(no subject)

 So, there’s a sort of long ongoing argument where one side says “Why is there no femslash? :(” and other people say “we just write what we want to write, and male characters are better developed and written to be more interesting” and the first people say “but isn’t fandom about reinterpreting canon and exploring things the creators don’t” and it just keeps going around and around and eventually someone says “why are you putting the burden on fanwriters when mainstream media has so much more power?”

This is solely in response to that last point.

Women have money. Historically ‘geeky’ fandoms haven’t been eager to take that money, but they’re starting to realize it exists and they might want some.

But all media still assumes that their core audience is straight white men 18-35. And they will not lose that audience if possible. And they assume that not writing about male characters will lose them.

But there’s a solution! If you write a show with no significant female characters, you can, they believe, still get women to watch it if you just make sure you have two pretty white men with lots of sexual tension. And straight white men 18-35 will still watch it, and probably deny that there’s any sexual tension at all.

The problem with saying that it’s on the creators is that we have so much evidence that if they can get away without writing lead female roles, theywill. And if they see that there is huge demand for shows with two pretty white men as the leading characters, they’re going to ignore any demand for anything else and then say that they are just giving female fans what they want.

If you object to any new female characters in a show about these two white boys, the creators of that show don’t know that you also watch Orange is the New Black. They hear “Women don’t want more female characters anyway. Actresses are sent death threats for playing love interests! Clearly there’s no point to focusing on the women in this show.”

And I’m not saying there’s an easy way to fix this. But there are reasons why we need to celebrate female characters in fandom, as much as we can. We need to say we want female characters, and show that we like female characters* or else we will be invisible in fandom, and women will be invisible in media.

The burden is on fandom because if we don’t show that we care about it, no one else will care. This sucks, but it’s what we have to deal with.

.

*Translation: that female characters will make more people watch the show, and that a lack of female characters will make existing fans say 'screw it’ and leave to watch something else, rather than also watching something else