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Femslash February Meme, Week 3
Feb. 21st, 2022 10:01 pmTaking a quick break from playing Horizon: Forbidden West (a game I'm not so much playing as injecting directly into my eyeballs) to return to the femslash meme.
15) A guilty pleasure?
No such thing as a fish!
16) A fandom where I have so many femslash ships?
ASOIAF/GoT, where I have written no fewer than nineteen different pairings, including three pairings where everyone involved was long dead before the canon even started.
17) A femslash pairing I like on principle without even being in the fandom
So my relationship to Critical Role is weird, because I was seeing fanart for it long before I even knew what it was, and even then I was going: Aww, the goth flower angel and blue ninja have made it work, that's nice.
I don't watch the episodes. Like, I'm trying to slow fade out of my Cyberpunk 2020 game because I find playing it so boring, so you can imagine how I feel about watching other people play. But it turns out the show really works for me as a podcast, and during covid I was, like, sure, I've got time to start a five hundred hour podcast. But I've not quite finished campaign two yet, and I'm seeing fanart for campaign three and without knowing the full context I'm already going: I'm really rooting for the sleep paralysis demon and the anime horse girl.
18) A character I headcanon as lesbian/wlw without having big ships with her
I have two, and while I have written a crap load of ship fic for both, to be honest, all of them, at their core, are about how gay I think Morgana and Sansa are.
Okay, say we take Merlin's magic as a metaphor for repressed gay feelings at face value, it didn't exactly work out well for anybody. Merlin spent several centuries living in a hedge pining after a dead straight guy, and Morgana just fucking died. And, like, I never cared about Merlin - live in a hedge then, weirdo - but I always thought that if Morgana could just get away from Camelot and it's myriad terrible men and settle down with a nice girl then she'd be just fine.
And Sansa Stark I think just has the worst case of compulsory heterosexuality ever.
19) Rec day! Canon or fics, as long as it's femslash! Or even shippable!
While we're speaking of ships I enjoy without really being in the fandom: Twenty-Eight (Critical Role; Imogen/Laudna) is an A+ take on an immortal in a relationship with someone who isn't going to live forever. And after you've had a little cry at end end you can cheer yourself up with its two sweet and hot prequels.
20) Do you like your femslash homophobia-free?
It...depends. I don't like it to be, like, a thing, or an obstacle the characters have to overcome, but there are canons, historical ones for instance, where it makes sense for there to be a certain amount of bullshit. I sometimes even put a little background homophobia in my own writing, because having the characters find happiness anyway feels like an empowering little 'fuck you.'
I do enjoy no-homophobia fantasy settings, but I often find myself wishing that more authors would take a big swing at how different a world that was truly free of sexism and homophobia might look.
21) Thoughts about lesbian tragedy and bad endings?
This question is really well timed, because last week I watched the movie Tell it to the Bees and I am still Extremely Mad about it. Its based on a book I read and enjoyed a few years ago in which a single mother falls in love with a female doctor in small town 1950s Scotland and face vile homophobia. The book ends with the two women leaving the country together, and in the epilogue we discover from their son that although they faced homophobia abroad too they were together all their days and were happy.
The movie...the fucking movie ends with the mother and son leaving the country, while the doctor stays behind because it's apparently more important to stay behind to doctor to the homphobic townspeople who have done nothing but make her life miserable.
And I'm not saying I need everything with a lesbian relationship to have a happy ending - let's take a much better movie, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, if that had pulled a happy ending out of thin air it would have felt dishonest and disingenuous. The tragedy and the fleeting nature of their connection was the point.
Tell it to the Bees had a preexisting happy ending, and pulled a disingenuous unhappy one out of its ass because, idk, straight people are into sad queers.
15) A guilty pleasure?
No such thing as a fish!
16) A fandom where I have so many femslash ships?
ASOIAF/GoT, where I have written no fewer than nineteen different pairings, including three pairings where everyone involved was long dead before the canon even started.
17) A femslash pairing I like on principle without even being in the fandom
So my relationship to Critical Role is weird, because I was seeing fanart for it long before I even knew what it was, and even then I was going: Aww, the goth flower angel and blue ninja have made it work, that's nice.
I don't watch the episodes. Like, I'm trying to slow fade out of my Cyberpunk 2020 game because I find playing it so boring, so you can imagine how I feel about watching other people play. But it turns out the show really works for me as a podcast, and during covid I was, like, sure, I've got time to start a five hundred hour podcast. But I've not quite finished campaign two yet, and I'm seeing fanart for campaign three and without knowing the full context I'm already going: I'm really rooting for the sleep paralysis demon and the anime horse girl.
18) A character I headcanon as lesbian/wlw without having big ships with her
I have two, and while I have written a crap load of ship fic for both, to be honest, all of them, at their core, are about how gay I think Morgana and Sansa are.
Okay, say we take Merlin's magic as a metaphor for repressed gay feelings at face value, it didn't exactly work out well for anybody. Merlin spent several centuries living in a hedge pining after a dead straight guy, and Morgana just fucking died. And, like, I never cared about Merlin - live in a hedge then, weirdo - but I always thought that if Morgana could just get away from Camelot and it's myriad terrible men and settle down with a nice girl then she'd be just fine.
And Sansa Stark I think just has the worst case of compulsory heterosexuality ever.
19) Rec day! Canon or fics, as long as it's femslash! Or even shippable!
While we're speaking of ships I enjoy without really being in the fandom: Twenty-Eight (Critical Role; Imogen/Laudna) is an A+ take on an immortal in a relationship with someone who isn't going to live forever. And after you've had a little cry at end end you can cheer yourself up with its two sweet and hot prequels.
20) Do you like your femslash homophobia-free?
It...depends. I don't like it to be, like, a thing, or an obstacle the characters have to overcome, but there are canons, historical ones for instance, where it makes sense for there to be a certain amount of bullshit. I sometimes even put a little background homophobia in my own writing, because having the characters find happiness anyway feels like an empowering little 'fuck you.'
I do enjoy no-homophobia fantasy settings, but I often find myself wishing that more authors would take a big swing at how different a world that was truly free of sexism and homophobia might look.
21) Thoughts about lesbian tragedy and bad endings?
This question is really well timed, because last week I watched the movie Tell it to the Bees and I am still Extremely Mad about it. Its based on a book I read and enjoyed a few years ago in which a single mother falls in love with a female doctor in small town 1950s Scotland and face vile homophobia. The book ends with the two women leaving the country together, and in the epilogue we discover from their son that although they faced homophobia abroad too they were together all their days and were happy.
The movie...the fucking movie ends with the mother and son leaving the country, while the doctor stays behind because it's apparently more important to stay behind to doctor to the homphobic townspeople who have done nothing but make her life miserable.
And I'm not saying I need everything with a lesbian relationship to have a happy ending - let's take a much better movie, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, if that had pulled a happy ending out of thin air it would have felt dishonest and disingenuous. The tragedy and the fleeting nature of their connection was the point.
Tell it to the Bees had a preexisting happy ending, and pulled a disingenuous unhappy one out of its ass because, idk, straight people are into sad queers.