merelydovely | (Reply)

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I'm a bi man, so I don't know if my opinion is wanted on this, but I do try to like femslash, and after about several fandoms this has been my conclusion: sometimes it goes farther than "there are fewer female characters onscreen with the ship dynamic I like". Sometimes it's "there are fewer female characters onscreen who are actual characters at all." In one of my fandoms, there's a total of four named consistently female characters in the canon. Two of them are older, and the fen skew young, so the only femslash ship with any real following is Sarah/Katherine. This is fine...except that Sarah is, well, a total lamp. She doesn't pass the sexy lamp test at all, and she isn't written well enough to give you a strong sense of what her personality is like. In order for me to become emotionally invested in any romance she has you first have to convince me she's an interesting person to have as a main character or love interest. Which is really difficult to do when 95% of the fics on ao3 are under 15k, and 80% of them are oneshots*. So I'm a lot more interested in Sarah-centric gen that fleshes her out as a human being rather than a character whose sum total of lines in 2 hours is less than a page**.

I've noticed this in other fandoms/characters, too (Suki from Avatar comes to mind). They're not characterized enough for me to be emotionally invested in relationships if the fic writer doesn't do that for me. I admit that as a bi man I'm more interested in seeing myself in works, but I wonder if women have this problem too?

*okay, these aren't real statistics.
**this actually IS a real statistic. Also it doesn't help that she's not plot relevant and doesn't have ties to most of the other characters, unlike some of the male characters who have very few lines.