this has been a meta post

[meretricula]

so... today is the day I realized that self-insert football fic was a thing on tumblr rather than just a random periodical annoyance in the victor valdes tag. huh. with the speed at which platforms for sharing ideas change these days, it's hard for me to guess whether this is all part of the same fannish "evolution" I went through, but maybe? I don't know. I mean, I think mine was a fairly common experience: self-insert (although the only genuine this-character-is-meant-to-be-me story I remember writing was orig fic about myself and my friends from chorus when I was still in grade school, and even then I used a different name for my character; I didn't like my name when I was younger) leads to a Mary-Sue period leads to an extended "slash only, het is gross!" period leads to eventual acceptance/appreciation of het (give or take some breaks for genfic) in one's old age. it kind of makes sense; tumblr fandom seems to skew quite young. the internalized misogyny that contributes to the fangirl growth cycle is obvious in retrospect but not so much at the time, of course.

I have decided opinions about fanfic on tumblr (one opinion, really: it doesn't belong there, tumblr is for pictures), but leaving all that aside, does this seem like the fanfiction.net developmental stage of our youth? (I was on Schnoogle rather than FF.net but same difference really.) LJ comms were fannish homebase for most of the "eww, het!" phase, and it seems like the AO3 hoved into view just as I was beginning to realize that fictional women deserve love and orgasms as much as fictional men do. I have no idea how much of that is dependent on which fandoms I am or was in, but my general experience across all my fandoms has been that neither livejournal fandom nor AO3 fandom is home to self-insert, but the AO3 is markedly more welcoming to het than LJ is.

my not-very-well articulated point has something to do with how distasteful I find it that the main football fanfic community on livejournal outright bans heterosexual stories. I can understand not wanting to become ground zero for an explosion of "tumblr-style" self-insert fic, but the self-insert/Mary-Sue phase seems to me to be completely distinct from hetfic in general. but at the same time, I say that from the perspective of being (in fannish years) A Really Old Person who has been through all these stages of development. (I have no idea what comes after learning to like het and slash equally. have I reached fannish nirvana? maybe I'll start to actually appreciate plot and quit skipping the blah blah plotty bits to get to the witty banter.) football fandom, much more than a lot of the big media fandoms that are now settling in at the AO3, is still in the middle stage of development, and thinks that girl characters are obstacles to be got out of the way of boy relationships and girl parts are generally icky. (I should clarify: Big Slash Fandom as a phenomenon is still going strong at the AO3 and pretty much everywhere else, too. a lot of fans never outgrow the middle stage of developments! but Big Slash Fandoms also get het fics written in them by fans who have hit the "hey, het and slash are both pretty okay" stage, and sometimes they're quite popular. I am currently reading the hell out of that one girl!Lestrade/Mycroft fic, for example, and judging by the hits, comments and kudos I am not the only one.) but at the same time I don't think it's fair of me to demand, on this side of enlightenment or whatever, that everyone else in footie fandom see the light: they're not old enough yet, and fair enough. it'd be like getting pissed that the 13-year-olds on tumblr don't understand punctuation. of course they don't! they're 13 years old! some of them will learn by the time they're 23, and fuck knows I wouldn't want to be judged on the basis of what I wrote like when I was 13. every writer, whatever her stage of development, deserves a safe space to experiment with her peers.

I suppose the question is whether there is any significant population in football fandom that is "old" enough to serve as an audience for hetfic. I know there are some people who read it, but on the other hand we tried to have a "ladies special" over on touchline a while back and it was pretty much the same six people talking to each other and it didn't really go anywhere and it made me very sad. (except for the fact that I learned about Neka and Irune because of the ladylove fest and that is always something to celebrate!) most of the time when I find het (and I do find it! I look! I even have a special recs section!) it's on a personal journal, not cross-posted--except sometimes for genderswap, which is kind of a special case. (this is also true of gen, for what it's worth.) is that the best case scenario that can be hoped for? or would a broader platform actually help reach an audience that is willing to read but doesn't know where to look?

the thing is, I don't think a het-specific platform is a good idea. it wouldn't be able to be self-sustaining, for one. I don't think I know anyone who only wants to read het football fic; I still very much want to read and write slash football fic, at least. I just also like to read and write het. (am I wrong? speak up, folks!) I don't want a "footballhet" comm; I want a central comm for football fic regardless of whether it's het, slash or gen. (yes, I know footiefic. nobody uses it. that's the problem.) I would love, in an ideal world, for footballslash to pull a rarelitslash and just change their rules to allow people to post het and gen. (rarelitslash absorbed a sister community that welcomed het and never changed its name; the misnomer never particularly bothered me. most of the fic posted there was and still is slash. it just stopped forbidding other stuff, on the apparently correct assumption that people who liked rare lit slash would probably like any form of rare lit fic.) but again, if all but a small handful of footie fic readers and writers are still in the "eww, het!" phase it's (a) pointless and (b) unfair to ask that their fannish space change in order accommodate the few who don't care if their fic has girl parts in it.

all of which is rather moot since I am unwilling in the extreme to bring this up myself to fandom in general/the mods of fbslash after having had five, count them, five separate instances of wank dumped on my head by the malcontents of footie fandom, but whatever. I like meta! I like talking to you guys about meta! talk to me! uh, if you could follow any of what I was saying, anyway, I know I rambled a lot. feel free to link to anyone you think could contribute to the discussion as well, obviously my flist is not universally representative and I am curious to hear what other people think about het/gen/femslash in footie fandom.

postscript: please, please, please do not pull out the "I just don't like het! I only like slash! stop being a mean judgey-pants bitch about my reading tastes!" card. IT IS OKAY. YOU ARE FINE. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH LIKING WHATEVER YOU LIKE AND I AM NOT CRITICIZING YOU AS A PERSON. I am probably older than you (maybe not in years, but I have been in fandom for... ahahaha oh god half my life, which I think counts for bonus experience points) and you are in no way obligated to listen to my Wisdom of an Older Person but look, you'll just have to trust me that I remember being just like you and that is why I am saying these things. you'll get it when you're older, maybe. and also your mother is probably right about more than you want to admit.

post-postscript: seriously. there is a lot of ingrained woman-hating in our society that contributes to the phenomena I'm talking about and it's hard to see it from the inside and it is not your fault, in any way, but there's not a whole lot of point in talking about it with someone who isn't ready to see it. so, if you just don't like het, that's fine, that's your prerogative, and you are not the audience to whom this post is addressed. come back and chat if you change your mind!

Comments

[draconic-voices.livejournal.com]

Delurking to say hi, and well said, and thank you for articulating something about fandom that periodically bothers me and leads me to leaving fledgling fandoms before they get to the stage of their maturity cycle that I am already at (if that makes sense). For the record, I'd put myself in the same category of fannish evolution as you, although I've always thought of it as reaching the discerning omnivore stage (I'll consume pretty much anything provided it meets certain quality requirements).

One of the things that has puzzled me for a while about football fandom is that it seems curiously static and almost immature for its age, as in, it is stuck at the "Mary-Sue/het is gross" stage and doesn't seem to move on. (The Mary-Sue fic seems to mainly be confined to personal journals and half the time the Mary-Sue is actually a real-life player acting as the author's avatar but that's another issue.) The only reason that makes sense to me for this curious stasis is that football fandom periodically resets itself: world cups, euros, popular/successful teams, transfer windows, retirements lead to constant changes in authors, readers and characters and so there is no drive for change.

The other big problem that I think football fandom has in moving past "het is gross" is the dearth of female characters, by which I mean WAGs and female 'ballers, as original female characters are too often derided as self-inserts/Mary-Sues no matter how well they are written. The wives and girlfriends are rarely portrayed as anything other than caricatures of themselves in the popular media, although twitter can help mitigate this (or exacerbate, unfortunately). As characterisation in sports fandoms is so often formed by interviews, on field/court personas, newspaper reports and gossip columns, this leaves us with almost no material to work with for het interactions. Unfortunately, no matter how popular women footballers get around the world cup they seem to disappear from fandom's consciousness as quickly as they appear, but for the brief time they're around at least they're written like real people.

Oh boy, this got long, but I'd just like to join you in wishing there was more het and gen football fic out there and to say that I love the idea of opening footballslash up to non-slash. Now, while the community is relatively quiet might be one of the better times to suggest it, because I can see the fandom resetting itself again come the end of the Euros.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

hiiiiii! "discerning omnivore" is such a great term for what I'm talking about, thank you, I am now going to steal it! (though now it makes me think about my mom telling me I'd learn to like other kinds of food when I was older. nope, still a picky eater! guess the taste buds in my mouth haven't evolved yet. XD)

that's an interesting theory, about fandom "resetting" itself, and I hadn't considered it from that angle but I could see that being part of it. especially because there is the occasionally amazing het fic in footie fandom (allow me to clutch a bonnetful of bee to my chest in perpetuity), but it's usually written by authors who have been around a while. and the author of that fic has since wandered off to other ventures, which I guess is rather telling. I usually attribute it to "age in fandom years" because so many people in football fandom aren't in other fandoms (i.e. I've not been in football fandom as long as most people but I think I've been in general fandom longer so I think of myself as being quite old in fandom years despite the fact that I'm not that old in real life... I hope!) but that certainly wouldn't account for all of it.

as far as ladyballers go, I wonder if part of the issue is that media coverage of female players when it exists doesn't skew as "bromantic" as coverage of male players. (but honestly I just haven't seen enough coverage to judge. I was in the middle of a trans-Atlantic move during the 2011 one and I don't think I was even aware of the ones before.) idk, it often seems to me that journalists are aware that their audience has a human interest in the relationships between male players and write about that sort of thing, whereas with female players it's either not mentioned or it's a kind of snide "probably lesbians" thing. see: any article about Marta and Johanna Frisk. (the fact that "probably lesbians" is often true may compound the issue, idk. it does sometimes seem exploitative to me in a way that male players getting asked who their BFF on the team is doesn't.)

man, I just don't know. I don't think fbslash would go for it, and fair play--it's their house, I'm not going to go in there and tell them how to run things. I'll keep thinking and hopefully other people will have thoughts too! maybe a complementary comm would be the best after all? THOUGHTS THOUGHTS THOUGHTS.

[louis-quatorze.livejournal.com]

I definitely don't think it'd go over well if you went in and said "but I know better than you, I'm older and have been in this longer so really, I'm right and you'll realize that someday." (Which I'm not sure is actually true, I know people in this fandom who have been around at least as long as you have.) Actually, I'm not sure I really like the "evolutionary" model you're putting out here, of how there's this linear progression of what fandom and fanfiction is, and you move through the stages in order to be a...better person? Better at fanfiction? More like what you want the fandom to be? I know you say you're not judging, but, well, you are. And it feels smug rather than conducive to actual "improvement" in the fandom.

Having voiced my concern with that, sure, I do think there should be a better system for het within football fandom. I do think the problem is, as mentioned, who are people going to write about? The handful of noteable female players? (Who might be decent-sized names in the US, but this isn't really a US-based fandom despite everything, and even these names seldom interact with their male counterparts. I notice you focus on het, and not femmeslash, which would be the more likely development, especially with the Olympics coming up. Fanfiction develops itself on interactions.) WAGs who may or may not have public personas of their own, which some people might have problems with (Alex Gerrard is one thing, but Olalla Torres? Claudia Lahm?). The issue with het in football fandom isn't a fandom issue, it's an issue of wider football culture that has no room for women. There's not even a Uhura or Chapel for us to give better backstories to, to use a classic fandom example. (Interestingly, in "classic fandom," het was by far the norm and people 'moved into' slash, which was much rarer- you had to be seriously vetted before you got access to it.) I think there should be more het in football fandom, but there will never be much of it until the wider football culture changes. That's the problem, really.

And I tried with the touchline prompts, but no one even responded to mine, so...

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

no, I know, there's a reason I rambled all over the place in my personal journal rather than bringing it up at the comm. which I personally am never going to do, given the various handicaps I have assigned myself over time with interacting with football fandom. XD and hell yes I'm judging the hell out of anyone who's old enough to know how to appreciate her own girl parts but doesn't want to think about why she never ever ever would want to read about someone else's girl parts because ew het, which is a significant part of slash fandom. (admittedly the assumption that I'm talking about slash fandom specifically did go... unspoken. it was very late, sorry.) there are plenty of grown women who never question the misogynistic attitudes that society has implanted in them. it's not their fault but that doesn't mean I think that's a good thing. (but I know you probably had a really different experience getting to where you are in fandom and I'd be curious to hear about it if you're willing to tell me! what happened to me I think usually happens to people who are or have been in Big Slash Fandom, and sports fandom, as we've discussed many a time, is weird and kind of divorced from other kinds of fandom. people who are only in Yuletide-style fandoms probably have a very different experience too, but that's so totally divorced from what I was talking about that it didn't seem worth bringing up.)

I focused on het because there's nothing stopping someone from posting femmeslash to the current main forum for football fic besides personal inclination; the problem there is exactly what you're describing, that wider football culture doesn't really care about female players so there's no educated audience for fic about them. (I can't even articulate my hang-ups about this. every time I try something different comes out.) but wider football culture does care about women who are involved in the men's game. Kickette is insanely popular and gossip about players' wives and girlfriends fuels so many tabloids. I totally get what you mean about not wanting to write people who don't have public personae--but at the same time, people write about Olalla Dominguez in Sernando fic all the time. they just only ever write her as a side-character that either roadblocks or graciously steps aside to allow the main romance. idk. I get that it's less difficult to make up characterization for someone if they're not the protagonist but... yeah, I really don't know about that one.

which isn't even getting into the "cult" female figures of the wider culture, like Eva Gonzalez at Chelsea or Sharon at Man City. (or even the lady presenter on ChelseaTV, whose name I don't know. but I think everyone has seen the clips of David Luiz making faces in the background while she's filming, and didn't she get hit in the head with a ball during training once?) Kickette talks about them; fandom is aware they exist. and it is currently fucking with my head big time that I've been thinking about writing fic about one of the (male) Barça physios but my own initial reaction to my thought of a fic about, idk, Eva Gonzalez/Juan Mata is a knee-jerk oh obviously self-insert Mary-Sue. ugh wtf self DON'T BE LIKE THIS. off to do some self-reflection.

(I know, I saw your prompts, I'm sorry! ;_; Per's wife sounds really cool but I just have zero interest in Per Mertesacker... I should have tried to do a better job getting people who know more about the Germans for you to play with.)

[ecocline.livejournal.com]

I came here to peruse your rec list, but this post interested me so forgive my strange butting in :D

I think I agree on the whole with what you're saying, although I've always been a fan of het, to me it depends of the actual subject/fandom, if the pairing works and I feel ok about it then I can ship it. So I don't think I've ever gone through the cycle you have.

RPF is a whole different ball game I suppose, and canon isn't black and white (depends who you ask!), but it's a real shame women get no love, wag or player-wise. I have to say, though, that I think there's a lot of self-insert fic around on livejournal, it's just the names have been changed to that of a favourite player, which is probably no better than the kind you've found in the Valdes tag. Sometimes I'm not sure if the author's aware they're doing it or not though :/

I've had to change my view of tumblr recently because my main fandom's 'best' (as in the quality of writing.I have issues with the the context/pairings but that's a different matter) fic is written on tumblr, which I don't particularly like, or find easy to read, but what can you do? So whilst I think tumblr is 'for pictures' in the football community, I think it's different for every fandom. though I agree that there seems to be a lot more younger people on there.

I adore femslash, and I wish it was more popular in every fandom, but it doesn't seem to be. Though within this fandom I see no surprises in the way women are treated as look at how they're treated by the football world/press as a whole. It sucks but I don't see it changing any time soon either :/

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

welcome welcome, stay and chat a while! :D (though off-topic but... should I move that post to the top of the page or something? I don't want people to be forced to read my blatherings just to get to it...)

dude good for you, I am not exactly proud of the six years of my life I spent almost exclusively hanging out in slash fandom. not that there's anything wrong with slash fandom, obvs, I'm still here! but the refusal to get into fandoms with ladybits in them was, in retrospect, kind of icky of me. (though weirdly enough, throughout those six years I was also devouring het romance novels, and I loved a lot of het canon source material; I just wasn't really interacting with it. I still have no idea what was going on in my teenage brain.)

oh, tumblr. I mean, I know other fandoms really do use it for fic, it just makes me sad. it's so completely impractical! tumblr was designed for pictures! but it's probably no worse than mailing group fandom, and I did my stint in those, so. (but livejournal! dreamwidth! AO3! SO MANY OTHER PLATFORMS BETTER SUITED TO POSTING AND COMMENTING ON FIC! ...ok I swear I'm done.) I have similar feelings about using tumblr as a srs bsns blog platform, and lots of people do that. I'm basically a cranky old woman shouting for the kids to get off my lawn.

yeah, it's just tough when there's so little known about any female "characters" that could be written about. I wish I had a solution, but I don't. even acquiring the knowledge doesn't really seem to be enough, I'm finding; the more I research female footballers, the less I want to write fic and the more I want to beat society over the head with a plank.

[fandomonymous.livejournal.com]

I do agree that there should be a good space for more than just slash fic in football fandom - but football itself does present one logistical problem: to write het, you either write one of the few male footballer/female footballer pairings (Alex and Serva!) or you're writing characters that are not necessarily celebrities. I obviously am perfectly comfortable with doing this (Claudia Lahm is a major character in one of my fics, after all) but I understand that not everyone is comfortable with that for reasons beyond "ew, het" and more towards "RPF of non-celebrities can be awkward". I think it'd be very different in a non-RPF fandom, or a fandom that doesn't have a gender line sanctioned by the outside (by which I mean FIFA would never take gender blind football seriously - which is its own issue!)

I don't have the answers - I don't know if anyone does, beyond all of us writing what we can - but it is an issue worth exploring.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

I totally get that, I just don't think it explains or justifies the het ban on fbslash, you know? cornerflag does have a ban on non-celebrity main characters, and the rules are very clear on why that is. I don't necessarily agree with that, but I can accept it. but a lot of football fic features non-celebrity characters, so I don't think the fandom as a whole has a hang-up about it. (honestly, I think writing about footballers' kids is probably ickier than writing about their partners on that scale, and I've never seen anybody complain about that.) I fully support the right to make a personal decision not to read or write about players' families and friends, obviously, I just don't think that's really what's going on most of the time. or maybe it is and I'm totally off-base! idk.

I guess my ultimate question would be something along the lines of: is it worth at least asking about a rule change (though I don't expect anyone to say yes), or creating another comm to serve as a common forum? or given how ridiculously disparate the elements of football fandom outside of slash, is it better to just try to be aware that this stuff exists and leave it at that? TOO MANY QUESTIONS, NOT ENOUGH ANSWERS.

[distira.livejournal.com]

just popping to say YES ALEX/SERVA!

[tinuvielchild.livejournal.com]

I am so completely not in fandom anymore, but am commenting just to say that I'll be reading this discussion with interest. I'm really happy that you're discussing internalized misogyny in the fannish world, and I'm very curious to see where the conversation goes.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

I hope it'll be interesting! I'm really curious too; fingers crossed people will actually talk to me and not just go "what a conceited bitch" and scroll on. :P

[falange84.livejournal.com]

Excuse me while I butt in with my two cents. Not sure I agree with you about a fandom cycle (pardon the pun) as regards women in fic. I never had an 'ew, het' phase, as you call it, but like many people I have a permanent 'ew bad fic' attitude and coupled with all the reasons others have mentioned above that leaves a pretty tiny sample of decent het to read. (genderswap is another thing altogether: with the sole exception of your Leo/'Cesca', I can't get into it, and even that was helped by A. great writing and B. my basically substituting Carlota) But I'd happily read good het it if it was there and if the lack of a forum is what's preventing it being written, then something probably should be done.

So, thinking practically: 1) A polite request for a poll to change the fbslash rule should be worth a try, surely? Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see why anyone would have a problem with the occasional fictional female orgasm. Other fandoms just 'warn' for het (which, ok, why do we need to warn for that, but fine) so it really shouldn't be a big deal. 2) If the mods (or, more depressingly, the poll) says no, then why not try to resurrect footific? I mean it's not completely dead anyhow (several posts in the last few weeks at least). If people don't know about it right now, a bit of cross-promotion (I assume it's an affiliate of fbslash) could probably be arranged?

Anyway, my essential point is that, regardless of age (in human or fandom years) I'm sure more people are disposed towards reading well written WAGS/female footballers/put-upon club photographers in fic than we imagine. Not on Tumblr though, obviously.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

no excuses necessary! :) I did ask for opinions.

but then... do you read het in other fandoms? is it just football fandom we're talking about here? because there is good het in this fandom already (though not a lot, admittedly) and I'm happy to point it out! I haven't come across much bad het, tbh (aside from my new discoveries on tumblr, of course). there's just so little of it.

well, I am not terribly optimistic regarding getting anything to change at fbslash (given that the name of the comm is, er, footballslash), but the main reason for my making this huge late-night ramble was to see what other people thought/whether it would be worth the bother of trying! we'll see. I personally am not comfortable with footiefic, but that's neither here nor there. XD

as someone who has written hetfic and seen the lamentable lack of interest in other people's het as well, I am not so sure, haha. but I guess you never know!

[the-beanster.livejournal.com]

(Well, everything I say, I can only say as a reader since I haven't written fics in forever and don't see myself ever writing again.)

I think there's a difference between sports-related fandoms and other (book, movie, tv show, etc) simply bc in many cases we don't get all that many females to choose from? I mean, in many cases, I might read only slash pairings in certain fandoms, but it's usually only one pairing that I really like, but it doesn't take away from my enjoyment of het pairings in canon. I mean, I was flailing when a guy and a girl kissed in a show I watch. But...the problem is that I get to do that. If I want to see two male characters from that same show, I have to track down fics. So, in many cases (and I can only speak for myself), it's not fair to judge people simply based on what they read online. Bc I know if you look at what I read, yeah, it's mostly slash...but that's bc I usually get to see my favorite het pairings actually happen.

The problem with something like footie (for me) is where people get their info. I only watch the games and check out articles on Barça's site. That doesn't really give me any female 'characters' for fics. So...I don't care to go out of the way to find them? I mean, I can't say that I'm opposed to it, but just that I have no feelings about females in the lives of my favorite players bc I simply don't know them, you know? Again, can't speak for everyone, but to anyone who's like me, the wives/girlfriends of players are just names. I mean, that's kinda terrible, but that's what it is. I mean, you wrote an Iker/Sara fic. I would read it. But I have basically zero info on her! (She's possibly a reporter? Or was that someone else?) So, I have no emotions regarding this pairing and for me...I like to know who I'm reading about, you know? In most cases, people like Sernando? I only found out about them bc they were a side pairing in a fic I adored. So, I had no choice but to find out about them and then I slowly started to care and ended up thinking Sernando was cute. But I didn't ever go out of my way to find out about them. So, if a fic with my favorite pairing had a side order of Iker/Sara and I slowly found out about her? I might read end up looking for fics with them.

This got a bit ramble-y and I'm not sure how much made sense...

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

you are a member of our community! you don't have to issue a disclaimer, sweetie, your opinion is important whether you read, write or do interpretative dance. <3

I get you, definitely. a lot of the time fic is about getting what you can't from the canon, so if you're satisfied already with canon ships you might not go looking for more! but... if someone is only ever in slash fandoms (especially Big Slash Fandoms, because those often become Big Slash Fandoms due to the fact that all the leads are male and the female characters aren't as well-written/don't get as much screen time/just don't exist) and never gets involved in fandoms that have a significant het component (which is a different scenario than the one you're describing, I know, bear with me)... well, it seems kind of likely to me that there's some unrecognized prejudice leading her to choose only slash-heavy fandoms. if Fan A likes to read slash in fandoms 1, 3 and 7, but likes gen in fandoms 2 and 5, het in fandom 6 and will happily read anything and everything in fandom 4, that seems perfectly healthy to me because different fandoms have different characters and appeal, but if Fan B only reads slash in fandoms 8-14 and defends that choice by saying "well all the good fic in all these fandoms is slash/well this is just what I ship/well I'm just not as interested in the female characters in these fandoms" then... really? ALL SEVEN FANDOMS? that's one hell of a coincidence. but every person is different and I like to make sweeping generalizations, which tend to be inaccurate on the small scale! XD

oh my goooooooooooooooosh ok I will make you an Iker/Sara primer. I knew I should have made more notes or something. not to worry, Fandom Enabler Girl is here! (I realize that's not your point but uh. too bad.) I could make up a list of good "get into knowing the WAGs" fic maybe? there was a Silva/Villa fic with some Cesc/Daniella in it, I know, and... yes. I will think about this. there isn't much, which is a definite pity and part of the problem, but I'll see what I can do. in the meantime: IKER AND SARA ARE SO FREAKING CUTE OH MY GOD AND I SAY THIS AS SOMEONE WITH ZERO INTEREST IN IKER CASILLAS AS A SEXUAL FIGURE. she is indeed a reporter, she was covering the World Cup for one of the Spanish channels and she got tons of flak for "distracting" Iker because yeah it's obviously the girlfriend's fault if her boyfriend can't do his job and then after they won she was interviewing him while he was crying all over the place, she tried to let him go pull himself together and he insisted on keeping going so he could thank his family and his friends and then he's clearly going to start crying again and he says "and you" and grabs her for a kiss on live TV and OH GOD THEY'RE ADORABLE ;_; he's just kind of obviously stupid in love with her and I am so charmed. and also she criticized Cristiano Ronaldo last year (she's a sports journalist! it is her job!) and the club told Iker to muzzle her and he was like, fuck off, I'm not telling my girlfriend not to do her job. YOU GO IKER.

but yes! this much is fixable. I managed to make this fandom ship Victor/Andres, I can handle educating everybody about cute het couples. NEXT UP: PIQUE AND SHAKIRA. SEXY SCRABBLE DATES.

[distira.livejournal.com]

so first of all you know how much i adore hetfic and ladyfic in general. so i'm glad you made this post!

i'm not sure how much of it has to do with fandom age, though. i mean, i get what you're saying- it definitely took me about four years in fandom to get around to actually liking hetfic. so i do understand what you're saying, i guess i'd just hesitate to say that it is a definite, one must achieve this age in fandom to appreciate ladies, type of thing. idk. IDK WHAT I'M SAYING, SORRY FEEL FREE TO IGNORE ME. (sidenote: typical distira, coming out of hiatus and trying to jump right into meta without having been involved in fandom for a few months XD)

i think it's unlikely that footballslash will change its rules, but i think that if you or anyone is going to bring it up, it should be before the euro? because by then, we'll be dealing with the typical influx of members and things will probably be too chaotic for a while. idk. i need to nap but i will be back with more coherent thoughts!

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

I was talking to you and lux about this on twitter a while back, right? and it seemed like it was a thing that maybe I wasn't the only person with a stake in, so. everybody should come have a chat about the role of non-slash fic in footie fandom! :)

oh, definitely, I don't think it's a number or whatever, there are 18-year-olds who are way better writers and appreciators of het than I'll ever be, and there are forty-year-olds who wouldn't touch hetfic with a stick. it's just that sort of... trajectory? in general? that I wanted to comment on. everybody's mileage will vary, obvs, and maybe we're getting to the point where the new baby fans have not been raised to think their gender is inferior and unworthy of their own stories! that would be exciting!

yeah, and also I can't and won't be the one to bring it up if anything needs to be aired formally, and the alternative that I've seen bandied around (footiefic) isn't one that I personally feel comfortable with. I'd rather have something that is explicitly a space for stuff that cannot be posted at fbslash than something that's vaguely trying to compete with it, if we can't have utopia and only one comm. but. I hope people will talk here and we can see what the general attitude is, and go from there! now gooooooo, sleep sleep! <3

[angualupin.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I don't think I can necessarily agree when it comes to women in footie fandom. What women are you going to write about? More and more attention is being paid to female footballers, which is great, and that includes more football femslash, which is also great. And of course there's always the occasional genderswap, like your Cesca fic. But other than that, the only women involved in football are the WAGs, and a lot of people have a problem writing about real people who don't have a public persona. Certain WAGs have a public persona of their own, like Sara Carbonera, and certain WAGs have a public persona by trading off their HAB's fame, like Alex Gerrard, but a lot of them don't have public personas. I'm highly uncomfortable writing or reading about a WAG who purposely keeps a low profile, and I know other people are as well -- and more relevantly, the official RPF communities, like fbslash, must be careful about what they allow. RPF is arguably on even more shaky legal ground than normal fanfiction because it's about real people, and certainly the public perception is that it's a hell of a lot creepier than normal fanfiction (which doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation in the public sphere to begin with). RPF's saving grace is that it is written more about a person's public persona than it is about the person themselves, but that only holds for people who have a public persona. Replace that with "woman who is married to famous person" or "woman who works for Chelsea Football Club" and you get on very shaky ground indeed.

I agree with you that women are often portrayed poorly in the footie fandom, and that this can have misogynistic undertones (which is, unfortunately, hardly unique to footie fandom). Certainly there have been countless fics where things were going along fine until a player's partner showed up, and then I had to hurriedly click away because the characterization was so nauseatingly unpleasant. But that is something that should be addressed itself, with "stop being so damn misogynistic", not, "these women we really know nothing about should be written about more/in a certain way". Because honestly, I don't think the partners of most players should show up in fic at all, because of the aforementioned not having a public persona. I am far more comfortable with fics in which the characters' partners magically don't exist than I am with fics in which a non-famous partner is given a large role, even if she is written well. If a person hasn't gone out of their way to make sure they are famous, then I feel they should not have porn written about them on the internet, and that covers a fair number of women who would be portrayed in footie fandom. You know I am always on the lookout for Andres Iniesta fic, but I don't want to read about Ana Ortiz, not because I want to pretend she doesn't exist to fuel a fantasy where Andres Iniesta is actually in love with me, or because I want to pretend she doesn't exist to fuel a fantasy where Andres Iniesta is actually in love with Xavi Hernandez, but because she's not famous and doesn't show any inclination of wanting to become famous, and I think it's disrespectful to write fanfiction about her as if she were.

And when it comes to places like Kickette, honestly, Kickette has a tendency to stray into the wrong side of creepy. The comments really do. I am (mostly) glad that Kickette exists as non-fanction-related proof of women being interested in football, but I really wouldn't take as a shining example any place that habitually has people posting with handles like "Mrs.DavidVilla"; RPF already has enough trouble with stalker types.

Basically, I think it comes down to this: there are a lot of fandoms out there that have really good het and femslash pairings, including most RPF. But if you really want female characters, you should try one of those fandoms, not football RPF.

[nahco3.livejournal.com]

I don't want to read about Ana Ortiz, not because I want to pretend she doesn't exist to fuel a fantasy where Andres Iniesta is actually in love with me, or because I want to pretend she doesn't exist to fuel a fantasy where Andres Iniesta is actually in love with Xavi Hernandez, but because she's not famous and doesn't show any inclination of wanting to become famous, and I think it's disrespectful to write fanfiction about her as if she were.

I think this beautifully sums up my personal reasons for not wanting to read or write fic about WAGs.

[angualupin.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it more, I think what it comes down to for me is "knowing what you've gotten yourself into". That is, entertainers -- sportspeople, actors, musicians, whatever -- have consciously chosen a profession where a large portion of their job is a perceived identity presented to fans. A footballer's job is to play football, but more than that, a footballer's job is to play football for other people. A footballer who does not play football specifically to entertain other people is called an amateur. A footballer, therefore, has knowingly chosen a profession that involves presenting an identity to a large number of people, most of whom she or he will never meet. Certain things, like getting pictures of yourself in the tabloids and having people write porn about you on the internet, are going to come along with that. The footballer might not like that part of the job much, and might try to keep his or her personal life as private as possible, but, fundamentally, the footballer has knowingly chosen that career, with all it entails.

Someone who is not professionally an entertainer has not chosen that. Choosing to marry someone famous or choosing to become a sports medicine doctor is not the same thing as choosing to become an entertainer. I therefore feel that such individuals should not be forced to provide an identity to fans, which includes the right to not have pictures of yourself published in tabloids and not have people write porn about you on the internet.

[mardia.livejournal.com]

Okay, first, this is a super interesting post and I'm glad this discussion is taking place!

I kind of agree with others that the "fandom trajectory" you're talking about just isn't true for everyone. I mean, it's not really true for me, and it probably doesn't apply to others either.

That being said--moving from larger, "fictional" fandoms like Star Trek XI into sports RPF has been, for me personally, a really weird experience, and not entirely in a positive way? Like, take Star Trek for example, there was a lot more freedom for me to move between writing Kirk/McCoy or writing McCoy/Uhura, or Uhura gen fic. I mean, let's be honest, Kirk/McCoy is still going to get more comments than McCoy/Uhura, but I still felt like I had the option of writing female characters, and sort of...working within a female-friendly space, if that makes sense.

Football fandom doesn't quite work like that. And part of that is, as others have pointed out, you just don't HAVE female characters to work with in the same way. I mean, Uhura, Chapel, Winona Kirk, etc etc, are part of canon, and even lesser known characters are fictional, so people don't feel bad about writing them the same way they might about, say, Ana Ortiz. And that's totally valid. I'll freely admit that part of the reason I'm drawn to writing about Alex Gerrard or Sara Carbonero is because I feel like they do have enough of a public persona to make them "fair game" for RPF. And because of that public persona, I can...extrapolate a characterization that I hope other people will recognize and enjoy reading about. But I also do feel like they're the exception, rather than the rule, when it comes to WAG fic. (Most WAGs don't have the same sort of public persona, and that is totally fair, but I get why some people aren't comfortable writing about them.) You can turn to writing about female players, but again, the lack of media info isn't helpful (the fact that the WPS just shut down sure doesn't help either, sigh).

That being said, I'm really uncomfortable with HOW people choose to work in the WAGs sometimes. I mean, either they're the understanding angels that step aside so the slash can occur, or they're the harping shrew that's villainized for the slash to occur. This happens/happened a lot with S/X and Alex Gerrard, and for a while, it was a huge, HUGE turnoff for me with regards to the pairing and to the fandom at large. I can't speak for others, but I'd rather have no female characters in a fic than that sort of misogynistic bashing.

But I would like to have a comm where I could link to female-centric fic. Every story I've written that involves WAGs, I've had to do mental "arithmetic" to figure out whether it's still slashy enough to pass muster for posting to fbslash, which is ANNOYING.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

I am definitely getting that on the divergence of fandom experiences! it's cool to hear from so many people about that. obviously spending so much time in slash-only fandom (though the more I think about it the more I realize I'm overgeneralizing my own experience, haha, I talked with my former babysitter who still reads all my fic for me and she pointed out that I was still writing stuff other than all-dudes-all-the-time during the period of my life that I think of as "slash only" and presumably I was reading it too; I was just reading and writing dude-on-dude way more so that's what I remember) means that most of the people I was around were pretty similar to me in outlook, which kind of skews my view of what "other people" in general think/thought.

yeah, Star Trek XI might have even been one of the fandoms that really opened my eyes to the light of LADIES ARE WONDERFUL AND DESERVE STORIES. I was never really actively in that fandom but it always felt so welcoming. I don't really know how to articulate it, but it felt like caring about women was a default? at least in the spaces I went into, and I do not feel that way at all about football fandom, or about Supernatural, which was my main fandom before falling into the wacky land of sports RPF.

it's totally possible that my RESEARCH EVERYTHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING glasses are blinding me to the common experience of football fandom. I like doing the research and, idk, finding out what Paula Mata is like, but I think I forget a lot of the time that most people don't feel that way (and I don't feel that way about other fandoms either! my relationship with sports RPF is weird) so I probably over-react to the attitude of "I don't know them so I don't care". it just depresses me sometimes that people will happily read a slash fic about two dudes they know nothing about, but ask them to read about a player they know and love and his girlfriend? OUT OF HERE. and of course you know my feelings about the angel/harpy dichotomy, we have discussed these things many times XD I guess the solution is maybe to keep writing ladies as secondary characters, and hoping that people will get to know them that way? idk. ALSO PRIMERS. WE ARE GOING TO WRITE SOME DAMN PRIMERS, MY FRIEND. MY ENABLER SKILLZ WILL BE PUT TO GOOD USE FOR ONCE.

(that mental arithmetic is one of the main reasons I thought this was worth posting about. DAMMIT I WANT A PLACE TO POST MY HET. I WORKED ON THAT STUFF, PEOPLE SHOULD APPRECIATE IT. XD)

[(Anonymous)]

For what it's worth, I love gen (in all fandoms I read) and would be willing to read more of it in football--I am not so much an RPF person in general but I do lurk for your recs because there are some good ones.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

that is good to know, and thank you for commenting! (if you lurk my recs I assume you have already found weightedpass and applefic but... just in case! :) and also zanoranna's been writing some lately.)

[acchikocchi.livejournal.com]

Wow, there are some great threads in this post. I think everyone else has probably said what I want to, so I'll try not to be to repetitive and please forgive me if I am. :D

As the privacy issue has been well-argued elsewhere in this post, I'll just add that that there are very likely going to be some fans out there who use that argument as a smokescreen for "ew girls in my otp," and that's certainly something for writers to personally consider and be honest with themselves about. But that's certainly not the only reason to be reluctant about writing private figures (especially in explicit fic) and it's one of those unique things about RPS fandoms that makes applying patterns from other fandoms more complicated. It's the inclusion and subsequent villainization of partners or female OCs, which I've seen frequently enough to be uncomfortable, that's reallll hard to spin that as anything other than pretty gross misogyny.

Now for those of us who are more comfortable pushing those public/boundaries. I think the obstacle for many fans is still privacy, but in a different way: it's the lack of a public narrative, rather than just visibility or persona, that's getting in the way. In the first paragraph I originally said something like, "for example I'm perfectly comfortable reading and writing about Patricia Gonzalez but I can understand why others might not be." But I was thinking -- why did I pick Patricia and not, say, Mamen Sanz or Olalla Dominguez, both of whom I know about and like? Because Patricia has her own narrative, unrelated to her relationship with David Villa, which is that she played the game herself, and then gave it up. That's a good hook - a great hook! (Favorite AU idea: what if she was the one who'd stuck with it, and he gave it up?) That gets me 1) emotionally invested and 2) interested as a writer.

So -- conclusion time! -- for that reason, I think the best path to increasing positive representation of women in fic/fandom is to focus on, er, actual female football players. (I'm not a great example here but distira is and I'm working on it!) I understand that this isn't quite the same thing, as it would generally involve a different set of "characters" who don't often interact with the first set, so to speak. But female players come with their own narratives, and that's the bread and butter of any fandom.

[acchikocchi.livejournal.com]

Addendum, having come back to this post at a reasonable hour: as far as practical concerns of writing and posting het/gen go, I'm all for having all the fic in one place. would much prefer that actually. idk how to get it to happen but uh there's my +1 I guess? XD

[brojan.livejournal.com]

i want pique/shakira fic, the end

okay, not the end. i think this part:
but again, if all but a small handful of footie fic readers and writers are still in the "eww, het!" phase it's (a) pointless and (b) unfair to ask that their fannish space change in order accommodate the few who don't care if their fic has girl parts in it.

is not a good excuse. i mean, no one reads everything (or even most things) in fbslash, right? and since you're required to put the pairing anyway, it's not like someone is going to be ambushed by vagina. there are already people posting gen there (which, for me, is good!), i don't see why the very, very small amount of het that exists being posted there would be much of an inconvenience to anyone.

and it's soooo much easier if everything is in one place. /lazy

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

Typing on my phone, excuse any errors....

Pique/Shakira yassssssssss

As to your main point... maybe this is me being over sensitive or reactionary or idek, but do you remember the wank that went down on the kink meme when I asked if we could stop requiring anonymity? The issue is not whether it would inconvenience anybody. The issue is that I thought my wanting things to be different was a reasonable reason to ask for the rules to be changed. And I am still apparently regarded as a high-handed bitch who thinks rules are beneath her in this fandom because of that, going by the comments about me on the hate meme I saw before I stopped looking. Like it or not (and I don't) footballslash has rules against posting het or gen. I would love to be proved wrong, but I'm fairly certain that the reaction to my going to football fandom and saying "hey it would be cool if our slash comm also allowed het and gen" would be "who cares what you want, this is a slash comm and we don't see any reason to change it on your sat-so". You know what I mean? Football fandom: lowering my expectations of humanity more with every day. XD

[diora1.livejournal.com]

Delurking to add my 2 cents in. Your Cesca fic was my introduction to footiefic, and while footie will never be one of my primary fandoms, it has still provided some absolute gems. Shihadchick had a post at http://shihadchick.livejournal.com/1603762.html#cutid1 wherein fandom and misogyny were discussed. I don't know if you've seen it, but it definitely raises some good points. There is definitely misogyny at work in fandom, and as you point out that is inevitable, because it is still entrenched in society. It is an absolute shame.

I'll be honest: I read your post and I had to take a step back and wait before I actually posted a response. After rereading and reconsidering, I was definitely taking my negative reaction to your fandom trajectory speculation and applying it to the rest of the post. I can only speak from my fannish experience, which does not follow anything of the sort you describe. I still feel that you've taken a rather patronizing tone concerning fandom, fic, and women within, but not nearly as much as I first thought. I just can't agree with the premise that if you do not like/read het fic you have not matured to the enlightened stage of fandom and are forever stuck with hiding your head in the sand to avoid thinking about the misogyny built into society. I think it is a lot more accurate to talk about the misogyny of the source material rather than speculate about the internalized misogyny of the fic authors and readers. I don't think its right or fair to generalize that someone who writes and reads slash fic, and only slash fic, is either misogynistic or dealing with internalized misogyny, whether he or she is aware of it or not. For some, it may well be about misogyny; but for others, it's a draw to those two male characters (sometimes its femslash and women, but its usually male). Part of the problem that I see is that more of the interesting, well rounded characters I see on tv and in the media are male while the women are more likely to be static and one-dimensional, and less interesting for me to think about and want to read about. It's great when authors take those one-dimensional women and make them more well rounded and more interesting. There are some awesome fics that do that. But fix it fics like that also take a great deal of extra work, on top of the work that goes into writing fic. I don't see it as misogyny for authors to love male centric shows and write about the men. It's societal misogyny, not individual.

I am a character person in fandom, by which I mean I fall in love with a character, and then seek out all the fic I can find about the character. I first started reading slash fic when I ran out of Harry Potter centric gen and het fic that fit the parameters I wanted to read (aka long and plotty). Now, in some fandoms I read primarily slash. Others I stick to het. In both cases, the fic I read tends to stem from my interactions with the source canon rather than an attachment to male or female genitalia.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

I am super appreciative of your taking the backwards step before commenting! (I am, uh, not really great with angry comments. like, "retreat from the internet and stare at walls for hours contemplating how I'm such an awful person" levels of not great with angry comments.) I am definitely hearing that my fandom experience is/was not universal, and it's very enlightening hearing about how everyone else sees things. I hadn't seen that particular post - thank you for linking - but I've definitely seen a lot of fandom discussion about latent misogyny, and more and more as time goes on, which is great!

it's hard for me to articulate (which is maybe a sign that I should shut my mouth on sensitive subjects, womp womp) but I do think there's a certain... inherent misogyny in maintaining a misogynistic status quo? especially in not at least acknowledging that the status quo is problematic because of that misogyny. yes, absolutely, source material is almost all male-dominated and male characters are almost universally better-written or (in the case of RPF) better-reported, and it is really effing hard to write about women given those constraints. and I have seen and admired some women in fandom putting down their foot and saying "look, if the source material is going to be shitty about the people who are like me, I'm not going to get invested in that source material" but I'm not that strong or principled. I like football fandom, god knows why, and I want to stay here, so. but on the other hand, I'm not going to pretend to myself that I'm not perpetuating the system by saying I don't care that the source material is shitty in the way it treats women. if we just accept the system it's never going to change.

I think maybe my main point, if there was one in that humongous pointless ramble above, is that even in a fandom as male-dominated as this one, there is fic with ladies in it! there is great fic with ladies in it! and the people who write them often can't share them with the wider fandom audience, and I think that's shitty. I think the assumption that most of the people in the wider fandom audience won't want to read them is shitty, and I think it's also correct, which is even shittier. but I really hope that if people talk about it we can maybe come up with something? I have no idea, but I live in hope!