zzxid:

zzxid:

Hey

“The reason why M/M ships are so popular in fandom is due sexism as fandom gives more attention to male characters to the point crack or abusive m/m ships will be more popular than canon m/f and f/f ships”

AND

“Male characters tend to make over the 85% of the cast in most media and next to all meaningful banter will be between men, meaning that when it comes to shipping, most people (including WLW) will rather create fanwork of two male best friends than two girls who hardly interacted”.

Are both true.

Both are linked to misogyny with a difference of sources, the first being sexism from the side of the fandom, and the second from the side of the writers. And my problem comes when people address one but ignore the other, either ending with people blaming the lack of attention to the fem-characters on the fandom ignoring any blame on the writers’ gender bias, or vice versa, when people should be adddressing both.

Other issue is people treating all media as is the same with its female characters. Like, the attention given to M/M (and/or M/F) ships compared to F/F in fandoms with equal number of female and male characters (like Homsetuck or Overwatch) could work as example of fandom giving more attention to male characters than girls, because otherwise the M/M-M/M-F/F ratio would be equal intead of having 75% of the fics be about boys.

But now, calling out the fandom on this same lack of attention of F/F ships in series where the female cast make the 15% or less (like Transformers or TF2) is not… very fair, specially seeing other wlw being acussed of misogyny for having more M/M ships than F/F ships. 

Right now my main fandom is the TF comics and I have only 2 F/F ships in an endless list of M/M pairs, and this is because there are only 4 female characters (and maybe other 3 or 4 minor ones) in the cast of hundres of male characters. And this is true for so many folks in “limited fem cast” fandoms and the best way to prove it is that in series where girls are well written (Undertale, LOK, etc) and make the most of the cast (Seteven Universe, Ghostbusters, Sailor Moon, etc) we actually end up loving or atleast appreciatting the existence of F/F ships… But then, then series that actually gives us F/F relationships are still smaller than the ones with M/M options.

And it becomes and endless circle, because, for one side, “This shows writes terrible female characters and I don’t like them enough to write facfiction of them” which is fair but also “But fans can write 5k fanfictions of a background male character while ignoring female protagonists” which is a true criticism, but also “I don’t like the fact that in order to make the female cast in my fanwork interesting I have to come with a bunch of headcanons and made up stuff while with the guys I can use their canon because the show creators can’t write women” is true and… again, endless circle.

tl;dr: The popularity of M/M relationships and desinterest of F characters can be either linked to a sexist fanbase or a sexist source writing (or even both sometimes). And before critiquizing this aspect of fandom you gotta ask “Is it the fandom that hates women? or is it the series writers?”