I should've just sent an email right to you, Asuka & Casey, to get the most coherent responses, eh?
M/m and f/f pairings don't come with the history of power imbalance that m/f pairings always have, for me.
I actually didn't pinpoint that until I began fiddling with a plotline for an original piece, and CP asked why it had to be M/M. At first, all I could say was, "because it works better," and then started thinking about what I meant by that. It came down to the fact that if I had a woman as one-half of the pairing, then suddenly the relationship had a crapload of baggage tugging along with it, no matter how much I might try to unhook it. Even simple things like having the female character be stuck in a position where she had to stay at the home of the male character suddenly became fraught with all sorts of issues about dependence, and assumptions of how she'd be expected to 'pay' for it, and so on. With a male character, those might come into play but they're not automatic, and they're not even necessarily tied to sex -- while in contrast sometimes it seems as though every male-female interaction is grounded, somehow, in sexual relations -- real or potential.
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Date: 3 Dec 2009 04:35 pm (UTC)M/m and f/f pairings don't come with the history of power imbalance that m/f pairings always have, for me.
I actually didn't pinpoint that until I began fiddling with a plotline for an original piece, and CP asked why it had to be M/M. At first, all I could say was, "because it works better," and then started thinking about what I meant by that. It came down to the fact that if I had a woman as one-half of the pairing, then suddenly the relationship had a crapload of baggage tugging along with it, no matter how much I might try to unhook it. Even simple things like having the female character be stuck in a position where she had to stay at the home of the male character suddenly became fraught with all sorts of issues about dependence, and assumptions of how she'd be expected to 'pay' for it, and so on. With a male character, those might come into play but they're not automatic, and they're not even necessarily tied to sex -- while in contrast sometimes it seems as though every male-female interaction is grounded, somehow, in sexual relations -- real or potential.