Femslash vs Manslash shipping...

Okay but the whole ‘why don’t people ship more femslash’ discussion is automatically flawed tho.

We keep saying ‘it’s because there are no interesting female characters’ and in a lot of fandoms, that’s true, but that’s not the only reason, because because even when there are well-developped female characters, femslash still doesn’t get attention. Take for example, The 100: from what I’ve seen on my dashboard, there’s a het ship that’s really popular, and maybe a m/m one. Do you know which pairing I almost never see?

The canon F/F one.

But when you look at M/M pairings? They’re everywhere in fandom. Two (white) dudes can’t look at each other on TV without at least a few people getting a little shippy with them. When the SPN episode with the Golem came out, people wrote fic in which Dean ended up going out with a guy who accidentally flirted with him. Stiles and Derek from Teen Wolf got shipped before even getting real personalities.

The truth is the discussion surrounding femslash is biased because we forget to take into account the amount of effort we’re willing to put into it. We’re all conditionned to invest ourselves first and foremost in the white male character, and that means we’re willing to do work that the writers didn’t put into the characters. We’ve seen it with the #CoulsonLives hashtag after the first Avengers movie, we’ve seen it when Castiel became a fan favorite before the show gave him a more fleshed background, etc.

When a male character lacks depth, we create it.

When a female character lacks depth, we move on and away to another character.

And that’s something that we need to take into account when we discuss femslash and its absence in fandom.

Posted on : Sun 31 May
with : 8 notes

My Posts On Fandom stuff to think a I've been thinking about that lately It doesn't *just* apply to female characters btw Characters of color Particularly black characters Suffer from it too Just look at Scott McCall The Latino protag from Teen Wolf and how Stiles sounds like a bigger character when you look at Tumblr gifsets We're all just so accustomed to make up for (white) men's flaws we don't even realize we're still doing it with fictional people