ngl i do think that some of you can get a little too lost in the sauce with the adjectives when horny talking. there comes a point when youre talking about how my dick is going to be absolutely emaciated that it stops being sexy and starts being very, very funny

“arooooo!” calls the gay werewolf

I will consume any media that is gay. A queer character can say one word and I eat that shit up.

But a guilty pleasure of mine is gay media clearly written by a straight person. Not the I-appreciate-the-effort types that come from a good place in the author’s heart. These attempts at queer representation are righteous. While God and his angels may cringe at these attempts, these attempts at representation aren’t thrown straight into the pits of Hell.

In Hell, I imagine a canyon overfilled with my guilty pleasure books. 

These are the gay situations clearly written because fetishization is a thing. Straight women love cute, usually college-aged boys. And what’s better than one cute boy? Two. And what’s better than two cute boys? Making them kiss!

I try not to judge those gay werewolf novels about the omegas and the alphas. I try not to judge the covers: two hairless, buff chests nipple-to-nipple- pushed together in embrace; behind these barely-legal Caucasian chests are the boys’ wolf versions. Of course, they’re werewolves. That or cowboys.

I adore these shitty books. And I adore leaving them negative reviews on Goodreads. My second-favorite part of discovering these books, besides reading them, is seeing what straight women readers have to say about them.

“OMYGOD!!!!” The cishet preteen girl types. “AUDHUDSXHOJGSS THERE SO KYYUUTTEEE!!!!”

“I really love the relationship these two have,” Says the middle-aged cishet mother of two. “So carnal.”

And a review from, you guessed it, another cishet lady. “This was a super good book and I loved it! Give me more!”

Obviously, nothing wrong with being cishet. Nothing wrong with writing or enjoying these books. But Jesus Christ I swear all cishet people think gay guys do is fuck.

Some real examples from books I’ve read:

Boyfriend A gets into fight with his mother because his mother (also a werewolf) is homophobic. Aw. That’s super sad. He runs off to the bedroom to cry. Boyfriend B goes to console Boyfriend A… by fucking him. Sir? Boyfriend A’s Mom is, like, in the living room right now.

They’re werewolves destined for female mates. Aw, poor babies. They meet at a big werewolf event and, two seconds later, go to the bathroom to bang in a stall. Welp. Very cool.

Guy A is freshly 18 (anyone else hear those alarm bells?) and meets Guy B, who is in his 40s (the alarm bells have turned into tornado sirens). They have a drink. Guy A is drunk. Guy B is not. (the tornado sirens are even louder tornado sirens now). Guy B takes Guy A back to his place. They have sex.

This fetizisation isn’t a problem solely in books. Comics, manga, TV, and video games are plagued with it, too.

While I’m technically non-binary, I get that I look like a chick. And I am AFAB. So let me speak on the lesbian issue.

It’s not nearly as entertaining for me. It hits closer to home. I mean, you think porn is bad for straight women? It’s worse for sapphics. No, really, how many goddamn times am I gonna have to see “Lesbian Seduces Her Straight Friend” or “Lesbian Girlfriends Invite Neighbor Over”. That’s vulgar, I know, but while the bad gay guy books may be entertainment for me, as I chortle at how wrong everything is, gay guys don’t get those laughs out of it.

A Defense of Mary Sue OCs

This is a direct response to the post I just reblogged about the creator of a Mary Sue test denouncing the test. I was going to post this as a reblog, but then it got hideously long on me so I decided to post it separately. Here is the link to the Mary Sue Litmus test in question if you’d like to look at it (prepare to be horrified: it’s sickening).

Firstly, I did not know this test existed until I saw it tonight, however I did see the kind of damage this kind of thinking did to the fanfiction community on fanfiction.net in real time.

For some background, I discovered online fanfic through FFN and Wattpad around July 2013 (I know this because one of the first fics I remember reading was the fic “No Hiding, No Safe Covers” which was published then). I was active on FFN in some form basically from then until I made my AO3 account in July 2018. My FFN account still exists, though I haven’t done anything there since December 2019 according to the last thing in my Favorite Stories.

I was in the Star Wars fandom during my FFN heyday (this should actually not be surprising: I have never loved anything else the way I loved Star Wars). This was when the Clone Wars was airing so the fandom was massive, there were so many new fics everyday. There was always something new to read.

Only it wasn’t all good. We had a lot of people who would go around leaving hate comments (we called these messages flames). I remember there was this one person who started deleting the hate comments on their work. When the flamers figured out about this they dog-piled on this person screaming about how they were deleting comments to make it seem like people liked their work more than they actually did. I’m pretty sure this person eventually left the site.

But what does this have to do with Mary Sues, Emjen? Let me tell you. As I recall, this person was writing Self Insert fanfic. In fact, most if not all of the people who ran afoul of the flamers were. At the time FFN (or at the the Star Wars fandom) had a huge anti-Mary Sue culture. People hated Self Insert fanfic because all the characters were Mary Sues.

What they missed was the fact that most of the people writing these fanfic were, you guessed it, middle school kids. These kids had just discovered fanfic and they were just learning to write. They loved the Clone Wars and they just wanted to be part of it. They made characters who were like themselves only better; the sort of people they wished they were. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with getting yourself through the crap that is middle school by imaging that you’re amazing and powerful and and get to save the day. There’s nothing wrong with exploring how to write with characters people might not be interested in reading. Kids shouldn’t be attacked for that.

Also, I firmly believe that the “cringey” Self Insert OC phase is one all fanfic writers go through. I know I did. Hell, my username is the name of one of my Self Inserts. I’ve just sort of detached it from the character and began to use it for myself over the years because I like the sound of it, but that doesn’t change where it came from. The difference is that I didn’t start posting fanfic on the internet until I was sixteen and by that point I was well past that stage and into more “respectable” types of fanfic. My Self Insert stuff--like the series my friend and I wrote when I was in middle school featuring my older Self Insert Reba-Kah who was one of Anakin Skywalker’s best friends (**insert ironic aroace chortling here**)--will forever remain buried in the notebooks we wrote them in. So will the detailed character guides I wrote with some canon characters and all my OCs (I had OCs for basically everyone I knew including detailed backstories for each one). Maybe it was cringey, maybe it was poorly written, maybe the characters were too perfect, but that stuff contained every ounce of my middle school aged passion, and there was nothing wrong with it. Nothing about it deserved hate, and the same holds true for every other kid who has ever written fanfic.

So back to the anti-Mary Sue sentiment on FFN. By the time I started posting on FFN, I wasn’t writing Self Inserts anymore. At one point, I did write a fic about my friend’s (the one from above’s) OC, but that was only posted on my Wattpad. Tbh I can’t recall if I had my FFN account at that time, but either way no Self Inserts were posted on my FFN. I learned that no one liked OCs; that at best you wouldn’t get reads for fics containing them, at worst you would get hate comments about how they were Mary Sues. I actually had a thicker skin in high school than I do now (how did that happen?), but I still stopped writing OCs. I went from a girl who had literally hundreds of OCs (ask me nicely and I might screenshot the character lists from my Warrior Cats phase for you: its impressive), to a girl who wrote canon characters and canon characters only.

It took me a long time to start writing OCs again. Eventually, when I was college I started to feel like the hatred of OCs was stupid. Why did I have to avoid OCs just because everyone hated them and thought they were Mary Sues? I wrote original fiction as well as fanfic! Didn’t that mean that I knew how to write an OC without making them a Mary Sue? I decided I was sick of it so I wrote a fic flying in the face of all of it. That fic is about the Jedi Order during the Clone Wars, and its easily one of the artsiest things I’ve ever written. It’s structured as a collection of short scenes set from the of AoTC until RoTS. Each scene is in a different character’s POV and at least mentions the character who will be in POV character in the next one. The characters were drawn from canon, the old EU and my old OCs. Reba-Kah makes an appearance, and so does Emjen Enla (actually I think this might be the only time I ever actually wrote Emjen, but that’s another story entirely). I’m not going to link it because I wrote it a long time ago and I’m a much better writer now, but while writing this I looked back at it I noticed that I’d included an author’s note that talks a lot about the same things I’m discussing here, so obviously that was on my mind.

No one read that fic, but at least I didn’t get any hate on it. Still, it’s now 2020 and I’m writing the Fightingverse, which is a series where half the major characters are OCs. I’m pleasantly surprised with the responses that it’s getting, actually. I didn’t think anyone would read the first Baas POV fic (I hesitate to say Baas’s fic because that’s something else entirely), but people did and it has a fair number of Kudos so it seems people like it. Maybe things are getting better now (probably not, but I’m a pessimist, what do I know?).

On a more global scale, in my experience only two types of characters get nailed with the “Gross, a Mary Sue” bullshit. They are:

1. Characters who are women who inhabit roles that are considered men’s roles or who are badass and powerful in ways people think only men should be. (Rey from the Star Wars Sequels is an example of this.)

2. Self Insert OCs written by kids (usually girls, actually) who are just having fun imagining that they are part of the story and are cool and powerful and can save the day.

If you look at those two categories it becomes obvious that there is a lot more to unpack here than just whether someone who writes a “Mary Sue” is a terrible writer and deserves to be shamed off the internet. Actually, it becomes obvious that isn’t the problem at all (//sarcasm Oh, it looks like Mary Sue hate was just misogyny all along! Who would have thought? I’m so shocked!). It becomes obvious that Mary Sue is just a charge people level on characters they personally dislike even if the character is well characterized. (And yes I know a Gary Stu is a thing, but that term was never used with as much hate as Mary Sue is.)

To further hammer this home, out of curiosity I tried to fill the Mary Sue Litmus test linked above out on myself. I got a 20, which in fanfic terms means there’s a low-to-moderate chance I’m a Mary Sue (//sarcasm “but don’t worry this is generally a safe range to be in”). 😬The list contains traits possessed by many well-loved fictional characters including Katara, Toph and Aang from Avatar the Last Airbender. It shits on age-old tropes like the chosen one narrative. Your character becomes more of a Mary Sue if the other characters mourn them when they die (wtf?). If you only check a couple things your character is either a “Hood Ornament” (meaning you’re such a sucky writer you can’t even manage an active character so we’re going to hate you) or an “anti-Sue” (meaning you tried so hard not to write a Mary Sue you did the exact opposite and we’re still going to hate you). Above all you can tell that the list is based on one person’s opinion, and their arrogance oozes through every word of the stupid thing. It’s awful. I hate it. It’s a good thing the creator realized it was messed up, even if it’s too late and the damage is already done.

Basically where I’m going with this is that there’s nothing productive about Mary Sue hate. It always either demonstrates your prejudices or attacks younger writers (often both). People need the space to learn, and they can’t do that if they get attacked for writing things that they enjoy. Women chosen ones and women with badass powers are also things that should exist; they should not be held to standards that men in the same roles would not be. The Mary Sue label is not helpful and just gives people a convenient buzzword to use to spew hate.

tl;dr: The concept of Mary Sues in inherently flawed and based in attacks on young writers at best and outright misogyny at worst.

(Note: I deliberately did not touch on the genres of x OC and x Reader fanfic that is written by adults because I have very little experience with them. However, at casual glance, it appears the point is writing a character who is generic enough to allow the reader to project themself into the story, which changes the rules slightly as you could argue the writer is deliberately trying to write a character who would be considered a Mary Sue.)

Day 2 - Ties

Did you know that two teams can tie in an NFL game? Ties are by no means an omnipresent phenomenon in the NFL specifically (this past season had two ties, which was on the higher end historically) or in American sports generally (among the four largest sports leagues in the US, the NFL is the only one that has a true tie. In hockey, you can get some cred in the standings for losing in overtime, but that’s as close as any other league gets). So, now you know that football teams can tie. This means that you now know something about football that Donovan McNabb did not know about football in 2008. Donovan McNabb, a potential Hall of Fame NFL Quarterback, who had played football for the first 32 years of his life, upon tying a game with the Washington Redskins (or, as I like to call them, the Washington Dud PR Timebombs [seriously, DC is a pretty liberal place, how the fuck has that persisted]), replied to a reporter’s question that he did not know an NFL game could end in a tie. Like, if someone asked him, “Hey Don, you know your whole playbook?” He’d be like, “Fuck no, I don’t even know the whole rule book!”

While Mr. McNabb’s response to the question may be disheartening to the more intellectual football fans out there (they exist, don’t laugh), his response is not the worst I’ve heard from an NFL player regarding a tie. Bubba Smith, all pro-defensive end, played ball in the 60s, went on record, in a newspaper, in print, that he would rather lose a game than tie. Well, Bubba, I know you died in 2011 and I’m speaking to you rhetorically right now, but I feel like you wouldn’t have been singing that same tune if 10-5-1 would have gotten you into the playoffs but 10-6 wouldn’t have. A tie is, after all, effectively worth half a win, which is exactly one half win better than losing the game. (Math is important, kids.)

Now, Bubba was clearly suffering from two issues here. The first, repeated head trauma. Like, massive amounts of good ol’ American  pre-team-doctor football head trauma. (Smith eventually passed away after long bouts with alcoholism, issues with his heart and with his brain, namely CTE. If you actually would like to make a difference instead of laughing about other people’s degenerative issues, donate to fund research at Boston University’s CTE Center, you cynical asshole: https://www.bu.edu/cte/financial-support/). 

The second issue Bubba faced was an inability to handle America’s most important endangered species: nuance. It seems that Bubba should have preferred a tie to a loss because, as discussed earlier, math. But that (admittedly somewhat small) benefit of the tie versus the loss was outweighed in Bubba’s mind by the tonnage of having to have mixed feelings about the outcome of game. If Bubba wins the game, it’s a big “WOOHOO” moment, and he carries it into the next game. If Bubba loses, it’s more of a “BOOHOO” moment, but he still gets to get angry, get amped up, and carry that energy into the next game. If he ties the game, it’s a sobering moment for him - ambivalence doesn’t translate well into unadulterated emotion. 

I think this phenomenon is one that I deal with pretty frequently - it’s just so much easier to have a view of the world that’s rigid, that draws lines very clearly, and comments all over the internet whenever some guy named Milo crosses one of those lines. Gradients are so nice in theory - they provide flexibility when trying to understand the world around us. But it’s a whole lot easier to draw the rainbow with exactly seven solid brush strokes (especially because I can’t paint for shit. That part’s not a metaphor - I am awful at painting.)

The reason that folks like myself and Bubba prefer to think in terms of black and white (or, if we are referencing the races of the respective individuals mentioned, white and black) is that it takes conscious, active, tiresome thought. Take, for example, discussing the current leader of the free world, Donald J. Trump (highly topical, whether or not you think he’s the best example, this is the only way I have of getting this blog read by anyone who doesn’t know me personally). While those who support him and those who loathe him hold diametrically opposing viewpoints on many issues, there is one thing that many on both sides of the aisle share: their opinion of the man is dishearteningly lacking in nuance. I have heard plenty of Trump protesters suggest he is a devil, a demon Satan, Armageddon, the Apocalypse, a felon, a fascist, a neo-Nazi, a regular Nazi, Hitler Himself, and, of course, orange. While these attacks regarding his rhetoric, actions and skin tone have catalyzed many a high five and chortle between folks who dislike the man, none of these epithets categorizes the man in these somewhat more moderate terms: a human being with some pent-up anger, a lot of money, an uncanny ability to navigate the American media, and a lot of people who are buying what he is selling. While I believe that describing him in these terms better outlines the danger he poses to many groups in America, it takes a lot longer to type it out, and I’d usually rather type 5 letters than type three lines if I’m trying to get a point across.

On the other side of the aisle, the simple terms in which he is described are a bit longer character-wise, but just as lacking in moderation as those used on the other ideological pole: Trump is a businessman, he’s an outsider lookin’ to drain the swamp (short aside: a show called Swamp People on the History Channel just premiered its 8th season, and there has yet to be a single politician on the show [this fact is entirely unconfirmed, but they are documenting people who live in a literal swamp, so I am confident in my guess]), he doesn’t talk like those politicians who lie all the time. The main failing with this broad stroke is the failure to convey any further why an outsider would be better at a job than an insider in any industry (I’ve heard of an outside hire before, but should a real estate firm hire as its CEO someone who spent the previous 40 years as the Commissioner of the NFL? [Roger Goodell, it seems that you may have some serious prospects in other industries when you’re done.]) For many who support Mr. Trump, the characterization he has cultivated as a champion for running the government like a business crumbles under a simple question: do businesses have to make sure homeless people don’t die on the street? Because governments do.

I think this is all I’ve got to discuss on the matter for now, but it shall return again (blogs are like gyms - it’s a nice first step to get yourself into one, but you have to keep going back and working on the same stuff consistently if you want to feel good about yourself). In the meantime, try to avoid the pitfalls of Mr. Smith - try to find the tie, try to consider all sides of the issues with which you are confronted in your daily life, and...try to minimize head trauma.