#as well as acknowledging fandom attitudes by transposing them in-universe

[honestlyvan]

Van, I'm bored, you must entertain me, give me an unpopular opinion about, uh, Bumblebee!

Why would you set me up to fail like this? My Bumblebee opinions are notoriously milquetoast, I like pretty much every iteration of him and actively think that if we have to have an Autobot who is in every thing ever, I'm glad it's Beepy Boy.

The one thing I'm sad only seems to exist in fandom is "Autobot PR frontman" Bumblebee. He'd make a great political animal, being able to talk his way around every situation he's ever put in and mastering the art of lying by telling the truth. It would also produce a cleaner break for Bee out of the role of being the default audience surrogate bot, I think, if he was made sneakier and more practiced at playing social games. As far as extroversion goes, the ability to doctor that spin and maintain control of a narrative is rare as far as heroic traits go.

Failing that, someone should give him a knife and let him start stabbing. He'd make a good spooky murder gremlin also.

[dgcatanisiri]

I had the thought recently about how the idea of “canonical character interaction is antagonistic which leads to them being shipped” is DEFINITELY representative of heteronormative attitudes - We have, for good and for ill, been brought up to believe that “pulling pigtails” is a sure sign of attraction between little boys and little girls, and this is then transferred over into a same-sex pairing. As a trope, this goes back AT LEAST to Shakespeare and The Taming of the Shrew.

Problem is, that’s NOT the same-sex attraction experience. The same-sex attraction experience is that someone of the same-sex shows us the smallest ounce of decency and kindness, we will spend years following in their shadow and building an image in our head of them being our perfect example of love. 

*ahem* What, why are you looking at me like that?

Anyway, there are two particular examples in my mind that kinda emphasize just how this plays out when it comes to media and the fans reactions of same-sex pairings, at least on the M/M end. And they make a case for certain problems within fan communities, with the respective media they’re for reacting in different ways, and, in my personal opinion, show how the people running the shows and the fan responses don’t get the differences.

(Even though, yes, I realize, both of my examples are helmed by gay men - it’s not like their staffs were gay and the studios were not, so that is less of a thing for the purposes of what I’m trying to say here.)

So, example one: Glee. Glee is, rightfully, a dark period of time we are truly better off pretending never existed, but it’s useful for my point, so please bear with me. IN CANON, Kurt spent much of the first season hopelessly head over heels for Finn. This was an actual, ongoing subplot through the first season, up to the point it culminated in the mess it that it did we’re not here to go into that god I really could rant on Glee if I were going to...

Right. My point. Sorry. Glee does that to me.

Anyway, Kurt’s canonical attraction in season one was towards Finn, and, while we all knew it would never happen, that the intent was always going to be towards the heterosexual breeding pair of Finn and Rachel... At this point in time, when I was in the Glee fandom, the main pairing was Kurt and Puck. 

Puck, the guy whose INTRODUCTION was leading a pack of bullies in tossing Kurt in a dumpster. THAT was where the majority of the fanfics I came across at the time were looking towards. 

Fandom saw “bully and victim” and took it to “Puck is expressing his repressed feelings for Kurt by bullying him.” 

And stick a pin in the concept of “fandom” in general, I’m going to come back to it after the second example.

Now, and brace yourself, because I’m about to say something positive in regards to Glee, the response on the show was to turn around and, the following season, not only introduce a new bully for Kurt who WAS doing what fanon!Puck had been doing, which lead to Kurt actively refusing a relationship with him, while also getting a canonical boyfriend. Yes, I call that a positive.

Because while I was closeted throughout my time in public school, I was still bullied and mistreated by other students, if not due directly to my sexuality. It did not lead to crushes on those guys. Hell, there were a couple of guys who spent a good amount of time pretending to be my friends, and if it had been a few years later, that might have become a crush. Instead, though, they revealed themselves before that happened and I completely cut them out of my life when they revealed themselves. And I’ve never felt bad about that.

The gay experience is not crushing on your bullies. It’s crushing on your friends, on the people who you know will be there for you. You don’t see the bully as “disguising their feelings.” No, that you’re gonna take at face value, because the alternative may well be dangerous to you. At least if someone’s been kind to you, they’re more likely to keep up that behavior. But why would you EVER put your heart - and your LIFE - on the line by telling someone who has shown you nothing but disdain “I’m attracted to you”?

Now, for the second example. If Glee was the good one (because the law of averages say it had to happen), then Teen Wolf is the bad one.

See, we all know that Stiles and Derek (no I am NOT going to refer to it by the ship name, I do NOT need that drama showing up in my feed) were considered the fandom darling. 

BUT... They were the above “bully/victim” ship. Their interactions in season one were very distinctly antagonistic. Meanwhile, in terms of positive pairings that could be teased, there were a few - Scott/Stiles (bromantic best friends), Scott/Danny (Scott canonically cuts in between Danny and his Prom date so that he can hide the fact that he’s not supposed to be there by making Coach look homophobic), Scott/Derek (Derek talking about how they had a bond as pack), Stiles/Danny (”Am I attractive to gay guys?”). 

But no. It was Stiles and Derek that became the runaway darling in the fandom. To the point that, eventually, the show engaged actively in queerbaiting, throwing them together more and more often, but ultimately never doing more than teasing before throwing female characters at the both of them. 

(Granted, I also don’t think that any discussion of that particular ship is valid unless you also acknowledge the racism involved, considering that the ship itself features two white guys, while the other two characters I mentioned are, respectively, Latino and Hawaiian, very clearly not white - you will note that Scott and Jackson had a similar antagonistic relationship, and THAT pairing didn’t get much attention at all, despite not having any competition with the “main” ship. In particular, I think that it was entirely valid for Tyler Posey to have seen this reaction and condemned the ship, because it was basically people diminishing him and his character to focus on white guys, especially when you consider how often Scott’s traits ended up being transposed onto Stiles... Okay, this is starting to move beyond the scope I wanted for this.)

Now. back to the issue of “fandom.” Because you know... I don’t think the “fandom” of either of these pairings, Kurt and Puck and Stiles and Derek consisted heavily of actually gay fans - not that they weren’t out there, but I don’t think they were the bulk of the initial fans of the first season, only really coming on board after season two and the active queerbaiting. I think they were, at the time of the first season, heavily made up of teenage girls.

And I’m not saying this as part of the general habit that there is in media critique to just dismiss teenage girls as a demographic as cringey don’t-pay-attention-to-THAT-crowd. It’s just my observation that, for teenage girls, all the things we say about women in fandom exploring their sexualities are magnified - what’s the common observation, that women in fandom use M/M pairings to explore a “safe” dynamic that they can observe and play out harmlessly for themselves, something to that effect?

So that’s the awareness I’m coming into this with - those teenage girls (and I’m emphasizing teenage girls because we have high school dramas, where I’m fairly sure these are the primary audience) use the awareness that they had of “how relationships work” when it comes to heterosexual relationships and were simply applying it to their perceptions of the gay pairings they were looking at. That “pulling pigtails” is the trope this audience associated with attraction, and so it’s how they applied.

THIS IS NOT CONDEMNATION. I really feel I have to hammer this point - I am observing a trend, in the name of awareness and understanding, I am not trying to say that anyone who was doing this or is still doing this has done ANYTHING wrong here. I want that to be very clear. This is me having spotting this trend and wanting to give it some attention, because look at the age of the examples I’m offering - both these shows lasted for six seasons and have concluded their runs, I’m only looking at their first seasons here as is, we are not talking about recent stuff, just history of fandom. I could have looked at more and seen if there was a universal trend or just a trend of the times or what. While this certainly could be grounds for one, this is not me having done some massive research project consisting of multi-media examinations of fandom and queerness, I’m just connecting dots and trends that I have seen to look at this thing that, going forward, I would like to see us pay attention to and be aware of.

Because my point is (for the TL;DR summary) that same-sex attraction manifests DIFFERENTLY. To express attraction to the person who is mistreating you is to invite harm being inflicted. The gay experience is to pine from afar because they were nice to you. And, obviously, a straight person is not going to know this inherently - this is part of an experience that they don’t have. 

I’d just like to see this recognized in the future when it comes to how people respond to and react to the popular same-sex ships in fandom - are they being shipped by actual queer people, or is it prominently the straight fandom using their view of things and latching on to a ship, rather than being actual queer fans expressing themselves.

Like, that’s one of my big things - I often don’t feel very... I’m going to hedge this as “noticed,” rather than any other term, within fandom a lot of them time, as a queer man and queer creator. The big names in fandom, writing for the popular ships, still tend to be female creators, which... I’m not discounting the queer women who are writing and making art and all that featuring M/M pairings, but I do feel like they get elevated to a point where the queer men doing the same creation do not, which can seem like a problem, even if I recognize that it’s as much an issue of who even picks up the pen or opens the word processor or whatever as it is a matter of promotion - I do recognize that it may be as much that queer men aren’t creating as much as it is anything else, there is a complex ball of interconnected issues pushing and pulling on one another.. 

It’s just a frustrating feeling of not seeing your experiences being given your voice - it means you have to depend on others to speak your story. Which, surprise, surprise, is not exactly encouraging to gay people, who’dve thunk?