#and XC3 being a self-closing circle I just feel *WEIRD* about the fluff

[honestlyvan]

I think I get what you mean about the weird found family stuff. I also don't really love shipping stuff, but, at least in the last couple of years, I find people get real weird about stuff like "oh he's the found family dad" sort of thing. It's hard to describe why it weirds me out, but I think it's that compulsion to give the characters "roles" in the found family stuff, where when I think of irl friends who are as close to me as family, I don't think of them as like a "sibling", they're just in my mind categorized under "family".

Of course this isn't even mentioning the weird sex negative stuff. Sometimes I want characters to have freaky weird sex stuff in their lives! Unsanitized. People into genfic can be weird about that stuff.

Yeah like for me it was the worst during the height of XC2's popularity and the absolute wealth of raging about the anime fanservice game having anime fanservice in it and the desperate urge to Divest From The Queer Horny that came with it. I don't know if the majority of the people perpetuating the moral panic eventually realised they were just useful idiots and the Killing The God That Supplanted Reality franchise was the place to get into endless unnecessary tailspins about sexual purity or not but it definitely put me off on quite a permanent basis in trying to do anything that deals with eroticism in this franchise.

It was all very prescriptivist, it was all very twee, it was all trying so hard to be cuddly and nonthreatening and safe, and it just got so uncomfortable when people were bringing all their deeply sexual baggage into the conversation over a story that, as horny as it was in places, just completely lacked any sort of genuine eroticism to me. The very few things that were hot to me that I was interested in exploring were completely ignored by-and-large, disinteresting to anyone but me, specifically. And I just couldn't get a conversational foothold about them with anyone, so I gave up.

So I kinda have this same problem with XC3 atm where I actually do find some things in it really damn hot and I am embracing the eroticism and then.... I just fail to find people with similar interests so I have no good fic to read and nobody to really talk to about it. (I've dragged two people into XC3 with me to have someone to wordvomit about the OTP to). The overt hostility against sex isn't as present, in my experience, but even if people didn't titter around the sexual aspects of the story as much.... IDK man I am tired and I am not a teenager anymore at this point themes of self-discovery and adolescence and normative pairbonding just don't do shit for me. None of it is queer and weird enough, nobody here is that attractive to me anyway, I'd much rather read gen, but then the gen is also kinda just. Like that lol.

And I know I'm probably biased, I definitely read less Xenofic than I'd like to because I look at how stuff is tagged and the summary and go "is it worth the disappointment" when there's probably good writing being done out there and I'm not giving it a chance b/c I'm fucking bitter. Like it's entirely possible that just like XC1 and XC2 didn't really have a ton of overlap in the fandom, XC2 and XC3 don't also and the things I'm really put off by the hardest are not even a thing in the fandom zeitgeist anymore.

But like man. IDK. The things I want to do with this story and the things people are doing with this story are just... really divergent. This has always been a franchise where I like the worldbuilding more than I like the characters, and then I will have like the one or two characters that I absolutely 100% am completely bananas about and they never get written in ways that I would enjoy reading.