BBC series I Kissed a Boy decision "homophobic in the extreme" - LGB Alliance

I remember years ago Xena and Gabrielle being made a couple by a section of their fans. That became a thing in the show although I doubt, from the way they danced around it, it was what the creators originally intended. There was probably a similar thing with Hercules and Iolaus. Which, if I recall my Greek myths correctly, would have been truer to the source material. I doubt the star of Hercules would have been keen on that though🤣.

I'm not a fan of romantasy, enemies to lovers type stuff. The stories, to me, often get broken in service to the relationships. I don't read fanfic but some of them do make it into print (I've seen a few Arthur and Lancelot). Then there are those self published on Amazon, which can catch you out if you buy ebooks. I accidentally read one that took a sudden turn into a homosexual relationship, illiterally from nowhere. Nothing explicit, when things progressed beyond loving glances, kisses and caresses it just faded into the paragraph break. Written by a woman.

That's about it. Now imagine that 80% of Star Trek fanfic is straight girls writing about Kirk and Spock getting it on, and you've got the picture.

So fanfic is about tv/film/book characters, where people imagine different story lines?

Like say I'm a huge fan of the X files and I start to write stories about how Mulder goes off to live with the aliens and Scully moves to Thailand and falls in love with a monk and sets up a monkey sanctuary

Am I in any way getting close ?

Maybe because I vaguely remember very old fanfic, it's interesting to me that there used to be a lot more hetero and even lesbian slash. It was just a natural offshoot of shipping discussions where you might say "I think Becky and Tom are a boring couple, Becky and Mike might be hotter."

Or it might be as I mentioned upthread, taking a show about a very close female friendship, adding in romance and making it a lesbian story.

The most notorious hetero version I know is Wanda and Pietro in Marvel comics, always being written in canon as incredibly close siblings as twins often are, and so many people in fandom riffed on the idea of them as an incestuous couple that it actually leaked into the Ultimate Universe comics.

I'm really interested though, and still don't quite understand, how it so overwhelmingly became straight girls writing canonically straight male characters in gay relationships (or their mental image thereof, which is very unlike gay male sexuality). There's something quite weird happening there.

I barely look at current comics - it's a dying industry and the product is pretty terrible - but I remember a couple of years back seeing an X-Men comic where... well, Cyclops and Wolverine were written for decades as romantic rivals, but in this one there was a very odd homoerotic vibe between them that didn't fit either character. The author was a youngish woman, and I bet she's heavily into fanfic.

Fanfic is an old, old thing. Long before the internet, it already existed in fanzines, good old paper magazines that fans put together and distributed among themselves. It scratches an itch in some readers/viewers but not everyone has that itch - though if you've ever wondered, "What would have happened if things had gone slightly differently at this point?" or "I could see Character A getting with Character C instead of Character B", then you have an inkling what the itch is about. As for slash, nowadays it's simply a fic centered around a same-sex relationship.

@SnoopyPajamas

"but if something does itch my brain, it tends to be more the "what if these miserable forty year olds gave it another go, though?" or "I wonder what this character's life would look like in twenty years?""

Yes!

"And the type of writer you get for boring old characters like that,"

You take that back 😛 ! Older characters have more life behind them, more struggles, more mistakes, more successes too, so how can they be boring!?

There are some surprisingly mature young writers - and some older writers who never seem to wisen up...

Thanks for the Stike rec! I'll see about giving the books a go, and see if I fall in love with them. It would be nice to get back into an active fandom.

I'm reading the above posts with interest. I've always enjoyed reading but until recently I'd never even heard of fanfic or fandoms. I have no idea what any of the terminology means. Slash?
Fanfic seems to be something very popular that completely passed me by. I thought perhaps it's because I'm Gen X in my fifties but I note that some pp mention fanfic of 30 years ago. Saying that, I didn't start using the Internet until 2005 and that was occasional use with crappy dial-up, but no, it's all new to me.

Hmm, whilst I can understand the argument around the politics of this, I've gotta say I'm not sure how I feel about this recent tendency to try and police what roles actors are allowed to accept. For me it's about the end product and the more I can view them as the character rather than the actor the better the immersion is for me - this must be a fairly common view due to the way some actors become typecast and hence might struggle to give true suspension of disbelief in some roles (like I might struggle to take Danny Dyer seriously playing a thespian, for example).

I guess I might object in some instances. Like if it was a known racist/misogynist playing some kind of philanthropic hero character or something. It would just be too hard/contradictory to take seriously. So I guess it's impossible to always separate the actor from their role in some cases.

However, if a casting decision is made for 'political' or ideological reasons then that might be different. But at face value I don't think I have an issue with a trans individual playing any role if they play it well. Otherwise, where does it stop? For example, it could be seen as insensitive to people struggling in life to have a millionaire actor playing a hard up character.

I've observed this too. Boys tend to aspire, girls tend to relate. It's why the heroine of a romcom is often an absolute mess, and the lead in an action movie will often be a boring square jawed hunk with no discernable personality. It's studios taking these tendencies of their audience to extremes

I don't want to alarm you, but AI has eaten Etsy's lunch on that one. There are already apps you can program to have the personality of your favourite fictional character, and be your boyfriend / girlfriend.

I think there was actually a disturbing case where an autistic boy killed himself because his AI girlfriend told him to. She was supposed to be Daenerys from Game of Thrones and the app glitched, I believe. I think the app was called Character AI?

So yes, this is already moving into disturbing new frontiers. People will be able to emotionally enmesh themselves with their favourite characters in ways that just weren't possible before. I don't think it's headed anywhere healthy.

I think this might be related to youth, and does settle down a bit as people get older. I'm not massively into fanfic this days - it's just too much effort to find something of decent quality, and I don't have the time for that - but if something does itch my brain, it tends to be more the "what if these miserable forty year olds gave it another go, though?" or "I wonder what this character's life would look like in twenty years?" And the type of writer you get for boring old characters like that, is often a fellow boring old and therefore refreshingly normal. And you don't have to interact with people whose brains are still cooking at all 😂

I'm a millennial, and I stick to my own kind or older, with this stuff. Not to tar all younger fans with the same brush! I'm sure there are some good eggs out there. But anyone who has a shaky sense of self or who seems a bit weird about the characters, I walk away from.

If you were a Harry Potter fan and you don't mind genre hopping, I've found the fandom for the Strike books to be refreshingly sane. They have fun, and you get some interesting analysis of the work, but it's all very relaxed. There's a good energy. I haven't explored the fanfic side of it, but there are podcasts and blogs, and everything I've seen has radiated good energy so far. There's some fancying of Strike that goes on, but purely in fun. It's all enhanced my enjoyment of the books, as a good fandom experience should, so I can recommend it

With our generation, girls read Jackie Collins and boys read Harold Robbins. There were tons of their books in the library and the second hand shops.

(This doesn't necessarily disprove your point. Harold Robbins was clearly a very strange man with some odd sexual preoccupations.)

Those books not being literature wasn't really the point. They were entertainment, which is a fine thing to be. But you wouldn't want kids to use them as a source of instruction about relationships.

The narcissistic identification is really interesting, and I think that could be one of those sexed differences. "Becky Bloomwood is just like me!" is something I can easily imagine hearing from friends who read Sophie Kinsella, even if they're not all that similar to Becky. They see some quality in her that they identify in themselves.

A character resonating with the reader seems to happen a bit differently with boys. I think of it as aspirational identification - like the stereotype of the nerdy, maybe lonely, boy who gets heavily into male power fantasies like James Bond or Conan or superhero comics. He's not saying "James Bond is just like me", he's identifying with some quality Bond has that he admires and maybe lacks, like his confidence.

I do love to go deep into character flaws. I mentioned Daria, and if that had been on TV when I was a teenager, there's no question I would have identified strongly with the clever, arty girl trying to keep her head above water in a world full of idiots. Watching it as an adult, there are still some elements of the character that resonate with me, but I actually find the writing more interesting because I can see that Daria is quite hypocritical and passive-aggressive and often treats people around her badly.

Where fanfiction fits into that, I'm not quite sure. I assume there's an awful lot of self-insert.

There seems to have been a rise in role play (people texting back and forth pretending to be the characters)

One of the weirder things I've seen is that you can pay someone on a site like Etsy to write you a love letter in the voice of a fandom character, and send it to your house through the mail.

Trying to dig into where the satisfaction is in something like that is a bit scary. It reminds me of the idea some people have that VR sex or sex with robots might replace real relationships for men.

I don't disagree, but I don't think that what most kids are reading rises to the level of literature or even erotica. Nor are most traditional romance novels for that matter. What male porn does around sex, romance novels do around romance. It's not totally divorced from the real thing or it wouldn't be compelling at all, but it's a shadow of a shadow.

So something like Wuthering Heights might be romance literature, but how many kids are reading that? They are reading Twilight, or 50 Shades, or a knock off of 50 Shades.

@SnoopyPajamas

"Growing up in fandom spaces, I was the girl who wanted to dig into the flaws of my favourite character. Explore their feelings and sense of self. If we had had the tagging system we have today when I was a teenager, I would have been gunning straight for all the stories tagged "character study"."

Oooh, you're speaking my language here!

"I can observe the behaviour of most teen girls in fandom and see the consistencies, but I don't fully 'get it'. "

Same. I can gather observations, but I don't know. I still feel like a stranger in fandom even though I've been in there for longer than the new generation has been alive 😂

I think sex is a part of the human experience and reflecting that in fiction is different to pornography. I just don't think you can meaningfully compare the two.

The cheap, "porn without plot" stuff that is just an excuse to make fetish content? I agree, that's mindless wank material and not great for women. There's an element of sexual self-programming there women are not immune to.

But a lot of writing in the romance genre does have fully fleshed-out characters and plot, and is trying to say something meaningful. Sometimes a sex scene in fiction has a purpose. Personally, I think it's too extreme to write off all written depictions of sex as harmful, or as pornography. I think we need to get back to a healthy balance.

I think when it's fanfiction about boybanders, it arises out of a young girl's crush on an unattainable idol. She can't meet the One Direction boys or the K-pop band in real life, but she's still experiencing an emotional journey, in her crush on them. That needs to play itself out in some kind of trajectory. For some girls, that's hating their real life girlfriends or going into meltdown when the band breaks up. For others it might be finding a boy who looks a bit like their crush and playing out a real relationship with him. For others, it seems to involve constructing a personality for the love interest inside their head, and reenacting the beats of a relationship through fiction.

With fiction based on an actual fictional property, I think it's coming from a slightly different place, and is more strongly tied to escapism. Sometimes it comes from over-identifying with a character. It's not necessarily even that they have a crush on this character. The character could be female, and they're straight, or male, and the girl is gay. But there is some element of this character the girl finds so relatable she sort of 'locks on'. And the character consumes her for a while.

This is very hard to explain from the outside. People often attribute it as a neurodivergent thing, but I think any lost, lonely person trying to figure themselves out can be vulnerable to this. Teenagers especially. I actually think most teenagers interested enough to enter a fandom are like this. Most of them, their brains are still cooking and they're predisposed to filter the world through a bit of a narcissistic lens. You know. "This character is just like me!" It's a natural life stage.

I've always been an outlier in fandom spaces. I tend to enjoy fiction for its own sake, and don't have that personal projected attachment to the characters. A character can be 'my favourite' and be someone completely appalling who has very little in common with me. I'm just fascinated by how they tick. Growing up in fandom spaces, I was the girl who wanted to dig into the flaws of my favourite character. Explore their feelings and sense of self. If we had had the tagging system we have today when I was a teenager, I would have been gunning straight for all the stories tagged "character study". But I soon learned that was rare. Most of my fandom friends were more interested in pretending the character didn't have any flaws, and getting defensive on their behalf. It was very important to them that everyone know their favourite did nothing wrong, actually, and every bad thing they'd ever done was some other character's fault. There tended to be a lot of arguments about that sort of thing.

It seems to have died down a bit these days, but now the need to project onto favourite characters has become more overt. I'm seeing a lot of self insert fanfiction, where you're supposed to simply swap out "Y / N" for your own name, and pretend it's about you. There seems to have been a rise in role play (people texting back and forth pretending to be the characters) and of course, there has been an absolute explosion of "trans headcanons". It's no longer at all unusual to look for art of a male character you know is not trans, and find him depicted with mastectomy scars in almost every picture.

Like I said, I've always been wired a little differently, so I'm a bit hamstrung in my understanding here. I can observe the behaviour of most teen girls in fandom and see the consistencies, but I don't fully 'get it'. I'm lacking that true inside perspective, of how it feels and what they're really thinking inside it all. I've never had that kind of illogical heightened attachment. Someone else might be able to explain that aspect better than me

Hmm. I don't see any reason male pornography couldn't be artistically crafted.

I don't actually think learning about sex from fictional stories or images is particularly necessary for humans to have successful sex lives. I don't think it makes people happier or healthier. But if it could have a worthwhile "educational" element, I don't see why male pornography produced with something like AI images couldn't as well.

But fundamentally, it's sexual wank material divorced from real persons, and I think that's always dangerous.

It's possible. I'm still trying to pin down my thoughts on this one. It's only in the last year or so that I've given any thought at all to the wider influence of fanfiction on young women. I'm still formulating my views 😂

I suppose my thought here would be that I do see where you're coming from, and the current state of AO3 would seem to indicate that the kind of written pornography produced by women, can go to an extreme that is as harmful in its own way as traditional porn produced by men. But I think generally speaking, romance and even smut is such a broad tent. Some of it is genuinely just harmless escapism. Some of it is genuinely well-crafted. And some of it can actually help model healthy relationships for women and girls, and model how to leave unhealthy ones. The same absolutely cannot be said for male-made pornography.

I also think women tend to adapt themselves to the reality of men, in relationships, while men can be more forceful about pushing their porn-influenced ideals onto women. The woman's fantasies mostly hurt her. The man's fantasies mostly degrade the woman.

Shows like "I Kissed A Boy" are a rare example of a woman's fetish pushing the men around her to warp themselves in her image. "Lars" wants to believe she's a gay man, and they all have to pretend she is, or face social sanction and loss of opportunity. It's got a lot of attention precisely because it is so rare.

Ha! At the library I work at, about half the "youth" fiction is smut. So your guess about the reading habits of young women may be spot on...

I haven't watched it, but this definitely came up in my periphery at the time, and was one of those I immediately suspected was a reskinned fanfiction. I don't know if it is or not, but it has all the hallmarks of one. I thought the same about that movie where Anne Hathaway falls in love with a knock-off Harry Styles.

Some of these, I don't know if they're actually fanfiction converted to "original fiction", but if they're not, they're a good example of the tropes of the genre (I do consider fanfiction its own genre these days) seeping through. See also: Heartstopper.

Yeah, if a woman tells me she's passionate about reading, there's at least a 50% chance that what she's reading is smut. This rises to 100% if she's on BookTok.

Not that I object to a well done romance (or even well done smut!), and there are certain romance novels or movies that are comfort food to me. But the dating coach Hayley Quinn often says that young women have had their views of the dating market completely skewed by consuming too many romcoms, and I think she's right.

It's interesting, thinking back, when I was young most of the stuff like nerd culture and comic cons was very male dominated, and I would agree it was more like a hobby thing.

It seems far more "fandom" dominated, and female dominated now, and I would also say many of the people involved seem to think of it as an identity. At least the girls do, and there is an element of creepy men who I suspect prey on that. I am not sure if these guys were as involved in the past, it wouldn't have given them much opportunity to creep on women, anyway.

Couple of things that might be a little disjointed but have been worrying away at the back of my mind. It has to do with how girls, or some girls at least, relate to fiction or art generally.

One thing is fandoms picked up in one's teens. I think boys develop attachments that have longevity - show me a 50yo man who's really into Iron Maiden, and I guarantee he got into Iron Maiden when he was about 13. There are whole musical acts still touring on the basis of ticket sales to men who got into those acts 30, 40, 50 years ago.

There's a contrast there with the stereotype of the girl who forms a really intense attachment to a boyband, and then has probably forgotten about them a year later. I'd speculate that while the teen boy is acquiring a lifelong hobby, the teen girl is preparing herself for romance. It helps that boybanders are not hyper masculine, they're pretty boys, unthreatening, twinkish, maybe a little effeminate.

I also remember a passage from early in Frances Donaldson's old biography of PG Wodehouse - Donaldson is explaining that though she'd known Wodehouse since she was young, being a friend of his late stepdaughter, it wasn't until relatively late in life that she got into his books.

So she speculates on why at least 90% of Wodehouse fans are men, and her theory has to do with the superior female imagination. That while the male reader will read with detachment, the female reader will place herself in the action, and maybe identify very vividly with a particular character. Donaldson speculates that Wodehouse's plots relying very heavily on things like impostors and mistaken identity and the protagonist suffering from avalanches of mishaps, are more likely to alarm a female reader than amuse her. And the romance is usually a bit sketchy and mostly functions to set up the comic business of impostors, pratfalls, theft of jewels etc, so you're not drawing in the female reader who's more interested in what Hamish Beamish and Jane Cholmondley feel about each other.

It's quite speculative, and I don't believe these are hard and fast sex differences, but I do think that on average there are real differences between how girls and boys consume things like fiction. And maybe while we're concerned about the porn-addled boy we're missing the fanfic-obsessed girl.