Imagine princess Reader, grinding desperately against your knight’s gleaming armor, your slick arousal coating the cold metal and spilling down in messy rivulets. The curve of his codpiece presses perfectly against your G spot, sending jolts of pleasure through you with every roll of your hips.

Males characters often get treated and analyzed as CHARACTERS, meaning that it gets understand by people that liking them does not mean you would condone theirs actions in real life, and whatever or not a character is a "well-written" characters is decided upon analyzing if the character's actions make sense, are coherent with the characterization, have motivations (even morally wrong motivations), etc.

While female charactets get often treated and judged by fandom as if they were real people, aka from a WATSONIAN prespective, meaning that they are liked or disliked based on how much symphatetic or relatable they are rather than on their complexity, coherence of writing, complexity, story's arcs or characterization.

Complex and morally ambiguous but still well-meaning male protagonists get raised for their nuanced writing, even if they would be a pain in the ass to deal irl (and it's not a wrong way to interact woth stories btw! You are SUPPOSED to feel empathy for characters you would not get along well in real life), while the way many fandom treat female main characters is to like them or not based on if these characters act in the story in a way people would approve or not in real life.

It is considered "normal" to love female characters who are not morally angelic can be love openly and without shame only if they are explicitely 100% a female villain in the story. In this case, and only in this case, it is understood that liking the character does not mean condoning all theirs actions, because due to their role as the villain said actions are usually already condemned by the story. (But be careful because if you do start analyzing theirs motivations with a little bit of sympathy, some people would come at you saying you are wobifying them and you just don't love female villain- even if all of your favourite supervillain might be women- and you just can't accept that women are able to be evil. It is incredibly funny when this happen in fandom where there are whole blogs and sides of the fandom dedicated to write 136822421 meta about X male Bad Guy was actually never a bad guy but just a misunderstood soul who wanted to end the world or something because his ex-girlfriend from kindegarden gave him a bad look once.)

But if your favourite female characters is not a super-villain antagonists but a flawed main characters who makes mistakes, hurt others or accidents or because she is a bit self-centered or just in general acts sometimes or often in a way that is selfish but also very human, or in a way that is reprehensible but coherent with theirs characterization and background or story-arc? Vade retro Satana Papa Aleppo. People in these cases forget what doylist analysis even MEAN. Only very, very good tv screen-writers manage to make most of fans fall in love with female characters who are very morally flawed and imperfect in very common and mundane ways, in the way your mother or your sister or even you can be.

(And also, who knows me know I love female super-villains, but I think on this site specifically they are more stanned/loved than very imperfect protagonist/flawed main-cast female characters because people on Tumblr often fall in the trap of thinking "it's fiction the war crimes are not real, my annoyance with the character is real" which isn't a completely wrong way to engange in fiction imo, it's true that characters exhist only in a fiction dimension so whatever they are interesting and well-written is more important to decide if they are good characters than to moralize over theirs actions... but often and often fans use this phrase to justify why they are annoyed AT characters for doing minor wrong things, like cheating or being a bad friend or saying something mean, regardless if those actions make sense with the character's story or not, but when it comes to more extreme acts of violence people are more able to see them as purely fiction and with no consequence on reality because they have never experienced such extreme violence upon themselves.)

Anyway.

I guess the difference between me, who complain about the treatement of female characters in fandom, and think they are analyzed too much through a watsonian lens, and the person who said we approached female characters too much through a doylist lens, while also complaining about poor treatement of female characters in fandom, is that she was more focused on minor character and, except rare exception (usually the super-villains I previously talked about) I am always more focused on female main characters than on the background one.

This person was complaining about how bland background male characters with one single trait of characterization always get more fandom attention and fics than the background female characters, and I agree it's true... but honestly I am more interested in analyzing why important-for-the-plot female character who are NOT a blank space but have actually a third dimensional characterization and flaws get judged more harshed than male protagonists with the same characteristics, than in coming up with a backstory and a personality for a nice flat female character to which the writers didn't bother to give more than two personality trait. Don't get me wrong, there are, many side female characters I love in many different stories, books and tv shows, and for most of them I would have liked if they were given more depht and attention by theirs authors, but usually if I want to come up with a complete new personality and backstory for a character I just write original fiction.

What annoy me is that there are often not enough fan content and discussion and love for female characters who are ALREADY complex and flawed, or at least not enough love compared to male characters with the same narrative importance and characteristics.

And I think it's kinda useless to wonder why people don't give enough attention to minor mono-dimensional background female characters if we first don't acknowlodges that many fans don't like engaging with female characters who have a rich characterization but are not always selfless and smart and relatable.

I am not interested in coming with backstories and fan content for forgotten female characters ignored by the narrative as long as fans of various media will continue dislike every female characters who is not always nice and kind and right.