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shrimpchipsssFeaturing an imperfect case study using my own fanart.
Toxic yuri had a moment on the ailing Twitter/X app over the summer which is very exciting and [ariana grande equality gif] to see, but I want to put forth some critical thoughts for people to consider as part of the yuri zeitgeist.
Because the toxic (I’m being real broad here, think anger, aggression, etc, not just abuse or manipulation) aspect of toxic yuri is something that is comparatively hard to come by in wlw fanwork as opposed to in mlm fanwork, particularly in wlw femswaps that are derived from mlm media.
x_los wrote a critique on the state of wlw femswaps in MDZS fandom circa September 2020 that I think really gets at the odd loss of athleticism and physical capability as part of the alchemical genderswapping, and the tendency for cis wlw femswaps to be domestic, mundane, and soft when the couple that the genderswap is derived from is blatantly not. It’s the kind of genre or tonal shift that isn’t a Thing on its own but is an annoying trend across entire fandoms, the cozy-fying of athletic, martial ships as you turn them into women, and therefore worth examining.
I’m going to branch off from the [physicality] aspect of this critique into a [violence and aggression] sub branch because it’s interesting to me and I think it has implications on the original argument. Let’s go.
Take for example Lesbingqiu (lesbian BingQiu from Scum Villain). BingQiu are perfectly set up to be angry and fraught and toxic which they definitionally are in the Jin Lan Arc in the story. During this arc, they have an angry confrontation in an alleyway where Binghe chokes Shen Qingqiu against a wall, stops the blade of Shen Qingqiu’s sword with his bare hand, drags Shen Qingqiu up by the hair, and feeds him his blood (x_los has a GREAT angry fraught lesbingqiu fic that takes place during this arc which I highly recommend).
I have also drawn a scene from this arc. Sorry to use my own fanart but like, it’s right there.
As well as a modern AU wlw scene that is spiritually from the same source
Like if you have any visual literacy at all you can see that the two are the same.
But I’ve found that the angry fraught bathtub drowning lesbingqiu is less popular (by a factor of 7x tumblr notes at time of posting) than the angry fraught blood feeding mlm bingqiu.
I think this is partly because it’s a modern AU and so people see it and go “!!! domestic violence!” which is understandably uncomfortable. But fanart of violent modern AU mlms don’t give people the same pause.
Which is where we get into the societal stuff. Men are culturally permitted to be violent while women are not. The book Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons is all about the way that aggression among girls is suppressed from a young age which just makes aggression among girls secretive and vicious and insane. There’s a notable study on girls being hushed in a classroom for raising their voices when boys in the same class had been speaking more loudly. Big thanks topallas_rose for recommending this book to me in our discussion on this topic.
(As an aside, there’s also a weird association between women and violence necessarily meaning that the woman is a victim of violence which is a gut reaction I’ve noted in myself and am extremely suspicious of as it is some gender essentialist shit that would be very nice to unlearn.)
But to get back to girl aggression, which is an actual useful term unlike all the awful and misogynistic “girl dinner,” “girl math” stuff people are peddling these days. Women aren’t allowed to be openly violent or aggressive even though women are no less violent or aggressive. So in society, aggression among girls and women becomes hidden. In fandom, aggression among girls becomes a mythic creature, the platonic ideal of toxic yuri that people keep talking about but which is harder to actually come by.
I think this is because people are uncomfortable with overt aggression (see the bathtub drowning scene) on the one hand, but also can’t seem to come up with good ways of portraying alternate aggression on the other.
Allow me to introduce tshirt’s essay on girl yaoi, which can be found on page 55 in Yaoi Zine 2. This essay differentiates girl yaoi from yuri and provides some interesting alternatives to the sad, defanged lesbians that proliferate in fiction.
Because it isn’t that domesticity or mundanity is inherently less interesting, it’s that people portray domesticity or mundanity in such a way that is entirely about aesthetics and set dressing (COZIFICATION) and has little to do with the characters’ social roles as the women they are supposed to be now. The thing that makes girl yaoi girl yaoi is that it is about femininity and the identity and social roles of the women involved.
Which is a useful thing to consider for genderswaps because genderswaps have to be ABOUT gender (at least if they are going to be satisfying to me). Otherwise what’s the point? Choose any two other already-existing fictional women and write about them. Which, I guess this is a good moment to say that my critique has mostly been about cis wlw femswaps, as femswaps with even one trans/nb partner tend to have something interesting to say about gender and social roles.
I keep getting off track and now I’m angry but like femswap wlw doesn’t even have to be toxic to be compelling or to have something to say! I don’t know, tell me something about how the characters embody their gender! Consider Nana which is all about personal style and amatonormativity and the slow creep of being influenced by someone else’s taste until you become them, or The Handmaiden and the mirroring and identification of self in the other.
Lesbingqiu is perfectly primed for such a situation, what with Binghe needing to be socially respected in order to be a worthy partner to Shen Qingqiu. What does that mean for a Bingqiu that are lesbians, a Bingqiu in which Binghe is making herself in Shen Qingqiu’s image? There is oh so much to explore.
And for those who /want/ to portray the secretive aggression, can’t that play out in the context of social roles and relationally, in keeping secrets and threatening ties and stealing someone’s signature scent, copying their outfits and gossip and haughty looks and betrayal?
For people who want that good wlw media, tshirt and I compiled some recommendations from people based on enjoying The Handmaiden and made it into a zine. I’ve taken a few of the recommendations and they have been excellent.
Disclaimer: this wasn’t really a critique on the state of Lesbingqiu fic, my frustrations with them are that I am not a writer and I wish I could write the modern AU fic where Binghe steals Shen Qingqiu’s taste and mannerisms and social positioning to become the best girl. It’s girl yaoi. It’s transgenderallegory. It’s everything idk
Toxic yuri had a moment on the ailing Twitter/X app over the summer which is very exciting and [ariana grande equality gif] to see, but I want to put forth some critical thoughts for people to consider as part of the yuri zeitgeist.
Because the toxic (I’m being real broad here, think anger, aggression, etc, not just abuse or manipulation) aspect of toxic yuri is something that is comparatively hard to come by in wlw fanwork as opposed to in mlm fanwork, particularly in wlw femswaps that are derived from mlm media.
x_los wrote a critique on the state of wlw femswaps in MDZS fandom circa September 2020 that I think really gets at the odd loss of athleticism and physical capability as part of the alchemical genderswapping, and the tendency for cis wlw femswaps to be domestic, mundane, and soft when the couple that the genderswap is derived from is blatantly not. It’s the kind of genre or tonal shift that isn’t a Thing on its own but is an annoying trend across entire fandoms, the cozy-fying of athletic, martial ships as you turn them into women, and therefore worth examining.I’m going to branch off from the [physicality] aspect of this critique into a [violence and aggression] sub branch because it’s interesting to me and I think it has implications on the original argument. Let’s go.
Take for example Lesbingqiu (lesbian BingQiu from Scum Villain). BingQiu are perfectly set up to be angry and fraught and toxic which they definitionally are in the Jin Lan Arc in the story. During this arc, they have an angry confrontation in an alleyway where Binghe chokes Shen Qingqiu against a wall, stops the blade of Shen Qingqiu’s sword with his bare hand, drags Shen Qingqiu up by the hair, and feeds him his blood (x_los has a GREAT angry fraught lesbingqiu fic that takes place during this arc which I highly recommend).
I have also drawn a scene from this arc. Sorry to use my own fanart but like, it’s right there.
As well as a modern AU wlw scene that is spiritually from the same source
Like if you have any visual literacy at all you can see that the two are the same.
But I’ve found that the angry fraught bathtub drowning lesbingqiu is less popular (by a factor of 7x tumblr notes at time of posting) than the angry fraught blood feeding mlm bingqiu.
I think this is partly because it’s a modern AU and so people see it and go “!!! domestic violence!” which is understandably uncomfortable. But fanart of violent modern AU mlms don’t give people the same pause.
Which is where we get into the societal stuff. Men are culturally permitted to be violent while women are not. The book Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons is all about the way that aggression among girls is suppressed from a young age which just makes aggression among girls secretive and vicious and insane. There’s a notable study on girls being hushed in a classroom for raising their voices when boys in the same class had been speaking more loudly. Big thanks to
pallas_rose for recommending this book to me in our discussion on this topic.(As an aside, there’s also a weird association between women and violence necessarily meaning that the woman is a victim of violence which is a gut reaction I’ve noted in myself and am extremely suspicious of as it is some gender essentialist shit that would be very nice to unlearn.)
But to get back to girl aggression, which is an actual useful term unlike all the awful and misogynistic “girl dinner,” “girl math” stuff people are peddling these days. Women aren’t allowed to be openly violent or aggressive even though women are no less violent or aggressive. So in society, aggression among girls and women becomes hidden. In fandom, aggression among girls becomes a mythic creature, the platonic ideal of toxic yuri that people keep talking about but which is harder to actually come by.
I think this is because people are uncomfortable with overt aggression (see the bathtub drowning scene) on the one hand, but also can’t seem to come up with good ways of portraying alternate aggression on the other.
Allow me to introduce tshirt’s essay on girl yaoi, which can be found on page 55 in Yaoi Zine 2. This essay differentiates girl yaoi from yuri and provides some interesting alternatives to the sad, defanged lesbians that proliferate in fiction.
Because it isn’t that domesticity or mundanity is inherently less interesting, it’s that people portray domesticity or mundanity in such a way that is entirely about aesthetics and set dressing (COZIFICATION) and has little to do with the characters’ social roles as the women they are supposed to be now. The thing that makes girl yaoi girl yaoi is that it is about femininity and the identity and social roles of the women involved.
Which is a useful thing to consider for genderswaps because genderswaps have to be ABOUT gender (at least if they are going to be satisfying to me). Otherwise what’s the point? Choose any two other already-existing fictional women and write about them. Which, I guess this is a good moment to say that my critique has mostly been about cis wlw femswaps, as femswaps with even one trans/nb partner tend to have something interesting to say about gender and social roles.
I keep getting off track and now I’m angry but like femswap wlw doesn’t even have to be toxic to be compelling or to have something to say! I don’t know, tell me something about how the characters embody their gender! Consider Nana which is all about personal style and amatonormativity and the slow creep of being influenced by someone else’s taste until you become them, or The Handmaiden and the mirroring and identification of self in the other.
Lesbingqiu is perfectly primed for such a situation, what with Binghe needing to be socially respected in order to be a worthy partner to Shen Qingqiu. What does that mean for a Bingqiu that are lesbians, a Bingqiu in which Binghe is making herself in Shen Qingqiu’s image? There is oh so much to explore.
And for those who /want/ to portray the secretive aggression, can’t that play out in the context of social roles and relationally, in keeping secrets and threatening ties and stealing someone’s signature scent, copying their outfits and gossip and haughty looks and betrayal?
For people who want that good wlw media, tshirt and I compiled some recommendations from people based on enjoying The Handmaiden and made it into a zine. I’ve taken a few of the recommendations and they have been excellent.
Disclaimer: this wasn’t really a critique on the state of Lesbingqiu fic, my frustrations with them are that I am not a writer and I wish I could write the modern AU fic where Binghe steals Shen Qingqiu’s taste and mannerisms and social positioning to become the best girl. It’s girl yaoi. It’s transgender
no subject
Date: 2023-10-03 08:39 pm (UTC)And in some ways--and this is not that I think art is easy, I can't do it--I think it doesn't fully answer this question to have suggestive pieces hinting at the complexity of these wlw relationships, bc I at least, and also I honestly think fandom as a whole, doesn't have the same struggle with the pictorial imagery of that Kpop video about killing pizza delivery boys as it does with like--imagining the lived reality and psychology of a raw story about women, Chloe Ruined Olivia's Fucking Life.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-04 03:25 am (UTC)and no i get what you're saying, I think it's a lot easier to assume that there's a deeper message with visual art, and I think that people do a lot of work to both interpret and project when it comes to fanart so if you have an audience that's looking for wlw relational interiority they might have an easier time conjuring that up
it makes me wish I had like, craft related things I could say about writing but I will say that I think about your line "of the clean smell of the crook of her Shizun’s neck" a Lot. and then always the Carson's translation of Oresteia line "Call me baseminded, blackmouthing bitch! if you like-- for if this is my nature we know how I come by it, don't we?" like these are extremely evocative of relations between women to me
no subject
Date: 2023-10-05 02:33 am (UTC)Your commentary calls to mind some critiques I remember seeing years ago about the side of the beefleaf fandom that was primarily into the two of them as women, actually. The idea that because they were women, now they were pure and UwU so cutesy and holding hands instead of the novel's far more complex reality, and that this was the lens through which they were being viewed by the Lesbian Beefleaf Contingent. What I couldn't tell was whether or not it was the actual state of things (I am not very good at keeping up with Fandom) or just a perception that people had come up with based on the fact that they were being depicted as women at all. That people just percieve women as less capable of violence and less threatening, and so read that perception onto any f/f couple they see, regardless of if it is actually valid.
I know for a fact that as an avid reader of yuri, I am constantly starved for less fluffy, 'pure' content and yet feel put off by the perception of yuri as something that is all about purity, because it isn't. Not sure what to do with that or where to put it. Just something I've been thinking about for a while.
Either way, from my own fairly comprehensive reading, both of lesbingqiu and of wlw genderbending in general, I really see your point. I think people tend to put their femswapped versions of mlm couples into modern aus, ones where oftentimes I don't actually see any writing about sexism or what being a woman means at all. It's often domestic, or very explicit, or both. If there is conflict, it is either unrelated to the actual conflict of the original narrative, or very fluffy conflict, or making up some third new thing. But rarely do I see any outright violent or aggressive stuff. That's very interesting to me! I hadn't actually been able to put it into words before I read this, but I think you're right that people are way more uncomfortable depicting outright violence when it features women in fandom spaces. I have to wonder if the placing of a female character into the usually male spot breaks the fantasy of it and the escapism. So while m/m-focused fic is all about escapism, the femswapped version is forced to either take place in a world made of pillow-stuffing, or outright address and explore it. And because fanfiction tends to be more about self-indulgence than exploration, pillow-stuffing it is.
I've noticed in me at least that I tend to really think through implications with my f/f reading and writing in a way I can sort of shrug and ignore with m/m fics. Though, with my own writing, I do tend to skew opposite of the norm (everything m/m I've ever written is fluff or hurt/comfort or something, while I've written and continue to write a lot of f/f stories with far more complex situations). I don't mean to make the discussion about me, btw, it's just that I am coming to this from a very personal place.
As a somewhat apologetic side note that I hope does not come across badly, I would love to add onto your reccomendation and say that I think people who liked the Handmaiden would also be interested in reading the book the Fingersmith! It is, after all, the book that the Handmaiden is based on, and is also very good, and I stayed up til four in the morning reading the last 250 of its pages because it was so enthralling and also upsetting and gripped me so hard. It's got some good, actual toxic yuri. With a happy ending.
Anyway, I hope I didn't leave too long or weird of an essay here. I just think about this a lot. Also I am excited to read the Yaoi Zine and have now bookmarked it for when I am less busy. I am very intrigued by this Girl Yaoi concept. Finally, thank you for writing this essay, as it really got me thinking! Also I adore your art.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-05 03:24 am (UTC)First of all, thank you for doing the good, good work (writing lesbians, that is, I have your work marked to read for later now!). Second of all, have you read the Scum Villain Freud zine? in case you haven't, it sounds extremely up your alley for the genderisms within https://longposter.neocities.org/freudzine.pdf
I'm a little familiar with the f!beefleaf critiques and I love that you bring it up because the defanging/softening effect with their fandom portrayal is exactly the thing that's been on my mind. Like it has led to some really comedic moments like a friend of mine assuming due to fandom osmosis they were just fun gay besties doing hot girl shit for hundreds of years and managing to read the whole story with zero fandom forewarning of the tragedy to come. But maybe that is a bit of a tragedy in itself? There is so much more that beefleaf are capable of, but is this their fanon legacy? I can't speak for beefleaf fanfiction but for fanart it seems to be so.
What you said about f/f focused fic defaulting to pillow-stuffing because people don't want to explore or depict aggression or violence is so interesting to me too because of the way girl aggression so often takes the appearance of things that could come off as pillow-stuffing. I think people really miss out!! On taking the thing that could be vapid and just for aesthetic (domesticity, doing your hair and makeup, choosing clothes) and making it a site for aggression or even horror (I'm thinking stepford wives, or getting weird about wearing similar outfits, or copying someone's makeup, stealing their signature scent). And these things don't have to be toxic to be interesting too, like the same exact things can be deeply interesting if they are about the characters' identities or social roles as women.
Count me intrigued about the Fingersmith now! Fall/winter seems like a nice time to read something like that ooh I'm gonna keep an eye out for it now.
I'm so glad you commented, this is what fandom essays are FOR, if you have further Yaoi Zine thoughts I am always extremely down to discuss....... (and thank you for the compliment! I'm so excited to read your writing!)
no subject
Date: 2023-10-05 09:08 pm (UTC)I may or may not have just binged like half of the freud zine (I have made it to part 5!), and will read more when I get the chance. I think I need to go write some meta about bingqiu and the blood-drinking/breast feeding and the entire medieval Christian mystical tradition of blood drinking from Christ's wound (but also the wound is described with vaginal imagery, but also there's a bunch of breastfeeding from Christ imagery). Binghe literally recieves the stigmata. I guess this is what Dreamwidth is for! Also fanfiction. I'm going to write some lesbian fanfiction about this also.
I was lucky enough to avoid most of the fandom osmosis for beefleaf. I had some understanding that there was a bit of tragedy, but no idea what to expect. Now I sort of yearn for a f!beefleaf fic that keeps all of the tragedy of canon. Or maybe a beefleaf Carmilla au. I think I am really primed to write that (though the tgcf fandom terrifies me). Something something the nature of consumption and ghosts and SQX (has anyone pointed out that one of the things SQX has taken away from them is the ability to transform into a female form? The form that they are the most powerful and comfortable in? I think about that a lot). I love what art I've seen of course, but I'm sort of desperate for some beefleaf with a little girl aggression. I have been in too many of those unhealthy, kind of homoerotic codependent teen girl friendships to not see beefleaf get a story with that.
The idea of girl aggression as pillow stuffing, as something that is expressed through the aesthetic and proper behavior is actually soooo Shen Yuan, come to think of it. The moment he wakes up as Shen Qingqiu, he is Performing, and the system is outright enforcing a very specific type of existence. It would be... so much fun to explore this through the lens of girl aggression. A female Shen Qingqiu, even more of a performance, used to even more restriction on what she is allowed to be. When she pushes Luo Binghe into the abyss, she herself is breaking a boundary by actualizing the girl violence as plain, physical violence, or something. If I am making any sense. What sort of Binghe would come back from this? She has to get the sword to escape, but the language of behavior she's been taught doesn't allow her to use it.
In any case, I feel like I should at least bring up Clear and Muddy Loss of Love at least once here. It's baihe rather than danmei, it's about gender (and also political drama), and I have no idea what to say about it at all. Except that it does not shy away from women and violence, but also both of the women committing that violence are already transgressing gender roles in some way (either through presenting as masc or becoming a female emperor). I loved that book. Then I went to look for fanfiction, and it was a majority really fluffy modern aus. I am still trying to figure out why that is.
Anyway, I continue to be entranced by this girl aggression concept, and am teasing it out in my head right now. It seems to come in a simultaneous enforcement and transgression of gender boundaries. Because, as you said, overt aggression isn't allowed to happen between women, it must be covert instead. The examples that you've given of where it can happen are great, honestly, and I am excited to think of more in the meantime as I figure out where in literature it can go.
I hope you enjoy the Fingersmith! You'll be familiar with the plot, because despite like 30 million changes (changes made to suit the visual medium, a transformation of setting and time period, having to stop at what is actually more of a halfway point in the book) it is a near perfect adaptation, I think. The heart and themes are All There, perfectly recontextualized.
I hope you enjoy my writing! I think when I finish the yaoi zine (and the freud zine) I'm definitely going to have a Lot of Thoughts. I'm sorry this comment was also still so long. I think my brain is full of thoughts.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-05 10:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-09 01:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-06 02:21 am (UTC)The whole thing of SQX losing access to their female form at the end of the story is Really Horrific if you think about it for a few seconds (like a lot of things that happen in MXTX's work...) there's so much gender horror to work with there! I'd love to see that kind of thing explored more.
And YES gender is performance and all that! I've read some really great takes where Shen Yuan is a trans woman who hasn't realized it yet, who transmigrates into cis woman SQQ and is like oh NO I have to pretend to be a woman now, and after years of that finally figures it out at some point down the line.
I got to about 80 chapters of Clear and Muddy Loss of Love and sadly couldn't stick with it! I couldn't be brought to care about the rest of the characters other than the main couple and it turns out it's not just that I tend to like stories with a strong ensemble cast but it's kind of a make or break for me. I've gathered the gist of the rest of their story though and I'm super in awe of the whole female emperor thing. Maybe one day I'll finish watching Empress of China but there are. so many episodes and they are. so, so long. And look there's some great examples of girl aggression in the insane harem politics and hidden plots to try to poison people or turn others against them.
If the whole girl aggression thing keeps haunting you I really do recommend Odd Girl Out, it's a fast and easy read because a lot of it is comprised of anecdotes. It's slightly of its time but still completely relevant and it put words to a lot of things I'd vaguely thought about, like how because girls are socialized to be caretakers and taught that their value comes from their relationships with others, one way girl aggression comes out as threatening to sever connections. It's, you know, emotional abuse. Love to see it in fiction!
no subject
Date: 2023-10-09 01:34 am (UTC)I'd really like to see SQX's gender horror explored more as well! There was a time when I read a lot of postcanon and au beefleaf fics, and something I noticed is that a lot of the more m/m-focused stuff almost... brushed over that part, or didn't really think about it? So I feel there's a lot to say it.
Thoses takes about Shen Yuan sound like so much fun! I feel like that is 100% something she would do.
And honestly, it took me a while to really get into Clear and Muddy Loss of Love and it's characters. I think what I ended up doing was a bunch of skimming when it focused on some of the other characters, until I just got so far in that I got invested. Especially when the female emperor stuff really started going. Empress of China sounds a lot like a harem politics drama I've been watching called Ruyi's Love in the Palace, and it's just the same. So much girl aggression. So much trying to outdo each other by being the Most Beautiful. To the point where I feel like it's less about impressing the emperor and more about Beating the Other Women.
I'll go and check out Odd Girl Out at some point then, because I'm still thinking about the girl aggression. I want to write more about the girl aggression. It's just so interesting. Like, this might be a weird one, but I keep thinking about this in relation to monasteries. I think we often see people depict monasteries as like, gay paradises (cries of "lesbian nuns!" and jokes about ) but they're still hierarchical structures. They still have SO many vectors for girl aggression, if not outright girl violence.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-10 01:55 am (UTC)No you're so right, harem intrigue plots have so much potential to be super homosocial. Everything hinges upon having the Emperor's favor but so much of the actual scrambling to get it happens among the women, their actions are as influenced by each other as they are by the Emperor.
I feel like people assume the same for single gender schools at all levels but what you mention about monasteries having hierarchy sounds suuuper intriguing.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-12 04:47 pm (UTC)I feel like we often see harem intrigue plots end up with women in camps; not only are they competing for the emperor's favor but the empress, and the empress dowager, and whoever has any power at all.
Yeah, like there's some things that female monasteries simply cannot do (women can't take confession, at least in the middle ages), and of course there's the structure of the abbess and the prioress and the layers of general sisters out there, and some are full-fledged and some are still in training. It's people with power over each other, in a time where corporeal punishment hasn't been questioned (and pain for the divine is often seen as a good thing). I could see this going in a lot of interesting directions.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-06 08:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-06 02:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-09 01:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-14 07:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-15 03:55 am (UTC)I think I'm gonna have to look into the book you recommended because the observations in Odd Girl Out about how girl aggression so often manifests in social relations because girls are discouraged from more obvious/tangible aggression feels so parallel to that and now I'm curious about the aspect of society trying to suppress violent women to reduce their social power.
Thank you so much for the recommendation and for responding to this!
no subject
Date: 2023-11-14 01:39 pm (UTC)I've specifically often avoided genderbent-MLM couples turned into WLW in that fandom... and I think this post about the reduced violence articulates part of why that is. The summaries I see and the few I've read tend to be AUs with the original violence/physicality of the original superhero canon very reduced... or when canon universe, focus on something gentle (life in the dorms, going shopping, a sweet date, low-stakes drama). The non-genderbent femslash ships honestly have the same issue (issue for me, anyway, who like violent/toxic stuff lol, I'm sure great for fluff-lovers), but I never made the connection that there's like... there's a square that's like
Canonical Men | Canonical Women
F/F: gets fluffier | Fluffy
M/M: Rich violent human experience | ?????
And in my head I always thought of it as a "the canonical women have less development/interest and get shafted by the narrative and fandom", but now I'm like "Oh wait is the F/F aspect IMPOSING this in some way? Even on originally M/M couples with more violent canon?"
Additionally though I think the specific act of changing the gender from canon very much inserts an individual author's conception of "What IS womanhood? What is gender?" into the story which... depending on the reader's opinion there is a lot of room for a mismatch. "WHAT exactly changes when someone is a woman now in the story?" is a question that has multiple answers, and the story has to make a thesis on the effects of womanhood while telling a story... which could be VERY RICH AND INTERESTING in a skilled author's hands whose done a lot of interrogation about gender, but when treated clumsily means the author's sexism or flawed understanding of gender take center stage of the reading experience. And based on this post, author's carrying the unconscious feeling of "woman = less violent or less capacity for violence" I think drives the toothless feeling of a lot of these stories.
Thank you for sharing these thoughts! A great read that brought up interesting thoughts for myself as well.
no subject
Date: 2023-11-15 04:11 am (UTC)I see the quadrant square floating before my eyes, I love it.
And no so true, like we know people shy away from truly toxic or violent yuri because of the discomfort with women being violent but the f/f aspect specifically... Part of me wonders if it has to do with people wanting their f/f fiction to be escapist (therefore fluffy?) but I am also of the mind that in order for something to be escapist AND have substance, the escapism should reveal something about the structural elements of the world it is escaping from rather than just be about vibes.
And EXACTLY about genderswaps having so much potential to just be an outpouring of the author's internalized ideas about gender. A shame when there's so much room to play with them! I feel like I've seen some really interesting and compelling takes about what the core aspects of a character is because of genderswaps specifically and I can only hope I continue to see such things.
Thank you so much for responding with your thoughts! Seriously appreciate the discussion.
no subject
Date: 2023-11-16 03:11 am (UTC)Substance is a good word... I focused on the violence aspect bc I think it often (tho not always) comes with substance and a willingness to grapple with more tense/interesting ideas, but really a "fluffy" date night story could have substance if it brings a meaty thesis into it. Of course there are ppl who love pure escapism and don't want something too dense bc they like reading to turn their brains off and relax... but I tend to like turning my brain on to engage!!