meme_of_bilitis | I have doubts that [a femslash meme] would be very long-lived

I have doubts that [a femslash meme] would be very long-lived

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Ah, maybe "Feralphoenix" might have been the better dememe term? These threads begin to elucidate on the batshit:

https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/227141.html?thread=1260306501#cmt1260
https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/229548.html?thread=1274355884#cmt1274

"has a huge problem with gay that sounds exactly like the problem that came up with Femslashex"?

... In light of this new context, yeah, you're not wrong. (And I didn't realize it until getting midway through the paragraphs below, but I don't believe there are any actual gay relationships in Uncommon Time. The main canon relationship is nb/f, and there is m/f in the backstory, but no gay that I picked up on. One character is gay but... see below.)

That said, pretty sure the asexual thing is mostly referring to Teagan. She's the protagonist, Alto's, best friend, who exists in the story pretty much to be the most wrong person to ever be wrong. She is canonically asexual and a bit sex-repulsed, and Alto makes some unkind remarks about both of those things. One gets the sense this might be worthy of critique in a story as issueficcy as Uncommon Time's, if it weren't:
- Coming from Alto, who is transparently Feralphoenix's abuse survivor power fantasy vehicle, whose feelings the whole story revolves around
- Directed towards Teagan, who has been Wrong in basically every other way and the conclusion to whose character arc is to get shit on forever by Alto and Alto's party for all her sins (which are about 50/50 between "being legitimately verbally abusive and controlling" and "making reasonable if dickishly phrased observations")

Additionally... I lowkey get the vibe that Feralphoenix kinks on older guy/younger girl devoted to him. Two of your party members are a 16-year-old girl and a 26-year-old man (this is the gay character, BTW). While they aren't canonically in a relationship (going back to the "plausible deniability" thing), they're devoted enough to each other that in one ending she kills herself after he dies (!), and in another bad end where Alto decides to destroy the world, they commit suicide holding hands in the same bed(!!). Uncommon Time is issueficcy as fuck, but at no point is this actually pointed out as codependency. I don't think Feralphoenix intended to let her id hang out this way, but it still pinged me as deeply creepy.

The countertextual reading fic where Teagan manages to leave is really good (and is also the most-kudosed fic in the fandom, to my delight):

https://archiveofourown.org/works/6492490

There's a background f/f relationship between NPCs that's part of the only game-spanning sidequest chain, and also easily missable. Other than that, nope, no same-sex relationships to be seen anywhere.

Re: Meirin and Saki... god there's just so much going on there. Alto actually does comment in passing that their level of devotion to each other is kind of unhealthy, iirc. But unlike Aubrey's mental health issues, which impose upon Alto by existing in the context of a romantic relationship with her, that unhealthiness doesn't directly affect the Only Real Person and therefore isn't a problem that needs to be addressed. Also she makes it sound like it's a mutual problem and not mostly just Meirin being overinvested Saki. And then of course there's the whole weirdness of the only gay main character never expressing any specific same-sex attraction and ending up in a het romance that's supposedly nonsexual, but if you read Feral's "canon fic", it's apparently the kind of "nonsexual" where when Meirin goes to a brothel without him present she doesn't feel comfortable ordering anything more than a massage and a handjob because going further than that would make Saki "jealous" (!!!). Oh, and then there's the fact that Meirin is the only major character who does have a specific, onscreen attraction to someone of the same sex: her unspoken, unrequited crush on Teagan, which never actually matters beyond making Meirin appear more sympathetic and Teagan less so in their conflict with each other. And I mean, why would it matter, when Meirin already has a Life Partner in the form of an older gay man she shares her hookers with?

Feral is/was? in Homestuck fandom, so I almost feel like she was trying to write Saki and Meirin as moirails. (Like maybe in a prior draft of the story they were fantrolls or something.) But outside of the context of troll worldbuilding, the thing they have going on is not cute, it's bizarre.

Theirs is not even the only weirdly-intense character dynamic like that--but like you said, Aubrey actually gets called out for their codependent streak, because it's unfairly imposing emotional labor on poor Alto. Meanwhile their (explicit!) obsession with and willingness to die for father-figure Altair doesn't develop much besides being a reason to make Alto feel upset and disillusioned with them.

I also like how in the only canon character relationship that isn't weirdly codependent like that (Arietta/Altair), it's rammed up your nose throughout Act 1 of her backstory how Arietta is so precocious and such a genius for her particularly young age. IIRC, it's not specified how old Altair is compared to her, but it's still strongly vibing with older guy/younger girl. And maybe I would not find it worthy of note if it weren't for all the other weird shit in the game. "Adult-intelligent loli" is a bog-standard anime trope, after all--completely played straight in a game that's obsessed with subverting problematic tropes.

I feel as if if you made a Venn diagram of Meirin/Saki, Aubrey/Altair(?), and Arietta/Altair, Feral's id would lie in the middle part. (I mean, Alto being an abuse survivor power fantasy is also clearly an id thing for Feral, but she's very open about that much, and trying to impress very hard upon you that her id is woke.)

And God, Feral's whole thing about sex workers is so weird too. Legal brothels which you're of age to go to at age 16 and it's not weird and there's no shady implications! The only reason Teagan would be upset about her brother being a sex worker is because she's so sexphobic to begin with!

Go I ended up looking at the fanfic category again, and there's another "canon fanfic" I hadn't seen before from last year, and just... The summary...

“I will love you no matter what you do with your hair,” Saki goes on calmly, as if he didn’t hear you. “Leave it like this, cut it short, dye it rainbow colors, shave it off, anything is fine as long as you like it. I’m not going to stop caring about you if I think that how you dress or modify your body is silly or not to my taste. It’s your body, Meirin. You’re the only one who has any right to decide how it should look.”

Heat rushes into your face at Saki’s too-patient pronouncement. “How and why do you keep always doing this.”

It was a rhetorical question, but he smiles and answers you anyway: “We’ve been living together for two years now. I know at least as much about how you behave as you have observed about me.”

In which Meirin receives a letter and pays a visit to friends, Teagan returns home, and there is much ado about Meirin's hair.

It's tagged "queerplatonic relationship," because that's how you brand your fantasy about how you want a Gay Male BFF to make you the center of his life to the exclusion of actually dating men and constantly shower you with ~emotional support in a way that brings heat to your cheeks as Woke, I guess.

sometimes i wish they'd just outright say it's het instead of pussyfooting around it like this

kind of like how some hetfic gets tagged as f/f despite not a single f/f ship being tagged on the fic

kind of like how some hetfic gets tagged as f/f despite not a single f/f ship being tagged on the fic

Ahhh, really? I'm not sure I've seen that, though given the many kinds of weirdness I have seen I'm not entirely surprised by it. Elaborate?

there's a lot of hetfic in the f/f tag for dragon age fics at least and a lot of them don't even have a f/f ship tagged in the first place and no it's not some f/f AU version of a het ship either

i think they do it to get in as many tags as possible but it's annoying to me because i have to scroll past so much fic in search of some femslash to read because a lot of it's just het

At least you can exclude by category now on AO3. I'm still holding out for primary/secondary ship categories but that might be a lost cause.

a secondary ship category would definitely be helpful but i foresee problems with that sort of thing too (people tagging secondary ships as primary ships, tagging primary ships as secondary ships, tagging for secondary ships that don't ever show up in the fic, etc)

Unfortunately there'd be no way to retroactively apply that change, so the millions of works already posted would just have all their existing ship tags categorized as "Primary" by default.

Wow that's absolutely absurd. In plenty of my fandoms I've seen people tag something as f/f and also tag a specific f/f ship that showed up for like two lines in the actual fic, but these clowns aren't even pretending.

+1

I thought my fandoms were bad with, both characters appeared in the fic, never interacted but I need to sink the canon het so tag it with f/f in their m/m and gen fics.

+2.

In my fandoms it's usually M/M (main pairing), F/F (background pairing who show up for two lines, usually to be sidekicks or yentas to the main M/M pairing). And that's fucking annoying, but this sounds even worse.

NA

There are a bunch of these in Red vs. Blue. Usually an abandoned longfic with maybe 1-5 chapters posted and a massive tag wall including at least five ships, none of them F/F, and all the pairing categories tagged.

Honestly at this point if I see all the pairing categories tagged I don't even bother reading the rest of the tags.

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I have doubts that [a femslash meme] would be very long-lived

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