she allegory on my allegorier til i allegoriest

You know how we call things "pseudoscience"... the media analysis that's being done on twitter and tumblr should be pseudohumanities

And I don’t mean this in a “fandom is so vapid, they make everything about shipping” way, I mean this in the way of “perennially online folks start to think ‘critical analysis’ means scouring everything for one or two slightly mishandled aspects or even just things that didn’t fit their personal preference to then pen an internet-buzzword-laden and at its core completely meaningless smug rant about it which they then slap into every main tag where it gets 2 notes” and the opinions expressed would somehow baffle and irritate both a totally offline casual viewer and an actual academic viewer of the thing. Worst of both worlds

i think i don't really vibe with most other fans of my favorite male characters is because they usually depict them too much of a man, and i am not interested in men, i am interested in The Character. and i am not saying that they should depict them as women, or nonbinary, or should depict them as feminine, no, not at all. but there's like, you know, you can depict a male character as The Character, and you can depict them as The Man. do you get me? like, i go to the fandom looking for art and fics, and it's just, regardless of his actual characterization, it's all just fantasizing about some kind of an abstract dominant patriarch, wearing my favorite character's face. it may be the most totally-wouldnt-have-normal-relationships (and sometimes even would-literally-abuse-you) kind of guy, and you join a dedicated space for his fans, and all they talk about is how they want to marry and start a tradcore 50s style nuclear family with him. it can be a guy who's arrogance and attempts of domination are explicitly shown to be a facade that hide the fact that he's actually kind of a massive pathetic wet loser, and you go to his fics, and they're all depicting him as a caricaturish daddy dom. at this point it's like, do you even like the character at all, or do you just like The Man, and project this man onto whatever character you find visually attractive? and these people kind of, really really poison actual discussion of the character, who is kind of a fucked up evil person (i only like *those* types, so im talking about them) because they see analysis of the actual character as an attack on their fantasized daddy dom husband, who is actually isn't The Character at all, and is simply a face of the day for The Man

Something I really struggle to get people to understand is that like. Sometimes there was no intentional homoerotic subtext, the author was just extremely misogynistic. Sometimes the author wasn't "secretly shipping" those two men, the author literally just hates women so much that they see them as being literally incapable of relationships with depth. Like this is kind of a big thing with misogyny actually. A lot of extremely misogynistic people truly believe that a man can only have meaningful and complex relationships with other men because they literally just think women are so inferior they only exist to birth children and clean the house. It's like when people say along the lines of "no one worships exclusively men quite like straight men do". It's just that phenomenon actually. That happens to be manifesting in a raging misogynist's writing. Writing a man character who literally only puts effort into his friendships with other men while completely ignoring his literal girlfriend or wife is actually an extremely straight thing to write. And that doesn't mean you can't ship those men or that there are no stories with actual intentional homoerotic subtext. I just think it's important to be able to recognize extreme misogyny in writing and acknowledge it without brushing it off and assuming good intentions when literally all evidence is screaming that this was a misogynistic writing choice and not a representing gay men choice.