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i'll give you handlebars to rule the world ([info]amberwaves) wrote in [info]fandom_wank,
@ 2006-04-18 12:29:00

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Minor millyfan wank. Ah, for fun.
Not too long, but I thought we wankers might enjoy another little bit of fun with millyfan. Never done this before, so please don't hurt me. Mods, I will alter/adjust/fix anything in this post I do wrong, just let me know.

Millyfan posts to fanficrants about her newest brain-child, a comm called un-het, with the following:

Inspired by the unslash_fc comm, I've started the un_het challenge. The point of un_het is to write a fanfiction dealing with a platonic friendship between a woman and a man, or to write slash, yaoi, femmeslash, or yuri.

The only true requirement is that one avoid heteronormative conventions such as traditional gender roles and expectations. Sadly, too many fics, even slash/yaoi/femmeslash/yuri fics, include concepts that come from the dark ages or the 1950s, and the point of this challenge is to open your mind beyond things like marriage and babies meaning happiness, happily ever after, seme/uke, the idea that het fic is truly the pinnacle of good writing, and many other heterocentric memes in fandom.


megalomaniageek gets the ball rolling by suggesting millyfan is misogynist.

But the real fun gets started when millyfan says that Meryl leaving her job to follow Vash is a heteronormative clichée.

akusai tells her to quit with the PC campaign.

megalomaniageek suggests that "writing a character canonically sometimes requires stepping off the soapbox and being a 'bad' role model".

This makes millyfan blow a gasket and become the pompous windbag we all know and despise love. Of course, she MEANT to be an asshat say it like that in order to trap those terrible fanon-over-canon people.

You're telling me this? I write characters canonically, and I don't write from a soapbox. Apparently you've never read my fics. That's fine since twincest isn't your bag, but this is absolutely laughable because I haven't written soapbox characters.

Yes, I do understand that fandom isn't the real world and canon makes the rules. However, you have fallen into my trap and stated exactly WHY I created this challenge: so many people have confused fanon with canon.

Let's say for the reverse of this, I said "Wolfwood left his job for Vash." That's a true statement in regard to canon in both universes, and yet if I used it as evidence for equal yaoi, I'd have the whole of this community screaming at me for being a stupid slash fanbrat. However, "Meryl left her job for Vash" suddenly means that she's in Twu Luv with him, and according to you, obviously, this Twu Luv means that she's going to change who she is to become a stereotypical mommy, and this assertion is seen as perfectly true.

There's a massive double standard, and heteronormative concepts are very hard to work around because that's how *everyone* is taught to see *everything.* The reason my challenge exists is not to be PC, but rather to take a look from another side of the picture.


There's mention of how those OMG BIG MEENIES over at GAFF have been oppressing her, and millyfan states her noble desire not to instigate yaoi vs. het wank on the comm. Then megalomaniageek ends it with some can't-argue-with-this logic:

There are a lot of slash fans here. There are some het fans here. A LOT of the people here will read whatever is deemed good no matter the het/slash-iness. Yaoi is even in the comm interests list.
It really just depends on what you say and how you say it. If you say that slash is better than het, you'll get wank. If you say het is better than slash, you get wank. If you say het or slash sucks, you get wank. If you say they both suck and you want to see more gen, you'll get a bunch of "word from this gen fan" responses.


edited to fix typos


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