#sexism? in modern day fandom? more likely than u think

[ibelonginthepast]

okay I need your klance fic recs(i feel like you have really good taste)(i mean your icon is literally THE keith of course you have god tier taste)

okay so the thing is.. that when i say am kinda messed up and disgusting sometimes... and becoming a madwoman... am not over exaggerating or saying it in a funky way.. i actually am getting like that .. and that's how i got into the klance fandom initially. i project through lance and read really langsty fics.. and they are messed messed with like violent nsfw, gore, horror, serious mental health issues etc? so if u want those... i'll only send them if u want?

yeah tho i entered with this thingy that klance is gonna be like my guilty pleasure or some shit but them i inevitably fell in love with some GORGEOUS fanfictions out there and KEITH KOGANE in all shapes sizes genders and ages so lol...

but they aren't flowery. that's just not my taste. Some of them might be "problematic"? it's in quotes because i don't agree with it. it's not going to be problematic in plain ignorant sense like racial issues or blatant sexism or mental abuse.... but they might have like stuff which people dont always agree with like drugs. most of them would have nsfw it's just something that i need to have for feels and that's why i asked if u minded it. some things are like more subjective,, characterizations for example, cause like some people dont think keith is a skirt guy cause he isnt in fashion but i think he is petty and rebellious so he will defo do that? some of them would have like physical fights and stuff.. or keith and lance being mean to each other.. some ugly habits which aren't necessarily condemned like anger or drugs.? but with how i see it, it's not glorified, so i see them as human. i love the raw and ugly in these or idk its just human to me (but some people dont like which is completely valid cause we are all different from different environments and think different and resonate with different stuff.)

wait addition: i think some of them will have sexist themes? which i have complained about a lot before. i dont know why authors feel the need to somehow put women down to show how a mlm relationship without any women is superior or some shit it's annoying as fuck i hate it. i dont think i would have any especially sexist fics here, but there might be some with lowkey themes and bad handling of those issues. some of them mau have that subtext of disgusting heteronormative standards, but in subtext uk like bottom lance having a small waist and being giggly and all in contrast to big bulk keith.

here are some that i had bookmarked... but i may remember some more and then send them to u and or add them here...

a heads up.. i dont remember all of them very well. its been a while and i read fanfictions A LOT so yeah.. incase one slips up here which isnt very good am sorry dont judge me

the bold ones are the ones u should really check out if our taste is similar.

to begin with plain f l u f f,, my first klance bookmark was How Could I Say No? by Padfoots_Pawprint. tws for violence, bullying, injury BUT it's not actually gory or something like that it's just keith being keith and getting hurt and lance helping my boi like he should. it made me feeeeeeeel ksksk

this was one that kinda really touched me,, Wasted youth, Cryptids, and Waterboys by Baea THIS HAS EXPLICIT NSFW in it, the first chapter kicks off with it.. its a good fuck buddies to lovers in my opinion.. i love the writing style, the choice of how it's just a couple entries of random days in their lives. i love keith's characterization.. he is a hobo and a conspiracy nerd.. i love how down for him lance is, very dedicated. i love their growth.. i love how they help each other grow,, and it's so like real and usual day to day and human and down to earth idk how else to express it. this is INCOMPLETE. it's 12 chapters and discontinued as of now,, but it's not a deadly cliffhanger

similar in style and approach to the above. tho i think here is where it gets dubious. Easy, Tiger. by @/WhatTheBodyGraspsNot ... this is INCOMPLETE too and as of now discontinued. this has that sorta murky vibe with it's drug usage, them being teenagers in school and engaging in stuff like this, bad boy keith and all. this has nsfw too. i just remember really liking it and its very raw and unfiltered. tho it's incomplete it's not an open ending for now.

okay so i am restarting this but am upset as fuck that it all got deleted so i am gonna be lazy and not put as much effort as i did.

i have also Crowd Pleaser bookmarked by the same author,, this one's complete and it has some serious issues around gaslighting if i remember correctly... i really liked it then. keith is literally an angel here, i want to kidnap him and marry him literally. the s h w ee t e s t shit ,, and i like how lance gives him all the support and space to get his shit together

Drummer boy by klancekorner,, i think it's similar to the prev one, but lance's pov(which is what i prefer ngl). this authors fanfics are all just wholesome. i had put links to all their fics before, but imma now just say that u should go and check all their fics out. i have them all bookmarked, i must have seen something in them (can't remember what now tho and i cant be bothered to skim through them like last time *rolls eyes*)

War of hearts? idk why honestly, just ik keira has made me gay, and lesbian rejection angst? garrison? yes :) it's incomplete, conveniently left at the point where lance's heart is broken lol

Fuck buddies with benefits. THE NAME IS BAD I KNOW but i just love the idea of a dedicated mess of a keith and lance taking care of him. that's it that's the fic if i remember correctly. oh wait yeah u might think keith is not treating lance right, but i think it's fine if lance is treated a bit stupid. this is a bit too sex driven tho i dont like it but just SLEEPDEPRIVED KEITH TO TAKE CARE OF IMMA SIGN UP (ik this maybe coming off toxic but lol look at me)

Rambling: THIS WAS ME.

Last Defense: TW SUICIDE this is literally the langst i have for canon lance

I want something else: bad boy keith can break my limbs and cut my face and i will thank him

A thank you would be nice: keira damn

game-set-match: b a d b o y

I swear to go the devil made me do it: my typically fav trop, hardcore pining lance, literally perfect angsty keith. very similar to the top ones ig? idk also this one is one of my comparatively recent sane bookmarks so that's something. it starts off weird, u think it gon be subtly sexist but it turns out better so hold on

you've got me locked up: i think it's delinquent keith,, its floofy

Dad lance and tattoo artist keith: the name says it

damn while going through my bookmarks i realized that there are a lot of things i never bookmarked? i am pretty sure i loved a lot of long fanfictions, flower shop aus and tattoo artists shit wtf-

wait here's one, it's not complete: Blood jumps in the sun: it's very heavy has a lot of growth and kinda wholesome,, tags and summary will give u an idea what u getting in.

The lessons we learned: can't remember much other than florist keith, sad keith, smart keith, really long, pining

damn i think i have a lot of happy ones i didn't bookmark cause my brain was like u dont deserve the serotonin :( i'll add if i have more)

some actually angsty, detailed nsfw and messy (according to the way u interpret these) ones... lemoninagin.. they have some very detailed and explicit nsfw stuff but i am not there for it. some of it has the kind of angst i like? an actual one that i love and they recently posted and the reason am putting them here is infinitesimal. best friends to lovers and tho usually it's not my cup of tea.. it's a character study, an interpretation of klance in a modern world i dare say,, which is very similar to mine. the thing about them is that i like their characterization a lot, and in no love in this, i like what kind of background stories they give to klance in their aus. i haven't read many by them, so if u want u can check them out.

i just realized i have put some lowkey sad/fucked fics here... i did remove 5 rn... i hope its all good damn why am i doing this i feel like am putting myself naked out there when i recommend my favs

[montpahrnah]

Hi! I know this might come out as a strange question, but do you think that gay marriage exist in the hp universe? And what are your thoughts on gay wizarding culture (is that even a word? Pardon me for my absolutely horrible english)? Anyway, I hope you're having a good day

beatrice you are the loveliest and i hope everything is bright and beautiful for you

so, as far as canon/word of jkr goes, i know she’s said something similar to what a lot fantasy/sci-fi writers do whenever this comes up, which is that ~wix~ are more tolerant than muggles and being queer just doesn’t matter, or no one cares, etc, which is an incredibly cheap cop-out for all the obvious reasons (and like, “it just doesn’t matter!!” et al is just… such a clueless, straight thing to say. of course it matters). the thing is, blood purity just doesn’t work as a catchall or replacement for real-world oppressions–as in, within canon, it doesn’t even work that way:  we have plenty of examples of sexism and misogyny throughout the series, very few explicitly non-white characters play significant roles, and the single canonically gay character is a chaste old man who has learned the error of his ways via a bad romance* and remains closeted for the entire series. THUS, i think blood purity is best (and most interestingly) viewed as another layer of oppression in addition to racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia etc rather than a one-size-fits-all exchange for those things.

because of that, i tend to think wizarding society would progress along similar routes as muggle society re:  gay rights, liberation, marriage etc. especially because i think queer wizards would necessarily have to have a knowledge of both worlds/learn to exist in both–given how small and insular wizarding society is, the muggle world definitely has more going for it! there are absolutely gay wizard bars/clubs/groups/resources etc, but they’d be far fewer/possibly feel a bit claustrophobic given the relatively tiny population of magical folks in general (on the other hand, it would foster an intimate, invaluable sense of community), so i feel like straddling that border between muggle/wizard is inevitable! as a result they bring muggle ideas back with them/bring wizard ideas to the muggle world, and as they got involved in muggle movements, they’d come back and start their own concurrently in magical society.

as far as modern-day magical society is concerned, i see no reason why gay marriage wouldn’t exist! i do think it’d take a bit longer for them than for muggles, and let’s be real, strict pureblood families are never going to go for it (tbh purebloods in general probably don’t take well to it), though i’ve always had a headcanon that queer witches and wizards from those families typically try to seek each other out for sham marriages lol, though that obviously wouldn’t work every time. given that muggle-magical duality i think they’d probably opt for a joint ceremony to make everything official in both places, or maybe just have two separate weddings for both since that might make things a little less complicated… i was trying to think of co-magical/muggle spaces for this where that might have a lot of symbolic meaning but atm i can’t come up with much. also this is kind of tangential, but something i’ve always been interested in is thinking about non- and part-human populations that function mostly outside of both magical and muggle societies, i.e. kelpies, veela, even werewolf packs, because there’s no way they would conform to mainstream muggle or magical ideas about gender and sexuality and i’d kill for a fic that explores any of that someday!!

other than that, i think at hogwarts and even after, a whole lot of queer content both magical and non-magical would get passed around like contraband. certain of auden’s poems, rimbaud’s letters to verlaine, orlando, some of nin’s better short stories, illustrated magical copies of things akin to the joy of gay sex and various zines, mixtapes ft. queer artists/obsessive queer yearning, sleater-kinney’s music later on, my beautiful laundrette, g.l.o.s.s.’s demo, new bloods’ lone album passed around like a sacred heirloom… i like to think they sometimes come to muggle stuff years or decades later and are so extremely enthusiastic about it their muggle buds can’t even bring themselves to tell them they’ve already read it fifteen times. (though part of our shared history, i think, has that ageless quality:  given the scarcity of art about and for us, and given how close we hold those things that are ours, there’s something about them that always feels relevant–and such joy in seeing other people discover them.)

AGAIN, i’m always desperate to hear what people think about queer magical culture–tell me your headcanons!!!!! we don’t talk about this nearly enough as a fandom, u know?

*as i wrote this i remembered that i don’t think we actually have confirmation that grindlewald reciprocated dumbledore’s feelings, so maybe “romance” is a strong word? idk

[lexpistachio]

y'all are the ones acting like parse is a main character instead of an occasional antagonist, jesus. let the woman draw her characters.

OMG my first anon hate (?). I thought for sure the day won’t come but NO. I am stoked. STOKED

Thus, I’m nothing if not bound to make this post extra long for you, my dear anon hater, because u my numero uno!

First off, no one claimed Parse was the main character, and the author has made it explicitly clear.

But what you’re implying in this statement is that fans are not allowed to care about development of side characters? Which is extremely problematic to me for several reasons:

1. Fans are actually allowed to make value judgments about a particular body of work. Interpretations of the comic isn’t left to the author alone.

Say, if the author says, oh this is my main character, you should be focused only on this, does this negate the fact that some other characters were written and are available for the readers to read and interpret? Surely Ngozi isn’t the first author to experience backlash from fans clamoring for more about a particular character they hadn’t intended to be big/discussed in the first place? To the uninitiated, it has in fact happened, and it’s what they call a breakout character, my dear anon.

What’s that you say, fandom had actually, repeatedly voiced their opinion in choosing which character they like, even though such character hadn’t intended to be the main character? Why yes, yes it had. I believe this leads back to the principle of modern/postmodern literary criticism, in that the work is believed larger than the author. To simplify Roland Barthes, the death of the author is the birth of the reader, and the work is open to interpretation regardless of the author’s express intent to guide such interpretation. I’m allowed to critique this work because it simply is available for me to read and critique. My interpretation isn’t less valid than that of the author, and of course, I’m allowed to care about whichever character I like, inasmuch as in this case, it is my critique of how Kent was underutilized in this body of work. I am allowed to do that.

2. So now, regarding Parse being the occasional villain, gather round y'all new Check Please fans and let me tell ya: there was a period of time in between the Check Please updates where the introduction of Parse brought outrage. Outrage of the angry tears variety. But it was also the time Parse could have been so much more than your “occasional villain.” After all, at that point, Bitty’s story didn’t have to be intertwined with Jack’s– he could have a story much much larger coming-of-age story than that; but Jack’s story will always be intertwined with Kent and vice versa.

Around the time Kent was introduced, he was immediately a threat to the burgeoning love story of the “protagonists,” but more importantly than that , his introduction brought question to where the series was heading. Obviously from the very beginning, we had the boy-meets-boy, boy-annoys-boy-and-then-they-fall for each other cliche rolled out for Bitty’s future. But then Kent came along, and see, at this point in time, Bitty, the “protagonist” (and let me get back to the dubious quotation marks later) still hasn’t had his story set as a future pie-baking WAG sidekick of a coming out story of a professional athlete. Jack could have been just a pitstop to his larger bildungsroman arc, and Jack could have had fixing it up with Kent and his still unresolved issues about his insecurity and anxiety, as his own arc. Or so I hoped. Those were some exciting new times, my friends, because the possibilities! Jack and Bitty could have ended up together after Bitty resolves what he wants in life and Jack could have resolved his personal vendetta first! Or Kent could have been someone Jack needs a heart-to-heart talk to, and maybe Jack could be Bitty’s first love but not his last! Not that these things could have ever happened, because after the “talk” happened in the previous update wherein Jack dismissed Kent as unimportant, it’s all pretty much the same boring coming-out cliche with Kent eventually being treated as the Horrible Successful But Obsessed Ex who should forever pine while cuddling his many accolades and plotting Jack’s career’s demise, and Jack’s issues were pretty much handwaved and cured so.

But why should I care about Kent then, and how he’s treated by this comic? Because it’s supposedly an LGBT story and a story which supposedly cares about coming out in professional sports, but it only has two (2)  queer professional athletes as characters, and it treats one (1) out of two (2) horribly, horribly wrong. Lest you forget, there has been no professional hockey player to come out as they were active in the NHL; the last openly gay pro player to come out had been stabbed to death jesus fuck. Here are some of articles about sexism and  homophobia in hockey, and even though You Can Play has done good work and many a player had said they would support an LGBT teammate, not one has come out. Nada. Not even in retirement. This sexist, homophobic locker room culture stems as far back as juniors, and maybe even further than that. This is the culture that would have been engendered in Jack and this is the culture that Kent Parson would have been playing in at, nonstop. In all likelihood, if there was an LGBT hockey player in the league, and statistics would point to YES, then someone has done all their hockey education perfectly until they got drafted, maybe through Juniors, as Kent did, and someone would have been choosing to hide like Kent does, which they don’t make lightly. Kent Parson’s story is closest to an LGBT pro hockey athlete that you can get, and this comic punished him by falling in love with someone who buddyfucked him and refused to talk to him after he got drafted above him. He was made an “occasional (love story) villain” in the last update, and so the closeted athlete was vilified, whose story was marked as irrelevant.

My dear anon, as a member of the LGBT community, and a closeted one at that, allow me to be salty over this.

And why do I care about how cliched this love story is? It’s because it’s condescending to me and to closeted people who should not be made as bad examples because they have little to no wiggle room to express their sexuality. This isn’t an LGBT story, but as a friend of mine said, (lol yeah), a story that a straight person thinks what it’s like to be gay. It’s straight-up patronizing and does not make a positive difference to people who really are in our situation. Instead it endorses more stereotypes to the  narrative that choosing not to broadcast one’s sexuality is a lesser way to live.

And sure, Ngozi or any author is allowed to write what they want to write, there’s no contesting that. But allow us to criticize what we don’t appreciate, allow us to be offended where we are actually offended. We’re allowed this too.

3. As it is, the main character’s stories to me are uninteresting.

I can go on and write more on this, tbh, but basically, I find that spitting on a closeted character’s story arc is frankly insulting so that he can stand as a foil to the ~feel good~ coming-out romance that the author has concocted. Because that’s the only ideal way to live right, straight people?

In any case, rally on your pitchforks and torches, but I don’t find Bitty compelling. Yeah I went there.

One of the first things people learn for, like, writing 101, was to give your protagonist a concrete, specific goal at the beginning of your story, as this is the thing that develops the plot and the standard upon which the character is evaluated at the end of their arc: do they achieve their goal? if yes or no, how are they changed because of it? Story structure varies whether the story is genre-specific or under literary fiction, but it’s universally acknowledged that protagonists have to be compelling, even though they’re not likeable. And Bitty as a POV character and a protagonist? Has baking pies for sure, but to quote Community Season 3, you are not allowed to have ‘baking things’ as your identity. He had one, for sure, when he was just trying to stay at the team, but I don’t see much there now, except to achieve their #GayGoals of coming out as the Jack’s beau in his gay success story (and maybe declaring a major). But then again I don’t really find that fascinating. 

But again, that’s just my opinion.We’re allowed to, yeah?