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Personally, it's not so much about the value of women as characters (even though that's true and important!) but that there are more interesting and underrepresented narratives for them than men. It's interesting to think of the drastic change in connotations when you just swap gender on a classic storyline. On top of that, there are so many stories that are unique to female characters in general. Why would I want to write more of what's already out there and doesn't need support?

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au where female characters are loved and defended by the fandoms

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bliphany reblogged your post “What is this “FLFC” blog?”

#oh I have so many feels about this okay  #it basically concerns my whole life from I am a little girl till now  #like I was the girl once claimed that I didn't want to watch any stories had female characters in it  #but more earlier than that my first few heroines in my life were all female characters  #and then I was like stopped and liked only problematic male characters  #because I found that I couldn't find a female characters in mass media that didn't make me feel like I am the lesser or dislike myself  #and here I am  #I learned to appreciate and understand even relate to female characters and it's like coming back to home  #and tbh my life and my sense of myself became so much better since then  #I am so grateful that they didn't abandon me when I abandoned them��

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I love female characters…maybe a little too much…? (no such thing)

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What is this “FLFC” blog?

A little under three years ago, I was seeing a lot of people justifying why they didn’t write or otherwise celebrate female characters and femslash, and a lot of those discussions framed their perspectives as natural or universal (“female characters are inherently less interesting because they’re all poorly written in canon” and so on)... but I knew there were others who disagreed, and for whom the relentless negativity towards their favorite characters (“just a love interest,” “bitch,” “whiny,” etc) was tremendously wearying.

So.  I thought it might be nice to celebrate inclusion instead of justifying exclusion.  I asked:

Why DO you create(/consume) fanwork with female characters?  or: Why DO you create(/consume) fanwork about femslash?

I’ve seen a lot of positive change in fandom's attitudes towards female characters over the years, though there’s still some ways to go, and there are still places where some female character fans might need a boost, so I’m reviving it, and archiving all the responses I can find on this blog.

Feel free to reply to this post, make your own post using the tag #FandomLovesFemaleCharacters, send me an ask (anon is on!), or submit to FLFC.

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in response to

Why DO you write(/read) fanfic with female characters?  or: Why DO you write(/read) femmeslash?

The glib answer to this question is that I’m a queer woman myself, of course I write/read female characters and especially romance between them. I’ve gravitated to stories about girls my whole life, because I was an outlandishly femme little girl and a literary misandrist to boot. I didn’t have many male friends (still don’t, honestly) and I didn’t like many “boy” things and I honestly didn’t care much for most of the boys I knew personally, so I wasn’t interested in “boy” books mostly by default. I’d read them for class sometimes and just get bored out of my mind. The first book about a boy that I voluntarily remember reading for fun was Harry Potter, and that was actually only because of an extenuating circumstance where it as the only thing I had to do and I was bored, and I damn sure wouldn’t have kept going with it if it hadn’t been for Hermione. I never wrote stories about boys as a kid because so many people were already doing that, and boys just weren’t as interesting. (I come from the Sailor Moon school of thought: 1-2 male protagonists are all you need, even in a group of 10+ people [or in that case cats].)

That’s still more the rule than the exception for me, especially as far as fic is concerned. There are guys I like writing (my beloved asshole Eric Northman, for example) but I don’t think I’ve ever written a story that wasn’t at least mostly about girls. And in fandom, that’s honestly mostly because - let’s face it, male characters get 1000x more attention and f/f relationships are so underplayed it makes me scream. (In the AO3 division of my pet fandom of the moment, MCU, there are 72752 m/m fics, 55251 f/m fics, and… 9150 f/f fics. Nearly half the fics in the fandom are m/m, while f/f is about 5% of the fandom. [Additionally, there’s only one POC character in the 10 most popular m/m pairings, whose relationship is one of exactly four I consider canonically viable and also potentially healthy, and the third most popular is two white male characters who exchange all of two sentences’ worth of dialogue. Once. There are two WOC in the f/f pairings, which isn’t much better but considering one of them ranks in at #2 whereas the MOC is #9 on the list it’s something, and every single relationship is potentially healthy, while eight of them are explicitly canonically viable.)

So the answer here is, I mostly write and read female characters and femslash relationships because it’s what’s most relevant to my interests but also because a lot of the time I feel like if I don’t, nobody will. (I’ve also written in a majority of the popular f/f relationship tags, while I’ve written in a whole two of the popular m/m ones.) I’m consistently unsatisfied with how little there is to read for what I’m into (healthy f/f relationships with a variety of variables, including elaborate AUs an pleasantly kinky sex) so I write it myself. My wife and I write together to fill this need. It’s what we do. She actually was the very first one to post in the second most popular f/f relationship in the MCU fandom, and we’ve both been regular contributors. That tag is ours. That ship is ours. We go out of our way to create new f/f relationship tags that are just as random as some of the m/m we see but, in our opinions work much better and also to contribute quality to as many as possible; in the MCU alone we’ve created no less than 26 f/f relationship tags and contributed to 29 others (not counting crossover pairs or poly configurations). We do this because we like to, but also because nobody else (or very few people) are giving us the fic we want. We figure if we want it, at least some others might, and it seems to be that way (we have some fans, although we’ve also had a hilarious incident with someone angry that our fic was “too political” and also that it didn’t feature enough canon [white heterosexual] relationships). But mostly we do it because it’s important to us.

Additionally, we do go out of our way to highlight and make up for canonical and fandom treatment of POC characters and relationships they’re in. In contrast to the above MCU stats, we write less than 10 m/m relationships but only one of them is two white boys, while at least 22 of our multitude of f/f relationships feature WOC. We make sure characters’ races and ethnicities are not forgotten or erased (reattributing forgotten Jewishness, for example) and we will bend over backward to both celebrate the POC characters who deserve as much love as ur white favs of equal or lesser canonical screentime (Daisy Johnson, Claire Temple, etc.) and avenge the POC characters whose canons did them wrong (the AOS season 2 trifecta of Kara Palamas-Jiaying-Raina, etc., poor Tara Thornton in my solo stuff). We do this, again, because most of canon just doesn’t seem to give a shit and that’s really unfortunate, because it’s worth telling. These are good, important stories.

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I’ve collected all the relevant standalone posts from the #FandomLovesFemaleCharacters tag onto this blog - if I’ve missed anyone, let me know!   

This blog’s ask and submit links are now open, if people want to share their responses that way, too.

There are also some great reblogs on the original call for responses - should I reblog all those, too, do you think?

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Sometimes it’s hard to see in the moment, but when you look back, it’s possible to see that sometimes things do in fact change for the better over time.  Case in point: the #FandomLovesFemaleCharacters thing, which I made a little under three years ago.  It used to be that I felt fandom was not entirely enthusiastic about people who liked female characters, and I wanted to encourage positivity in that area.  Now, I almost feel silly about asking - I don’t see as much negativity (”female characters are less interesting than male characters,” etc), and there is a TON more femslash, including canonical wlw and femslash ships, YAAAAY!

But it’s still good to encourage positivity, I think, and there are perhaps still some folks in certain fandom spaces who could use a little uplifting, hence the reblog earlier tonight.  <3 to everyone who’ve contributed to the change over the years, especially all those who participated in FLFC before.  

I’m making a side blog to archive responses, so if you see flfc.tumblr.com reblogging something from you, that’s me! :)

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Sorry but does writing au femmeslash count? I have a universe set in BBC where Joan is a disabled vet and Sherlock is a WOC and they get together. Does it not count because they aren't canonically female?

There’s no need to apologize - and I both understand your desire to ask it and think this question is a valid one.  Since this is my ‘challenge,’ so to speak, I get to set the rules, and I think talking about why you’ve chosen to change canonical male characters to female ones, what value telling that kind of narrative has for you, and so on is a really interesting way to approach this question, and I look forward to reading your post.

Also, please provide the link to that fic in your response post, ‘cos I’d love to read it (and I’m sure other folks might, too).  :)

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I’ve been meaning to make this post ever since saathi1013 first asked us:  Why DO you write(/read) fanfic with female characters?  Why DO you write(/read) femmeslash?

The thing is, my answer is pretty simple. I love reading and writing about female characters because it’s so much more fun to identify with female characters & celebrate them rather than ignoring or tearing them down (or being jealous of them, even jokingly–it’s a thing that pops up occasionally in my fandoms and just seems weird).  

Liking things is so much better than not liking things.

#FandomLovesFemaleCharacters

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A couple of weeks ago saathi1013 asked, "Why DO you write(/read) fanfic with female characters?  or: Why DO you write(/read) femmeslash?“ and I finally found some time to answer.

I read fanfiction that features female characters and femslash for a lot of similar reasons that have been mentioned in other fandomlovesfemalecharacters posts.

I am a woman and a lesbian, and I like when I get to see myself in the stories I read.

I love some female characters dearly, and I want to read and think about them.

Part of the reason why I read fanfiction is I want to expand the universe that canon gives us, and unfortunately, female characters often have many more holes that need to be filled in. 

I want to support people who are doing things that I want to see more of. Fandom (like the rest of society) doesn’t always do a good job of treating female characters as people, so when I find fans who are doing a good job, I want to celebrate and thank them for that.

And while I don’t write fanfiction, I do make gifs. And increasingly, I find myself making gifs of female characters. Recently, a gifset I made of Ella Thompson was making the rounds, and there were a few comments to the effect of, "I forgot this character exists.” And that pretty much sums up why I’ve been making more gifs of female characters. Because women should be remembered; they deserve to take up space in our lives, in our minds, in the stories we tell…

Now Ella isn’t a main character and her scenes are set up in contrast to the main thrust of the narrative of Sherlock. But she is one of the few characters who actually appears in multiple episodes, and no one seems to forget about the male characters who have similar screen time (e.g. Mike Stamford or Angelo). Ella is also black, and that affects how likely she is to be remembered and was a big reason why I made that gifset in the first place. (Because she was always left out of women of Sherlock posts and my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.) So if making a gifset of her (and other female characters) gets folks to think about them for a moment or two or even remind them, “Oh hey, this female character exists,” then it’s a step in the right direction.

Because in the end, I can’t control or influence which people or what stories media decides to talk about. But I can control what content I produce. Every few weeks some variation of “why are we asking fangirls to do better when the media is so misogynistic?” crosses my dash. And yes, the media is hella misogynistic, and we need to demand change. But I can’t wait until TPTB decide to get their acts together and give me shows with multiple diverse, fully realized female characters before I start shipping women together. And I can’t realistically expect TPTB to change if I’m not making a good faith effort to change the way I and those around me think and talk and interact with female characters who already exist. And sometimes it just feels really good to say to TPTB, “See that female character you threw away? The one you left flat and underdeveloped? Well over in fandom we’ve found her story, and it’s infinitely more interesting than whatever white dude manpain story you decided to retell for the umpteenth time. And it’s a real shame that you missed her potential.”

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Been having tons of fun in the #FandomLovesFemaleCharacters tag. I’ve already written a post about ladies in fanfiction, inspired by my current writing project, so I’m tossing it into the tag for general perusal. Keep ‘em coming, gentlepersons.

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Love Song for Lady-Fic Writers

Late to the party as usual, but here’s my response to saathi1013’s prompt:

Why DO you write(/read) fanfic with female characters?  or: Why DO you write(/read) femmeslash?

I don’t even write fanfic, but I am compensating for the lack with extended textual adoration. Under the cut, since this shit spools out longer and longer each time I make a text post. Apologies for anyone rocking it on mobile.

Keep reading

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Showing up late to the party, but from this post and also sorta this:

Keep reading

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#Fandomlovesfemalecharacters is my new favorite tag on tumblr and i highly recommend browsing through it.

The reasons I love reading and writing about female characters:

women are complex and interesting people, just like men, and too often their stories are flattened or sidelined in mainstream media

i relate more to women. and i care about them. of course i want to hear their stories.

femslash opens up a whole new world to me that i didn’t know i was missing until i found it. representation is super important, and sometimes it seems there just aren’t enough queer ladies in the media.

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Why DO you write(/read) fanfic with female characters? or: Why DO you write(/read) femmeslash?

I’ve always read stories about women, partially because I searched them out when I was younger and reading middle-grade and YA works, and then later when I got into romance novels. I like stories about women, usually written by women, for women. So I write stories about women.

To quote latropita’s Open Letter to Winona Kirk (and also the tagline to the where-no-woman community on Livejournal): Who wouldn’t want to hear your stories?

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hatepig answered your post: saathi1013: I see so many posts expla…

Because there’s a MILLION people writing dudeslash and I love female characters too much to not let there be femmeslash.