#misogyny000

How the Harem genre is rooted in sexism and exoticism by cedgehog

Pic source: "a deep dive into the kpop demon hunters fandom" by ColeyDoesThings (https://youtu.be/bH-g4nEt7tU?si=JNiULoS6MfRKjlF8)

What's with modern fandoms calling "misogyny" if you're a fan of male characters???? I promise you, there are more reasons to like male characters, BESIDES misogyny.

The responsibility of representation for non-dominant social groups is on the producers of mass media. Not on the fans. Fandom is just liking whatever happens to resonate with you. You can't help what you like. If male characters have more popularity than female characters from the same series, it's because there's a bigger variety of them than female characters, to resonate with more types of tastes. We've only recently started to get away from all animated female characters being the same "hot girl" body type. KPop Demon Hunters is being repeatedly lauded as "one of the first" mass media representations of female characters being allowed to make "ugly faces"---and it released only just this year! We're only just starting to get a bigger variety of female characters in the mainstream. Mass media producers are the ones who need to provide more female/minority representation, until there is enough variety of such characters to resonate with everyone's different tastes.

Granted, there is something to be said about fandoms being majorly carried by female fans, combined with heterosexuals being the majority. But even if a majority of fangirls are expressing their hetero crushes on male characters, there's still a lot of them who have made female characters also popular. Even the hetero fangirls aren't always thinking with their lust. Some of them really identify with the female fictional characters. Some of them have favorite archetypes that are best represented by the female characters in a mainstream story. But they don't get called "misandrists" for favoring female characters. Now, this could be, that given the long history of misogyny as context for our world, any popularity for female characters is too important, as push-back against the patriarchy, to accuse and quell as any kind of sexism. And it is indeed, needed push-back against the patriarchal context of our world. But if people are picking favorite characters for reasons other than lust or sexism, if there is indeed a wide spectrum of reasons that people love certain characters and make them popular, then everyone who loves your favorite female character isn't automatically motivated by "virtue signaling", and everyone whose favorite character isn't also your favorite character, who happens to be a girl/woman, isn't automatically motivated by sexism. There are more reasons to like characters besides this imagined, absolutist binary of motivations of either "misogyny or virtue".

There's some weird kind of "virtue signaling" going on in fandoms recently. Maybe it's "Purity Culture"-adjacent, because that's been on the rise in recent years too. It's all very strange. It might be a bunch of people too afraid of being called "problematic", so they accuse first, to "prove" they're not bad and to demonstrate that they know who the "problematic" people are, and can therefore, differentiate themselves from them. Or, it might be a bunch of people getting high, off of feeling "superior", whenever they point out what the "bad" thing is, or who the "bad" people are, and therefore again demonstrating how they're so much better. Yeah, easy to feel superior when the bar is on the floor, and you put it there, by labelling EVERYONE ELSE as "bad".

There are bad things in fandoms, and we are gradually weeding them out. The same for mainstream media. But this performative virtue signaling that I keep seeing growing in recent years, this "self policing" in fandoms, is worrying.

Ugh... I keep running into this stuff...

I'm so tired of seeing "if you like male gay ships, when there's a female character in the cast, then you're misogynist". And then the female canon love interest is either boring, badly written, doesn't have as interesting a relationship with the male lead, or the male lead has a more interesting relationship with the other male character that the fandom keeps shipping him with. Or sometimes it's just a matter of personal tastes and individual preferences in relationship dynamics and archetypes.

I've never heard these misogyny accusations so much as now, after I've gotten into Arcane. I'm sorry, but if you tell me one ship is an "ethical cop butting up vs a corrupt system" paired up with a "boxer from the wrong side of the tracks with a heart of gold", BUT RIGHT OVER THERE are "MAD SCIENTIST WIZARDS"...! Then me---as someone who has loved the mad scientist archetype since I was 7 or 9, and has also loved scifi mixed with magic for almost as long---well of course, I'm going to go with the "mad scientist wizards doing taboo experiments breaking laws of the universe"! I promise, there are reasons to like ships besides misogyny.

And it's not like I dislike ships with women in them! ZelLina, IchiRuki, Lelouch/C.C., HomuMado, Amane/Hikari, Kumiko/Reina, MitsuAya,... But it has to be archetypes or relationship dynamics of tropes that specifically speak to my weird tastes. I'm not going to jump on board a ship with a woman in it, just to virtue signal vs misogyny. Fandom is for playing with my specific tastes in toys. Not for me to advertise what I believe in. (Shipping can reflect my ideals, but that's a retroactive analysis, not a determining motivation.)

I'm so tired of seeing this.... 😩

And the funny thing between me and my disinterest in the hetoro ship MelJay, is that all the things I admire about Mel are very similar to some major things I liked about my favorite character from one of my fandoms before Arcane. Even her archetype paired up with Jayce's archetype, is a relationship dynamic that Claumitri proved i like. But MelJay isn't exactly like Claumitri's dynamic. I don't see Mel playing pranks and flippantly skipping out on important meetings. And again, I'm going to instead go for the "mad scientist wizards breaking taboo laws of the universe in the name of Love". That specifically is more my thing. It's just my unique, individual, idiosyncratic tastes.

The weird thing is, before Arcane, if you liked a gay ship over the canon hetero ship, no one called you misogynist. Granted...the subject was usually a Shonen Jump series with notoriously, either underwritten female characters or objectified female characters. And Eiichiro Oda did warn that Shonen Jump editors or superiors are creepy towards women. Meanwhile, Arcane has objectively well written female characters as season 1's main canon ship and within its secondary canon ship. And maybe if I hadn't gotten into Arcane backwards, watching it from JayVik's final scene, then backwards, before watching it chronologically, maybe I wouldn't be shipping what I ship. But I'll never know. But what I do know is that I have a thing for mad scientists, magitech, and obsessive freaks, breaking taboo laws of the universe in the name of "Love". And that has nothing to do with misogyny. Especially since the last ship I loved who did that was yuri.