kurosu:

Alright, Tumblr. Let’s start off with a few things we can all agree on and a few disclaimers. This post will focus on the stigma against M/M pairings rather than F/F, since femmeslash rarely gets the same sort of hate that maleslash does. For all intents and purposes, it can apply to femmeslash too when/if people bitch about it.

1. Disliking M/M pairings in fiction does not make you homophobic.
Everyone has their own preferences, and that’s fine. Some people don’t care for het pairings, but that doesn’t mean they have a problem with heterosexuality in real life, and the same works in reverse.

2. Saying that M/M pairings — or any pairings, for that matter — are “disrespectful” to characters is balls-out motherfucking ridiculous.
Newsflash: fictional characters don’t have feelings and can’t be disrespected, no matter how much you think so. Yes, I know, it is so very sad to see your favorite character in a situation you don’t like, but you will have to suck it up and move on with your life. Real people CAN be disrespected, and it’s just plain rude to say something like that about a fanwork they created. Hell, it’s also fucking terrible to say that because it’s m/m, it’s disrespectful. Get real: heterosexuality is not “normal”, it is just “common”, and I don’t want to see shit about gay pairings being disrespectful to your poor “straight” male characters. Even if someone is interpreting a character’s sexual orientation differently, how is it hurting you?

3. There is het everywhere. Repeat after me: everywhere.
I’m sick of people whining about how slash pairings are ruining their lives, how they can’t find any het, why can’t two characters be straight anymore!!! They can, shithead. It’s likely that in whatever canon you’re a fan of, there are heterosexual overtones somewhere. In. Canon. If you’re going to bitch about going against canon then you better throw out every fanwork you’ve ever seen. Sexuality is just another aspect of it that fans are welcome to interpret — and hey, guess what: sexuality is not black and white. A male being interested in girls doesn’t make him heterosexual. It might! But interest in girls does not necessarily mean a lack of interest in boys. Being stereotypically masculine certainly doesn’t make him anything at all. Dressing a certain way doesn’t make him anything at all either. There are such things as bisexuality and pansexuality, and people identify as these in real life, and I’m sure they don’t appreciate having their orientations delegitimized by some asshole who’s under the delusion that their poor precious character can only be straight because a girl’s breasts flustered him in canon.

You are welcome to your beliefs. If you think someone is straight, that’s great. If you think someone is gay or bi or pan or asexual, that’s great too. No one is being shamed for liking anything — and if you feel outcast because you prefer het pairings, you might want to take a step out into the real world, because you’ll find them everywhere. You can walk down the street and see them in real life. You can turn on any channel on television or walk into any movie theater or open any book in the library and find all the heterosexuality you want, and no one will ever look at you twice. You can’t turn on any channel or walk into any movie theater or open any book in the library and find homosexual romance that isn’t tokenized or stereotyped — hence why people turn to fandom, because unfortunately, they have to use their imagination in 99% of cases where canon does not provide. There is nothing wrong with that at all. And if you honestly feel threatened by that, if you feel like your life is just being overtaken by all this homo, try to think of it in reverse: what it’s like to actually be gay, bisexual, pansexual, or otherwise, and not be able to indulge in media and find characters you can identify with. They’re stereotyped to hell, or their issues are made into spectacles, the cores of their entire being. It’s a very lonely feeling to only see people who are not only different from you but also praised as being “normal” when you want identity and want to feel like you’re not a fucking freak.

So we participate in fandom. If they won’t give us something other than heteronormative bullshit, we’ll take it and make it our own. Got a problem? Get over it. You’ll live. So will your favorite characters and pairings. I promise.

As a note, I totally understand what it’s like when there’s not a lot of fanwork for your favorite pairing, whether it be het, m/m, or f/f — but that has nothing to do with this. If there’s a lack of anything, you don’t need to be blaming it on ~teh yaoiz~ or whateverthefuck people say. That’s not it at all. People just like something different than you do, and that’s life. They’ll write what they wanna write and draw what they wanna draw. It can be a bummer, but I promise you, it has nothing to do with homos ruining your life, so let’s just stop saying shit like that.

(Source: gigamacho, via kirkbonesspock)