Ok, this is going to be pretty long so brace yourselves and EDIT: no cut anymore. you guys are reading this.
Ok so first off, before anyone starts saying “you can’t talk about that you white cishet male piece of trash!!!1! you know nothing jon snow!1!!” , I would like to inform you that I am a grey-pansexual, that I have been on tumblr and on the internet for a fairly big amount of time and that most of my ships are gay as hell.
They belong together
(I also see myself as agender but that’s not even relevant to what I want to say.)
I see a lot of people complaining about how lesbians are fetishised by men but almost no one complaining about gay men being fetishised by women. Like, at all.
For example, as a French man I had to study Les Misérables quite a lot in school so when I see a post along the lines of “omfg les mis is so good everyone is so gay” I want to ask only one question:
Do you see gay people everywhere because the author made it that way or because you want to see gay people everywhere?
Look.
This is pretty gay
This is very gay
This is ultra gay
This isn’t
javert does not want the d, javert is married to the law.
So now you’re gonna say “But we lack representation! That’s why we write so much fanfic about it!” And I understand that. I would probably set up fireworks if I were to see some good pansexual representation in the media.
Go my son, show everyone how queer you are.
“There aren’t a lot of female characters in the show, it’s only normal if we have that many gay ships! That’s a good explanation!”
Well, actually, no, no it’s not. It’s a terrible excuse and I’m going to show you exactly why.
Let me tell you about Homestuck.
It’s a great webcomic and it has a huge fan base so I think it’s a fairly good example.
Homestuck has 20 main characters, 10 girls and 10 boys. We have 12 trolls (they’re aliens), who are all bisexual except Kanaya who is an adorable lesbian vampire.
Obvious OTP is obvious
The kids: Jonh is straight, Rose is a lesbian, Jade is straight and Dave is bisexual (at least according to the last update and Hussie’s tweets about it). Jane and Roxy are straight, Jake is bisexual and Dirk likes boys, which gives us… 4 straight characters out of 20. I don’t know about you, but I think it looks like there are a lot of possibilities here, we’re pretty much invited to embrace the gayness.
Now, if we follow this strange force called logic, there should be an equal amount of popular lesbian and gay pairings, right? RIGHT?
Well, let’s take a look at the Homestuck section of AO3!
So, we have 7 gay pairings, 2 straight pairings and one lesbian pairing. It’s already starting to look pretty unequal to me.
Now, which ones are canon?
Right. So that’s 3 gay pairings, 2 straight pairings and one lesbian pairing. Which leaves us with 4 fanon gay pairings. Plus, Davekat has only just been confirmed, so it was fanon for a very long time.
Do you see the problem here? Homestuck is literally one of the most unproblematic stories we’ve had lately : equal amount of male and female characters, a lot, and I mean A REAL FUCKING LOT of LGB characters, good representation in general… … And yet, here we are, with an overwhelming amount of gay pairings, fanfictions, fanarts and more about them. I’m not seeing a lot of Scourge Sisters and Meenah/Vriska stuff out there!
So not only you are fetishising gay men, but you are also ignoring canon lesbian relationships.
So this goes to all of Tumblr, and not just the Homestuck fandom (which is, by the way, a lot less problematic than a lot of other fandoms) : please think before you ship.
Give some love to everyone. I understand that you want to produce more LGBTQ+ stuff than straight stuff but if that’s really the case, then maybe try something else than a couple of cis gay guys. Just sayin’.
im bringing this back, its old but its still good. read it.
