"Wah, why aren't fandoms fun anymore?"

Because you keep policing people's headcanons, making fun of them and calling them horrible things, and on top of that, you're somehow claiming to be a safe space for people to express their creativity, yet turning around and harassing them anyways because you've made a billion exceptions to the "don't police people" rule and you think, like everyone else who's made their own exceptions, that your exceptions justify harassment.

So you're making fandom into a field of rat traps where nobody even dares interact with anyone, or shares art anymore, because you still might just attack them for it because they did something as simple as writing a canonically soft character as... a softie.

Let people do their "cringe" y/a romances, let people do their "gross" ships, let people write those characters as jerks or softies. Let them, and mean it when you say you'll let them, instead of soapboxing about it in a patronizing post but not really meaning what you're soapboxing about.

Proship is an anti-censorship anti-harassment stance. If you do not support censorship or harassment then you are proship, it does not matter what you read or do not read yourself.

Sometimes being the mum who exists in fandom spaces leads to awkward, even concerning, conversations. Such as the one which happened this morning. The mum of my daughter's best mate asked me if one of their mutual friends had sent her a specific message. This message was a link to a fic on ao3, if this had been a G rated fic this conversation would not have happened. It was not G rated. It was an E rated fic. Our kids aren't even 12 yet. As it happens, both of our kids have their internet access heavily locked down and monitored. They have phones because of how their school manages homework. The mutual friend, however, is not so monitored. Or she wasn't, given what her mum found she's about to be. This kid had found a fandom, joined it, and found it chock full of antis. The fic had been sent to her by one of them as an example of the sort of terrible people out there who need to be harassed and attacked because they wrote a smutty story.

Someone thought it was appropriate to send written porn to an 11 year old to encourage her to attack the author.

This resulted in a very awkward conversation where I had to explain to multiple horrified parents the anti culture that is becoming so prevalent. The fact that there are adults who use that purity message to groom kids. The way they escalate and how it bleeds into real life. One parent told me she'd wondered why her 14 year old was suddenly concerned about the two year age gap between her parents. The more I explained, the more absolutely ludicrous it sounded and the more baffled these poor mums looked. More than once I was told "but the characters aren't real, it's really weird but it isn't hurting anyone". Which is the point. The fictional situation isn't hurting anyone. The person who sent porn to an 11 year old is.

Was the person who sent it the author? Doubtful, that thing was tagged in the extreme. Was the person who sent it an adult? Almost certainly. The parent who's child received the original message has found more concerning stuff and gone to the police, but from the language the person doing the sending was in the US. We aren't. Did my daughter receive it? No, she isn't interested in that fandom and therefore wouldn't have bothered with it. Is this the fault of the author? No, they didn't send the link, they didn't ask to be harassed, they wrote a story and put it on ao3, the website created in response to rampant censorship and designed to allow for all kinds of fiction. Is this the fault of the parents? Partially, they should have been looking at their daughter's internet use and clocked what was happening sooner. Is this the fault of the child? No, she's 11, she didn't know better.

This has been a difficult day. Multiple parents have had their eyes opened to parts of fandom culture they had no idea existed. And the thing of it is, they aren't concerned about the why of anti rhetoric. They don't care about the adults writing about teens or rape or incest or torture or any of the rest, because they looked at the clearly tagged and rated fics and figured that it worked the same as a warning on any streaming service. They only cared because some utterly vile individual decided to expose their child to something this girl might not have looked at for years.

Proshippers did not cause what I have spent afternoon helping several sets of parents navigate. Antis did. Normally I'm fairly quiet about the whole debate because I just want to get on with my life and share my experiences. Today I got dragged into that mess in my every day life and the adults in the equation didn't react the way Antis like to think they would. They didn't condemn the author. They condemned the anti who shared the work with a preteen.

This has kicked off, so a brief update:

I don't know all the details and can't share a lot of them because of legal stuff. What we do know is the anti responsible is in the US so whatever happens with them is out of our hands (kiddo's mum relayed this, don't ask for details because I don't have them). Turns out this poor kid had also been exposed to NSFW fanart and a few other fics before we caught on. She is not in a good place, and breaking the mindset is not easy.

So fuck the anti rhetoric. All you're doing is protecting works of fiction at the expense of real children, and I despise that.

Ok, so I don't have an update about the child most hurt by all of this. Mostly because investigations into stuff like this is slow at the best of times, and international investigations are even bloody slower, but also because it's none of anyone's business at this point and I'm not going to spread anymore of this kid's business over the internet. The awareness of the harm done to them is enough. I do, however, have something I need to add because some people lack the critical thinking ability to do the really fucking bloody obvious:

Do not come onto this post with your comments or your reblogs that contain the phrase "I don't agree with proshipping but...". Alright? Just don't.

"Pro" a prefix meaning "for". "Anti" a prefix meaning "against". Alright. End of. Proshipping is simply ship and let ship. Shut up and mind your own business about whatever that person is shipping. Because this post isn't a discourse about whether there are things people should be allowed to ship and write about or not. This post is about the very real harm the so called anti community is doing to very real people in order to protect fucking pixels.

You think proshipping is the thing causing the harm? The people who make their work and tag it to shit before posting so that the people who want to see it can, and the people who want to avoid it are able to avoid engaging? The person who wrote an E (for explicit, this was ao3 remember) story, posted it on the website created so that people could ship their ship and write their dark and nasty fic without having it deleted or being persecuted for it, and tagged it so clearly that I didn't even need to open it to know it contained specific themes. That person? You think that person did the harm when it was actually some purity obsessed asshole who sent it to a literal, physical, real child? You really think the person who tagged their stuff so thoroughly to protect people who didn't want to read it from reading it is the person responsible for the harm done to that child? And you're going to come into the comments on this post and go "I don't agree with proshipping but..." at me. Fuck right off. If that's your first thought, get off the internet, go take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror and contemplate why you're getting your knickers in a twist over works of fiction. Because people like you are the ones on the slipperly slope to harming real, living, breathing children. Not the poor bugger who just wanted to write and share a work of fiction for reasons of their own.

We've been saying for years that this culture of exposing minors to NSFW, dark, and disturbing content in the name of callout posts actually ENABLES predators to groom and traumatise minors, and here you have it. Yet another anecdote showing the harm done. When will this stop?

Whenever people try to tell me to ship "moral ships" I like to think about how inherently immoral it is to flirt with service workers at coffee shops where they're obliged to be nice to you so... many coffee shop AUs are like. Immoral. But given that they are a fantasy where this is instant romance without the fear of trapping a service worker in an uncomfortable situation that's tantamount to workplace sexual harassment, I enjoy the cutesy coffee shop AUs immensely.

And that's basically my attitude towards all fantasy. There's lots of things I enjoy in fantasy that wouldn't work IRL. Enemies to lovers. Sudden kisses. Miscommunications in relationships. Codependency. Fight sluts who physically assault each other while emotionally connecting.

Once you start ascribing your morals to the fiction you consume, you tend to miss the issues in even the most innocuous, innocent seeming scenarios. It's easy to judge other people's fictional enjoyment until someone points out your innocent coffee shop AU is romanticised workplace harassment.

But it's all fiction. It's a fantasy. That's why it's fine.

A lack of education around things like consent, healthy relationships, self respect and respect of others, bodily autonomy, etc, has made people think they can rely only on fiction to tell them what right - but that's dangerous. And unsustainable.

i'm usually pretty flippant about discourse around problematic fiction. i don't really believe in writing impassioned essays about why it's categorically insane and bullshit to equate the art someone creates with their morality and worth as a person. i don't think it'll change anyone's minds, because you can't rationalize someone out of an instinctive disgust reaction or undo years of sex negative, kink negative, christofascist conditioning with a tumblr post. but, i will say this:

it is deeply, inherently human to write upsetting stories. we live upsetting lives. trauma and brain chemistry interact in ways we don't really understand, and often what it produces is art that is reflective of the grotesque, the horrifying, the uncomfortable. this has been the case for as long as people have been people.

i also believe that we, as artists and writers, don't owe anyone an explanation for where our art comes from. it doesn't matter if you're coming from a place of cathartic "this happened to me, and now i write about it to cope" or if you're coming from a place of "i just think this is hot, and i couldn't tell you where it came from." upsetting art is a fundamental part of the human condition, and the drive to create it is also fundamentally human.

i don't believe it's necessary to self-examine where that drive comes from and attempt to rationalize or moralize about it. the creation of art in all its messy discomfort is morally neutral. it says nothing about whether you're a good person or not.

what matters is how you treat other people. your thoughts aren't real. your fantasies aren't real. they have zero impact on if you're Good or Bad, because that's not how human nature works. i'm not interested in what you fantasize about, or the relative darkness of the art you create. i want to know--are you kind? do you show up for others? do you treat people with gentleness and respect? because that's what matters. not any of the other noise.

"i'm not interested in what you fantasize about, or the relative darkness of the art you create. i want to know--are you kind? do you show up for others? do you treat people with gentleness and respect? because that's what matters. not any of the other noise."

Louder for the people in the back.

i'm usually pretty flippant about discourse around problematic fiction. i don't really believe in writing impassioned essays about why it's categorically insane and bullshit to equate the art someone creates with their morality and worth as a person. i don't think it'll change anyone's minds, because you can't rationalize someone out of an instinctive disgust reaction or undo years of sex negative, kink negative, christofascist conditioning with a tumblr post. but, i will say this:

it is deeply, inherently human to write upsetting stories. we live upsetting lives. trauma and brain chemistry interact in ways we don't really understand, and often what it produces is art that is reflective of the grotesque, the horrifying, the uncomfortable. this has been the case for as long as people have been people.

i also believe that we, as artists and writers, don't owe anyone an explanation for where our art comes from. it doesn't matter if you're coming from a place of cathartic "this happened to me, and now i write about it to cope" or if you're coming from a place of "i just think this is hot, and i couldn't tell you where it came from." upsetting art is a fundamental part of the human condition, and the drive to create it is also fundamentally human.

i don't believe it's necessary to self-examine where that drive comes from and attempt to rationalize or moralize about it. the creation of art in all its messy discomfort is morally neutral. it says nothing about whether you're a good person or not.

what matters is how you treat other people. your thoughts aren't real. your fantasies aren't real. they have zero impact on if you're Good or Bad, because that's not how human nature works. i'm not interested in what you fantasize about, or the relative darkness of the art you create. i want to know--are you kind? do you show up for others? do you treat people with gentleness and respect? because that's what matters. not any of the other noise.

when i see someone say they're a "freak" and "weirdo" and then have proship in their dni

i've been on this website for almost 10 years. all queer discourse looks like this:

hello fellow queers, don't you just hate those [queer subgroup] trying to harm us [different queer subgroup, "real queers" implied] by [discussing their experiences], which is [bigotry toward queer subgroup 2]. these [fascist dogwhistle] want to [fascist scapegoat rhetoric], because [identity phrenology]. clearly, we must destroy these [fascist dogwhistle, implied queer subgroup 1] because they are a threat to [queer subgroup 2] and queer people as a whole!

Honestly most discourse on here looks like this (though especially queer intracommunity discourse) and it withers my soul. People need to learn to recognise fascist dogwhistles more. Imho radfems basically invaded this site in the 2010's and people went completely unaware of it, until boom suddenly their rhetoric and subsequently fascist rhetoric started popping up everywhere.

"ugh proshippers and antishippers are both sooo immature like shipping discourse is sooo stupid like i'm neitherrrr like why would you even want to engage with that"

I've seen antishippers unironically say and agree with eachother on the following opinions: being a proshipper means people should be allowed to bully you. proshippers make them believe in eugenics. proshippers all belong in jail. being a proshipper means people can send you death and rape threats because "you deserve it". being a proshipper should be basis for taking away someone's human rights or at least put them on a watchlist.

I'm not a proshipper because i care too much about fictional ships, I'm a proshipper because antishippers sent my friends threats for liking certain ships. I'm a proshipper because i believe i shouldn't have my human rights taken away or be bullied or in jail just for liking a fucking ship. If you believe ship discourse is stupid and immature, then you probably believe people shouldn't be thrown in jail for it.

Brother they are tattling on me to my fiancé

unpopular(?) opinion: it annoys the hell out of me when people tag fic about siblings or other family members with stuff like "this isn't incest fuck you if you ship it romantically" or whatever

like buddy. I KNOW it isn't incest. I didn't think it was incest, I wasn't thinking about incest at all in fact, and I would really have liked to have CONTINUED not thinking about incest except every damn author in the tag feels the need to remind me about it constantly. people who do this shove incest ships into my face way more than actual incest shippers do because they won't fucking stop talking about how much they don't ship incest.

please just tag your fic with the things it DOES contain and don't worry about the things it DOESN'T, okay. I promise you no one's gonna think your fic is full of secret incest even if you don't spend 30 minutes decrying it in the tags before every fic.

In a similar vein, I avoid reading things tagged No Underage Sex. The vast majority of the things I read does not contain underage sex, but if an author is so afraid of the concept that someone might think they would write underage sex that they feel the need to tag for its absence, they're too anxious about it for my taste.

My avoidance is only reinforced by the fact that in my circles, "No Underage Sex" is occasionally code for "No one admits they want each other till the younger party is 18 years and 1 second old," which is what you get when people are squicked by underage lust, but not by age gaps. Pretending that there's no attraction before the object of affection is 18.0000001 is perfectly valid as a kink and diametrically opposed to many of my kinks, which involve people owning their kinks.

Now I'm wondering how often people write "Relatives, e. g. Dean and Sam Winchester, discover that they're not biologically related which makes it okay for them to bone down, so they do, despite having believed that they shared genes until the Ancestry.com test came back," which seems similar in disingenous-to-me effect.

Write what you want to write. Tag appropriately so that people who want it can find it and people who don't want it can give it a pass. Accept that the vast majority of the people in the fandom, let alone the world, aren't going to read it no matter how good it is.

I've seen this same thing with art posted on Tumblr. People will be like, "this is PLATONIC so don't be a freak and tag it as a ship" or whatever and I'm just like. Babe. Sweet summer child. You can NEVER control how anyone else interprets any kind of art. And you put that on the internet, so now it's completely out of your hands. That image or fic or gifset will mean whatever other people want it to mean in their heads and you just have to accept that.

And honestly, I think that's one of the coolest things about art - every work becomes something new for every person who experiences it.

no but how much audacity and sheer entitlement do you have to have to tell people they need to stop posting their darkfic and porn fic and any other fic you don’t like to ao3 so you can have a safe space when ao3 was literally created as a safe space for writers to post their content without fear of it being randomly wiped out by pro-censorship assholes with an agenda like what has happened to plenty of other fic archives before?

“but a lot of us see ao3 as a safe space to get away from that kind of nasty content” - lol you can see the middle of a busy interstate as a safe space all you want too but that doesn’t mean that you get to walk into the road and scream at all the cars going by that they’re the ones infringing on your safe space either

ao3 is not, has never been, and will never be a site meant for nothing but children’s stories. you can “see it” like that as much as you want but there’s a difference between fiction and reality and that view of what ao3 is like is as fictional as the stories posted on it.

Caveat your policies and principles, because there’s a mad difference between children’s stories and stories that are harmful across the board.

A lot of writers on ao3 don’t care to tag their stories appropriately, or consider the harm they perpetrate with their stories, or take responsibility for the harm they cause with their stories. It’s one thing to write whatever you want, it’s another to publish it, publicise it, and not take care enough to note if it’s harmful.

Let’s be honest, a lot of supposed “dark fic” is generally just exploitive masturbatory fantasy. It’s often written by ppl who don’t care what bigotry they perpetuate, what harmful tropes they use, any of that, as long as they get their kicks.

You can write what you want, but if you choose to post it publicly, you need to be prepared for an audience that has its own opinions. And the audience might say, “This archive needs a better policy”.

The audience might - but AO3 wasn’t created for the audience. It was created for the authors, so they’d have a place to post their fics that kept getting thrown off of other sites.

You might think those sites were correct and some kinds of content shouldn’t be allowed in public anywhere. In which case, you might want to stay away from AO3, because it was explicitly and directly created to host stuff that was unacceptable elsewhere. That’s its core purpose.

Fics that aren’t tagged according to the archive’s rules can be reported. However, there’s not much tagging that’s actually required: Just the warnings (including the option of “choose not to warn,” meaning “not telling you if any of these things are here”) and a fandom. They can leave off the rating, and it’ll be sorted as if it were explicit.

AO3 was meant to be supportive of both “authors who want to tag major and minor pairings, every notable trope in the story, and several types of relationships” - and authors who tag NOTHING but the fandom and maybe a pairing. The “what tags are required?” debate was not new when AO3 was founded, more than 13 years ago. So they opted for a bare minimum of safety tags, added the option of adding a bunch more, and said “Reader Beware: We don’t require that tagging be complete.”

Bitch, if AO3 was just for authors, it wouldn’t exist, because we all would have gotten off our own dicks years ago and realized we didn’t need public acclaim to enjoy writing.

It wasn’t created “just” for authors. But it was created for authors first, with the for-readers features being most focused on, “hey authors - how do you want your readers to find you?”

There’s a difference between wanting to share writing with a community and “needing public acclaim.”

We knew damn well when we set up AO3’s terms of service, that there would be people who decided, “I am NOT putting my writing on a site that hosts THAT AWFUL STUFF.” (At the time, we kind of assumed “That Awful Stuff” was “Voldemort victorious; Death Eater orgies abound” fics, not “Harry/Draco underage” fics, but we also knew that what’s considered “wrong” changes over time.) (Some of us remember when just saying you read slash could get you kicked out of a fandom’s locked email list.)

We weren’t really expecting demands that AO3 change its policies, because… those weren’t after-the-fact decisions? It wasn’t, “hey, let’s build an archive, and oh, I guess we’ll let the icky smut in too.” It was, “The icky smut keeps getting banned/ deleted/ forbidden/ removed because the mods got into a fight about what to allow…. what can we do about that? How about… an archive?”

Complaints that AO3 allows the stuff that AO3 was created to host will get zero results. No changes in policy; no open consideration; no public discussions.

AO3 is now one of the busiest fanfic sites on the internet, because it turns out, a LOT of people like a no-censorship approach. But if popularity wanes and only the ultra-kink-friendly people are still active… that’s fine. That’s what it’s for. Everyone else has a whole internet that will host their content.

If you do not like AO3’s no-censorship policies, you are welcome to create your own site with heavier content restrictions. I believe the code is open source, so have at it.

They don’t want the pure-and-wholesome filth-free fic repository, they want the bullying.

Lots of people get into fandom when they discover it because they’ve been being bullied for being fans. But some of those people don’t want no bullying, they want to be on the other end of it.

THIS RIGHT HERE. Too many people want to live out their high school mean girl fantasies, and they're fully willing to recreate "fundamentalist Christian moral puritanism but for fandom" in order to do it.

that's... not how it works. you can't guarantee that your work definitely won't squick anyone. what do you think you're saying?

"squick free" someone writes on their wholesome family fic about married characters expecting a baby.

I read it and am extremely squicked.

You do not know what squicks other people. "Squick" is not a category of elements, it is a description of a reaction.

my instagram explore page loves showing me those like erotic dark romance novel tiktoks and i really have to wonder: why do all these straight women desperately want to fuck a mafia boss

Okay, let's try and break this down.

Sexual fantasies are, by their very nature, transgressive. Yes, even the fluffy, romantic ones. As long as general culture remains negative about sex and sexuality in any form that isn't cishet procreative sex within the confines of matrimony with the woman not as an equal actor but an object sex is performed onto, this is going to remain true.

And the thing about fantasies is that our brains like to take the things we crave the most and mix them up with our fears, anxieties, pain, and trauma into a melange of, sometimes, truly epic levels of fuckery.

But here's the secret - things we fantasize about, from the most wholesome to the bizarre to seriously fucked up? They are very, very often NOT what we literally want.

Being into dubcon or noncon doesn't mean you actually want to be raped or rape. Being into monsters doesn't make you a zoophile. And fantasizing about violent, obsessive men doesn't mean you wouldn't run as far the fuck away from a man like that the second one of them set their sights on you.

If you're really interested in the subject, I recommend reading My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, a compilation of anonymously submitted women's sexual fantasies. And, as it turns out, women fantasize about a lot of really violent, uncomfortable, and just plain screwed up stuff.

And, for most of them, even when they don't actively realize it, it's about reclamation. Of fear, of trauma, of loss of power. It's about THEMSELVES and how THEY feel. As weird as it's gonna sound, the men featured in those fantasies don't really matter, they're just a vessel, a manifestation of the extreme version of what you're dealing with and/or crave. A safe, cathartic way to experience something profoundly unsafe, unwise, and terrifying.

For women fantasizing about criminals, villains, monsters, and anti-heroes, it's very often about the idea that someone like that - intense, violent, with single-minded focus, and immense power - would love her, want her, always put her first, go against all his instincts/training for you without a second thought and be a clear and present danger to everyone but warmth and safety for her and only her, and burn the world itself down for hurting her in even the slightest of ways. It's a sexual version of the fantasy of having a pet tiger, one that would never, ever attack you or hurt you in any way.

And just like the people who want to boop the forbidden snoot, the women fantasizing about their fantasy Mafia Boss Lover are very well aware of the fact that 1) men like that don't actually exist, 2) the criminal world of their fantasy has all but nothing to do with reality, and 3) that the thing they're actually fantasizing about is being loved, wanted, and safe... just in a REALLY intense, exaggerated way. And, let's not mince words, there's also often a more or less strong D/s dynamics at play in the scenario, too.

Now, you can choose to be judgy bitches about it (goodness knows plenty of you in the replies, comments, and tags are), in which case I would suggest you examine why you're feeling such a profound need to shame women for enjoying themselves in their own little world, or you can apply the YKINMKATO mantra and understand that straight women, living in the constant state of preyhood, sometimes consciously or subconsciously reclaim power over that situation through transgressive sexual fantasies.

Also, fuck this idea that queer people only fantasize about healthy and wholesome relationships, romantic, sexual, or otherwise, as if at least half of Tumblr isn't simping for, oh, for example, Hannibal fucking Lecter. Do you have ANY idea how many Mafia and Thug BL content there is out there?! FFS, Tom of Finland, a WWII veteran who fought against Nazis, drew art of exaggeratedly masculine men in Nazi uniforms in pornographic situations as a way to dissociate himself from those traumas and fascists themselves as far back as the 1950s!

So yeah. Less judgement, and more taking some responsibility for curating your online experience if seeing someone's kink truly offends you this much.

"Booping the forbidden snoot" is a good way of putting it

prev tags, text ver. below the cut

I'm going to try to explain this without sounding completely deranged but like, okay: IMO, there are two kinds of fantasies. let's call them horses and unicorns.

a horse fantasy is something that is theoretically possible. I do not currently own a horse, and the reality of owning a horse would involve boring stuff like paying for its food and mucking out its stall, but it is something I could do in real life. like, horses exist and can be owned by humans. lots of fantasies can fall into this category: traveling to a foreign country, living in a cute house with just you and a cat, winning a marathon, basically anything that is technically achievable even if it would be difficult to do so in real life.

a unicorn fantasy is something that is definitely (or almost definitely) impossible. I do not currently own a unicorn, and there is no version of reality where I could own a unicorn, because unicorns are not real. the actual logistical issues that might arise from owning a unicorn, like paying for its food or mucking out its stall, are completely immaterial because it's not something that could ever actually happen. and like, it's in my brain! I control it! I can imagine a unicorn that only eats marshmallows and shits potpourri if I want to!

I think the disconnect comes in when people assume that a unicorn fantasy is actually a horse fantasy. to use the tiger example from upthread: you can own a tiger. you can't have a completely domesticated tiger that would never hurt you, not even by accident. so saying "I want a pet tiger" is a unicorn fantasy, because everything necessary for that fantasy to work (it being completely domesticated and incapable of harming you) are not things you can have in real life.

now, serial killers/war criminals/normal criminals/etc. are all things that exist. and there are definitely people in relationships with them in real life! so it's tempting to assume that something like "I want to fuck a serial killer" is a horse fantasy: something you would want to do, and could do, if given the opportunity.

but for the vast majority of people, that's not the fantasy. the rest of the fantasy ("he's a serial killer, BUT he only kills bad people and he's nice to me and is both able and willing to protect me from literally anything and has sex exactly the way I want to because he magically knows what I want because, again, this is happening in my brain") is what makes it a unicorn.

This is obviously not exclusively a cishet woman thing but cishet women do deal with a different flavour of sexual repression than queer folks (not better or worse, just a different flavour!) and those fantasies really are about power, just not how you think.

The fantasy is that here is a powerful, aggressive, even violent man, and he wants you and needs you so much that he would burn the world down for you. The central fantasy of the romance novel is that the heroine is so desired and loved by the hero that he is both metaphorically and literally forced to his knees for her. I'm not with my books or notes right now so I can't remember the exact quote, but I think it was Jayashree Kamblé who said that this aggressive/Alpha male subtype of romance heroes is "a lion among men who is a lamb before his woman". That's the fantasy. It's really powerful! If your life experience has told you to expect to do all the care work and to minimise yourself and your needs to be palatable to others and to be grateful for any crumb of attention because you're too fat or too outspoken or just generally not perfectly feminine enough, the fantasy of someone going absolutely feral because they want you so much is really powerful and empowering!

Again, not exclusively cishet women, and also sometimes you just think a scenario would be hot if it happens within your mind where you are 100% in control and can just stop if it feels bad. That's also fine! That's normal! We need to stop shaming people for their romantic or sexual fantasies, especially those of us who clearly have no idea what a fantasy is and what it does for the person indulging in it 🙄

A lot of the "you're supposed to like X" cultural baggage is, IMHO, effectively dubcon with the coercion outsourced to some other actor, usually society, but with the "love interest" willingly profiting from that coercion, at your expense.

The effect is something like when you've got a persistent unwanted suitor doing "romantic" shit like sending you flowers at work and lovebombing you and otherwise making a big deal out of his feelings and your coworkers or your family or your friends are all encouraging you to give in because "it's so sweet" or "he wants you so badly, it's cruel of you to deny him" or "I wish my boyfriend did that for me, you're so lucky" and none of them will understand that a) what they want isn't what you want and b) the persistence, the control, the disregard for your wishes all make him the romantic equivalent of food that's been pissed on---and neither does he.

The whole effect is viscerally uncomfortable, and even the echoes or memories of coercion taint the whole concept.

And I think a key factor in the fantasy is a variant of that unicorn situation up above, to wit:

Your church, family, repressive upbringing, and/or purity-focused socialization will never approve of you dating a mob boss or a monster

Therefore

Your church, family, repressive upbringing, and/or purity-focused socialization will never force you to date a mob boss or a monster.

Therefore

Your fantasy about the mob boss or the monster is effectively free from the coercion you're used to in your real life and trying to escape.

It is, ironically, coercion-repellent, directed at the existing dynamics of coercion that might be present in your life or in your past.

“Queer people need to get weirder-” you can’t handle like. A lesbian.

The funniest part of this post is everyone in the tags immediately making it about things other than lesbians. You can’t even handle like. Thinking about a lesbian.