Signal Boosting: Banks across the US are continuing to engage in shady-ass business practices.
Signal Boosting: Moondancer Drake has a new novel out.
UM defends rights of research assistants.
Michele Bachmann—-> WHAT A CANDIDATE.
I wish *I* could play ping pong too!
Appropriation is never cute.
Sexism begins early.
From Casey:
As someone over the course of the past week experienced some personal drama in my slash community, when I stumbled upon this link on Womanist Musings it gave me a lot of food for thought (it also reminded me of some comments on here from a while ago where some readers said that they take slash fics on a case-by-case basis when it comes to its depiction of queer male sexuality, even referencing being ”mansplained to” by gay men due to potentially problematic portrayals, which kinda struck me as maybe a weird facet of privilege? IDK. Also, I even made fail-tastic remark in the comments section that I’m still smarting from…curse my easily damaged ego!):
Perhaps being a writer is not all it’s cracked up to be.
The military’s reduction in forces is coming at a bad time for young people seeking employment.
DoD schools failing children.
More on EPA rules for coal burning plants.
The repeal of DADT hasn’t changed the de facto homophobia of the enlistment process.
Somebody should go see Unnatural Acts because I can’t.
Republicans lie.
Does deployment make you a single parent?
Don’t let daddy lick me again!
Racism vs. comedy.
JK! Slavery WASN’T good for black children.
Environmentalism is the new terrorism.
Honey Bee Colony Disorder has spread worldwide.
Finding 35mm from the 1980s is a bit of a challenge…
Flashback to 1906 Market Street in San Francisco.
Woman facing misdemeanor charges for vegetable garden.
HAHA SM STIRLING HAZ A SAD THAT SOMEONE CALLED HIM ON HIS RACIST BOOK. I’m so glad Jha is awesome. I couldn’t even finish that crap. He’s posting as joatsimeon.
Sworn virgins are dying out
Holy shit, Summer Glau and Peter Dinklage will be sharing the screen!
Whaaaaaaaaaat. Cyborg art.
Reactions to Arranged
From Gabbie:
Hey,
The following is from Slate and basically calls for intelligent movies to cast on-screen couples at a ‘similar’ age (no more than ten years gap, no more than five if the woman is under-25 – and even then, I STILL don’t know any couples with a ten-year gap) or at least an attraction of WHY the couple of question are together.
Catwoman’s origin story is fascinating.
Are POC leads the kiss of death in the publishing world?
From Lindsey:
“I think women are different, and I think having them in the room is crucial to a family comedy, ensemble comedy, television comedy, where half the eyeballs on your show are women. As it turns out, I think Megan’s the only female writer who’s staying this year, so now, even though Bromstad’s gone, now I’m carrying this legacy, going, “Eh, guys, we really need a half-female writing staff.” I would teach it. I think we have to stop thinking of it as a quota thing and think of it as a common-sense thing.”
This just in! Dan Simmons still Islamophobic!
The dairy industry is flipping its shit.
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Commenting on assorted topics at once:
For an example of using just one language to portray several languages, C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series does that trick fairly well. It uses a formal version of English when she has the characters speaking the alien Atevi’s Ragi language (with Ragi prefixes/suffixes/titles/ect. added in where needed), and using informal English when people are speaking the human Mosphi (sp?) language. While the series may not be to everyone’s taste, I think it provides a good example of how to convey different languages while writing in just one.
Based on my understanding of the terms, seme and uke translate better into English as pitcher and catcher rather than top and bottom. You can have uke top and a bottoming seme, or a dominant uke/submissive seme pairing, you know.
As for slash pairings in works where the creator never intended a certain pair of characters to be romantically involved, it leaves me with two conflicting feelings. While I somewhat understand the idea of certain fans “claiming” a creators work for themselves by reworking it to suit themselves, I also feel like some of the slashing is a way to, for lack of better phrasing, neutralize any intense male/male platonic relationships that try to go beyond shallow boobs/bullets/beer interests as male buddy bonding experiences. Or if it’s a fandom that that has a decent female fanbase, the forced m/m slashing is used as a way of telling the girls “HA! You’ll never find a real guy that acts decent like them because your idols ARE REALLY GAY AND DON’T LIKE GURLS!!!!!!!!!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!! You have to settle for us sexists slobs instead!!!! LEEEEEER!!!!!!” Or at least that’s the feeling I get sometimes reading some posts (not on this site, btw) on which fictional characters are really secretly gay or not.
On a side note about personal fanfic fantasies not always being PC: I recently got bitten by the Full Metal Alchemist bug, and started reading through some of the FMA fanfics on fanfiction.net, and some of the slash pairings I found there left me seriously wondering if maybe creator Hiromu Arakawa was perhaps a trifle too subtle for some fans about Ed and Al being brothers. I mean, seriously, Ed/Al slash? And in the few fics with that pairing I looked through, having no other character who learned of that relationship NOT considering it the slightest bit deviant? That lack of thought only makes the pairing squickier, not “edgeir”. (Sorry about the mini-rant; had to vent someplace about it.)
IF/when I ever get the rest of this manga* and read through it a few times, I may wind up with some candidates to add to the Favorite Fictional Feminist post. Virtually all the main female characters I’ve seen so far are well-rounded people with faults, virtues, and histories of their own, who have motives and lives that don’t solely revolve around getting nookie from the male characters. And there doesn’t seem to be any real social pressure on any of the women to change their career paths to something more acceptably ‘feminine’, however one may define that term. The self-proclaimed “just a housewife” alchemist isn’t shamed by being told she’s wasting her talents by choosing to stay at home and help her husband run the family business instead of having her own career outside the house; her choices are respected by everyone without anyone commenting about whether she’s made the ‘right choices’ for her life. Similarly, the politically ambitious “Ice Queen” woman whose stated goal is to become the leader of her country if/when that post opens up, is not derided by the other characters– or the writer — as desiring a goal that’s unwomanly or “just for men”. She’s treated as though she’s got as many rights to be the leader as much as any of her male rivals do. In fact, I sometimes get the feeling that Arakawa is having some fun inverting certain stereotypes and seeing if that makes FMA a better story in the long run. Only fail I’m picking up at this point is that a couple of the non-white males look like she used old black caricatures in their design, but those are relatively rare in the series as whole so far. Once I’ve read the entire series I’ll have a better “feel” on how it stands up feminist-wise.
*Curse you Border Books, for your bankruptcy taking down my local Walden Bookstore! It was the only bookstore in town that had anything resembling a very good graphic novel/manga/SF/Fantasy section(s) that were larger than half a shelf long! Cuuuurrsssssse yooooouuuuuu!!!!!!!!!!!!
Cloudtigress(Quote) (Reply)
I think it’s quite well known in the fandom that Ed and Al are brothers. Being someone who has a LOT of experience in dippy fandoms with incest ships, I can only come to the conclusion that most of these people simply think “INCEST IS WINCEST LOL IT’S TOTES HAWT”.
(This is tanginital, but I mean, for me, in WWF/E and wrestling slash fandom (my big fandom of interest), I can only get my jollies from Edge/Christian shipping if I make then incestuous twin brothers and justifying it by saying “WELL THEY USED TO BE BROTHERS IN KAYFABE”…I’ve got problems…and that doesn’t even BEGIN to fully unpack how potentially weird/squicky/disrespectful Real Person slash is. >_>V)
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
Yep, those are the closest translations to ‘seme’ and ‘uke’ and yes reverse, uh for lack of a better term, positions have been done. Unfortunately, those words have acquired different implications, no longer just meaning the simple definitions. They are pigeon-holed roles now that sadly have a lot of sexist and traditionally-hetero connotations(And I think those unfortunate connotations were there even before English fandom got a hold of them, but that’s just what I’ve gathered.) Men-who-are-uke are the “women” in the relationship and men-who-are-seme are, um, the “men.” (Gee, I wonder if people think this happens in real life for actual same-sex relationships. *sigh*) Anyway, I think that those terms should just be used for their original intent(sexual positions) and not for a character’s ‘personality.’
Well I have heard the argument against slashing two male characters denigrates/moots the friendship between those characters or even between all men. While I see where it comes from, I can’t say that I agree. Friendship between guys is pretty much a given in almost all media so I’m not really worried about that. I agree that people can just be friends…but I think this should apply to platonic relationships like ones between a man and a woman or two women just as much. And I’ve also found, it doesn’t matter how shallow the bond between two characters are or how ‘decent’ those people are; if people feel a spark between those characters, then let the shipping begin! XD I don’t think there’s any real agenda–intentional or otherwise–when it comes to shipping/slashing, at least not most of the time. It’s just one of those things that happens or doesn’t.
I’m also not worried about ‘forced slash’, though I can’t say I have encountered such a thing where it wasn’t a ‘crack-ship’ and not meant to be taken too seriously. After all, Mary Sue(and Marty Stu) fics are still around, still popular, and in some fandoms, are more pervasive than slash-fic is. In other words, there’s still plenty of fans who love to ship their favorite characters with themselves. Also, there is just as much ‘forced’ hetero-pairings. *makes a side glance at the Avatar:The Last Airbender and Harry Potter fandoms*
As for incest/twincest/”wincest”, eh, never been a thing for me, but I think this is where “your kink is not my kink” comes in. (It’s been a while since I’ve seen FMA. I should get into it.)
Ebb(Quote) (Reply)
Wincest? Do I really want to know…..?
If I hadn’t been half asleep when I posted that, I would have remembered to include a /sarcasm comment in there, to show that I knew the brotherly relationship is definitely part of the plot. (Also, if I wasn’t half-asleep, I could have kept the word diarrhea under control
) The elricest meme (as it’s referred to in the fanfics) just caught me off guard for some reason, even though it really shouldn’t have, given what else can pop up in fanfictions.
(This is tanginital, but I mean, for me, in WWF/E and wrestling slash fandom (my big fandom of interest), I can only get my jollies from Edge/Christian shipping if I make then incestuous twin brothers and justifying it by saying “WELL THEY USED TO BE BROTHERS IN KAYFABE”…I’ve got problems…and that doesn’t even BEGIN to fully unpack how potentially weird/squicky/disrespectful Real Person slash is. >_>V)
Not a kink I’m into, unless I morph the Real People involved into truly fictional characters insid my head. However, I guess if you don’t mistake your ship for what the Real People are really doing in their private lives, it can work some.
Cloudtigress(Quote) (Reply)
Figured as much. If the pigeonholes shown in most yaoi/fanfics get to be too much for me, I’ll just have to hunt down my copy of Youka Nitta’s first Secret Diplomacy book, and hunt down an online scanlation of her second (and hope she’s been allowed to continue/complete it), and remind myself that dominate uke/submissive seme can be a hot combo, written well. And avoid all analyzing commentaries claiming that the only “real” appeal yaoi has for its female audience is that it portrays romantic relationships between true equals that are impossible to show using hetro pairings blahblahblah the female reader doesn’t have to mentally compete with the “feminine” male character so it’s safer for her to pretend he’s her blahblahblah yuri (the female version of yaoi, for those who haven’t encountered that term before) can’t be used to show truly equal romantic relationships because it’s been left as the plaything of straight males for waaaaaay too long for women to get interested in it blahblahblah one half of the yaoi pairing HAS to be bi because it won’t appeal to straight women otherwise if both characters don’t have an interest in women blahblahblahBLEECH! (Yeah, I’m thinking of one analysis in particular that made me wonder if the writer had actually asked very many yaoi fans why they like yaoi, instead of using secret psychology explanations to explain why women would REALLY like that genre. Me, I started reading yaoi because I was curious how two guys actually “do it”, and wanted to read about it in stories that actually had plots that appealed to me, and the fact that I have no clue where the nearest gay/lesbian book store is to me and thus couldn’t go there to find what I wanted.)
As for incest/twincest/”wincest”, eh, never been a thing for me, but I think this is where “your kink is not my kink” comes in. (It’s been a while since I’ve seen FMA. I should get into it.)
True enough. While I admit that the “elricest” kink could be done well, the writer would have to be one that actually put some thought on how it might work in real life, and what the actual reactions of the other characters would be to that kink, and acknowledge the wrongness of the pairing too. The ones I stumbled across didn’t do anything with it beyond going HAWTHAWTHAWT!!! , and that really didn’t appeal to me at all. A bit too squicky for my tastes.
Speaking of FMA animie, do you know that there’s two separate series now? The first one that was forced to do a 90′ turn from the manga plotline out of necessity (the manga wasn’t anywhere near completed when the anime needed episode material, and thus had to make up stuff to create it’s own separate universe), and the more recent one under the Brotherhood label, that’s evidently a very faithful adaptation of the manga. Just a fyi in case you didn’t know about that.
Cloudtigress(Quote) (Reply)
Cloudtigress,
Ebb,
My boyfriend is bilingual and lived in Japan for 3 years. I was surprised to learn seme and uke aren’t in use by gay men at all (at least in Tokyo and Kyoto I assume). I don’t remember the terms he told me are in use, except the one for bottom translates as ‘cat’ which made no sense to me. Seme and uke are terms pretty much exclusively used by heterosexual women which kind of jives with the majority of yaoi fans in the US.
Shaun(Quote) (Reply)
That’s pretty much what I do. I try to stick to kayfabe/storylines/WACKY ALTERNATE UNIVERSES…and really, the less I know about the real people’s personal lives the better (I feel like an even bigger creeper otherwise). HOWEVER I know a lot of people in fandom who strongly disapprove of Real Person slash/shipping in general and find it straight-up amoral…which makes me feel kinda uncomfortable even though I don’t force my kinks on others.
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
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