Subject: Maybe slash is harder to write well.
Author:
Posted on: 2015-05-08 22:35:00 UTC

Gay guys are rarer than straight guys, and more stigmatized. Most fan writers have had less interaction with gay guys than with straight guys, and gay guys in many places still can't be as open about being romantically involved. That means a straight or female writer usually has fewer real-life observations to draw from. Even a gay male writer might have seen more straight romance in his life than gay male romance.

Many slash writers are cis female. They don't have guy genitalia. If the slash gets explicit, that means they're not writing about something they have daily experience. They simply don't know how things work and, if unwilling (or too young) to do the research, can end up writing things that would make any male reader cringe in sympathetic pain.

The lack of experience with guy/guy relationships, plus the lack of knowledge about mechanics, can lead writers to try to squeeze a guy/guy relationship into a girl/guy stereotype. So one guy becomes "masculine" and the other "feminine", and their personalities change, and explicit scenes are written almost as though one of them were female. Sometimes one partner even gets pregnant. (By masculine I mean male-stereotype--the cultural idea of male, you know, rough and tough and muscular.)

Sure, there are gay guys that are feminine in personality and dating/married to a much more masculine guy, but they're still two guys, and anyhow, there's no unwritten gay rule that one partner has to be more feminine.

But regardless of the existence of such couples in real life, when this masculine/feminine stereotype is imposed on couples in fiction with pre-established personalities, it can throw them way out of character. Characters written as a slash couple are often not written as themselves, but as a seme/uke stereotypical gay couple.

That really bugs me. It's as though these writers think that just because a guy is written as gay, his personality must change to a "gay" personality. But gay people have the same wide range of personalities as anybody else; they're just attracted to the same gender. And if I'm reading romance between, say, Aragorn and Legolas, doesn't it make sense that I'd want to read about Aragorn and Legolas, not two stereotyped cardboard cutouts with name-tags reading "Aragorn" and "Legaolas"?

Reply Return to messages