title

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How do you refer to that?

"A kink."

Okay, but seriously, you're asking the wrong question. The issue isn't how to rephrase an offensive and silly generalization without using any words on the naughty list. The word 'heteronormative' isn't a slur. It's fine to use it. The issue is that this entire framing around one of them being The Girl™ is flawed.

Using different language won't save a poor conceptual framework.

I agree that there are patterns in people's taste, but if we want to have a grown-up conversation about them, we need to assess what actually exists and approach the whole thing with curiosity, not default assumptions.

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Question number one on our minds should be whether "everyone" does see queer ships the same way.

I really do not like the classic, stereotypical BL roles of yore. They're not to my taste. At the same time, I've been getting into Chinese danmei novels lately. What I expected to find was a lot of those exact dynamics, and they're certainly present in some novels. Totally by accident, I've managed to stumble across novel after novel that just does not hit my squicks. These ships are all technically fixed since that's the genre default, but many of them barely talk about who's on top or the sex goes one way but a lot of other aspects of the dynamic go another or the book pokes fun at the whole thing.

It's not that these books are revolutionary: it's that the cliche in my head was pretty narrow, and the actual modern genre is much broader than that. Even in a space that does more or less adhere to the stereotype you're referencing, there are clearly lots of different preferences among authors.

And it's not necessarily obscure novels either. Thousand Autumns is right behind MXTX and Priest in terms of having attracted the interest of anglophone fandom. It's popular enough at home to have gotten an animated version. The setup couldn't be more classically fixed: The mustache-twirling head of the bad guy sect is the top. The tragic woobie head of the good guy sect who starts the book injured and helpless is the bottom.

But this author loooves messing with the top. There's a whole Crossdressing for The Plot™ section, but it's the top who has to. The bottom is super pretty. The top thinks about how good he'd look in women's clothing. But it's the top that the author actually stuck with that plotline.

And that's a bog-standard extremely fixed dynamic book by a big author. I'm sure if we went looking for books with a different dynamic, we could find them. Yes, they won't be the most popular and famous, but there's variety out there if you dig.

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Who is "everyone"? Your tumblr friends? Your high school anime club? My front porch?

Because I gotta tell you, you've sent this ask to the highest concentration of top POV enjoyers around!

The real crux of the matter is that what you see as boy-girl is often more accurately looked at as romance novel protagonist and romance novel love interest.

A lot of readers and writers are more interested in a bottom character or a sub character or a character who is the focus and recipient of a lot of things in the narrative. They're also going to apply their favorite kinks to that same character. They're also going to give most of their identity headcanons to that character.

The one in panties will also be the one giving the boring PSA about autism.

Part of why I don't like classic fixed dynamics of the most stereotypical sort is that I do tend to like to make my favorite characters top. In weaker writing, the protagonist is the super special princess and nobody else's feelings matter—or even exist—and that protagonist is generally the bottom. In a stronger work, everyone gets some development and interiority, so even if my fave is the top and not the emotional focus, it won't be as annoying as when they're turned into an emotional support boyfriend who just exists to dispense therapy or sex.

The problem isn't that the other one is The Girl. The problem is that I have opposite taste in POV characters, so crummy writing gets on my nerves more easily.

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We also need to break down what the aspects of "girliness" even are. I've seen this debate rage for decades in slash and BL fandom. On the more Western side, dynamics are often officially not fixed. People will tell you that they write the characters switching. In practice, however, we see the same romance novel protagonist vs. romance novel love interest vibe all over the place. Maybe there's cursory lip service to them sometimes switching up who does what during anal sex, but there's still a big difference in how one character is typically written vs. the other, and people still complain about it endlessly.

The longer you see this conversation, the more you will realize that "you turned him into The Girl" can refer to any of the following:

you put him in panties

you put him in makeup

you had him bottom during anal

you made him a sub in a BDSM scene

you put him in a trauma recovery situation

you made a vid of his POV using a song sung by a woman

you had him cry in your fic

you had him talk about his feelings

you had him cook for his boyfriend

you made him the more emotionally intelligent one

you gave him an artistic hobby

you made him the researcher or the wizard instead of the action hero who punches things

you gave him your own suburban US college student taste in music, your hobbies, your clothing preferences, or anything else that seems like it's personal to you

There is really no limit to which things can be accused of being part of making him The Girl. It's any fic or headcanon or art or comment that the speaker doesn't like.

The last bullet point usually leads to a portrayal I find OOC. You can call it cringe if you like. But it's not about consciously feminizing men. It's about the part of fandom that you, anon, hang out in not denigrating their own preferences.

Me vidding a male character to a Taylor Swift song isn't really that different from someone writing a modern AU about the same dude listening to that album. I find one far more aesthetically pleasing, that's all.