-disabled feelings, die mad

Firstly, I’m going to discuss Kaz, his play on the stereotypical “mean cripple” trope and how Bardugo subverts it, his cane, and disabled rage. Then, I am going to discuss Wylan, the “inspiration porn” stereotype, caregivers / parents, and the social model of disability. Finally, I will then explain the problems in the fandom from my perspective as a disabled person, largely when it comes to wylan, bc yall cant leave that boy tf alone.

Kaz Brekker

Think of a character who uses a cane (obviously not Kaz). Now, are they evil, dubiously moral, or just an asshole in general? Because nearly example I can think of is: whether it be Lots’O from Toy Story, Lucius Malfoy, or even Scrooge and Mr.Gold from Once Upon A Time all have canes (the last two even having their canes appear less and less as they become better people)

The mean/evil cripple trope is far more common than you would think. Villains with different bodies are confined to the role of “evil”. To quote TV Tropes, who I think did a brilliant job on explaining it “The first is rooted in eugenics-based ideas linking disability or other physical deformities with a "natural" predisposition towards madness, criminality, vice, etc. The Rule of Symbolism is often at work here, since a "crippled" body can be used to represent a "crippled" soul — and indeed, a disabled villain is usually put in contrast to a morally upright and physically "perfect" hero. Whether consciously on the part of the writer or not, this can reinforce cultural ideas of disability making a person inherently inferior or negative, much in the same way the Sissy Villain or Depraved Homosexual trope associate sexual and gender nonconformity with evil. ”

Our introduction to Kaz affirms this notion of him being bad or morally bankrupt, with “Kaz Brekker didn’t need a reason”, etc. This mythologized version of himself, the “bastard of the barrel” actively fed into this misconception. But, as we the audience are privy to his inner thoughts, know that he is just a teenager like every other Crow. He is complex, his disability isn’t this tragic backstory, he just fell off a roof. It’s not his main motivation, nor does he curse revenge for making him a cripple - it is just another part of who he is.

His cane (though the shows version fills me with rage but-) is an extension of Kaz - he fights with it, but it has a purpose. Another common thing in media is for canes to be simply accessories, but while Kaz’ cane is fashionable, it has purpose.

The quote “There was no part of him that was not broken, that had not healed wrong and there was no part of him that was not stronger for having been broken.” is so fucking powerful. Kaz does not want nor need a cure - its said in Crooked Kingdom that his leg could most likely be healed, but he chooses not to. Abled-bodied people tend to dismiss this thought as Kaz being stubborn but it shows a reality of acceptance of his disability that is just, so refreshing.

In chapter 22 of SOC, we see disabled rage done right - when he is called a cripple by the Fjerdan inmate, Kaz is pissed - the important detail being that he is pissed at the Fjerdan, at society for ableism, not blaming it on being disabled or wishing he could be normal. He takes action, dislocating the asshole’s shoulder and proving to him, and to a lesser extent, himself, that he is just as capable as anyone else, not in spite of, but because he is disabled. And that is the point of Kaz, harking back to the line that “there was no part of him that was not stronger for having been broken”.

I cried on numerous occasions while reading the SOC duology, but the parts I highlighted in this section especially so. I, as many other disabled people do, have had a long and tumultuous relationship with our disability/es, and for many still struggle. But Kaz Brekker gave me an empowered disabled character who accepts themselves, and that means the world to me.

Keeping that in mind, I hope you can understand why it hurts so much to disabled people when you either erase Kaz’s disability (whether through cosplay or fanfiction), or portray him as a “broken boy uwu”, especially implying that he would want a cure. That flies in the face of canon and is inherently fucking ableist. (if u think im mad wait until the next section)

Next, we have Wylan.

Oh fucking boy.

I love Wylan so fucking much, and y’all just do not seem to understand his character? Like at all? Since this is disability-centric, I’m not going to discuss how the intersection of his queerness also contributes to these issues, but trust me when I say it’s a contributing factor to what i'm going to say.

Wylan, motherfucking Van Eck. If you ableist pricks don’t take ur fucking hands off him right now im going to fight you. I see Wylan as a subversion another, and in my opinion more insidious stereotype pf disabled people - inspiration porn.

Cara Liebowitz in a 2015 article on the blog The Body Is Not An Apology explains in greater detail how inspiration porn is impactful in real life, but media is a major contributing factor to this reality. The technical definition is “the portrayal of people with disabilities as inspirational solely or in part on the basis of their disability” - but that does not cover it fully.

Inspiration porn does lasting damage on the disabled community as it implies that disability is a negative that you need to “overcome” or “triumph” instead of something one can feel proud of. It exploits disabled people for the development of non-disabled people, and in media often the white male protagonist. Framing disability as inherently negative perpetuates ideals of eugenics and cures - see Autism $peaks’ “I Am Autism” ad. Inspiration porn is also incredibly patronizing as it implies that we cannot take care of ourselves, or do things like non-disabled people do. Because i stg some of you tend to think that we just sit around all day wishing we weren’t disabled.

Another important theory ideal that is necessary when thinking about Wylan is the experience of feeling like a burden simply for needing help or accommodations. This is especially true when it comes to familial relationships, and internalized ableism.

The rhetoric that Wylan’s father drilled into his head, that he is “defective”, “a mistake”, and “needs to be corrected”, that he (Jan) was “cursed with a moron for a child” is a long held belief that disabled people hear relentlessly. And while many see Van Eck’s attempted murder of Wylan as “preposturous” and overall something that you would never think happens today - filicide (a parent murdering their child) is more common than you would like to believe. Without even mentioning the countless and often unreported deaths of disabled people due to lack of / insufficient / neglectful medical care, in a study on children who died from the result of household abuse, 40 of 42 of them (95%) were diagnosed with disabilities. Van Eck is not some caricature of ableist ideals - he is a real reflection on how many people and family members view disability.

Circling back to how Wylan unpacks the inspiration porn trope - he is 3 dimensional, he is not only used to develop the other characters, he is just *chefs kiss* Leigh, imo, put so much love and care into the creation of Wylan and his story and character growth that is representative of a larger feeling in the disabled community.

That being said, what you non-disabled motherfuckers have done to him.

The “haha Wylan can’t read” jokes aren’t and were not funny. Y’all literally boiled down everything Wylan is to him being dyslexic. And it’s like,,,, the only thing you can say about him. You ignore every other part of him other than his disability, and then mock him for it. There’s so much you can say about Wylan - simping for Jesper, being band kid and playing the fuckin flute, literally anything else. But no, you just chose to mock his disability, excellent fucking job!

Next up on “ableds stfu” - infantilization! y’all are so fucking condescending to Wylan, and treat him like a fucking toddler. And while partly it is due to his sexuality i think a larger portion is him being disabled. Its in the same vein of people who think that Wylan and Jesper are romantically one sided, and that Jesper only kind of liked Wylan, despite the canon evidence of him loving Wylan just as much. You all view him as a “smol bean”, who needs protecting, and care, when Wylan is the opposite of that. He is a fucking demolitions expert who suggested waking up sleeping men to kill them - what about that says “uwu”. You are treating Wylan as a burden to Jesper and the other Crows when he is an immensely valuable, fully autonomous disabled person - you all just view him as damaged.

And before I get a comment saying that “uhhh Wylan isn’t real why do you care” while Wylan may not be real, how you all view him and treat him has real fucking impacts and informs how you treat people like me. If someone called me an “uwu baby boy” they’d get a fist square in the fucking jaw. Fiction informs how we perceive the world and y’all are making it super fucking clear how you see disabled people.

Finally, I wanted to talk about how the social model of disability is portrayed through Wylan. For those who are unaware, the social model of disability contrasts the medical model, that views the disability itself as the problem, that needs to be cured, whereas the social model essentially boils down to creating an accommodating society, where disability acceptance and pride is the goal. And we see this with Wylan - he is able to manage his father’s estate, with Jesper’s assistance to help him read documents. And this is not out of pity or charity, but an act of love. It is not portrayed as this almighty act for Jesper to play saviour, just a given, which is incredibly important to show, especially for someone who has been abused by family for his disability like Wylan, that he is accepted.

Yet, I still see people hold up Jesper on a pedestal for “putting up with” Wylan, as if loving a disabled person deserves a fucking pat on the back. It’s genuinely exhausting trying to engage with a work I love so much with a fandom that thinks so little of me and my community. It fucking shows.

Overall, Leigh Bardugo as a disabled person wrote two incredibly meticulous and empowered disabled characters, and due to either lack of reading comprehension, ableism, or a quirky mix of both, the fandom has ignored canon and the experiences of disabled people for…. shits and giggles i guess. And yes, there are issues with the Grishaverse and disability representation - while I haven’t finished them yet so I do not have an opinion on it, people have been discussing issues in the KOS duology with ableist ideals. This mini series was no way indicative of the entire disabled experience, nor does it represent my entire view on the representation as a whole. These things need to be met critically in our community, and talked about with disabled voices at the forefront. For example, the limited perspective we get of Wylan and Kaz being both white men, does not account for a large portion of the disabled community and the intersection of multiple identities.

All-in-all, Critique media, but do not forget to also critique fandom spaces. Alternatively, just shut the fuck up :)

happy fucking disability pride month, ig

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potteresque-ire · 3 years

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Can you talk more about the usage of the word "wife" to talk about men in the BL context? I've noticed it in BJYX (particularly with GG), in the (English translations) of MDZS, and then it came up in your recent posts about Danmei-101 (which were super helpful btw) with articles connecting the "little fresh meat" type to fans calling an actor "wife." My initial reaction as a westerner is like "this is very problematic," but I think I'm missing a lot of language/cultural context. Any thoughts?

Hello! First of all, for those who’re interested, here’s a link to the referred posts. Under the cut is arguably the 4th post of the series. As usual, I apologise for the length!

(Topics: seme and uke; more about “leftover women”; roster of feminisation terms; Daji, Bao Si & the origin of BJYX; roster of beautiful, ancient Chinese men; Chairman Mao (not part of the roster) ...)

[TW: feminisation of men]

In the traditional BL characterisation, the M/M (double male) lead pairing is essentially a cis-het relationship in disguise, in which one of the M leads is viewed as the “wife” by the creator and audience. This lead often possesses some of the features of the traditional, stereotypical female, but retaining his male appearance.

In BL terms, the “wife” is the “uke”. “Seme” and “uke” are the respective roles taken by the two male leads, and designated by the creator of the material. Literally, “seme” (攻め) means the dominant, the attacking / aggressive partner in the relationship and “uke” (受け), the passive / recipient (of actions) partner who tends to follow the seme’s lead. The terms themselves do not have any sexual / gender context. However, as male and female are viewed as aggressive and passive by their traditional social roles, and the attacker and recipient by their traditional sexual roles respectively, BL fandoms have long assigned uke, the passive, sexual “bottom”, as the “woman”, the “wife”.

Danmei has kept this “semi” and uke” tradition from BL, taking the kanji of the Japanese terms for designation ~ 攻 (”attack” is therefore the “husband”, and 受 (”receive”), the “wife”. The designations are often specified in the introduction / summary of Danmei works as warning / enticement. For MDZS, for example, MXTX wrote:

高貴冷豔悶騷攻 × 邪魅狂狷風騷受

高貴冷豔悶騷攻 = noble, coolly beautiful and boring seme (referring to LWJ) 邪魅狂狷風騷受 = devilishly charming, wild, and flirty uke (referring to WWX)

The traditional, stereotypical female traits given to the “uke”, the “wife” in Danmei and their associated fanworks range from their personality to behaviour to even biological functions. Those who have read the sex scenes in MDZS may be aware of their lack of mention of lube, while WWX was written as getting (very) wet from fluids from his colon (腸道) ~ implying that his colon, much like a vagina, was supplying the necessarily lubrication for sex. This is obviously biologically inaccurate; however, Danmei is exempt from having to be realistic by its original Tanbi definition. The genre’s primary audience is cishet females, and sex scenes such as this one aren’t aiming for realism. Rather, the primary goal of these sex scenes is to generate fantasy, and the purpose of the biologically female functions in one of the leads (WWX) is to ease the readers into imagining themselves as the one engaging in the sex.

Indeed, these practices of assigning as males and female the M/M sexual top and bottom, of emphasising of who is the top and who is the bottom, have been falling out of favour in Western slash fandoms ~ I joined fandom about 15 years ago, and top and bottom designations in slash pairings (and fights about them) were much more common than it is now. The generally more open, more progressive environments in which Western fandomers are immersed in probably have something to do with it: they transfer their RL knowledge, their views on biology, on different social into their fandom works and discourses.

I’d venture to say this: in the English-speaking fandoms, fandom values and mainstream values are converging. “Cancel culture” reflects an attempt to enforce RL values in the fictional worlds in fandom. Fandom culture is slowly, but surely, leaving its subculture status and becoming part of mainstream culture.

I’d hesitate to call c-Danmei fandoms backward compared to Western slash for this reason. There’s little hope for Danmei to converge with China’s mainstream culture in the short term ~ the necessity of replacing Danmei with Dangai in visual media already reflects that. Danmei is and will likely remain subculture in the foreseeable future, and subcultures, at heart, are protests against the mainstream. Unless China and the West define “mainstream” very similarly (and they don’t), it is difficult to compare the “progressiveness”—and its dark side, the “problematic-ness”—of the protests, which are shaped by what they’re protesting against. The “shaper” in this scenario, the mainstream values and culture, are also far more forceful under China’s authoritarian government than they are in the free(-er) world.

Danmei, therefore, necessarily takes on a different form in China than BL or slash outside China. As a creative pursuit, it serves to fulfil psychological needs that are reflective of its surrounding culture and sociopolitical environment. The genre’s “problematic” / out of place aspects in the eyes of Western fandoms are therefore, like all other aspects of the genre, tailor-made by its millions of fans to be comforting / cathartic for the unique culture and sociopolitical background it and they find themselves in.

I briefly detoured to talk about the Chinese government’s campaign to pressure young, educated Chinese women into matrimony and motherhood in the post for this reason, as it is an example of how, despite Western fandoms’ progressiveness, they may be inadequate, distant for c-Danmei fans. Again, this article is a short and a ... morbidly-entertaining read on what has been said about China’s “leftover women” (剩女) — women who are unmarried and over 27-years-old). I talked about it, because “Women should enter marriage and parenthood in their late 20s” may no longer a mainstream value in many Western societies, but where it still is, it exerts a strong influence on how women view romance, and by extension, how they interact with romantic fiction, including Danmei.

In China, this influence is made even stronger by the fact that Chinese tradition places a strong emphasis on education and holds a conservative attitude towards romance and sex. Dating while studying therefore remains discouraged in many Chinese families. University-educated Chinese women therefore have an extremely short time frame — between graduation (~23 years old) and their 27th birthday — to find “the right one” and get married, before they are labelled as “leftovers” and deemed undesirable. (Saving) face being an important aspect in Chinese culture introduces yet another layer of pressure: traditionally, women who don’t get married by the age agreed by social norms have been viewed as failures of upbringing, in that the unmarried women’s parents not having taught/trained their daughters well. Filial, unmarried women therefore try to get married “on time” just to avoid bringing shame to their family.

The outcome is this: despite the strong women characters we may see in Chinese visual media, many young Chinese women nowadays do not expect themselves to be able to marry for love. Below, I offer a “book jacket summary” of a popular internet novel in China, which shows how the associated despair also affects cis-het fictional romance. Book reviews praise this novel for being “boring”: the man and woman leads are both common working class people, the “you-and-I”’s; the mundaneness of them trying build their careers and their love life is lit by one shining light: he loves her and she loves him.

Written in her POV, this summary reflects, perhaps, the disquiet felt by many contemporary Chinese women university graduates:

曾經以為，自己這輩子都等不到了—— 世界這麼大，我又走得這麼慢，要是遇不到良人要怎麼辦？早過了「全球三十幾億男人，中國七億男人，天涯何處無芳草」的猖狂歲月，越來越清楚，循規蹈矩的生活中，我們能熟悉進而深交的異性實在太有限了，有限到我都做好了「接受他人的牽線，找個適合的男人慢慢煨熟，再平淡無奇地進入婚姻」的準備，卻在生命意外的拐彎處迎來自己的另一半。

I once thought, my wait will never come to fruition for the rest of my life — the world is so big, I’m so slow in treading it, what if I’ll never meet the one? I’ve long passed the wild days of thinking “3 billion men exist on Earth, 0.7 of which are Chinese. There is plenty more fish in the sea.” I’m seeing, with increasing clarity, that in our disciplined lives, the number of opposite-sex we can get to know, and get to know well, is so limited. It’s so limited that I’m prepared to accept someone’s matchmaking, find a suitable man and slowly, slowly, warm up to him, and then, to enter marriage with without excitement, without wonder. But then, an accidental turn in my life welcomes in my other half.

— Oath of Love (餘生，請多指教) (Yes, this is the novel Gg’d upcoming drama is based on.)

Heteronormativity is, of course, very real in China. However, that hasn’t exempted Chinese women, even its large cis-het population, from having their freedom to pursue their true love taken away from them. Even for cis-het relationships, being able to marry for love has become a fantasy —a fantasy scorned by the state. Remember this quote from Article O3 in the original post?

耽改故事大多远离现实，有些年轻受众却将其与生活混为一谈，产生不以结婚和繁衍为目的才是真爱之类的偏颇认知。

Most Dangai stories are far removed from reality; some young audience nonetheless mix them up with real life, develop biased understanding such as “only love that doesn’t treat matrimony and reproduction as destinations is true love”.

I didn’t focus on it in the previous posts, in an effort to keep the discussion on topic. But why did the op-ed piece pick this as an example of fantasy-that-shouldn’t-be-mixed-up-with-real-life, in the middle of a discussion about perceived femininity of men that actually has little to do with matrimony and reproduction?

Because the whole point behind the state’s “leftover women” campaign is precisely to get women to treat matrimony and reproduction as destinations, not beautiful sceneries that happen along the way. And they’re the state’s destination as more children = higher birth rate that leads to higher future productivity. The article is therefore calling out Danmei for challenging this “mainstream value”.

Therefore, while the statement True love doesn’t treat matrimony and reproduction as destinations may be trite for many of us while it may be a point few, if any, English-speaking fandoms may pay attention to, to the mainstream culture Danmei lives in, to the mainstream values dictated by the state, it is borderline subversive.

As much as Danmei may appear “tame” for its emphasis on beauty and romance, for it to have stood for so long, so firmly against China’s (very) forceful mainstream culture, the genre is also fundamentally rebellious. Remember: Danmei has little hope of converging with China’s mainstream unless it “sells its soul” and removes its homoerotic elements.

With rebelliousness, too, comes a bit of tongue-in-cheek.

And so, when c-Danmei fans, most of whom being cishet women who interact with the genre by its traditional BL definition, call one of the leads 老婆 (wife), it can and often take on a different flavour. As said before, it can be less about feminizing the lead than about identifying with the lead. The nickname 老婆 (wife) can be less about being disrespectful and more about humorously expressing an aspiration—the aspiration to have a husband who truly loves them, who they do want to get married and have babies with but out of freedom and not obligation.

Admittedly, I had been confused, and bothered by these “can-be”s myself. Just because there are alternate reasons for the feminisation to happen doesn’t mean the feminisation itself is excusable. But why the feminisation of M/M leads doesn’t sound as awful to me in Chinese as in English? How can calling a self-identified man 老婆 (wife) get away with not sounding being predominantly disrespectful to my ears, when I would’ve frowned at the same thing said in my vicinity in English?

I had an old hypothesis: when I was little, it was common to hear people calling acquaintances in Chinese by their unflattering traits: “Deaf-Eared Chan” (Mr Chan, who’s deaf), “Fat Old Woman Lan” (Ah-Lan, who’s an overweight woman) etc—and the acquaintances were perfectly at ease with such identifications, even introducing themselves to strangers that way. Comparatively speaking then, 老婆 (wife) is harmless, even endearing.

老婆, which literally means “old old-lady” (implying wife = the woman one gets old with), first became popularised as a colloquial, casual way of calling “wife” in Hong Kong and its Cantonese dialect, despite the term itself being about 1,500 years old. As older generations of Chinese were usually very shy about talking about their love lives, those who couldn’t help themselves and regularly spoke of their 老婆 tended to be those who loved their wives in my memory. 老婆, as a term, probably became endearing to me that way.

Maybe this is why the feminisation of M/M leads didn’t sound so bad to me?

This hypothesis was inadequate, however. This custom of identifying people by their (unflattering) traits has been diminishing in Hong Kong and China, for similar reasons it has been considered inappropriate in the West.

Also, 老婆 (wife) is not the only term used for / associated with feminisation. I’ve tried to limit the discussion to Danmei, the fictional genre; now, I’ll jump to its associated RPS genre, and specifically, the YiZhan fandoms. The purpose of this jump: with real people involved, feminisation’s effect is potentially more harmful, more acute. Easier to feel.

YiZhan fans predominantly entered the fandoms through The Untamed, and they’ve also transferred Danmei’s “seme”/“uke” customs into YiZhan. There are, therefore, three c-YiZhan fandoms:

博君一肖 (BJYX): seme Dd, uke Gg 戰山為王 (ZSWW): seme Gg, uke Dd 連瑣反應 (LSFY): riba Gg and Dd. Riba = “reversible”, and unlike “seme” and “uke”, is a frequently-used term in the Japanese gay community.

BJYX is by far the largest of the three, likely due to Gg having played WWX, the “uke” in MDZS / TU. I’ll therefore focus on this fandom, ie. Gg is the “uke”, the “wife”.

For Gg alone, I’ve seen him being also referred to by YiZhan fans as (and this is far from a complete list):

* 姐姐 (sister) * 嫂子 (wife of elder brother; Dd being the elder brother implied) * 妃妃 (based on the very first YiZhan CP name, 太妃糖 Toffee Candy, a portmanteau of sorts from Dd being the 太子 “prince” of his management company and Gg being the prince’s wife, 太子妃. 糖 = “candy”. 太妃 sounds like toffee in English and has been used as the latter’s Chinese translation.) * 美人 (beauty, as in 肖美人 “Beauty Xiao”) * Daji 妲己 (as in 肖妲己, “Daji Xiao”).

The last one needs historical context, which will also become important for explaining the new hypothesis I have.

Daji was a consort who lived three thousand years ago, whose beauty was blamed for the fall of the Shang dynasty. Gg (and men sharing similar traits, who are exceptionally rare) has been compared to Daji 妲己 for his alternatively innocent, alternatively seductive beauty ~ the kind of beauty that, in Chinese historical texts and folk lores, lead to the fall of kingdoms when possessed by the king’s beloved woman. This kind of “I-get-to-ruin-her-virginity”, “she’s a slut in MY bedroom” beauty is, of course, a stereotypical fantasy for many (cis-het) men, which included the authors of these historical texts and folklores. However, it also contained some truth: the purity / innocence, the image of a virgin, was required for an ancient woman to be chosen as a consort; the seduction, meanwhile, helped her to become the top consort, and monopolise the attention of kings and emperors who often had hundreds of wives ~ wives who often put each other in danger to eliminate competition.

Nowadays, women of tremendous beauty are still referred to by the Chinese idiom 傾國傾城, literally, ”falling countries, falling cities”. The beauty is also implied to be natural, expressed in a can’t-help-itself way, perhaps reflecting the fact that the ancient beauties on which this idiom has been used couldn’t possibly have plastic surgeries, and most of them didn’t meet a good end ~ that they had to pay a price for their beauty, and often, with their lowly status as women, as consorts, they didn’t get to choose whether they wanted to pay this price or not. This adjective is considered to be very flattering. Gg’s famous smile from the Thailand Fanmeet has been described, praised as 傾城一笑: “a smile that topples a city”.

I’m explaining Daji and 傾國傾城 because the Chinese idiom 博君一笑 “doing anything to get a smile from you”, from which the ship’s name BJYX 博君一肖 was derived (笑 and 肖 are both pronounced “xiao”), is connected to yet another of such dynasty-falling beauty, Bao Si 褒姒. Like Daji before her, Bao Si was blamed for the end of the Zhou Dynasty in 771 BC.

The legend went like this: Bao Si was melancholic, and to get her to smile, her king lit warning beacons and got his nobles to rush in from the nearby vassal states with their armies to come and rescue him, despite not being in actual danger. The nobles, in their haste, looked so frantic and dishevelled that Bao Si found it funny and smiled. Longing to see more of the smile of his favourite woman, the king would fool his nobles again and again, until his nobles no longer heeded the warning beacons when an actual rebellion came.

What the king did has been described as 博紅顏一笑, with 紅顏 (”red/flushed face”) meaning a beautiful woman, referring to Bao Si. Replace 紅顏 with the respectful “you”, 君, we get 博君一笑. If one searches the origin of the phrase 博 [fill_in_the_blank]一笑 online, Bao Si’s story shows up.

The “anything” in ”doing anything to get a smile from you” in 博君一笑, therefore, is not any favour, but something as momentous as giving away one’s own kingdom. c-turtles have remarked, to their amusement and admittedly mine, that “king”, in Chinese, is written as 王, which is Dd’s surname, and very occasionally, they jokingly compare him to the hopeless kings who’d give away everything for their love. Much like 傾國傾城 has become a flattering idiom despite the negative reputations of Daji and Bao Si for their “men-ruining ways”, 博君一笑 has become a flattering phrase, emphasising on the devotion and love rather than the ... stupidity behind the smile-inducing acts.

(Bao Si’s story, BTW, was a lie made up by historians who also lived later but also thousands of years ago, to absolve the uselessness of the king. Warning beacons didn’t exist at her time.)

Gg is arguably feminized even in his CP’s name. Gg’s feminisation is everywhere.

And here comes my confession time ~ I’ve been amused by most of the feminisation terms above. 肖妲己 (”Daji Xiao”) captures my imagination, and I remain quite partial to the CP name BJYX. Somehow, there’s something ... somewhat forgivable when the feminisation is based on Gg’s beauty, especially in the context of the historical Danmei / Dangai setting of MDZS/TU ~ something that, while doesn’t cancel, dampens the “problematic-ness” of the gender mis-identification.

What, exactly, is this something?

Here’s my new hypothesis, and hopefully I’ll manage to explain it well ~

The hypothesis is this: the unisex beauty standard for historical Chinese men and women, which is also breathtakingly similar to the modern beauty standard for Chinese women, makes feminisation in the context of Danmei (especially historical Danmei) flattering, and easier to accept.

What defined beauty in historical Chinese men? If I am to create a classically beautiful Chinese man for my new historical Danmei, how would I describe him based on what I’ve read, my cultural knowledge?

Here’s a list:

* Skin fair and smooth as white jade * Thin, even frail; narrow/slanted shoulders; tall * Dark irises and bright, starry eyes * Not too dense, neat eyebrows that are shaped like swords ~ pointed slightly upwards from the center towards the sides of the face * Depending on the dynasty, nice makeup.

Imagine these traits. How “macho” are they? How much do they fit the ideal Chinese masculine beauty advertised by Chinese government, which looks like below?

Propaganda poster, 1969. The caption says “Defeat Imperialist US! Defeat Social Imperialism!” The book’s name is “Quotations from Mao Zedong”. (Source)

Where did that list of traits I’ve written com from? Fair like jade, frail ... why are they so far from the ... “macho”ness of the men in the poster?

What has Chinese history said about its beautiful men?

Wei Jie (衛玠 286-312 BCE), one of the four most beautiful ancient Chinese men (古代四大美男) recorded in Chinese history famously passed away when fans of his beauty gathered and formed a wall around him, blocking his way. History recorded Wei as being frail with chronic illness, and was only 27 years old when he died. Arguably the first historical account of “crazy fans killing their idol”, this incident left the idiom 看殺衛玠 ~ “Wei Jie being watched to death.” ~ a not very “macho” way to die at all.

潘安 (Pan An; 247-300 BCE), another one of the four most beautiful ancient Chinese men, also had hoards of fangirls, who threw fruits and flowers at him whenever he ventured outside. The Chinese idiom 擲果盈車 “thrown fruit filling a cart” was based on Pan and ... his fandom, and denotes such scenarios of men being so beautiful that women openly displayed their affections for them.

Meanwhile, when Pan went out with his equally beautiful male friend, 夏侯湛 Xiahou Zhan, folks around them called them 連璧 ~ two connected pieces of perfect jade. Chinese Jade is white, smooth, faintly glowing in light, so delicate that it gives the impression of being somewhat transparent.

Aren’t Wei Jie and Pan An reminiscent of modern day Chinese idols, the “effeminate” “Little Fresh Meat”s (小鲜肉) so panned by Article O3? Their stories, BTW, also elucidated the historical reference in LWJ’s description of being jade-like in MDZS, and in WWX and LWJ being thrown pippas along the Gusu river bank.

Danmei, therefore, didn’t create a trend of androgynous beauty in men as much as it has borrowed the ancient, traditional definition of masculine Chinese beauty ~ the beauty that was more feminine than masculine by modern standards.

[Perhaps, CPs should be renamed 連璧 (”two connected pieces of perfect jade”) as a reminder of the aesthetics’ historical roots.]

Someone may exclaim now: But. But!! Yet another one of the four most beautiful ancient Chinese men, 高長恭 (Gao Changgong, 541-573 BCE), far better known by his title, 蘭陵王 (”the Prince of Lanling”), was a famous general. He had to be “macho”, right?

... As it turns out, not at all. Historical texts have described Gao as “貌柔心壮，音容兼美” (”soft in looks and strong at heart, beautiful face and voice”), “白美類婦人” (”fair and beautiful as a woman”), “貌若婦人” (”face like a woman”). Legends have it that The Prince of Lanling’s beauty was so soft, so lacking in authority that he had to wear a savage mask to get his soldiers to listen to his command (and win) on the battlefield (《樂府雜錄》: 以其顏貌無威，每入陣即著面具，後乃百戰百勝).

This should be emphasised: Gao’s explicitly feminine descriptions were recorded in historical texts as arguments *for* his beauty. Authors of these texts, therefore, didn’t view the feminisation as insult. In fact, they used the feminisation to drive the point home, to convince their readers that men like the Prince of Lanling were truly, absolutely good looking.

Being beautiful like a women was therefore high praise for men in, at least, significant periods in Chinese history ~ periods long and important enough for these records to survive until today. Beauty, and so it goes, had once been largely free of distinctions between the masculine and feminine.

One more example of an image of an ancient Chinese male beauty being similar to its female counterpart, because the history nerd in me finds this fun.

何晏 (He Yan, ?-249 BCE) lived in the Wei Jin era (between 2nd to 4th century), during which makeup was really en vogue. Known for his beauty, he was also famous for his love of grooming himself. The emperor, convinced that He Yan’s very fair skin was from the powder he was wearing, gave He Yan some very hot foods to eat in the middle of the summer. He Yan began to sweat, had to wipe himself with his sleeves and in the process, revealed to the emperor that his fair beauty was 100% natural ~ his skin glowed even more with the cosmetics removed (《世說新語·容止第十四》: 何平叔美姿儀，面至白。魏明帝疑其傅粉，正夏月，與熱湯餅。既啖，大汗出，以朱衣自拭，色轉皎然). His kick-cosmetics’-ass fairness won him the nickname 傅粉何郎 (”powder-wearing Mr He”).

Not only would He Yan very likely be mistaken as a woman if this scene is transferred to a modern setting, but this scene can very well fit inside a Danmei story of the 21st century and is very, very likely to get axed by the Chinese censorship board for its visualisation.

[Important observation from this anecdote: the emperor was totally into this trend too.]

The adjectives and phrases used above to describe these beautiful ancient Chinese men ~ 貌柔, 音容兼美, 白美, 美姿儀, 皎然 ~ have all become pretty much reserved for describing beauty in women nowadays. Beauty standards in ancient China were, as mentioned before, had gone through significantly long periods in which they were largely genderless. The character for beauty 美 (also in Danmei, 耽美) used to have little to no gender association. Free of gender associations as well were the names of many flowers. The characters for orchid (蘭) and lotus (蓮), for example, were commonly found in men’s names as late as the Republican era (early 20th century), but are now almost exclusively found in women’s names. Both orchid and lotus have historically been used to indicate 君子 (junzi, roughly, “gentlemen”), which have always been men. MDZS also has an example of a man named after a flower: Jin Ling’s courtesy name, given to him by WWX, was 如蘭 (”like an orchid”).

A related question may be this: why does ancient China associate beauty with fairness, with softness, with frailty? Likely, because Confucianist philosophy and customs put a heavy emphasis on scholarship ~ and scholars have mostly consisted of soft-spoken, not muscular, not working-under-the-sun type of men. More importantly, Confucianist scholars also occupied powerful government positions. Being, and looking like a Confucianist scholar was therefore associated with status. Indeed, it’s very difficult to look like jade when one was a farmer or a soldier, for example, who constantly had to toil under the sun, whose skin was constantly being dried and roughened by the elements. Having what are viewed as “macho” beauty traits as in the poster above ~ tanned skin, bulging muscles, bony structures (which also take away the jade’s smoothness) ~ were associated with hard labour, poverty and famine.

Along that line, 手無縛雞之力 (“hands without the strength to restrain a chicken”) has long been a phrase used to describe ancient scholars and students, and without scorn or derision. Love stories of old, which often centred around scholars were, accordingly, largely devoid of the plot lines of husbands physically protecting the wives, performing the equivalent of climbing up castle walls and fighting dragons etc. Instead, the faithful husbands wrote poems, combed their wife’s hair, traced their wife’s eyebrows with cosmetics (畫眉)...all activities that didn’t require much physical strength, and many of which are considered “feminine” nowadays.

Were there periods in Chinese history in which more ... sporty men and women were appreciated? Yes. the Tang dynasty, for example, and the Yuan and Qing dynasties. The Tang dynasty, as a very powerful, very open era in Chinese history, was known for its relations to the West (via the Silk Road). The Yuan and Qing dynasties, meanwhile, were established by Mongolians and Manchus respectively, who, as non-Han people, had not been under the influence of Confucian culture and grew up on horsebacks, rather than in schools.

The idea that beautiful Chinese men should have “macho” attributes was, therefore, largely a consequence of non-Han-Chinese influence, especially after early 20th century. That was when the characters for beauty (美), orchid (蘭), lotus (蓮) etc began their ... feminisation. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which started its reign of the country starting 1949, also has foreign roots, being a derivative of the Soviets, and its portrayal of ideal men has been based on the party’s ideology, painting them as members of the People’s Liberation Army (Chinese army) and its two major proletariat classes, farmers and industrial workers ~ all occupations that are “macho” in their aesthetics, but held at very poor esteem in ancient Chinese societies. All occupations that, to this day, may be hailed as noble by Chinese women, but not really deemed attractive by them.

Beauty, being an instinct, is perhaps much more resistant to propaganda.

If anything, the three terms Article O3 used to describe “effeminate” men ~ 奶油小生 “cream young men” (popularised in 1980s) , 花美男 “flowery beautiful men” (early 2000s), 小鲜肉 “little fresh meat” (coined in 2014 and still popular now) ~ only informs me how incredibly consistent the modern Chinese women’s view of ideal male beauty has been. It’s the same beauty the Chinese Communist Party has called feminine. It’s the same beauty found in Danmei. It’s the same beauty that, when witnessed in men in ancient China, was so revered that historians recorded it for their descendants to remember. It doesn’t mean there aren’t any women who appreciate the "macho” type ~ it’s just that, the appreciation for the non-macho type has never really gone out of fashion, never really changed. The only thing that is really changing is the name of the type, the name’s positive or negative connotations.

(Personally, I’m far more uncomfortable with the name “Little fresh meat” (小鲜肉) than 老婆 (wife). I find it much more insulting.)

Anyway, what I’d like to say is this: feminisation in Danmei ~ a genre that, by definition, is hyper-focused on aesthetics ~ may not be as "problematic” in Chinese as it is in English, because the Chinese tradition didn’t make that much of a differentiation between masculine and feminine beauty. Once again, this isn’t to say such mis-gendering isn’t disrespectful; it’s just that, perhaps, it is less disrespectful because Chinese still retains a cultural memory in which equating a beautiful man to a beautiful woman was the utmost flattery.

I must put a disclaimer here: I cannot vouch for this being true for the general Chinese population. This is something that is buried deep enough inside me that it took a lot of thought for me to tease out, to articulate. More importantly, while I grow up in a Chinese-speaking environment, I’ve never lived inside China. My history knowledge, while isn’t shabby, hasn’t been filtered through the state education system.

I’d also like to point out as well, along this line of thought, that in *certain* (definitely not all) aspects, Chinese society isn’t as sexist as the West. While historically, China has periods of extreme sexism against women, with the final dynasties of Ming and Qing being examples, I must (reluctantly) acknowledge Chairman Mao for significantly lifting the status of women during his rule. Here’s a famous quote of his from 1955:

婦女能頂半邊天 Women can lift half the skies

The first marriage code, passed in 1950, outlawed forced marriages, polygamy, and ensured equal rights between husband and wife. For the first time in centuries, women were encouraged to go outside of their homes and work. Men resisted at first, wanting to keep their wives at home; women who did work were judged poorly for their performance and given less than 50% of men’s wage, which further fuelled the men’s resistance. Mao said the above quote after a commune in Guizhou introduced the “same-work-same-wage” system to increase its productivity, and he asked for the same system to to be replicated across the country. (Source)

When Chairman Mao wanted something, it happened. Today, Chinese women’s contribution to the country’s GDP remains among the highest in the world. They make up more than half of the country’s top-scoring students. They’re the dominant gender in universities, in the ranks of local employees of international corporations in the Shanghai and Beijing central business districts—among the most sought after jobs in the country. While the inequality between men and women in the workplace is no where near wiped out — stories about women having to sleep with higher-ups to climb the career ladder, or even get their PhDs are not unheard of, and the central rulership of the Chinese Communist Party has been famously short of women — the leap in women’s rights has been significant over the past century, perhaps because of how little rights there had been before ~ at the start of the 20th century, most Chinese women from relatively well-to-do families still practised foot-binding, in which their feet were literally crushed during childhood in the name of beauty, of status symbol. They couldn’t even walk properly.

Perhaps, the contemporary Chinese women’s economic contribution makes the sexism they encounter in their lives, from the lack of reproductive rights to the “leftover women” label, even harder to swallow. It makes their fantasies fly to even higher, more defiant heights. The popularity of Dangai right now is pretty much driven by women, as acknowledged by Article O3. Young women, especially, female fans who people have dismissed as “immature”, “crazy”, are responsible for the threat the Chinese government is feeling now by the genre.

This is no small feat. While the Chinese government complains about the “effeminate” men from Danmei / Dangai, its propaganda has been heavily reliant on stars who have risen to popularity to these genres. The film Dd is currently shooting, Chinese Peacekeeping Force (維和部隊), also stars Huang Jingyu (黄景瑜), and Zhang Zhehan (張哲瀚) ~ the three actors having shot to fame from The Untamed (Dangai), Addicted (Danmei), and Word of Honour (Dangai) respectively. Zhang, in particular, played the “uke” role in Word of Honour and has also been called 老婆 (wife) by his fans. The quote in Article O3, “Ten years as a tough man known by none; one day as a beauty known by all” was also implicitly referring to him.

Perhaps, the government will eventually realise that millennia-old standards of beauty are difficult to bend, and by extension, what is considered appropriate gender expression of Chinese men and women.

In the metas I’ve posted, therefore, I’ve hesitated in using terms such as homophobia, sexism, and ageism etc, opting instead to make long-winded explanations that essentially amount to these terms (thank you everyone who’s reading for your patience!). Because while the consequence is similar—certain fraction of the populations are subjected to systemic discrimination, abuse, given less rights, treated as inferior etc—these words, in English, also come with their own context, their own assumptions that may not apply to the situation. It reminds me of what Leo Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina,

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Discrimination in each country, each culture is humiliating, unhappy in its own way. Both sexism and homophobia are rampant in China, but as their roots are different from those of the West, the ways they manifest are different, and so must the paths to their dissolution. I’ve also hesitated on calling out individual behaviours or confronting individuals for this reason. i-Danmei fandoms are where i-fans and c-fans meet, where English-speaking doesn’t guarantee a non-Chinese sociopolitical background (there may be students from China, for example; I’m also ... not entirely Western), and I find it difficult to articulate appropriate, convincing arguments without knowing individual backgrounds.

Frankly, I’m not sure if I’ve done the right thing. Because I do hope feminisation will soon fade into extinction, especially in i-Danmei fandoms that, if they continue to prosper on international platforms, may eventually split from c-Danmei fandoms along the cultural (not language) line due to the vast differences in environmental constraints. My hope is especially true when real people are involved, and c-fandoms, I’d like to note, are not unaware of the issues surrounding feminisation ~ it has already been explicitly forbidden in BJYX’s supertopic on Weibo.

At the same time, I’ve spent so many words above to try to explain why beauty can *sometimes* lurk behind such feminisations. Please allow me to end this post with one example of feminisation that I deeply dislike—and I’ve seen it used by fans on Gg as well—is 綠茶 (”green tea”), from 綠茶婊 (”green tea whore”) that means women who look pure / innocent but are, deep down, promiscuous / lustful. In some ways, its meaning isn’t so different from Daji 妲己, the consort blamed for the fall of the Shang dynasty. However, to me at least, the flattery in the feminisation is gone, perhaps because of the character “whore” (婊), because the term originated in 2013 from a notorious sex party rather than from a legendary beauty so maligned that The Investiture of the Gods (封神演義), the seminal Chinese fiction written ~2,600 years after Daji’s death, re-imagined her as a malevolent fox spirit (狐狸精) that many still remembers her as today.

Ah, to be caught between two cultures. :)

#tell-me-everything #pie metas #yizhan #bjyx

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belfrygargoyles · 3 years

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*whispers* I would like to hear what you have to say on reader inserts in the SW fandom because I too have a problem with them and I feel like not enough people are calling it out 👉👈

I’ve made a few posts about it in the past but I think it’s high time I actually Do This and really get into it.

Before I start: 1) This will be in specific reference to fanfiction written for the Star Wars fandom, particularly tcw and the mandalorian eras, 2) A lot of the issues come down to racist fetishization of men of color by white women; I am white, so there is much that is simply not my place to make statements on. What I can speak most on is my take from the gender side of things.

I’d honestly recommend reading this post by @nibeul with addition by @clonehub first, as they discuss the core issue with reader inserts in the Star Wars fandom.

And 3) some of this will involve discussion of sexual acts (as they relate to fanfiction) and sexual fantasies. These discussions will be non-explicit, and no pornographic text or content will be displayed.

Also. I’m GNC and nonbinary. I’m also a very feminine looking person that falls under the generalization of “small and petite.” I don’t have dysphoria, I like my body and the traits I have, and treating them like inherently female sends me into a blind fury. This is, unfortunately, important.

For the sake of making sure I come across as clearly as possible, I will be writing as though the reader of this post has never read or is broadly unfamiliar with reader-insert fanfiction.

Without further ado.

Hey, Star Wars reader insert fic writers? Please get your shit together.

INTRODUCTION

I’ve been reading reader-insert fanfiction since I was a grade schooler waking up early to check Quizilla. I love it! It got me into fandom, kept me engaged, helped me make and develop some of my oldest OCs, and it’s just fun to read and write- it’s like a self-indulgent little gift you can give to a bunch of people all at once. Because who doesn’t like the idea of starring in their own little adventure, usually alongside some of their favorite characters? It can be fun, immersive, get you attached in ways other ways of fandom interaction may not, make you feel just a little bit special, or be a way to express some feelings you might have about canon and the way the story went.

Like any form of fiction, it ends up saying more about the author’s feelings than anything else, whether the author realizes it or not. For many, many authors of reader-insert fanfiction, the primary enjoyment comes from writing “themselves” into the story- before the readers, the author most often makes the “reader character” someone they, themselves, can relate to and substitute for themselves. They write to live out a self-indulgent fantasy they have, and their readers can come along for the ride.

Some writers do actually try to write as diverse or as vague of a reader character as possible- as few details about the body, identity, etc. as possible so anyone could superimpose their image without the narrative directly contradicting it. This is not the kind of reader insert author I will be discussing.

The kind of author I will be discussing is the one most common in the Star Wars tag on Ao3: White, AFAB, cisgender, gender-conforming, able-bodied women who assume all of their readers are also White, AFAB, cisgender, gender-conforming, able-bodied women. Yes, you can tell.

ISSUE: fetishization of men of color

Again, this post puts it in the best words, but there is a rampant problem with Star Wars reader-inserts, particularly those involving the clones, Boba Fett, and Din Djarin, fetishizing characters played by men of color as either “physically aggressive and threatening, hypersexual and dominant, big strong men who are scary because they do violence and fuck constantly when they’re not” or “completely inexperienced baby who doesn’t know anything about things and needs a gentle nurturing guiding touch to introduce him to the mere idea of a vagina.” The former is common across all of them, the latter most common among clone trooper fics or Din/Reader.

I went into the Boba Fett/Reader tag on Ao3, because I like him and hoped to find something alright. Here are some stats I tallied up (give or take some) based solely on tags, summaries, and warnings:

There are 284 works in the Boba Fett/Reader category as of the time of this post.

198/284 are rated E for explicit sexual content. 69.7% of all Boba Fett/Reader works are sexually explicit.

259/284 are in the F/M category. 91.2% of all Boba Fett/Reader works involve an explicitly female or AFAB reader.

24/284 are tagged with or mention “Age difference,” “Older man/Younger woman,” “Innocence kink” or “Virginity kink.” 8.4% of all Boba Fett/Reader works are written explicitly with an age gap, with Boba Fett as the older party

26/198 E rated fics are tagged with or make reference to “Daddy kink” or involve the reader being called some variation of “little girl” by Boba. 13% of all E-rated works under Boba Fett/Reader are daddy kink fics, or allude to Boba Fett being a daddy dom/sugar daddy.

102/198 E rated fics are tagged as, make reference to, or suggest in the summary that Boba Fett takes a dominant sexual role with a submissive reader involving rough or painful play, or make reference to Boba Fett being frightening, physically intimidating, having a power dynamic over the reader, or being possessive or violent. 51.51% of all E-rated works under Boba Fett/Reader portray Boba Fett as sexually dominant and/or enacting use of physical force or pain play.

Just using this as an example, because it’s the easiest stats I can gather and also what made me realize there was a pattern.

The problem isn’t even necessarily that people write explicit fic about Boba- it’s that 1) over half of all fics in the category are explicitly pornographic, and 2) the way those pornographic fics are written. The two things compound on each other. They’re dominance fantasies projected onto a character of color in which he becomes extremely sexual, physically rough with the reader, possessive, and demeaning towards a reader character who is always written as White, AFAB, and petite.

This brings me to the next issue.

ISSUE: The way sexual relationships are portrayed.

Let me clarify so there is no chance of me being misunderstood: sex is good. Liking and wanting and enjoying sex isn’t bad. It is not bad if you are AFAB and have submissive fantasies. It is not bad to be sexually attracted to a man of color. You can write about sex even if you haven’t had it. Writing about sex can be a good way to express some more complicated feelings you could have about certain things. It doesn’t even have to be realistic. It has its time and it has its place.

This being said.

Sexual relationships as they are portrayed in the vast majority of E-rated Star Wars reader inserts are… not great.

The reader is always AFAB. I can think of maybe one fic off the top of my head where an AFAB reader was written with they/them pronouns and not just she/her.

The reader is almost always submissive, the dominant character is almost always portrayed as cis male. Even when the characters are supposed to just be having spontaneous casual sex, D/S or BDSM aspects will be introduced with no prior discussion or talks about it afterwards. Sometimes characters will start using dirty talk and it just does not fit at all, but it’s what the author thought was hot.

Sometimes, it just reads like a quick smutty oneshot. More often than that, it reads like the author doesn’t realize that sex… isn’t always a dom/sub thing. Or that someone can take the lead in sex and that doesn’t automatically make them a dom.

It’s not bad to be inexperienced. It’s not bad to have preferences or kinks or specific turn-ons.

But it gets… tiring to read, over and over and over and over, because that’s all there is.

That and… I dunno, it just has me a little worried? It doesn’t make me feel good knowing so many people can only portray a sexual relationship if it’s dom/sub. I don’t know why it makes me so uneasy.

Vanilla sex isn’t a bad thing I promise. It's this feeling of insistence that something "spicy" absolutely has to happen for it to be worth writing that gives... some weird vibes.

I’m going to move on to the next Big-

ISSUE: Every “reader” character is exactly the same

By which I mean the following:

Always cis AFAB female

If a character is written with gender neutral pronouns they will always be AFAB and written like Girl Lite

I have never seen an explicitly stated nonbinary/gnc reader character unless it was a request specifically for a nonbinary reader

I have never seen a gender neutral reader insert fic where the reader was AMAB

I have seen a grand total of 1 cis male reader fic and 1 trans male reader fic. The trans male reader fic was about dysphoria.

The reader is allowed to have one of the following backstories: slave/runaway, mechanic, medic, ex-Rebel, secret Jedi, bounty hunter.

The reader is allowed to have one of the following personality traits: throws knives, babysitter, completely civilian, WOMAN, says curse words.

The reader is never written with any narrative agency- things only ever happen to the reader character or around the reader character, they are never written to take charge and actually affect things on their own. Essentially the sexy lamp trope.

Remember when I said the majority of people writing Star Wars reader-insert fanfic on Ao3 were White, cisgender AFAB women who are gender-conforming and able-bodied? This is how you can tell.

It’s at this point where you can tell they’re really not meant to be reader-inserts, but author-inserts with the names removed- they were only meant for a very narrow selection of readers.

I’m nonbinary, I’m gnc, and I’m a very feminine looking person, generally speaking. I’m used to people looking at me and assuming oh, girl. I’m at peace with that.

I can barely stand reading some of these fics just because of how much the author emphasizes that the reader is FEMALE shes a WOMAN with BOOBS and a VAGINA and FEMININE WILES. There’s barely ever even a chance to give myself room to mentally vault over all the “she”s and “her”s because then I’m getting hit with Din or someone calling the reader “girl” or “the woman.” It’s unbearable, and I even fall into the general description every fucking fic author uses for their generic protagonist!

Even with the “gender-neutral reader” fics, it is just. Painfully clear that they just wrote a female character and changed the pronouns- no, there is no such thing as “male behavior” or “female behavior,” and I quite heartily rebel against the concept of gender essentialism. And honestly, I can barely even begin piecing together how I know it and what it feels like, because it’s just one of those vague conglomerates of cues and writing patterns I can’t consciously pick up on but I know it’s there- it’s frustrating, it’s demeaning, and it feels like you’d have to threaten these authors at gunpoint to get them to write a reader character who was any major deviation from the same three cutouts they use every time.

It seems like they can’t possibly force themselves to write a reader character who isn’t meek and submissive or has the sole personality traits of “mean and can hit things”- you can actually strike a balance between “absolutely no personality” and “fleshed out oc” you know? And you don’t actually have to tell the reader what their hair looks like or how full their figure is

It’s like 2:20 AM and I started this at like 8something PM but.

I’m someone who loves reader-inserts. I enjoy them. I still check for new ones regularly. I’ve been reading them for well over half my life now.

So many of these authors are just locked in on exactly one way to write things and it fucking shows. It’s like a self-feeding loop, they just keep writing the same things and the same dynamics because they see each other doing it and they never think about taking a step back.

It’s… exhausting. I’m exhausted. If you’re a reader-insert fic writer and you want to improve your reader character inclusivity and have also read this far, you can DM me or shoot me an ask.

#star wars #x reader #star wars x reader #star wars reader insert #maintagging because for once i actually want ppl to see this #i hope my points are made clearly enough #if something needs clarification you can shoot me a DM or an ask

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elamarth-calmagol · 3 years

Text

What actually is LACE? (an informal essay)

What’s LACE?

Laws and Customs among the Eldar, or LACE, is the most popular section of the History of Middle Earth books. It's available online as a PDF here: http://faculty.smu.edu/bwheeler/tolkien/online_reader/T-LawsandCustoms.pdf . There’s a lot of LACE analysis in the fandom, Silmarillion smut fics are usually labeled “LACE compliant” or “not LACE compliant”, and I’ve been seeing the document itself show up in actual fics, meaning that the characters themselves are discussing it.

LACE is an unfinished, non-canonical essay split into several parts. It covers the sexuality of elves, which is mostly what people talk about. It also covers elvish naming (which I want to make a whole different post about), the speed at which elves grow up, changes that happen throughout their lives, their death and rebirth, and finally the legal and moral issues of Finwe remarrying after Miriel’s death. The discussion about rebirth conflicts with Tolkien’s later writings about Glorfindel’s re-embodiment, but to the best of my knowledge, LACE is the best or only source for most of the topics it covers.

However, LACE is not canon since it doesn’t show up in the Silmarillion. Counting all of the History of Middle Earth as canon is literally impossible, considering Tolkien contradicts himself all over the place. It is only useful because it has so much information that is never discussed in the actual canon. Many people consider it canon out of convenience.

Another important thing to remember is that, other than presumably the discussion of the growth of elvish children, the information is only supposed to apply to the Eldar (meaning the Vanyar, Noldor, Teleri, and Sindar) and not the dark-elves such as the Silvan elves and Avari.

The rest is behind the cut to avoid clogging your feeds.

Problems with LACE interpretations

But because it’s hidden in the History of Middle Earth (volume 10, Morgoth’s Ring), barely anyone actually gets the opportunity to read it. I don’t think most people are aware that you can get it online, so it doesn't get read much.

I feel like this leads to a handful of people saying something about LACE and everyone else going along with it. I definitely did this. I was amazed by all the things that were in the actual essay that nobody had ever told me about, or had told me incorrectly. For example, most people seem to believe that elves become married at the completion of sexual intercourse (whatever that means to the fic author). In fact, LACE explicitly says that elves must take an oath using the name of Eru in order to be legally married. Specifically:

It was the act of bodily union that achieved marriage, and after which the indissoluble bond was complete… [I]t was at all times lawful for any of the Eldar, being both unwed, to marry thus of free consent one to another without ceremony or witness (save blessings exchanged and the naming of the Name); and the union so joined was alike indissoluble.

I’ve seen a marriage oath being included in a few stories recently, but most writers leave out the oath entirely and just have sex be automatically equivalent to marriage. What would happen if elves had sex without swearing an oath? I don’t know, but I’d love to see it explored.

Then there’s a footnote that might explicitly deny the existence of transgender elves... or not, but I’ve literally only seen it mentioned once or twice. Overall, I feel like all of LACE is filtered through the handful of people who read it, and we’re missing out on a lot of metanalysis and interpretations that we could have because most fans never see the actual document.

Who wrote LACE?

I mean within the mythology of Middle Earth, of course. Since LACE appears in the History of Middle Earth and not the Silmarillion, we can be pretty sure that J.R.R. Tolkien himself wrote it and it wasn’t added to by Christopher Tolkien. But that’s not the question here. Remember that Tolkien’s frame narrative for all of his Middle Earth work is that he is a scholar of ancient times and is translating documents from Westron and Sindarin for modern audiences to read and understand. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings come from the Red Book of Westmarch, and I believe The Silmarillion is meant to be Tolkien’s own writings based on his research (though it might also be an adaption of Bilbo’s “Translations from the Elvish”, but I haven't looked into that). So what does LACE come from?

Christopher Tolkien admits in his notes that he doesn’t know. He says, “It is clear in any case that this is presented as the work, not of one of the Eldar, but of a Man,” and I agree, because of the way it seems to be written as an ethnographic study rather than by someone who lives in the culture. Honestly, it talks too much about how elves are seen by Men (e.g. speculating that elf-children might look like the children of Men) to be written by an elf. This changes once it gets to the Doom of Finwe and Miriel, but that could be, and probably is, a story told to the writer by an elf who was there at the time.

Tolkien actually references Aelfwine in the second version of the text. The original story behind The Lost Tales, which was the abandoned first version of the Silmarillion, was that a man from the Viking period named Aelfwine/Eriol stumbled onto the Straight Road and found himself on Tol Eressea. He spoke to the elves and brought back their stories to England with him. So it makes a lot of sense that Aelfwine would also write about the lives and customs of the elves for an audience of his own people.

Does LACE exist in Middle Earth?

I keep finding fics where first age elves discuss “the Laws and Customs” openly, as if it’s a text in their own world. I usually get the impression that it was brought by the Noldor from Valinor. But did the document actually exist in that time period? For me, the answer is definitely not.

First of all, LACE was probably written by a Man, meaning it could not have dated back to Valinor in the years of the Trees, because Men hadn’t awaked yet. In fact, the closest thing to an established frame narrative for it is that it was written by Aelfwine, who comes from the time period around 1000 CE (though Tolkien doesn’t seem to have pinned him down). This is at least the fifth age, if not later.

But what if you don’t believe that it was written by a Man? It still couldn’t have been written in the First Age, because it discusses the way the relationship between elves’ bodies and souls changes as ages go by. For example:

As ages passed the dominance of their fear ever increased, ‘consuming’ their bodies... The end of this process is their ‘fading’, as Men have called it.

A lot of time has to go by in order for elves to get to the point of fading. As a bonus, here’s another reference to the perspective of Men. LACE also discusses the dangers that “houseless feas”, which are souls of elves who do not go to Mandos after their bodies died, pose to Men. How would they have known about that in the First Age? It further says that “more than one rebirth is seldom recorded” (which isn’t contradicted anywhere I know of), and that’s not something you would know during your life of joy in Valinor, where almost nobody dies. That’s something you learn after millennia of war. This has to be a document written well after the Silmarillion ends.

So what about the sex part? That’s all we care about, right? Well, it is entirely possible that this was written down by the elves and Aelfwine translated it (though my impression is that he mostly recorded stories told orally to him and that elves were not very much into writing, at least in Valinor where you could get stories directly from someone who experienced them). However, why would the elves write this down? They know how quickly their children grow up. They’ve seen actual marriages. They don’t need that described to them. And if they did have a specific document or story explaining the expectations of them when it comes to sex and marriage, why would they call it “Laws and Customs”? That’s a very strange name for a set of rules for conduct. I’m sure they had a list of laws written out somewhere in great detail, like our own state or national laws (that seems very in character for the Noldor, at least). But I seriously doubt that those laws are what we’ve been given to read. LACE is not an elvish or Valinoran document.

Is LACE prescriptive or descriptive?

Here’s the other big question I’m interested in. Prescriptive means that the document describes the way people should behave. Descriptive means that it describes how people do behave. And the more I worldbuild for Middle Earth and the culture of elves, the more I want to say that LACE is prescriptive in its discussion of sex, marriage, and gender roles.

But wait. I’ve been saying for paragraphs that I think LACE is Aelfwine or another Man’s ethnographic study of elvish culture. Then it has to be descriptive, right?

Does it? How long do we think Aelfwine stayed with the elves? Did he wait fifty years to see a child grow up? Did he get to witness a wedding ceremony? Did he meet houseless fea? I don’t think he could have done all of that. Maybe a different Man who spent his entire life with the elves could, but then when was this written? When the elves were still marrying and having children in Middle Earth or when so much time had gone by that they had begun to fade already?

Whoever wrote this was told a lot of information by elves instead of experiencing it firsthand, the same way he heard the stories from the First Age from the elves instead of being there. Maybe it was one elf who talked to him, maybe several different ones. But did those elves accurately describe their society the way it was, give him the easiest description, or explain the way it was supposed to be? If I was describing modern-day America, would I discuss premarital sex or just our dating and marriage customs? Maybe people would come away from a talk with me thinking that moving in together equated to marriage for Americans in the early 21st century. And I don’t even have an agenda to show America in a certain way, I'm just bad at explaining. Did the elves talking to what may have been the first Man they had seen in millennia have an agenda in the way they presented themselves?

Or did the writer himself have an agenda? Imagine going to see these beautiful, mythical, perfect beings, and you find out that they behave in the same immoral ways Men do. Do you want to share the truth back home? Or do you leave out things that don't match your worldview? Did Aelfwine come back wanting to tell people what elves were really like? Or did he want to say “this is how you can be holy and perfect like an elf”?

Anyone studying the Age of Exploration will tell you that Europeans neber wrote about new cultures objectively, and often things were made up to fit the writer’s idea of what savages looked like. For example, my Native American history teacher in college told a story of how explorers described one tribe who (sensibly) didn't wear clothes as cannibals, because cannibalism and going around naked went together in their minds and not because of any actual incident. Unbiased scholarship barely existed yet. Even Tolkien was extremely biased and tended to be imperialistic, as we all know. There’s absolutely no reason to think that Aelfwine wasn’t biased in his own way. (Of course, now we have to consider what biases a Danish or English man from the centuries around 1000 would have when it comes to things like gender roles. I assume he would have been more into divorce and female warriors than the elves are said to be.)

But is that what Tolkien intended? Probably not. He probably wanted LACE to be descriptive. But he also never got much of a chance to analyse the essay after the fact, which might have led to him discussing its accuracy and even the exact issues I just pointed out about explorers. Anyway, we know he's biased, and honestly, what he intended has never slowed down the fandom before.

Conclusion

In short, I take LACE to be a prescriptive document describing the way elvish culture is supposed to be, not a blueprint I have to stick to in order to correctly portray elves. I also don’t believe the document that’s available for us to read existed even in the early Fourth Age, where The Lord of the Rings leaves off. There maybe have been some document outlining the moral behavior of elves, as a set of laws, but thats not the Laws and Customs we have.

Of course, canon is up to you to interpret. If you want Feanor discussing LACE with someone back in Valinor, go ahead. If you want to throw out LACE entirely, go ahead. It’s not even a canonical essay. All of this analysis is honestly useless when you consider the fact that no part of LACE exists in any canonical book.

But that’s Tolkien analysis for you.

#lotr #silmarillion #tolkien #laws and customs of the eldar #history of middle earth #silm #analysis #meta #headcanon #long post #mine

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lais-a-ramos · 4 years

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ok, this one is kind of a hard topic, and i appologize in advance for any mistakes i make or not being articulate enough

all the concearns over ppl in fandom hyping the only prominent white character, christina, in lovecraft country instead of the black characters are valid and the critique is definitely important, once it's common for ppl in fandom to either erase the half of a couple that is a BIPOC or to deny a canon cis het biracial ship to hype up a fanon white wlw ship and other problematic stuff plenty of times in LGBTQ+ fandom spaces.

but i also think we can't dismiss the entirety of the ship only bc the same LGBTQ+ fans are back at it again with their problematic behaviour, especially bc of its significance for black women and feminine-aligned nb folks who feel attraction to woman/feminine-aligned nbs -- lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, biromantic, panromantic etc.

for what i've seen so far, this ship is very important for black women and female-aligned nbs bc finally we have a dark-skinned black woman, who is also fat, to be treated with absolute respect and consideration and be passionately desired in a way that is not some kind of secret fetish or played for laughs, treated as being as worthy of being courted and romanced as her light-skinned and skinny half-sister.

christina respects ruby's choice and agency for most of the time -- i think the exception may be that first time ruby transformed into hillary;

she immediately explains to ruby her plans and intentions whenever ruby questions her behaviour and demands answers, including ruby in her plans when even ruby's loved ones keep secrets from her; she gives her all these baths and caresses her so softly, literally bathing her with affection and desire; she woos her with vows of devotion; and even tried to understand what ruby said when she asked her to try to understand her pain -- albeit in a fucked up way that only a privileged and sheltered girl raised in an enviroment in which magic is real and present in ppl's daily lives possibly could.

christina overall acknowledges that ruby is a woman with her own emotions, motivations, hopes, dreams, wants, needs and desires, and that's something y'all should keep in mind because i'll return to that later.

overall, these things i described are actually the basic that a person should do for the one they call their lover, and in no way erase the fact that christina is willing to kill innocent ppl to accomplish her goals of self-protection, nor turn these things acceptable from a moral standpoint.

but it's not the kind of treatment black women and feminine-aligned nbs receive, neither in fiction or in real life, by the way.

there are specific forms of misogyny that black women and female-aligned nbs face in which we are read as aggressive or animalistic, oversezualized or stripped from our sexuality and have our femininity denied if we don't check the boxes of what society deems acceptable.

there's this interview wumni mosaku gave for elle magazine U.S. in which she discusses her personal experiences with this problem, and how these eurocentric standards of femininity forced her to act in an overtly nice manner as a way to make sure ppl will treat her kindly instead of with suspicion and assuming she is aggressive.

that is because of the ways race and gender intersect creating a very complex scenario when it comes to definitions, experiences and stereotypes of femininity.

white women are overall treated with an authomatic presumption of innocence, as delicate and frail flowers who must be protected at all costs, especially if they are from upper classes -- that is something that is actually held against low-income white women, who are expected to adhere to certain standards to have their femininity acknowledged.

but, as we can see by that moment in episode 1x05, "strange case", when ruby as hillary is escorted by the policemen to her supposed husband who is actually christina shapeshifted , and, actually, by christina's entire motivations and characterization, that very same presumption of innocence is one of the sources of their oppression, because they are infantilized and stripped of their agency in favor of the men in their lives -- husbands, brothers, fathers etc --, being stopped and/or forbidden to do things cis het men usually get to and are expected to do.

in spite of this paradox, white women still have a privilege when compared to black women, because they're are still seen as ppl that belong to the world of affections and are worthy of receiving love, care and concearn for their wellbeing.

but that is not the case with black women.

usually, we are reserved two roles: one that revolves around being hypersexualized for men's consumption, both white and black alike; and the other, in which we are seen as "beasts of burden", carrying the weight in terms of work, emotions and so on, being expected to be desensitized to experiences and problems that no human would be expected to. sometimes, these two roles actually cross paths.

here in brazil, black activism and academics have been calling it "solidão da mulher negra", "the loneliness of black woman", and i think it's a very pertinent and powerful way to describe it.

and, that is the thing, when you're a black woman or feminine-aligned nb that doesn't fit into this role of being sexualized, you can feel this loneliness go a step further, because all that is left for you is that beast of burden part.

you end up not only being cast aside and abandoned by cis het white men and black men alike if you're attracted to men, but, overall, everyone in your social circle, including family, relatives and friends, expect you to be this source of strength and carry weights and resist to things ALL. THE. TIME.

and, guess what type of women and feminine-aligned nbs usually don't fit into this role of being sexualized????

the ones that are dark-skinned, fat, bulky, or any combination of these.

it's a combination of colorism, fatphobia, misogynoir and other factors that come to play, really.

one can check a few boxes, or check them all.

i myself don't check the "dark-skinned" box because, as a biracial women, i have light-skin privilege -- even though my skin is not as light as jurnee smollett's, who plays ruby's half-sister letitia "leti" lewis. but i sure have dealt with the consequences of not having the right body type for my whole life. i've been one of the "fat kids" for all my teen years, and, even now that i lost weight because of health issues, i'm still bulky and with large shoulders, feet and hands bigger than what is expected for women, and for most of my life i've felt in a similar way than what wumni mosaku describes on that elle magazine interview i mentioned earlier.

now, ruby literally checks ALL. THE. FUCKING. BOXES.

while we haven't seen much of her past, for the tidbits we got we can imagine that she had to be the responsible one in her family, being the older child, and basically raise her two siblings while their mom neglected them.

and we can see that, while the producers and writers changed a lot of her characterization from the source material -- in the part of the book i am right now, she has yet to show up, but the way she's described she seems more domestic and the shrinking violet type like show!hippolyta at the begining -- she is still seen as someone respected in her community and a source of strength -- e.g. being trusted to take care of dee.

and that clearly takes a toll on her, because everyone in-universe seems to expect her to be this mammy type or a role model, "a credit to the race" -- which is kind of ironic, given that it seems the audience seem to expect this of her as well.

and she puts all this pressure on herself because of it, and, while she is a woman with a very active sexual life, she seems overall very unsatisfied and repressed.

interrupted, as ruby herself perfectly put.

everyone seems to expect something of her at home, and not only all of her goals in the professional realm seem to be frustrated by social structures of oppression, but even her relationship goals as well, given that most of the men that she gets involved with, whether they are black or white, seem to believe they have the right to abandon her and treat her like trash because she doesn't feel a thing and is "strong" enough.

and that is where christina comes in.

now, it's true that the character that's pointed by many as a representation of white feminism surely is problematic in many ways, including her "colorblind" approach to racial issues, which is a particular form of racism that comes from an indifference towards social issues that steem from the privilege of not having to worry about said racial issues because one's not affected by them.

but, inspite of this colorblindness, or precisely because of it, christina sees ruby not for the roles she plays in other ppl's lives, but as the woman with her own emotions, motivations, hopes, dreams, wants, needs and desires that she is (see??? i told y'all to keep that in mind because it would be useful later).

some of these things might not be politically correct, like wondering what would it be like to be white and not have to deal with all the bullshit she has to.

some of these things might be dowright immoral and unethical, like the revenge fantasy she made come true against that abusive, sexual harasser and possibily rapist that was the guy from the department store that appeared in episode 1x05.

but, they are what makes ruby, well, ruby.

they are what makes her human, what humanizes her.

and christina accepts all of it, all that makes ruby who she is.

like the av club review for episode 9 pointed out, the two women are actually not that different when it comes to motivations: the stakes might be different for them because christina is protected by her whiteness and wealth, but both of them want the same thing in the end -- to not feel interrupted by the social restraints that bind them.

and that is what draws them to each other and feel attracted to each other, even though they might not understand quite well what to be queer means to them, or even avoided/repressed the question altogether as they grew up.

they are two points that seem opposite, and might as well be in some ways, but belong to the same axis that is gender and sexuality.

their relationship is incredibly complex and layered because of all these intersecctions.

ruby and christina's relationship is all about revealing different parts of yourself to the other and peeling each other's layers (sorry for the pun, but, it was just there lol), and, because of this, it's no wonder that it's seen as more romantic than, say, tic and leti's relationship, that seems to be playing out like plenty of cis heterosexual relationships, moving too fast because of the passion involved and what society expects, without the two of them being able to truly proccess and decide what they want, something that will defintely get more complicated now there's a baby on the way.

everything is so raw between ruby and christina, quite literally (it's one ot the things i love the most about all the gory scenes between them, it's a very clever way of using a fantastical setting to highlight these metaphors and symbolism).

with all of this, it shouldn't be a surprise that many sapphic black women and feminine-aligned nbs relate so much to ruby and got so attached to this relationship.

it's not because they endorse the problematic stuff christina or ruby have done -- although, well, to be fair, in a show that draws inspiration from pulp fiction magazines, particularly horror and detective/mystery stories, all characters are expected to be problematic and do fucked up things.

it's because queer black women and feminine-aligned nbs, regardless of whether they check only a few of the boxes i mentioned before or check all of them, can relate to this feeling of loneliness that the producers and writers portrayed so well with ruby -- but also with hippolyta, and dee too.

and for relating to these feelings, they relate to this relationship between ruby and christina.

and it's kind of hard to know what's gonna happen next in the show and the future of this ship

hell, even know whether the show is gonna be renewed or not.

but this should be a lesson for the future, on this fandom and others, to try and consider the perspectives of LGBTQ+ black ppl in these spaces, because, when you don't do that, you're basically reproducing, in a space we should be safe to have fun, the same oppression and silencing we deal on a daily basis

#lovecraft country #ruby baptiste #christina braithwhite #ruby x christina #lgbtq #lgbtqiap+#black women #black representation #character analysis #character meta #meta

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bulkhummus · 2 years

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Bulk, I'm thinking thoughts and need your input: at what point does disliking a female character goes from simply not liking the character to sexism?

I've seen some discussion about it in a fandom I'm in but it's always so unclear that I don't even know if I'm interpreting correctly most of the time tbh

This is a loaded question, and I’m going to preface that I can only offer my own opinion and experiences regarding creating, reading and discussing female characters!

A good rule of thumb is just asking yourself, “Would I be as critical of this characters actions/attitude/role if they were male?” If the answer is yes, than you hate the character, and not because she’s female. If it’s no, than you just hate that a character is female.

With most things, context is important, and there is no formula or line. Place the character in context. Characters are there to tell and propel a story. If a female character is written poorly, it’s hard to connect with that character and their place in the story. A lot of writers (even female writers too) stumble when writing female characters because they think they have to do something different, and often forget that women are just people. By removing the gender entirely when thinking about a character, you can determine what the character does for the story, and if you find they’re a weak link, or poorly written, than it’s just the character you dislike. But again, because so many female characters are written poorly/hollow/ throwaways, it becomes common to hate female characters, because they are bad characters and you see the problematic cycle! Sure some things are innately female and male (even this is a simplified statement and I’d argue not true but for the sake of what I’m trying to say here we’ll assume the characters are cis, because trans characters are a whole other discussion) but almost everything is shared by them, because, we’re all people! You see it in the way heterosexual relationships are written, because more often than not, the male lead has more chemistry with his best friend than his girlfriend because, guess what, the people who suck at writing female characters also suck at writing those characters in relationships. It’s the men are from Mars and women are from Venus conundrum— and its ridiculous and outdated.

You can hate characters that are written to be hated that are female. You can hate poorly written characters that are female.

You can’t hate a character who is female just because she’s doing traditionally feminine things, because she’s ruining your ‘ship’, or because you think she’s behaving in a way that women don’t (ie. strength/skills, attitude— see: cocky, not liking men, dressing more masculine, dressing more feminine, being too smart, etc.) because I promise you there are women out there that are that way and do do those things, even if you can’t conceive it/ won’t believe it.

There’s a bunch of things that I’m not discussing here for the sake of being brief, but for the most part this is what I think about when I find myself disliking a character.

You get me? Hope that helps! And as always, ask multiple people for their opinions, because I‘m just one person.

#ask tag #anon

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enbee-ai · 3 years

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gender, sexuality, and Bokuto's queerness

This was meant to be the first part of my post about Bokuto’s feelings towards Akaashi, but I think it deserves its own post after all.

Akaashi’s homosexuality has been discussed over and over again, mostly because it is quite easy to prove: he has never shown any kind of interest towards girls... or anyone other than Bokuto, so that is the natural conclusion to draw.

Now, we don’t have the actual confirmation for this, huh, theory, which is the whole point: no character is given a precise label in canon. We know Yachi has been attracted to Kyoko, much like Nishinoya and Tanaka; Kyoko is attracted to guys (referencing what we know from chapter 401), we see some couples in the background, Oikawa has a girlfriend; we have seen most of the Nekoma VBC talking about girls. Even so, there's no reason why these characters couldn’t be read as queer, since attraction to one gender doesn’t exclude attraction to more genders.

With that in mind, Akaashi was written to be interpreted as gay (and in love with his best friend, wink wonk). Actually, if we draw our conclusion only based on canon, I'm pretty certain that no other interpretation is possible.

As for Bokuto's relationship with gender and sexuality, I consider it the most complex we have seen.

We need to consider the nuances and the hints that are purposefully written so queer people can read the characters as they were meant to be read in the first place.

Bokuto has expressed multiple times an interest in girls—except, he has quite a different approach than other characters in the manga. We see his teammates and managers trying to cheer him up from his slumps by telling him he has been given compliments by a girl; he behaves similarly to Tanaka towards Kyoko; he says he “likes plump girls, too” in hq bu. Still, his interest remains abstract throughout: he never talks about his type like Nekoma does, or about girls he might be interested in, he never hints at a possible (ex) girlfriend as it happens with Oikawa or Daishou. That, of course, doesn’t dismiss his attraction to girls, which is very real. On the other hand, the implications are that there might be something more to it, something that suggests his attraction to men, as well.

(all of the panels I am taking into account are from haikyuu!! bu)

Evidence 1:

Here we have a fun scene of this boy, whose name I do not remember, sorry, being anxious about his date with his girlfriend (“Isn’t this a little too much?! A date at the beach with my girlfriend?”), while Mika and Daishou are being lovey-dovey in the background. We are presented this situation as different couples being on dates. Then we have Bokuto and Akaashi, on what cannot be defined as anything other than a date of their own. Their purpose is, along with Mika and Daishou, to create contrast: they are comfortable and used to each other’s company, while the first couple seems quite nervous (that's important for the plot lol).

They take part in a volleyball match, so there is no reason why it would be just Bokuto and Akaashi participating, out of the whole Fukurodani VBC (It is a 2v2, it could’ve been good and fun practice for everyone). Instead, bokuaka is presented exactly like the other two couples.

(note that Bokuto openly says he was distracted by the girl they were playing against, while Akaashi couldn't even phantom something like that... I live for openly bi/pan Bokuto and dense Akaashi)

Evidence 2:

Here, Bokuto and Kiryuu are being interviewed as two of the top aces. I don’t think there’s any need for me to explain this panel, but I’ll do it anyway. I find it very telling that Bokuto is thinking about guys in the same way Akaashi thinks of Bokuto (a greek god). “swinging around an axe shirtless... truly a king of the mountain bandits!” makes me go feral, personally.

Evidence 3:

This scene was actually what prompted me to make this post in the first place. Here, we see Bokuto and Kiryuu posing for a picture; the latter is perplexed, “Bokuto--that’s a pose for a guy and a girl to do together.” But Bokuto doesn’t seem to mind one bit, even when it is quite clear that he is posing like a girl would (at least according to Kiryuu, and instead makes a point to convince him to pose in a different way than usual.

This ultimately proves that Bokuto doesn’t see gender and gender roles in a conventional way. He doesn’t seem to care if people don’t see him as a cool masculine guy. He is one of the most, if not the most, emotional character in Haikyuu, despite it being often considered a, huh, “feminine” trait. He isn’t afraid to openly show his feelings, is extremely emotionally aware, and has also said “choudai” which is very amusing (it is mostly used by women or children).

(in this sense, haikyuu continuously breaks this kind of stereotypes throughout the series)

All of this can honestly be interpreted however you want—enby Bokuto? Bi Bokuto? Pan Bokuto? Trans Bokuto? Ace Bokuto??? Everything's valid and amazing. But I think, ultimately, it is safe to say that there’s no way Bokuto wasn’t written to be interpreted as queer, at least by the non-cishet part of the fandom.

TL;DR: Bokuto is hinted to feel similar attraction both towards men and women and to have an unconventional view of gender; he has gone on a date with Akaashi in hq bu, and was written as a queer character.

#bokuaka #bokuaka canon #akaashi keiji #haikyuu!!#akaashi #hq #haikyuu bokuaka #bokuaka meta #hq!!#haikyuu bu #bokuto koutarou #bokuto kotarou #bokuto kotaro #i hc bokuto as pan and also demisexual maybe 👀

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c-is-for-circinate · 4 years

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So here’s the thing: I really, honestly do not get the appeal in Widojest. I don’t entirely see the appeal in Caleb Widogast. And I’m okay with that; I have other faves who I pay more attention to; I get to do that, because my show is 3-5 hours long every goddamn week that it airs and there is plenty of time for literally everyone. And I do not have to be a Caleb stan to understand at a really fundamental level that, hey, even if he isn’t important to me? He is very clearly very important to a lot of actual real-live people.

There will always, always be stories that aren’t for you. Maybe they just don’t speak to you at all. Maybe they hit buttons in your brain that remind you of real hurts. It’s always going to happen. In a perfect world, with perfect representation where there are stories for you everywhere, there will still be stories that aren’t.

And it hurts, I know it does, when you feel like the story you want for you doesn’t exist anywhere, but here’s one more story that isn’t it. It hurts when there’s a story that you thought was for you and then it turns out not to care about you at all. There should be more stories for all of us, especially the stories that feel like they’re not getting told.

That is a real, valid pain. We all clear on that?

Good. Because this next part is also absolutely true:

The story that is not for you is very important to someone else. And particularly in fandom spaces, there is a very good chance that the someone else in question has experienced marginalization on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, disability, mental illness, or general trauma.

The story that is not for you has worth.

People who find worth in stories that are not for you--even if your story is underrepresented and their story really has been told one hundred billion times before, even then--ARE NOT INHERENTLY BAD PEOPLE for finding worth in those stories.

There’s this extra dimension to this particular ship war, where I think a lot of Beaujester shippers are so angry not because of what’s actually happened, but because of what years of pattern recognition has taught them (taught us?) must inevitably be coming next. When a leading man in a fantasy series, on an arc of learning to better himself and maybe even value or forgive himself, repeatedly expresses unrequited love for a girl who he believes is too good for him, the narrative will give her to him in the end. This is a pattern and it’s real and its existence hurts, outside of Widojest, just in general in the world.

And on one hand: that has not happened yet with Widojest, and there is a very good chance, for a million reasons, that it won’t! And on the other hand: even if it did happen, that would not be an excuse for violent or abusive behavior, or to dismiss the worth that story might have to other people! And on the third hand: yes, I totally see why it feels like that’s the trope being invoked here, and why that is scary, and why it hurts!

We know about Caleb’s feelings in this one specific way and we don’t know about Jester’s. In theory that means that Jester’s feelings could be ANYTHING, and this could go ANYWHERE, and of course Caleb and Liam would respect Jester and Laura’s ‘no’, and there is plenty of agency all around and that’s great. In practice, it can feel like another reminder of that old trope, where the male lead character’s emotions are given to the audience like something important, and the female lead character’s feelings are generally passed off as vague platonic affection until the final romantic reveal, and we have to extrapolate what was going through her head the whole time.

We know that Critical Role cares about representation and queer visibility, and without a network to fight, they get to make the show as gay as they want. In theory this means that we can trust them to give us the rep we’re craving. In practice, we worry, because in an ad-libbed show where you don’t have to plan ahead or deliberately fight for representation, it’s easy to accidentally slip into old familiar patterns and biases without even noticing they’re there.

We know that Laura’s agency and Jester’s agency matter here, that of course it’s not just about Caleb, and in theory that should make ANY romantic ending better and good and right and fine, but in practice--well, what does it mean, when you’ve got agency over a story, and use it to choose to tell what feels like the same old story all over again?

And right, let me say it again: none of this has happened yet. QUITE LIKELY NONE OF IT EVER WILL. We don’t know!!! Not even the players know!!!

Which, maybe that’s the scariest thing of all. When I’m watching a scripted show, I usually know what to expect out of the formula. I know when a show is going to be queerbaity and then quit gay chicken at the last second. I expect it. I can feel out how trustworthy the showrunners are in a few episodes, and while sometimes there’s a long slow decline or a short sharp surprise, after 20-30 years of media engagement, I know what I’m going to get.

I suspect that CR feels like it should be more “trustworthy,” to many Beaujester shippers, in terms of providing the kind of story they’re craving--but it’s so hard to know for sure. It’s so hard to know whether to brace for disappointment, or be resigned, or ragequit and be done with it, or most terrifyingly at all, to be hopeful.

It’s hard. I do get that it’s hard.

And it’s really easy, isn’t it, to go on twitter and tumblr and into the comments sections on critrole.com and fuck knows where else, I’m assuming there’s a Discord somewhere that I’m not cool enough to know about, and be furious. To be mean. To blame the fear of not getting the story that will mean something to me, again, on anyone else. To make fucking death threats, I don’t even know why that seems acceptable or easy to anyone, but it’s just words typed on a keyboard, so yeah, I guess it’s easy.

Do not fucking do that! Don’t do it! Whether you identify with everything I’ve said here or you have a completely different reason to be full of rage and fury, don’t do the furious threats thing! Just don’t! That, also, is easy!!! And doing absolutely nothing is at least as effective as being violently angry at strangers on the internet, so it has that going for it as well.

There are a lot of feelings to be had here, and I’m sure not going to sum them all up or solve the problem of representation in fiction in one tumblr post, but maybe we can change this discussion a little. Maybe we can redirect.

I started this post by saying that I’m not the world’s biggest Caleb fan. I don’t mind him, but his story doesn’t particularly speak to me. I don’t love the amount of space he takes up in the ongoing fandom discussion. I particularly don’t love that every single time he comes up, the volume of discussion doubles because of people vociferously objecting to every single thing about him.

So I find the parts of the story that are for me. I let the people who want to have Caleb discussions have their Caleb discussions, because they are enjoying a thing they like and I’m glad for him, and then I host a discussion about Beau or Fjord or Caduceus or whoever, because I WANT TO HAVE FUN TOO. I am watching this show because it is full to the brim with things I like and have thoughts about. There is SO MUCH OF THAT TO GO AROUND.

#critical role #fuck it I'm maintagging this #beaujester #discourse #go hog wild in the reblogs y'all #as always abusive asks/replies get ignored #genuine asks/replies get answered as the executive function allows #which is to say probably not but I'll give it a go

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henshengs · 3 years

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About Rule 63 fanworks

I was asked yesterday to elaborate on my genderbend opinions, as a trans person, which I’m happy to do, and I’ve thought about it a bit today to make sure I’m not saying something off the cuff and not thought through. Still, this is a sensitive, complicated topic, and I’m open to discussion on it.

This also got long, so I’m putting it under a cut.

So, obviously I can’t speak for all trans people. No minority group is a monolith in our opinions and this is particularly the case for the transgender community because our experiences are so very diverse and individual.

I am very rarely hurt or offended by genderbends/genderswaps/rule 63 fanworks. I know people for whom this is not the case, and I believe the pain involved is very real. The thing is... living in this world is inherently kinda painful when you’re trans. This world’s not built for us. All kinds of random things can cause me pain throughout my day. Store mannequins. My own reflection. Lesbian poetry. Pictures of other trans people. When something triggers my dysphoria or feelings of alienation, I have to stop, acknowledge the feeling, and then consider whether the thing is, outside of hurting me, contributing to the ignorance of and hatred of people like me by its very existence.

I don’t think the basic act of asking, “What if this character who is a cis man, was a cis woman instead?” does that. I think if anything, it opens the door to then ask “what if he was a trans man? Or a trans woman? Or nonbinary?”

Asking “what if this story was about a cis woman” lets cis women talk about their experiences and see themselves in stories, something I think is valuable! and also can lead to stories exploring sexism and misogyny, things which affect all trans people too!

In the rest of this post I’m going to use the terms “rule 63″ and “genderswap” to refer to the act of creating a fanwork changing a cis/presumed cis man to a cis or not-specified-to-be-trans woman, because this is the vast majority of the work under that label, because most fictional heroes and iconic characters are cis men, and because people who create cis man->trans woman or cis woman->trans man content, in my experience, usually use terms like “trans headcanon” instead.

(A lot of rule 63 fanworks don’t explicitly specify that the now-female character is cis. We can presume that most artists aren’t even thinking about the possibility of the character being trans, but we can presume that for 99.99% of all art, anywhere. It’s not a unique evil of rule 63.)

The claims that rule 63 is inherently transphobic, rather than just something where it’s good to be extra careful to avoid transphobia, as far as I’ve seen, use two arguments: A) that making the character a cis woman is wasting an opportunity to make them a trans person, and this is transphobic, and B) that rule 63 fan art is gender essentialist and cissexist, because it ties gender to physical characteristics.

Argument A doesn’t hold up for me,

because couldn’t one then say that reimagining an abled white cis character as an abled white trans woman is racist and ableist? that reimagining them as an abled trans woman of color is ableist? No transformative reimagining can cover every identity. We say “write what you know” and talk about Own Voices, and that includes cis women who want to write about the experience they know.

It’s also not fair to tell trans people that we must always think about trans experiences, even in our fiction. A lot of the time we don’t want to have to write or think about dysphoria and discrimination and we want to live in the heads of cis characters or even just characters whose AGAB is not mentioned!

And it is also, imo, not a great idea to pressure people who may not be educated about trans experiences to write about trans characters just because they want to explore sexism or write about lesbians.

many, many trans people first begin exploring their gender identity through creating cis rule 63 content, because it’s ‘safer’ than directly engaging with trans content.

With argument B, I agree that a lot of rule 63 art looks like this

and this sucks. To me, though, it’s important that it’s not the genderswap aspect that makes it suck. Artists who do this are also designing original characters with sexist, gender essentialist designs. Artists who don’t draw sexist art in general, also don’t draw sexist rule 63.

(yes, I know She-Hulk is not a rule 63 of regular Hulk. But you guys know the kind of art I’m talking about.)

I’ve also noticed a genre of fanfic that’s like, “if these characters were girls, they’d be sensible and conflict avoidant and none of the plot would happen!” or “what if these violent, tragic male characters were Soft Lesbians who braided each others’ hair” and again, I assume these authors write canonical women the same way. The genderswap part isn’t the bad part, the sexism is.

Non-sexist rule 63 actually, in my opinion, fights gender essentialism and cissexism. When a character is exactly the same except for the ways a gender essentialist world has shaped and pressured them based on their AGAB, that’s a strong statement on the constructed nature of gender!

But the argument that making /any/ change is gender essentialist, is... I understand where it’s coming from. I am a trans person who presents androgynously and I am a hypervisible freak because of it. I would love to live in a society where visible gender markers weren’t a thing! Unfortunately, we don’t live in that society. We live in one where we are constantly under pressure to conform to one of two profiles. There are almost no gender non conforming male characters in popular media. And changing a gender conforming cis man into a gender conforming cis woman seems to me to be a neutral action at worst. Not to mention characters from historical canons, who would be under a ton of pressure to conform.

For physical body type characteristics... 65% of all speaking roles in Hollywood are cis and male. It’s harder to get statistics on other forms of media, but it’s undeniable that overall, most stories are told about cis men who do not have breasts or wide hips. Changing the story to be about a cis woman who has those features is introducing more diversity!

I typed “rule 63″ and “genderswap” into the tumblr search bar today, and I saw a lot of art of women with a variety of aesthetics and body shapes and characteristics, who looked like people I’d see out at the mall.

Again, I sure do wish we lived in a post gender society. But we don’t, and in our society, everyone, myself included, looks at a picture of a person and gender categorizes them based on appearance. It is not wrong for someone to draw “Geralt the Witcher as a hot butch woman” and give her some physical markers generally agreed upon to denote ‘butch woman’ rather than ‘gender conforming man’ to tell the viewer that that is what they have drawn. Just as it is not wrong to draw “my OC who is a hot butch woman who fights monsters” and give her those markers.

Finally, both arguments against genderswaps are, in my opinion, flawed because they implicitly posit the act of creating fanworks of the original, cis male gender conforming character design, as neutral. I think this is incorrect. I think that if you’re going to argue that drawing a cis male character as a cis woman is transphobic, you have to also argue that drawing the character as a cis man is transphobic. But I’ve only seen people do this when a trans headcanon becomes extremely popular in a fandom.

Again, I’m just one person. I’m also biased, because firstly, as I mentioned, rule 63 doesn’t usually trigger my dysphoria; secondly, I almost always come down on the side of “don’t limit what people can explore in fiction; ask them to explore it more sensitively or with more content warnings instead.”

I definitely encourage creators to seek out and listen to a variety of trans opinions. But this is mine: I love rule 63, I make a lot of it myself, and I think if no one created it we’d lose something awesome.

At the end of the day, what I really want is more trans content*, but I’d rather have cis rule 63 than just stories about cis men.

Also: I personally have nothing against the terms genderswap or genderbend. I don’t think it reinforces the gender binary to acknowledge its existence by saying you’re ‘swapping’ the character from being cis with one AGAB to being cis with the other. But I can definitely see the argument against it, so I don’t blame anyone for going with rule 63 instead.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading; I hope you have a nice day, and have fun creating and consuming the fanworks your heart desires. I’ll end by linking this comic, which is just eternally relevant.

(*by which I mean: trans content created by other trans people, that matches my hyperspecific headcanons, likes and dislikes, and doesn’t set off any of my often changing dysphoria triggers. See what I said at the start, about transgender existence being constantly mildly painful. There are many awesome aspects to being trans! This is one of the less awesome.)

#rule 63

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