#man speaking of LJ era I remember the straight girl who said slash fans all have internalized misogyny

[mzminola]

Remembered this and I feel it may partially be fueling my annoyance with the comics fans who insist if we like a guy character and focus more of our attention on him (through reading canon, reading/writing fic & meta, drawing art, etc) than on gal characters who share at least one trait/theme that we're either a) sexist or b) are tragically unaware of the gal's comic and if only we read them we'd like and focus on her more.

I mean firstly, that's a really paternalistic attitude? Like oh wow, you definitely know more about why I like a certain character than I do and your judgment of what makes a character ~better~ is definitely more meaningful than mine despite this being completely subjective!

But secondly, my mom, dad, and stepmom are all voracious readers of science fiction & fantasy who freely let me browse their shelves as a kid. My mom also has a lot of women-led mysteries along with the sci-fi & fantasy.

Which meant I'd read, reread, forgotten, and rediscovered a metric fuckton of women & girl protagonists, antagonists, and supporting casts having fantastical adventures long before I stumbled across Scans Daily on Livejournal, my first real exposure to superhero comics instead of cartoons.

There's a couple consequences to this. One being my pickiness: while I prefer comics & cartoons over text for superheroes specifically, I can get most of the elements I'm after outside them. If the art skeeves me out too much, I'm gone, and it won't be a loss.

The other being a strong feeling of "Ex-fucking-scuse me?!" when people pull the crap I mentioned above. You're seriously gonna sit up there on that high horse assuming everyone else's tastes come down to sexism? Really? Fucking really?

You are not psychic. You don't know why people like a given character or story unless they tell you. You don't know what else they read. You don't know what they haven't read, unless, again, they tell you.

It's just "My fave is better than yours!" wank in a gender studies hat, no more meaningful than any other fandom wank, and just as obnoxious.

One of the fun things of having been an Not Age Appropriate reader as a kid is seeing all the people gushing about how the Tortall books’ female protagonists were Such A Big Deal to them when they first found the books, and I’m sitting here having read most of Dragonriders of Pern and Valdemar years before I ever laid eyes on Tortall going “what the fuck”.

Anyway now I just want Alanna & Lessa to meet.