Wankery

[zenolalia]

Below the cut, find me complaining aimlessly about ship wank relating to, of course, Voltron. But nothing to do with sheith, klance, or inter-ship wars.

Just the behaviour of, tragically, Lotura shippers.

Sometimes I forget straight people exist.

Like, I know Lotor/Allura is, ostensibly, a "straight" ship, but it's so far removed from what typically gets passed off as romance for straight audiences, that I forget it's still, well. Straight.

It's easy for me to perceive Allura as a queer woman, and Lotor as a genderqueer person (I hestitate even to use man, that's how deeply baked it is), and I just. Forget the straights.

There's so much about the ship that matters more, anyway, than the assumed gendered experiences of Allura and Lotor respectively. Like, survival, and genocide, and child abuse, and war, and starvation, and betrayal, and hurt, and picking your own life and your own family long after the one you were born in has crumbled to dust.

But, it's a romance between a man and a woman, between a prince and a princess specifically.

So there's, like. A LOT of straight people in the fandom spaces for it. Like a lot. Now, obviously I'm not going to be naming names or identifying details or quotes, but jesus fuckign christ. I just honest to god forget that straight people don't automatically have to experience the isolation and exclusion of queerness. Plenty of them experience isolation and exclusion, but it's not universal or assumed in the way it is with queer folks.

And it's so exhausting and, yeah, isolating, to be surrounded by straight people in a fandom space when you're accustomed to queerness.

I'm just very tired of it, I guess.  And then there's the other issue.

It's an M/F fic. Which a great many people involved in "queer fiction" tend to automatically write off as useless. Which means they also tend to avoid the ships, which makes queer and queer-adjacent Loturas rarer than they already are.

But anyway, if I ever do get around to the voltron fix-it that I outlined, I'll have to absolutely work in an "episode" on how every single character in it is very queer. 

Comments

[elendraug]

I could get onto a very long and frustrated rant about bi and queer erasure within M/F pairs in Homestuck, too, but I am too tired so I'll just say that I empathize and I agree.

[elendraug]

I should note specifically in the context of seeing someone one time call Daverezi a "straight" ship, and I'm like... I'm sorry, did them hypothetically hooking up with each other just delete the rest of their experiences?

[zenolalia]

Oh god, I saw a few people doing that too, and I just like. I had to sit there and explain in great detail (this was before Davekat was a meaningful factor in canon) that Terezi DATED. VRISKA. A GIRL. AN F/F RELATIONSHIP. AND THAT ALL TROLLS ARE TO BE PRESUMED BI UNTIL PROVEN OTHERWISE PER THE WORLD BUILD BECAUSE GENDER OPERATES DIFFERENT AND PER AUTHORIAL MANDATE BECAUSE OF THAT ONE TWEET.

And I still, STILL had people say, directly to me, that just because Terezi is queer doesn't make her relationship queer and it's still a "straight ship."

[wolffyluna]

I feel you there. Not necessarily with Lotura, specifically, but with other m/f ships shipped largely by straight people. They seem to be from a slightly different planet from me, and it's kinda weird to deal with. (Plus, I find that a lot of the straight fans have a tendency to 'she was a girl, he was a boy, do I have to say more?'... and yes. you do. I want chemistry, damnit!)

I pretty much only ship m/f ships if I can say 'both participants are bi'-- and I'm lucky that the only fandoms that I have f/m ships in that's either canon/not considered strange, or I'm pretty much the only one in it.

[wolffyluna]

That's just-- ugh. Also not how it works, like, at all.

[leahandillyana]

Very true. Even the more mature and insightful fam members tend to display "blind spots" when it comes to queer reading of texts. (At least Allura fans in general, regardless of shipping preferences, are better at reading from race perspective than what I am accustomed to in the fandom)

[stardust_rifle]

I feel you. Not with Lotura specifically, but with some other M/F pairings I ship.

It sucks, especially when they don't bother writing anything beyond "He was a boy, she was a girl, can I make it any more obvious" type things.

coughcoughJoker/Makotocoughcough

[zenolalia]

God, I hate how the whole like. Dominant mindset of straight shipping is so easily reducible to two lines of a song form the early noughts that two different people used it in this comment section. Like, please, @heteros, behave urselves.

[zuki_san]

when I remember being most active and involved in homestuck fandom, 'every troll is bi until proven otherwise, except Kanaya who's probably a lesbian but if you want to <> ship her with Karkat we won't judge much' being the standard. it's disconcerting to me to see vriska or terezi or any troll that isn't kanaya or elwurd described as lesbian

then again my entire met-through-homestuck friendgroup was queer, i literally can't think of anyone straight in it, 30% of this group of people have changed pronouns since we met.

and here I'd thought we just liked to default-bisexual our characters because it made the torrid interpersonal drama of our roleplay OCs easier to ship with.

...and even before DaveKat got the canonization there was such a HUGE John/Dave contingent, and I do indeed seem to recall a meaningful OT3 Dave/Karkat/Terezi contingent, I'm not hallucinating that right?

[zuki_san]

like!

I really LIKE Joker/Makoto! It's not my favorite, but it's solid?

But it sure can come off as 'I wrote my favorite het relationship dynamic and put these two nametags on it' when the characterization is shallow.

[stardust_rifle]

I've just noticed that a lot of people tend to write it as "Joker the Strong Man sweeps Makoto off her feet in some sort of contrived damsel in destress situation."

[zenolalia]

I've not played p5, and only watched maybe 6 hours of scenes, so forgive me if I'm mistaken, but isn't Makoto the like. Valedictorian detective girl who figured out your identity and helped you infiltrate the fucking government along with her lawyer sister?

Like, the cute French girl, I can see being a damsel. The hyper competent one with the vampire eyes, less so.

[stardust_rifle]

Yes. That's what makes it so damn infuriating!

I swear half of these people writing fic didn't even play the fucking game, with how they write her.

[zuki_san]

Makoto. As a damsel-in-distress?

Makoto, master aikidoka? Makoto, who always makes a plan first and the plan is (nearly) always to attack head-on?

If Joker is rescuing Makoto it's because she's a fellow heroic rebel in-over-her-head.

[zuki_san]

And frankly! Even playing up 'cute French girl' as a damsel is taking the mask she presents to the world at face value and ignoring her entire introduction arc?

It's always so frustrating when you see fans or fandoms take what a character wants others to believe about them as face value for who they actually are.

looking at you, Karkat Vantas, Dave Strider

[zenolalia]

My apologies, most of what I've seen of the French girl is that she has a tea party card when she kills an enemy, and her hair is super cute.

P5 is absurdly long, and persona/smt games just aren't my speed, you know?

Like, here's my entire knowledge of every character in the game probably. Hopefully, this will be entertainingly incorrect for you, an actual fan. Think of it as a "what I learned about P5 from my dashboard."

Your player character, who may be a delinquent? You live in a cafe.

The autistic gf. She's a baby.

The blonde gf. She's fashionable.

The valedictorian. She's as smart as she is stubborn.

Big sister lawyer-San. Definitely overthrows the entire Japanese government with a cell phone.

The French girl (wait is she actually French?). She's rich.

The blonde boy. He runs real good.

The artsy boy. He's so asexual it hurts, and I love his extremely dumb speech patterns.

The teacher who moonlights as a maid.

There's a cat, who is perhaps in lesbians with blonde gf, but also possibly is a boy, anyway I ship it.

There's a doctor? Like a back alley human experiment doctor? But she's a good guy???

There's a magical boy detective. He and the main character are definitely fucking, even though that's not a romance tree option.

And finally, there's your good, good uncle, who makes the coffee and has never done a thing wrong in his life, he adopted his ex-girlfriend's kid after she and her husband died for fucks sake, he's a good man.

And somehow there's over 100 hours of storyline with these people, which is insane and I say that as a kingdom hearts player.

[zuki_san]

haha, yeah, Persona franchise is definitely not paced for everyone! I don't know if I"d actually finish one on my own if I wasn't watching a friend or an LP.

You've.....basically got it, honestly. magical boy detective and main character are hatefucking, and Rich French Girl is also the one who fights with a giant axe and a grenade launch, so she's got a well-repressed but violently brutal side. or a S&M kink, whichever.

in conclusion,thank you for letting me nerd the fuck out about a franchise you don't even know in your comments