Am I the only person here who is genuinely tired of sick boys, especially pertaining to gay males? Those ‘males’ are so obviously almost self-inserts of female characters (especially in BxB fics) and they have no real discernable personality past ‘a cinnamon woll! UwU’ that ‘must be protected at all costs!’
Characters that aren’t even nice guys [not even close, that’s different than being a soft boy–you can be a nice guy and have a personality, and do good things and be a character], these characters are just vapid, and don’t change and serve no point apart from to explore ‘BxB’ especially for these women, and to just be shipped over and fawned over (by everyone).
Look, I know teenage boys aren’t burly usually and aren’t meant to be bricks and are still growing up, but some of them are just girls in wigs, without breasts literally. In that art, especially Yaoi art. They never grow up and are perpetually petulant and coddled, and literally never mature (in any way).
I can forgive teenagers a bit but when the teens become eternal twinks. Come on. He wouldn’t act, or look like that in the real world. He would have grown some. Mentally, and physically. He would be less ‘UwU’ and more ‘U’. The world would have changed him a bit. (Not saying he can’t be ‘soft’ but it’s not in the way that they are usually written).
Look, I have nothing against sensitive men, and men who aren’t masculine but it’s how these soft boys get written that annoys me. The ones that never grow up. The ones that never learn. The ones that never mature, or learn anything. I’m not saying that they have to become masculine, but please use them for more than experimenting and cute ships.
Yaoi fans (mainly most of the females) are an interesting bunch to begin with.
I understand what you mean.
They rather have males how they want placed in a relationship of their ideals.
This is going to sound mean as hell, but some of those yaoi fans probably never had a guy even remotely interested in them.
Still, as much as I find yaoi fairly cool sometimes. I do think that it is just they dislike rough and tough men and think males should be more sensitive to a female’s needs, but in their case a males.
That whole “if I can’t date or find a suitable man, I’ll make two guys in a yaoi relationship instead” mentality is a bit strange.
Sometimes I think it is merely a fetish thing.
I could be wrong, but yaoi shippers are just bonkers to me!
If I don’t make sense, ignore this comment.
Yeah, to be honest a lot of what you said is true.
I never got the whole ‘making an ideal gay relationship because I can’t have one’ mentality. And gays shouldn’t be fetishized. It would be weird if the tables were reversed, and a gay man was fetishizing two teenage girls in a relationship… so why is this any different?
I honestly thought I was speaking nonsense! Thank you so much!
Exactly! Seriously, I worry about people like that. The sad thing is that people think it is fine because NOBODY IS GETTING HURT in the end. I mean yeah there is nobody getting killed or anything and it might be purely out of fun, but people’s sanity aren’t looking great in that aspect.
I am not saying all of the of yaoi fans are batshit obsessive and insane, but some are and the ones who are need serious attention and help.
Well it’s in my drafts lol it’s only half complete. Too lazy to write the remaining half. I did a deep dive into the literary criticism of the gay novel.
The conclusion is… stop putting the heteronormative (or even the homonormative) lens on gay people, relationships & issues.
Yes, Hanya Yanagihara comes straight (no pun intended) to mind here with A Little Life. She just wrote gay trauma porn, and all of a sudden she’s getting a TV show from it. And a musical.
A Little Life is smarter than people give it credit. It’s the complete rejection of what a gay novel should be, which I don’t think it’s even trying to be one. While still an exercise in suffering (which happens to be a major theme in both gay fiction and Yanagihara’s work), it avoids the coming out, impossible affairs and the AIDS narratives which dominates contemporary gay fiction. It also is a commentary male social networks and intimacy, a kind of Uranian camaraderie for the 21st Century.
YouTubers made it the edgiest book that’s ever edged. And so some people can’t get past a surface level reading of the text, which is sad. But hey at least they’re reading. Is it trauma porn? It is if you look at it that way.
I think I’d prefer that than the post-gay narratives of “Oh yeah everything’s totally fine and cute!”
My problem with it is that she makes it sound so boring and pretentious. Jude is abused and this and that, and then the post man thing. I think it could be so much better In my opinion.
It’s not ‘edgy’. Just meh, to me. Nothing against people liking the book (that would be stupid), but I’m not going there (for me). Not my cup of tea at all.
I think I prefer something that I write–not to be cocky–because at least I know it’s not gonna be trauma porn or everything’s fine and cute. It will be something that I like (obviously lol) I try to make it somewhat realistic, interesting, and unorthodox.
Depressingly cute and happy stuff is boring (something like Heartstopper is just really childish and too Gen Z to me), and so is trauma porn, boring to me. Balance it out.
If you ever need to stab your eyes out, I can show you that Klbible. The massive problem is that the ship usually places Lance above Keith, which is not the basis for a healthy or even interesting dynamic if the writer has such extreme favoritism.
an unfortunate amount of gay male content is written by (often young) cisgender heterosexual women with other cisgender heterosexual women in mind. as a result, it can come across as unrealistic at best and at worst fetishistic and dehumanizing.
i remember reading an article once—and this was years ago, i wish i could find it again today—about how this phenomenon goes hand-in-hand with heteronormativity and fandom culture reinforcing misogyny. look at nearly any works of popular fiction from the mid-2000s/2010s. usually, male characters and their (non-romantic) dynamics with other men are fleshed out, given depth, and female characters are relegated to the role of “love interest” regardless of whether they have any real chemistry. female characters are not afforded the assumption of having interesting, rich inner lives the way male characters are. to add insult to injury, the female love interests of fan-favorite male characters were usually poorly received by the audience equal parts because of their lazy writing and because of weird, misdirected jealousy. so many female actors of potential love interests in supernatural, for example, received insane amounts of harassment from the fan base, so those pairings didn’t really come to fruition.
this resulted in the young women in fandom exploring their attraction to men in the form of gay male pairings, but because of their internalized misogyny and heternormativity they end up essentially reinventing gender roles in the form of yaoi dynamics. they don’t ask “which one is the man and which one is the woman?” anymore, they ask “which one is the uwu so innocent anxious precious smol bean and which one is the strong masculine manly man?”
i hope it doesn’t sound too much like i’m engaging in apologia for these women, i’m not—i’m speaking as a non-cisgender, non-heterosexual person here. just rambling and offering some explanation as to why this happens.
I’ve discussed this with my gay friend, and we both came to the conclusion that why some of those stories are tasteful and well-written, a HUGE chunk of it is a bunch of women fetishizing and sexualizing the fuck outta gay men, and how inslulting that is. It’s to the point that these stories are targeted towards female audiences and not gay men, hence all the self-insert characters.
A majority of lesbian content, for example, are stories written by queer women for queer women.
I truly beleive if a majority male audience wrote lesbian content, sexualizing and fetishizing it like they do gay stories, people would have a MUCH bigger issue.
The major problem on top of all this is that these women actually think theyre allies. Like, no sandra, this is a sexual fantasy of yours. Youre not supporting anyone by spreading these gross sterotypes.
I think some leniancy can be had because a good chunk are (usually) teenagers. A wake-up call should 100% be inserted, but theyre young, dumb, and ignorant. When you have grown women doing this? Yeah, big weird.
Can I finish it for you? LOL
In my opinion.