The response by the way I got to this sucker on Tumblr was largely "so you like grimdark? let me just--" or "but not everyone likes grimdark! I want happy endings!" and a lot of "so you want abusive relationships then?" and, like...
I hate grim dark fic. I just want more depth than just soft femme fluff? Like, I like femme women, I just want them to have opinions and goals and quirks and weird obsessions and personality. At some point, I am going to actually write up why Aubrey/Chloe is a bulletproof ship from me from the first Pitch Perfect (I need to watch the sequels), and it's not like Aubrey isn't a super femme character. It's just that she is also a perfectionist and wound extremely tightly and bad at identifying what she wants and incredibly competitive, and I love those things about her even as she is a quintessentially femme ambitious woman. Or my delight over Daphne in Ocean's Eleven, who hides behind cluelessness and is bored to tears and has one hell of a mischevious sense of humor. Or GOTG's Mantis, who is a different kind of very femme and very non-combatant and has a spine of steel under it, despite being raised to be afraid.
Pitch Perfect fandom actually made me very sad when I went looking because... it was like the fandom saw Chloe being super into Becca, which is a reading I can get behind, but there didn't seem to be much interest from Becca back and I didn't see much in the way of--of convincing me why there was that interest, or even why something might last long term given Becca's general wariness of emotional vulnerability. For me, the thing that draws me in is vivid personalities with bright contrasts, and it felt so much like the fandom was just softening all of those vivid personalities in order to Give Chloe What She Wants without... really... delving into the places where those personalities can be off-the-wall, or ridiculous, or rub up on one another in such a place as to create conflict that can be resolved, or even working on why exactly these two specific people like each other.
Incidentally, I love established-relationship fic, and this is why--I love stories with characters where the new relationship energy has worn off and now you have to learn to live with each other's rough edges and less-than-wonderful traits and everything else. I love stories about strong personalities learning to make room for one another. And I feel like that is something I see much more clearly shown (not told) in dudeslash, much more of the time.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 08:33 pm (UTC)I hate grim dark fic. I just want more depth than just soft femme fluff? Like, I like femme women, I just want them to have opinions and goals and quirks and weird obsessions and personality. At some point, I am going to actually write up why Aubrey/Chloe is a bulletproof ship from me from the first Pitch Perfect (I need to watch the sequels), and it's not like Aubrey isn't a super femme character. It's just that she is also a perfectionist and wound extremely tightly and bad at identifying what she wants and incredibly competitive, and I love those things about her even as she is a quintessentially femme ambitious woman. Or my delight over Daphne in Ocean's Eleven, who hides behind cluelessness and is bored to tears and has one hell of a mischevious sense of humor. Or GOTG's Mantis, who is a different kind of very femme and very non-combatant and has a spine of steel under it, despite being raised to be afraid.
Pitch Perfect fandom actually made me very sad when I went looking because... it was like the fandom saw Chloe being super into Becca, which is a reading I can get behind, but there didn't seem to be much interest from Becca back and I didn't see much in the way of--of convincing me why there was that interest, or even why something might last long term given Becca's general wariness of emotional vulnerability. For me, the thing that draws me in is vivid personalities with bright contrasts, and it felt so much like the fandom was just softening all of those vivid personalities in order to Give Chloe What She Wants without... really... delving into the places where those personalities can be off-the-wall, or ridiculous, or rub up on one another in such a place as to create conflict that can be resolved, or even working on why exactly these two specific people like each other.
Incidentally, I love established-relationship fic, and this is why--I love stories with characters where the new relationship energy has worn off and now you have to learn to live with each other's rough edges and less-than-wonderful traits and everything else. I love stories about strong personalities learning to make room for one another. And I feel like that is something I see much more clearly shown (not told) in dudeslash, much more of the time.