#het fic examples to ease people in to this discussion without slamming on the discourse brakes

[betterbemeta]

I feel like in the past few years there has been a serious shift in how fandom sees fictional characters. Maybe it started with the backlash to Twilight, but I am not really sure. But it gathered speed around that time, and by now the major opinion about what fandom media is even for has drastically changed.

When random teenage (and adult!) fangirls in like, 2005, wrote smut about Captain Jack Sparrow, or whoever... I don’t think they were even thinking about him as a ‘real person.’ He was a character, a persona, a kind of essence that really couldn’t have an opinion about what kind of gaze he was subjected to. He wasn’t representative of real men. Very few people thought that you could divine what women thought of their boyfriends or real crushes-- or even attractive strangers-- by reading Pirates of the Carribbean fanfiction. And that was probably good because some of it would send real men running for the hills.

But now, it is the norm for almost all pairings to be analyzed assuming that a fictional character is a stand-in for a real person. A lot of voices today are convinced that you’re not actually writing about a fictional character in a fictional situation, but about what you want for real people with some traits of the fictional character to experience in their lives. If you’re writing about Captain Jack Sparrow, you’re not really writing about the fictional, emotional ghost that connected with your emotions or sexuality in some way, you’re assumed to be writing about what you believe about a real man that would be like him. And that real man could be disgusted by you, or hate your gaze in particular.

And I don’t know which is better, or worse, or if either could be better or worse. On one hand, a lot of fanfiction written a few years ago scans as cringe to us now because lust can run wild into situations that we’d find dangerous or inappropriate in our own personal lives, with the lens of realism or activism applied. But on the other hand, a kind of neopuritianism will reign when the most “appropriate” couplings in our society are still “people with absolutely harmonious social synergy, of the exact same age and social status, capable of householding and procreation”, or at least those who do not threaten such a paradigm.

I don’t know if it’s better to normalize art that expresses one’s inner desires and emotional impulses, at the risk of inappropriate or cringy fantasies... or to normalize art that is totemic for what we want for the real world at the risk of alienating counterculture or placing too many filters on ourselves. I just know that right now, the pendulum has swung far from where it was when I was adolescent. And when I am older, it probably will have swung again.