214 50/50 Tropes
Jun. 17th, 2012 03:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mklutz posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
slashreport
Double up on your popcorn this week folks, because MK, Pru, and The Hoyden take a journey of terrible discovery in the depths of your favorite (and least favorite) fanfic tropes. We cover everything from soulbonding to soulbonding with a mind meld, and detour in the land of magical ass babies and high school AUs along the way. If that sounds like your cup of tea, or perhaps you are just a keen fan of listening to auditory train wrecks, crank up the volume and settle in, because /report is always happy to serve.
Our RSS/itunes feed can be found over here or you can follow us on twitter for even more inanity during the week.
Get ready to ruin yourself forever and go download or stream this week's episode!
no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 04:13 am (UTC)DON'T STONE ME, I REGRET IT FOREVER.
anyway if you're interested in more detail, i could do that
Far too many words about boypussies.
Date: 2012-06-18 09:03 am (UTC)I've NEVER seen someone label a Glee fic with bp and mean something to do with an asshole. I've only ever seen fic where either the bp is there instead of a cock (i.e. essentially a vagina, though the character otherwise remains male-bodied), or as an EXTRA organ (cock, bp, & asshole, and again otherwise entirely male-bodied), and I've seen universes that include female characters with the corresponding girlcock (or whatever the popular term is) and the same variance of total sexual organs.
I suspect this trope may have developed as a way to normalize Kurt's often unique gender presentation. Glee actively brings up issues of homophobia, transphobia, and gender policing, particularly around Kurt, so I can easily understand how unusual genderfucks like BPs would show up in a Kurt stan's kink list. It's essentially people saying fuck your gendered tropes and throwing fun stuff like vaginal sex, cunnilingus, pregnancy, etc, into a fic that is still 100% slash, no questions of gender asked or even posited. Which has a couple of interesting overarching consequences.
First of all, we're getting universes where every pairing, regardless of gender makeup, can be compatible in terms of sexual reproduction, eliminating the traditional biological imperative argument against same-sex coupling. BP AUs, like designated soulmate AUs (also HUGELY popular in Glee fandom), are one of the ways that authors can erase homophobia entirely from their fictional worlds.
And second of all, we're also getting worlds where someone's perception of their genitalia is wholly dependent on their gender identity, and not the other way around. Meaning they're essentially creating fic with intersex and/or trans* characters whose intersex and/or trans* bodies are perceived as normal and thus, neither gender-related bullying nor gender-related body dysphoria occur.
The extent to which this is naive and/or fetishizing is debatable (personally, I'm inclined to say "it's the kink meme, that's the point" and let it go), but I think the fact that this has developed as a trope at all is really interesting. The fact that it's found popularity in the Glee fandom makes a lot of sense to me, although I'd love to get more specifics of its origins and proliferation.
Re: Far too many words about boypussies.
Date: 2012-06-18 12:25 pm (UTC)Re: Far too many words about boypussies.
Date: 2012-06-18 12:43 pm (UTC)The panel mod pointed out that fact that in many ways Glee is a young fandom. Its writers seem to skew younger than in other fandoms. So you have a lot of young girls writing about Kurt's boy-pussy. But it's not about the trans* thing or the gender thing often.
Such fics have Kurt being ashamed or embarrassed by his body, but having another person being comforting and understanding. It's a way of coming to accept ones own genitalia.
Go back to the fact that we're talking about the vagina. And I can only speak for cisfemale people, but young girls are taught nothing about their own bodies, to the point they don't seem to belong to them in a way young boys and their penii don't have to deal with.
So. You have a lot of cisfemale girls writing about a character who doesn't understand their own genitalia but slowly coming to acceptance with some help from a loved on, and learning about one's own body.
Sound familiar?
Anyway. Just an alternate theory.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 03:04 pm (UTC)Re: Far too many words about boypussies.
Date: 2012-06-18 03:05 pm (UTC)Re: Far too many words about boypussies.
Date: 2012-06-18 03:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 03:55 pm (UTC)When I posted the entry, it was 2003, around march 22nd. The entry itself was pretty simple: the title of the entry was "Who do you hate" and I just asked people to name names & give reasons and reassured people that it would all be anonymous & I wouldn't censor anything until & unless I was forced to, or if it got off-topic. (Ugh. Basically imagine that I'm wincing the entire time I'm writing all of this, because I am.)
I remember considering making the entry friends-only to begin with, but it's impossible to allow anonymous comments on a friends-only entry, so that was out. I wasn't interested in counter-attacks and defensive crap being pulled; I was sincerely curious.
I didn't do it because I was upset with anyone in particular, and interestingly enough, I actually never said anything on the meme. I pretended I had, to make other people more comfortable (I know, wtf? but seriously, I've been in therapy for 6 years and I can't explain that), but it was more like... I don't know. Poking a stick in an anthill to see what happened. Also lots of twisted psychological reasons, and mostly, to be honest, the stupidity of being 16. The internet equivalent of a slam-book, I guess, or really nasty gossip: I just wanted to know what inspired others to dislike someone who they really only knew through words.
Erm, and also I was bored. I think it was spring break for my high school at the time. Yeah. This isn't really defensible, I know, I'm just trying to explain what the hell I was thinking.
I remember that the first person to post a comment actually wasn't on my friends' list at all, as far as I could tell— the person linked in that comment wasn't on my flist, nor on the flist of any of my friends. That should have been a hint that this was getting way bigger than I expected it to, but I didn't realize that.
I was still on dialup (or possibly a very low-speed ADSL connection) & had left comments turned on, so I remember logging on to check my email and ending up having to download something like 300 comments after only being gone to sleep.
LJ Abuse emailed me and made me take it down after around four days, but I don't have that email anymore because that was 2 addresses ago. :(
I did do did a search thru my archives for the aftermath of that entry. Oddly enough, no one has dropped me since I posted the semi-infamous entry asking you all to list who you hate on lj (this explains a little bit of what I thought was my rationale for creating a hate meme in the first place), Just checking to make sure that the internet hasn't blown up., and a poll on whether I should delete that shit or not.
(The poll is interesting, mainly because I had 140 respondents-- before the meme, I think I had maybe 100 friends-of [who actually read my journal regularly] at the time, so people were evidently more interested in my journal, which was an unforeseen side-effect.)
LJ Abuse "graciously" requested that I not formally announce taking down the hate meme, but didn't prohibit me mentioning it in the comments, so.
The grand total of comments when I was forced to delete the entry by LJ Abuse was "900+", which doesn't sound like a lot until you realize that TWO LJ news posts about a redesign posted at around the same time only had 500ish combined.
It seems like now, pretty much everyone with a brain knows that hate memes are bad juju, but honestly, looking back, it seemed like it was a 50/50 reaction initially: half the people who knew me before I posted it seemed to think that I was encouraging the bad side of people to come out blah blah serial killers etc Godwin, and the other half seemed like they thought it was just shit people would be thinking and not saying and that talking about how someone's writing style & font choice secretly indicated that they were a horrible person who needed to die was just blowing off some steam.
Basically, the reactions were totally polarized. I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was really shocked at that— I felt like Sherlock might feel, I guess: is this how people really react to something that bothers/upsets them? Rationalize it into harmlessness or vilify it into Ragnarok? No middle ground, no interest in seeing the experiment play out?
That was the most shocking thing to me, I think. Of course now I understand that I had encouraged people to verbally attack anyone they had a grudge against, and what a powder-keg that was, but at the time I just thought it should have been pretty harmless.
However, now that I am NOT seventeen, emotionally, mentally, & chronologically, I can say categorically that this is one of the very few things in my life I truly regret. LJ Abuse has done some truly amazingly shitty things, but forcing me to take that entry down was the right thing to do.
Finally, even though I hate that this is true: if it hadn't been me, someone else would have done it eventually. But—that doesn't excuse it. As I said, there's no excuse. Maybe there would've been another few months, or a year without the idea occurring to someone on LJ, and maybe it never would've taken off without someone with as many friends as me posting it, and all of that. There's no way for me to know.
(if you have any further questions, let me know--I think I covered just about everything, but thankfully I've lost that supreme confidence in my own infallibility that is the most annoying thing to me about teenagers)
no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 06:47 pm (UTC)bugcock
Date: 2012-06-21 04:38 am (UTC)Re: bugcock
Date: 2012-06-21 06:36 am (UTC)re: genderfuck
Date: 2012-06-21 05:19 pm (UTC)Really enjoyed this one and I agree with a lot of the caveats, but obviously not all. It's really interesting to discover, through reading slash or porn or even orig fiction, what tropes appeal to you. And also interesting to think about what formative life experiences affected those tastes.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-25 06:30 am (UTC)So only two people were involved, right? Someone to request and another to fill. Unless no one filled it and the requester just did it themselves. I think I'll cling to that belief and another that no one commented on the fill.
THESE BELIEFS WILL GET ME THROUGH THE NIGHT. DO NOT DISABUSE ME OF THEM.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-30 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-22 06:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-26 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-04 09:00 pm (UTC)