#then you consume the media and you're like wait they're not actually together. the gays got scammed again

[six-of-cringe]

Because it's happened to me a billion times with other fandoms containing queer ships - if I were an outsider to the SoC fandom and just caught glimpses of fan works/posts, I'd have to wonder if Jesper and Wylan were actually canonically together or if fans just made it up so hard they tricked me into thinking it's real. like ok are these little crime guys actually in love this time or are we feeling left out again.

[olderthannetfic]

When it comes to representation I think people often forget there is more than one type: rep that's meant to resonate with the ingroup, rep that's meant to be friendly to the outgroup, rep that is meant to do both, and rep that isn't really written with the idea in mind that it will be rep at all. Fanfic often falls under the last one because it's very iddy and more has to do with characters people like being cute/hot/whatever together than explicitly sitting down to create or consume something that's meant to be "rep". Also, rep doesn't and shouldn't mean that the character is representative of or even relatable to everyone in the ingroup. That's 1. impossible and 2. puts a lot of pressure on creators to tip toe a knife's edge and also makes it so people's experiences outside of that are shamed and disregarded for not meeting the ideal. If everyone understood this we'd have a much better time.

The amount of times I've seen wank that amounts to "XYZ is bad rep because blah blah" and then people chime in with "wait, this is my actual experience/this isn't unrealistic/unheard of" I'd be rich.

It's like a catch-22. You can't write your gay couple to be white picket fence normies complete with separate beds because that's hetwashing them but if you do anything other than that you're a sick fetishistic weirdo. Bonus points for the uncomfortableness around people immediately going to you oversexualizing gays when the content isn't even sexual at all because people's minds immediately going from gay to sex to bad isn't unfamiliar at all!

Really tired of coming across shit and having to think to myself "if this was me writing for an M/F ship this wouldn't be a concern at all". Seriously, I'm starting to think people's problems with M/M and F/F content isn't that it's bad rep but that they're on a certain level uncomfortable with LGBT and LGBT themes and rationalize that discomfort as the depiction just Not Being The One True Depiction that will make it Okay.

--

Yes, that last paragraph is exactly what's going on.

Also, I am sick to death of people thinking everyone's representation needs are met by literal representation. That matters in big media, absolutely. But in in-group niche stuff, it is perfectly common to like allegorical representation.

What is allegorical representation?

Drag.

It's fucking drag, okay? Drag queens are not representation for women, nor should they be. Drag kings and BL and slash fanfiction are not typically representation for men. BL fandom does have some dudes in it, but overall, it operates like drag, and this should be understood, respected, and defended.

A lot of the people bawwwing about "oversexualizing" just cannot handle the idea that anybody but cis men (or cis men plus themselves) could ever have a legitimate reason to depict cis male bodies but not be making art for cis men. Ditto the people who look at bi women and scream bloody murder about how lots of us write m/m when we could be spending that time writing f/f.

These attitudes not only remove necessary liminal space where various flavors of trans people figure themselves out but also shit on the entire concept of drag. And they have the nerve to say they're defending gay culture!