Dec. 15th, 2015

dreamer_easy: (*writing 8)
... brought to you by premenstrual syndrome and Brintellix, an anti-depressant with side effects including irritability.

So I'm sitting here innocently reading Tumblr, and someone quotes one of the stars of the show How To Get Away With Murder, Conrad Ricamora, who plays half of a gay couple:

"The strangest thing I've noticed is that there are a lot of straight women who are fans of our relationship. I was sitting at a bar and two women approached me saying they were huge fans of the show... They said that a lot of times, when women are portrayed in a relationship with a man, there's a disparity in intelligence, they aren't written as smartly and there's an inequality there. It seems, that with these two guys, there's an equality in their relationship and that's something they want to have a mirror for. They're tired of the damsel in distress stereotype and aren't interested in watching that anymore."
And someone else added this remark in a tag: "what slash fans have been saying for years".

One of the reasons I don't read much fanfic is that it's so cookie cutter. However beautifully it's written, there seems to be a small pool of story ideas, into which fanfic writers simply plug their favourite characters. Now your first thought will be "but most professional fiction in books, on TV, etc, is also cookie cutter stuff". This is true; but fanfic is extolled as subversive and resistant.

If my impression of fanfic's homogeneity is a fair one, then perhaps it's not surprising if fans write slash because they lack the imagination to write equal straight relationships. We demand that TV showrunners under the thumbs of nervous executives and advertisers give us straight couples in which the woman is equally smart and useful. And yet, given total creative freedom, we apparently can't even figure out what that would be like.

Arguably, someone writing for a show watched by millions has responsibilities that a fanficcer with a handful of readers doesn't. But this is beside the point. If the reason for slash - or at least the reason it's political - is the lack of competent female partners on TV, then slashers are simply dodging the problem. (That is, when they're not reproducing it, with unequal same-sex relationships.)

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