Slashy Meta: Two for One

Please don't eat me.

There's two types of fail-meta wandering around fandom that I quietly determined not to poke into—misogyny in slash and homophobia in slash. On both I am all too likely to be RAGE FLAIL ANGRY YELLS OF DENIAL, and no matter how mildly I word my post/comments I can't be certain that I won't come out with all sorts of wrong. Slash is near and dear to my heart, and I've gotten very used to the "you write what, omg that's sick and wrong" reaction. So I bristle.

This is me avoiding bristling, and not avoiding poking the issue with a stick, because I have a long history with sticks and getting bitten on the ass.

(Note to self: tackle slash-shaming as relates to misogyny, homophobia and knee-jerk reactions to outsider accusations in another post. I do believe it's tangentially relevant to this post, but only tangentially. It seems to me that there's a correlation between slash outsiders [gay men who don't read/write fanfic, for example] talking about reasonable concerns in regards to slash, and the instantaneous VROOSH-ASPLODEY response from some slashers that is more emotional than reasonable.)

I feel like fandom, and slash particularly, have been instrumental in helping me grow as a person, as a bisexual person and as a writer. When I see posts that can be summarized as "slash is inherently anti-gay" or "female erasure in slash shows it's misogynist", it feels like my last ten years are being sneered at, and I want to defend all the good slash can do, and has done. I'm addressing both of these issues in one post because I feel like one leads naturally into the other, and I can't easily separate them.

I believe that the misogyny inherent in Western culture not only leads to misogyny in fanfic, but also directly into slash fanfic. Misogyny and homophobia are linked, and both are embedded into culture on an inherent and pervasive level, both of which end up reflecting in a genre that (unexamined) seems designed to avoid and discredit both. In short, it's a domino effect of fail. I do not think that the presence of problematic tropes discredits the entire genre.

I also feel that the majority of this discussion is about this discussion, which is repetitive at the best circle-wank at the worst. What started out reasonably (LAMBDA Fail) has become about how slashers react to criticism of slash and is then being applied to the genre itself with no differentiation. Yes, writers can be terrible about responding to criticism; this does not devalue what they write. I'm dealing with slash, for the record, not with the issue of slasher reaction to criticism.

Here's what I'm going to do. This is divided into two pieces. The first are My Thoughts, and is hopefully not exactly the sort of flaily defensive thing I've been trying to avoid. I can only use my own perspective, so that's what I've done. The second (much more painful lol) will be posted later, in the form of a ten-year review/meme of my time writing fanfic, from where I started to where I am now, pulling one fic a year from my files and looking at it to see if I have grown like I feel I have, or if I'm just in an echo chamber making myself feel better.

Between these two, I reached almost 5000 words of what is hopefully not BS. Yeah, it's like that. Oi.
( Teal Deer Found Here )