The one you want to be friends with 😘

As a lesbian, I do not feel as if it is unreasonable, to ask that the people who claim to care about women, to be attracted to both men and women, to actually interact with fandom and the source material in a way that actually reflects that?

Why is it that the focus is so constantly on the male characters? Even when the people writing fic are bi/pan and supposedly also into women! Why is it so difficult to get broader fandom interested in female characters and their storylines? Many of the romance options who are women in Dragon Age aren't even hetlocked! You've got Leiliana, Isabela, Merrill, Sera, & Josephine if you still want to play as a woman! You've got Bellara, Neve, and Harding in DATV if you'd like to play as a woman or non-binary character.

I know there's bi mods for Morrigan because I've used one. I'm sure there's also bi mods for Cassandra!

I do recognize that it's work to unlearn the inherent biases we were raised with, and that centering men comes naturally because that's what is most common in the world we live in. But we've got to do better than this. It's so worth it to practice decentering men. It doesn't have to be this way.

Please.

Take my hand.

Let's decenter men together.

Mlm ships overtake fandoms because the fans are passionate. Try matching that passion instead of trying to act as if they're inferior. 😐

>ask the fandom if the character is subversive of gender norms or transmisogynistic caricature

>they don't understand

>pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is subversive of gender norms and what is transmisogynistic caricature

>they laugh and say "it's a good character"

>watch the source material

their graphs:

"What's your gender identity?: Cis woman (48.2%), nonbinary (31.5%), trans man (10%), cis man (2.3%), trans woman (1.9%)"

"What's your sexuality?: Bi/pan (48.9%), ace-spec (39.5%), aro-spec (19.1%), lesbian (14.6%), straight (9.1%), gay (6.9%)" + 4.9% total other write-in responses

So the largest demographics of Dragon Age fandom on tumblr (represented only by this census, but no other conflicting sources afaik?) are women who are not straight; so you would think, from this, and from other various fandom polls/censuses/surveys, that tumblr tags and ao3 would be heavy on women player characters/self inserts, but a fairly equal spread of love interests + general characters who are focused on. And yet

And yet

A lot of times, when the subject of women characters being underrepresented or ignored in fanworks comes up, there's a response of "What, so you just want everyone to write/draw/enjoy the characters you like instead of what they like?" but come on! by all metrics available, these are all characters everyone should be want to interact with. They're all great characters from the same media franchise, who should appeal to self-professed majority bi women fandoms romantically, sexually, and platonically.

Really, I don't doubt that the people responding to these surveys are being honest. Rather than dishonesty, I think this apparent mismatch of personal identities versus action/attention in fandom just indicates, once again, that a lot of people have a lot of internal biases and misogyny.

This also isn't getting into the issue of race and fandom.

Which similarly, fandom is so generally accepted as being a cozy liberal safe nice space, this should be shocking; but it really isn't. The Dragon Age Tournament census didn't have a race demographic, only location (USA and Europe being the huge majorities at 61% and 31% respectively) but fandom is a very white (esp. American, British, northern European white) space. We know this data-wise from other similar fandom polls/surveys, and anecdotally from using our eyes and brains. This feels different from the misogyny issues, which is predominantly women continuing to propel fandom misogyny via character treatment, because this is really white people making fandom spaces unfriendly or downright antagonistic to fans of color while also ignoring Black and non-white characters.