Getting awfully tired of people in fandom spaces saying things like "[XYZ character] could not dom to save his life, he could NEVER dom, if you think he could then all of you are all just wrong."
Besides being a rude thing to say to your fandom neighbors, it betrays a real misunderstanding of what power-exchange kink is about or how it's practiced. If you scratch one millimeter deep in this statement, the underlying assumption is that domming is about forcing the sub to do what you want, and a character's ability to dom is therefore based on whether they have the necessarily forceful personality. It suggests a complete unawareness of the fact that, in actuality, the sub is a complicit partner, and it's their consent and good-faith cooperation that makes the kink scene work as a scene.
In other words, a dom is only as successful at domming as their sub helps them to be. You can have the most wet-tissue-paper man in the world, but if his partner is a horny freak of a mega-sub, then any "deficits" in his "ability" to dom can be balanced out by the sub's enthusiasm for subbing. Why? Because the sub is an active and engaged participant in pulling off the scene. The dom is not doing all of the work all by themself! In the theater of it, the sub is a costar on stage -- they're not an audience member passively munching popcorn while watching a play performed solely by the dom!
This is, of course, related to the overall way kink-inexperienced people in fandom write BDSM. Rather than making the execution of the kink fit the characters' personalities, their personalities are butchered to force them to fit into and comply with some kind of government-issued checklist of How This Kink is "Supposed" To Be Written. So many people seem to be blithely unaware that there are as many ways to dom/sub as there are doms/subs. I can only assume that this is because they might have never met an actual kink-practicing person in real life. Y'all, they are goofballs. They are nerds. They are big ol' dweebs. Folks are holding up some dweeby goofball nerd character and saying, "This man could never dom, he doesn't have a dominant bone in his body," and I'm like, "You.... you do know doms are allowed to make stupid puns and dumb dad jokes the whole time, right? You know he doesn't have to stop being a goofball during the scene???"
There's also the issue of many people in fandom not knowing that you're allowed to take turns, but that's getting into a whole thing about "please stop reinventing gender roles" thing that top/bottom discourse also suffers from.
