Hello, my name is Strong Female Character, and my secret power is reaffirming the heterosexuality of the disproportionately male cast.
Hello, my name is Slash Shippers, and my job is to dismiss female characters that might get in the way of my non-canon ship and then insist that what I’m doing is called activism.
Hello, my name is Common Sense, and I’m here to point out that neither of these problems would exist if we had more narratives featuring multiple queer and/or female characters; that straight women, while undeniably subject to restrictive and stereotyped portrayals, still get more mainstream and varied roles than queer anybody, such that dismissing queer fandom’s understandable desire for self-validation as sexist is really gross; that the aforementioned lack of female characters is doubly damning to those of us who want and need to see more queer ladies; and that it’s hypocritical to blame fandom for not having a higher opinion of lone, often poorly or inconsistently written female characters than their creators do, being as how our reception of those characters is dependent on their ability to make them three-dimensional in the first place, and especially not when so many fics still go out of their way to revive fridged women or give them better arcs than their source material ever did.
Foz nailed it, thank you Foz.
reyairia: “Hello, this (terribly written) female character is only there as a tool to reinforce heterosexism and homophobia--often while straining consent to the breaking point, subtly enough that (casual) viewers in rape culture will still see it as het (attraction), having her assaults/harassment be made/kept ambiguous and called strength by the majority.” freckles: “Hello, let’s blame fans for valid emotional reactions to this, while subtly validating homophobia’s erasive standards of ‘canon’, with an attitude suggesting it’s gratuitously sexist to prioritize ‘not real’ queerness over ‘real’ (straight) women who tend to follow the pattern rey suggested of, again, being a tool to reinforce heterosexism/homophobia.” foz: “Hello, let’s turn blame where it belongs. Not on fans, with valid emotional reactions to (terribly written) near-singularly heterosexism/homophobia-enforcing straight female characters, in a way that victim-blames for the effects of institutional homophobic erasure and invalidates those who react that way if the ‘ship’ isn’t ‘canon’ enough--subtly weaponizing homophobic gaslighting that means queer ships are almost never that, but on the creators for lack of giving us anything else, and thus often forcing us to choose between prioritizing women and prioritizing queer pairings, and making our emotions for both fight themselves like this, while we also fight each other’s emotions like this. Not to mention, many (while having those fights) try to salvage what we can of both women and queer pairings anyway.”
Me: (rephrasing) No one’s saying it’s okay to hate fictional women, that’s not what’s being said here (though I would argue sometimes it should be said, it’s not always the end of the fucking moral world if you hate a fictional woman or two, especially considering the way they’re presented by sexist creators). People are saying the different standard created and upheld for queer ‘non-canon’ ships here, regarding emotional reactions to female characters who’re ‘in the way’ (and it’s fairly often more complicated than that), perpetuates homophobia, because of the safe-to-say institutionally validated assumption that most ‘canon’ ships will not be queer and female characters will often be employed solely as a way to remind queer fans of that. People are saying that there is a valid reason to have a negative emotional reaction to the character employed that way, as she often represents little but heterosexism/homophobia (especially after repeated fights of this very nature with people like freckles make it clear to us that nobody even cares that those things exist in her case), and that since heterosexism/homophobia maintains a standard where every woman being “dismissed” or whatever is a straight woman and every ‘non-canon’ ship is queer** (and thus generally devalued and dismissed), people who feel safe in condemning people for this emotional reaction are being functionally homophobic by wording the justifiably exasperated ‘don’t hate women for x’ this way. (**The institutional exception proves the rule in this case. The relative lack of something like, idk, hating/demonizing/dismissing the lesbian Commander Lexa in The100 [because she’s complex, causes conflict, and most of all, gets ‘in the way’ of a ‘non-canon’ m/f ‘ship’ by being half of a canon ship with gay feels on both sides--if not fully a resolution and relationship yet] as a hugely widespread and prevalent standard for many fictional women, condemned by many as habitual of shipping in a specific way... ...is not because people statistically like lesbians better [they do their best to make up for the lesbians not around as much as straight women are to be ‘dismissed’, by hating Lexa even harder, trust me], but because no one ever believes m/f is ‘non-canon’, even and especially while f/f is canon, because of, AGAIN, institutional heterosexism and homophobic erasure and fandom’s expectant validation of the double standard created by that. Statistically, few [myself not included] treat Blarkes this way for how they react to Lexa [despite her being a rare lesbian antagonist, allowed to be complex and yet still have the love of the bisexual protagonist, as well as a woman] yet many do 'Slash Shippers’ for how they react to much worse written straight female characters reinforcing heterosexism and doing little else. That’s the exception that proves the rule: the rule being that this heavily touted different standard for queer 'non-canon’ ships is homophobic.) To summarize: Please don’t dismiss/hate innocent female characters solely for any ship. Please check yourself regarding ladies and check up on if that’s why you do. Please try and work yourself out of doing so, especially if that’s why. But please do not create and uphold different standards for this depending upon how “canon” queer ships are, okay. Queer people get enough shit already.
