#look im not saying that every gay romance book written by straight woman is bad
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garfield-milk · 8 months ago
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if i see one more straight woman writing only mlm romances im going to set myself on fire
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dezemberzwolf · 1 year ago
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I know nothing of fate but your ship sounds fascinating
im going to tell you about them now
so the whole conceit of fate is that mages can summon servants that are the incarnate versions of heroes kept in the collective cultural unconsciousness, and then make those heroes fight to the death in order to fulfill a blood ritual that gives the mages access to the Root, the very center of the magical universe
kariya is a fucked up little man whose whole thing is that he fails. he failed at being an heir because he ran away from his horrifically abusive family, he failed at romancing the woman he fell in love with, and he failed at protecting that womans daughter from being brought into kariyas horrifically abusive family. because that kid is one of the three sole people in the universe that loves kariya back kariyas like "welp i will now help her by taking her place in the murder ritual, subjecting my body to irreparable torture so im barely alive and in screaming pain every second of the day because i dont want her being alone and i dont want her to be the one in the position of sacrifice". he fails in this too dont worry.
for his servant in the murder ritual, he summons lancelot, whos loosely implied that kariyas been a fan of the arthurian legend. bc his grandfather whos torturing him is a dickhead, he forces kariya to summon lancelot with a curse of insanity on him which makes lancelot 1. demand much more magical energy from kariya which causes further pain to his deteriorating body 2. basically debases him as a hero
but the twist is that lancelot did that on purpose and debased himself into a "rabid dog" instead of a man because he hates himself for the betrayal of king arthur and doesnt want a face any more. this also emphasizes the inhuman aspects of lancelot, who in older myth has a bunch of fairy connections. he is a straight up faceless lake monster On Purpose.
He Wants This. the end of f/z will try to tell you he didnt, but if thats true then literally zero of his actions make sense. in return, lancelot busts into kariyas dream which manifests as him taking a naked kariya, biting him to drink his blood, and then declares that kariya "belongs to him" and essentially theyre bound 4ever. both lancelot and kariya are mega fuckups of people where kariya keeps mirroring lancelots legend that as you may know ends in disgrace and murder and depression and death, but lancelot keeps fighting for his wishes anyways. in the end, kariya sacrifices himself so lancelot can get his wish of facing king arthur instead. afterwards, every single time lancelot is summoned, he wears the curse of insanity that kariya gave him. he Will Not let it go, even though he got what he wanted to use that excuse of insanity for and could very easily simply drop the curse. later a "sane" lancelot gets summoned but this lancelot is arguably and imho a Completely Different Guy bc of the way the throne of heroes/collective unconscious works. look at me look into my eyes its because kariya and lancelot got bound together by blood sacrifice (lancelot drinking his blood and saying kariya belongs to him) and now lancelot will not leave this vestige of his first master behind.
also there's a scrapped novel illustration where its super mega implied berserker fucked kariya, because the f/z novel is 1. "the worst people you know and 2 functional gay couples experience the worst possible choices ever" 2. "the gay one", and even this was scrapped because everyone looked at urobuchi and was like "cmon man we cant put this one of the scrawny freak super defo dicked down by a haunted suit of armour in the book"
if anyone ever asks you if you know anything about fate now you can say u know the bug man and the haunted suit of armour got nasty
also dont read/watch fate/zero there are like 10000000000000 trigger warnings like real bad its if youre advanced committed to fate fandom. i cannot stress this enough. f/z was written as a King Arthur Torture Dungeon and has every trigger possible do not touch it unless you wanna read some real fucked shit.
watch this clip of lancelot tho it rules
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imeengoldberg · 3 years ago
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yall shouldnt be surprised when i can give you a dictionary length book full of just story titles of mlm stories written by cis straight women ive seen not looking for them, but can count on my hands and toes all of the (male character) x male reader stories ive found while looking for them.
its all fun and games until i also tell you, hey, theres even less (girl character) x girl readers, or just wlw stories at all. It’s starting to sound a lot like fetishization. 
im not saying you cant write mlm stories as a cis straight woman- obviously not. part of being a writer is writing stories far from your own personal experience. It’s just like what we call bad representation. those people (very flamboyent gay men specifically) do exist, but they are the only gay men every shown because they fit comfortably into hetero-safe stereoypes.
if you only write mlm stories, and youre not an mlm yourself, and you always have the same heteronormative dynamic (one uwu twink sassy girlboss and the alpha badboy in detention who coUldNt bE gAY, hE plAyS FoOtbAlL anD hAz MeAn GiRlFwIeND- but thats all an act? like geez, just say ur biphobic and ask random gay men to be ur gay best friend??) it just starts to lead me to the conclusion you dont have the queer community in your best interest.
honestly, the fetishization is disgusting. it reinforces already harmful stereotypes. Also, I have never, and I mean NEVER- found a mlm story about a trans man in love with another man that wasnt practically porn without plot, save for one kiribaku fic that i wish i could find again. That definitely does not put us trans men in a wonderful light. we are not to be sexualized for our bodies, and neither us nor mlm should be fetishized for loving.
if youre unsure you can accurately write a queer love story accurately, do not do it. if youre worried at all it will come off bad on the lgbtqia+ community, do not do it. it will not hurt you if it’s bad rep, but it will hurt us.
are you good at writing queer romance as a straight person but notice that you have an odd amount of mlm & straight romance and an abandoned desert for wlw or trans/nonbinary love stories? write some! we really need it!
also, there are not enough people of color in stories in general. i notice that a lot of the time, they’re shoved off as one of the side characters- at most, a best friend. why? well, we know why, its racism, but why in my fanfiction. like, this fanfiction was so good, until i realized every single character was described as a western/eurapean with white skin, when, listen, this is an anime and they’re all japanese, jessica. although it’s not something i can speak in depth about as a very white pasty mf, it’s something ive definately noticed and its very annoying tbh. all these mcs look the same. give me some actual people please.
speaking of actual people!
why are there no chubby mcs? ever? like wtf? i get it, skinny people aesthetic or whatever, but it’s actually so frustrating when every character is a size 0 and an unrealistic representation of average people, despite usually starting out as ‘average’. I’d like to feel good about my stomach instead of comparing it to a paragraph in a fanfiction.
finally, ive gotten to something good! 
wlw stories are finally getting as mainstream as mlm! not there yet, but it makes me smile every time i see a wlw story on my feed cuz it means were getting there :)
all-in-all, this is the reason I stopped reading fanfiction regularly a while ago.
this time two-five years ago, you couldn’t pull me away from the fanfiction. I would read main characters (women) who were only ever ‘tomboy’ enough to fall into a safe view of heteronormativity that I held. I’d never even seen the word transgender until middle school- and because my entire life I was conditioned to believe that that stuff was weird or gross, I rejected it hard.
It took me years to get to where I am, and it was a huge struggle. Not that this is one fanfiction/story writer’s fault. This is an entire community’s fault. I just dont want the next generation of queer, chubby, or poc kids to think they’re weird or lesser than like I did. If it’s something I can help to stop, I will.
So, if I ever write an original story, or original characters into a fic, you bet your ass its gonna be the most realistic representation of the real world i can get into a story. now, fuck jk rowling, and have a good night. au revoir, bitches.
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neoromances · 4 years ago
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red, white, and royal blue: my thots - i didnt realize this was adult fiction the cover looks like every YA romance novel that has ever been made, ever - didnt expect the audiobook reader to speak aloud some non-explicit M-rated smut, but thats all on me. this was longer than i thought it would be everything is under the cut :)
what i liked: - cute and silly rom-com moments - all the characters are relatively functional competent adults and its not     infantilizing - enemies to lovers (-ish? does enemies count if youre both faking it?) - explicit minority representation - acknowledgement of the british royals as a legacy of colonialism and imperialism - acknowledgement of some american queer history what i disliked (aka my minor criticisms): - if youre going to be a millenial harry potter nerd the least you could do is not write drarry fanfiction and then publish it with different names <3 -  if youre going to be a millenial hamilton the musical nerd the least you could do is acknowledge that the only reason you keep bringing up alexander hamilton is because of some musical. and this isnt even a call to validation for the millenial hamilton nerd reader, im not even entirely sure there was a reason to bring UP the recurring motif of hamilton because the author really doesnt do anything with it other than for the author to be like “look i listened to this musical back in 2016 and i really like it soo.....” - its a romcom so this isnt. a huge criticism but the plot was very,,, predictable. not inherently a bad thing because i didnt come into this fiction with the expectations of a tragedy or major plot twists or anything, but, within the genre of rom-com romance novels the story itself limited by the fact that its universally expected to have a happy ending. - throwaway cheap one-liners that represent both the characters and the authors political takes - that ending with the election result was the most boring shit in my LIFE. wrap it up, folks, i honestly dgaf about alex’s mom’s campaign. this is a romcom i know shell win.
what i really disliked: - the treatment of british and american political spheres. aka this wet-dream liberal america. this america that elects some woman president two terms in a row, and not donald trump. again: this book is a rom com and im NOT expecting it to delve into the deficits of the current american government but it feels weak that its only really a vague one-liner near the beginning that acknowledges the US imperialist state and the fact that the MC’s mom is a war criminal. - okay yeah i KNOW it was written pre-pandemic and there was absolutely no WAY the author could have predicted it but the fact that she chose to set it in the future during the 2020 elections,,, not much i can say but BIG yikes. it comes off as insensitive and yes- adds to this above image of a perfect, democratic, idyllic, founding-father perfectionist patriotic america that doesnt get involved into these things like pandemics. - the main baddie (vaguely?) is a republican which in and of itself is representative of the narrow-mindedness of the author- (as in: democrats=good, republicans= bad and evil and conservative and campaign-sabotaging). truth is theyre all bad <3 - again, the richards or whatever they were were painfully supposed to be a trump mirror but it was done very poorly the only realistic thing in this novel was that no federal reform or election drop ever came of the confirmed sabotage of the claremont campaign. - hatsune miku binder thomas jefferson but its gay latino bernie sanders - this book was so pandering towards america the brave + the beautiful and other patriotic bullshit while it kept relentlessly criticizing britain for having the exact same nationalist ideas.
its a cute story; its commercial adult fiction in this new age where its possible to monetize off of queer stories. would this story have worked it if were a straight couple? i mean, yeah. at least in the spheres that im in, this book is popular because its queer fiction. the author does go into attempts to look at the realistic political ramifications of a high-profile same-sex couple but in the america that im seeing right now? its not viable. in the creation of this utopia where the queer and high-profile gay characters arent subject to endless scrutiny and vitrol (something that the author could have looked at more instead uhhh, i dont know, the mom-presidents political campaign), mcquinston has effectively created this book that is so distanced from the political happenings of realities she may as well have written henry as the prince and alex as the son of the leader of two completely fictional, made-up countries and gotten the exact same story across.
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