quick question for those of you familiar

[kaigou]

...with yaoi-girls and/or (female) m/m fans. Of those you've known/met in the subculture who prefer the m/m and avoid the m/f, have any of them ever explained the reasoning behind their preference? Beyond just the younger version of "well, m/f is icky" or the lazier version of "I just don't like m/f". Anything more in-depth, more honest, more insightful?

Because the only explanations I've ever gotten amount to variations on those two, and that's not much substance when it comes to deconstructing what, exactly, is going on for readers with the preference.

Comments

[white_aster]

+1 to this. My thought exactly. I mean, yaoi and manga are Japanese-based, so all the canon female characters are drawn from that culture...and females fall into so few stereotypes there that it's just BORING to see the same character over and over and over. The guy characters have more freedom, more screentime, more actual plot and decisions to make, and thus are more interesting to me as characters who might like to interact with other characters in a sexual fashion. :shrugs:

[ivoryandhorn]

I wouldn't necessarily confine the phenomenon to Japanese anime/manga, but yep, pretty much.

[kaigou]

I agree; I don't think it's just Asian animanga that does this. That's one reason I was so enamoured of BtVS when it was on the air, because for once a girl not only got the screen-time but it was a girl who didn't spend 98% of her time chasing boy(s) and the other 2% snipping at her friends -- and she became a complex, complicated, multi-layered character in her own right. I'd never realized just how rare that was, until then. Well, actually, it's still fricking rare, honestly. On the whole, in media the world over, the focus of the story is always the guy -- even when it's a so-called woman's story, like the romance genre, the focus is still on the guy-to-get, or the guy-to-keep, and the woman is in there only as our lens through which we can stare at the guy she's focused on. The lens is rarely on her, exclusively.

[ivoryandhorn]

I think, upon reading your comment, this might be why I have suddenly developed an f/f OTP in one of my newer fandom obsessions. Women! Talking to each other! About important things that aren't men! And being comrades and equals and friends! And also engineers and scientists! I could literally feel my brain tick off "passes Bechdel test" and scribbling hearts all around the check mark, because I can't remember any other fandom off the top of my head that's given me anything remotely like that before. The fact that this occurred in a comic might've inflated my reaction a bit, since comics usually have a pretty bad track record when it comes to this sort of thing and I have low expectations of them, but yeah.

Anyway, trying to get a little more back on topic, if you searched the archives of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books I'm pretty sure you'd probably find some posts on the very subject of why m/m is becoming popular in the romance genre, seeing as it's a blog focused on romance fiction. I remember, vaguely, a post or two on the subject waybackwhen I was following it regularly but I couldn't point you to them now.

[kaigou]

Yep, I've been on a few of the related threads taking place on Dear Author, which shares a good chunk of its reading/talking base with SBTB -- and many of them have struggled with the same basic issue, that M/M fiction is predominantly for and by women, but pivots on gay men, and there's an uncomfortable level of appropriation going on in there, or so some feel. It's that discomfort with potential appropriation -- and whether or not it even really is, and why, and what makes it 'appropriative' as opposed to 'adaptive' -- that I find most intriguing.

[kaigou]

I mean, yaoi and manga are Japanese-based, so all the canon female characters are drawn from that culture...and females fall into so few stereotypes there that it's just BORING to see the same character over and over and over.

Sometimes I'm not sure there are enough Japanese female stereotypes for us to even use the plural. They're all variations of girlfriend -- either wannabe girlfriend, current girlfriend, or jilted girlfriend. The career woman, the teacher, the adventurer, the scientist, everything always gets boiled down to sub-category A, B, or C of the category 'girlfriend'.

Then again, with only a few notable exceptions, I suppose I could say the same about western pop culture as well. I have no problem with a complex character who also wouldn't mind a relationship -- it's the not-so-but-potentially complex character who then ruins it all by word or deed making it clear all she really wants is a boyfriend, and that the rest is just window-dressing (or killing time!) until the right boy comes along.

Why, yes, I hated Bridget Jones and all things Jones-like, as if this is any surprise.