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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[fandomonymous.livejournal.com]

Pardon butting in, but on the female presenter at ChelseaTV: her name is Gigi Salmon, and she is WONDERFUL! (note to self: re-download every Friday Night Live interview EVER.) But for some reason I've never thought about writing fic for her. Hmmm.

[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.

[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.

[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]

ahh, I think I did know her name at some point! thank you. :)

did you watch the British documentary on women in football? they all talked about how hard they worked to not be seen as women, just as people. I wonder if that has something to do with it--they're actively trying not to be sexual figures. ~thoughts.

[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

[draconic-voices.livejournal.com]

Hee, you're welcome to the "discerning omnivore", I like it because it totally maps onto those times where I want to read ooc, bad grammar, no-plot smut-fic and I can tell myself that occasionally a little junk food is a-ok, just as long as you're aware it's bad for you, lol.

It's interesting that you say that often people in football fandom aren't in other fandoms, and I definitely think that's a contributing factor to the lack of het. I'm also a relatively new arrival to football fandom but I've spent a fair amount of time bobbing around general fandom (I actually started out in het Buffy fandom, then bounced through several Big Slash fandoms before ending up gravitating towards sports rpf), and it sometimes seems that football fandom can be quite insular. By which, I mean that club culture can lead to little enclaves of writers that form a repeating loop of fic and feedback where authors never really step outside their comfort zone. I'm also frequently surprised by how low the level of knowledge about wider fandom is within football fandom and also how often some of the architecture of fandom seems to be missing, for instance, the use of Betas seems to be much lower in the fandom as a whole than it is in other fandoms that have been around for more than a few years.

Rereading the last couple of sentences of that paragraph makes me sound like I'm flinging my toys out of the pram because football fandom doesn't match up to my expectations of fandom, but I'll leave it stand because I think they are real issues.

In going back to the issue of the low amount of het fic, and touching on some of the points that you and others made in the comments, I do think that there are sources of characterisation available for quite a few of the women involved in the game and they aren't utilised enough. Even if we say that only those with public personas are fair game, there are still a lot of fairly famous women who are wives or girlfriends and for whom there should be enough public material available - kickette, their own newspaper columns, tv footage especially when they're reporters or presenters - to produce fleshed out, realistic characters. There are issues with writing about women who choose to remove themselves as much as possible from the public side of their husband's/boyfriend's lives and I think that's a judgement call that a writer has to make but I know that if someone wrote good Olalla Domínguez fic, with or without Fernando present, I'd read it. Also, pictures like this (http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m11cunqvVY1qdfl6xo1_500.jpg) of Raul Meireles's wife, Ivone, really make me want kick-ass lady fic, no matter how public the lady's life is. Incidentally, I would love to see well-written fic involving those women that are employed by football clubs themselves such as Eva Carneiro (Chelsea doc) or Gigi Salmon (Chelsea TV presenter - have I outed myself as a Chelsea supporter yet?) or Kay Murray (Real Madrid TV), although I find myself wanting gen or outsider-pov fic from them mainly so...

I don't know if a new complementary comm is necessary, but maybe we need more encouragement of authors who do write het and gen to crosspost to footiefic - the comm might be mostly dead, but I still have it on my friend's list and I would love if more fic showed up on it.

[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.

[louis-quatorze.livejournal.com]

How do you know for sure, though? You can assume, based on Big Slash Fandom, but football fandom is decidedly NOT Big Slash Fandom. Throwing around accusations like that, and promoting it as your greater enlightenment, is patronizing at the very best.

Kickette is insanely popular, but you have to go three pages back right now to find a WAG. Even the bits of famous WAGdom we do see don't present much of a character for them- they're wearing clothes or buying things or saying stupid stuff. Not exactly inspiring, at least for me. While you might see them in the tabloids, I'm a) not sure how popular reading tabloids actually is in the fandom and b) they're not actually in them all that much. I picked up a few British tabloids last time I was there and it's really much more reality stars and actresses. It's certainly not as it was in 2006. And they're certainly never in sites like the Guardian or the BBC, which is what people at least claim to read.

Do we see interviews with those "cult" figures though? Do we see them as their own characters? Who is Eva Carneiro (who I assume you're referring to, Eva Gonzalez is someone else entirely, and that says something about her profile right there) besides "pretty physio woman on the sideline"? The problem is that they're not actually characters or personalities to build on, which is why your reaction to Eva/Juan Mata is "oh obviously self-insert Mary Sue." We don't know anything about her or who she is, so when writing about her, that's likely what's going to happen. (Not that this is her fault. She's a doctor, not a pop star. She doesn't have to be a media figure just for the sake of someone's fanfic.) Hell, does Sharon even have a last name?

The issue is that the women in football, except for maybe some female footballers and the bigger-name WAGs, are personality-less adjuncts. Additionally, women aren't seen as having "a place" in serious discussions of men's sport. That's a serious problem, and the lack of het outside of self-insert Tumblrfic is a symptom, I think. That's the issue, even more than "ew girl parts."

(But see, even there you're unable to separate Ulrike from Per. I was interested in discussing Ulrike- Per is related to that, of course, but he wasn't at all the point of the prompt or what I was interested in. I wanted to talk about her and her sport/career. But she had to be attached to someone you were interested in for you to be interested.)

[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...

[distira.livejournal.com]

just popping to say YES ALEX/SERVA!

[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

[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.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

well, that's the point, isn't it? that football slash isn't Big Slash Fandom? I'm not trying to accuse anyone; I got to where I am in one way and I know other people got there in a similar way, but I also know it's not the only way to get there, and I'm interested in getting to know the other routes too. which is why it is great that people are talking! but the world in general is by default sexist... so fandom in general is sexist, the status quo is sexist, and if I'm not actively thinking about it I'm sexist. which sucks. I don't think it's controversial to say that people need to hit a certain level of maturity to start actively thinking about sexism, though? obviously everybody gets there at different points in time. if the fannish landmarks I hit on my way to my current level of maturity/acknowledgment of my own and the world's sexism aren't universal that's good to know! it's a cool theory but I'm not married to it.

oof, yes, Eva Carneiro. sorry, Chelsea fans! I was reading an interview with Mata the other day where he talked about her so she was on my mind, but obviously this is not my corner of the fiefdom. >_>;; all I'm really qualified to talk about is Sharon... I don't remember her last name, honestly, but she's a recognizable member of the MCFC staff, she appears regularly in Inside City, I'd be comfortable describing her interaction with the players. I know enough about her to write her as a background character. (better than a lot of the players tbh, I am a terrible fan.) if I were writing her as a main character I would be doing a lot of fleshing out. but the same is true for a lot of male characters and I write them anyway, so it bugs me that I would dismiss the idea as "oh, self-insert" just because the character is a woman. I'm just talking about myself there, though. I know there's levels and levels to how much any given writer is comfortable making up about a character. (UGH WHY CAN I NOT MAKE WORDS MAKE SENSE. but, like. I wrote Oriol Romeu fic for zanoranna! AND IT WAS TOTALLY SELF-INSERT, WHO AM I KIDDING. I was writing about my experiences being a cold and lonely tourist in London. but I don't think it was necessarily a bad fic? idk. so why do I assume that if I did something similar with Eva Carneiro it would necessarily be a bad fic. someday my brain will make sense to me.)

but, um. yes, I agree that lack of het is symptomatic of widespread sexism in football culture! I think it's symptomatic of some other stuff, too, because lots of things are sexist, not just football culture. and I am curious to see what other people feel about it, and if it's something that they would be interested in trying to remedy, even in a very small way!

(okay, I do not in any way want to derail you so cut me off right here if you feel like that's what I'm doing. but, um... I feel like that is a slightly different issue? I'm not in handball fandom.)

[the-beanster.livejournal.com]

Lol, I meant that I can only look at this as a reader. I just meant that if I wrote, my fandom experience would be different. Don't know how familiar you are with Thor (the movie, since I haven't touched the comic books), but the majority of fic is Thor/Loki. Now, I adore slashing them up, but if I bothered to write? I think I'd only bother with gen. Or if Lord of the Rings fandom was still active and I actually wrote in it? You'd get Legolas/Aragorn and Eowyn/Faramir from me, you know? That's what I meant. As a reader, I don't get much say in what's written and so, I just read what I like out of what's available. I tried reading some Eowyn/Faramir, but they were few and far between and not that great, so...I stuck with Legolas/Aragorn. And unfortunately, there's very little gen in Thor fandom. So, it looks like I only care about a slash pairings when I really didn't have much of a choice as a reader. That's what I meant.

Also, I watch Glee (my number one guilty pleasure) and I used to read fics of a certain slash and femslash pairing. Then both couples became canon and...I left fandom. That' the kind of person I am. If I get what I want from canon, I don't need fanon. But yes, half the time, the biggest problem is just the amount of love that guys get. I mean, it's hypocritical of me to say anything bc a lot of the time, my favorite characters are male as well, but I do feel really disappointed when I step into fandom and wanna flail over a certain character and can't find someone lol. Or, half the time, I think a female character is phenomenal but I don't like her with anyone, and it's hard to find fics where she's awesome but...alone, you know? And of course, there are times where it really is a situation of pretty boys together lol.

As for your scenario? Yes, that's problematic, but it depends on several things, I believe. I was in two communities for a fandom - one only for slash and one for any fic. The one for any fic had a member that would constantly put random stuff that wasn't exactly against the rules but I could really care less about. It got to the point that I left the community. So, it now looks like I only read slash when I am perfectly open to anything but couldn't handle my flist getting cluttered. Or I'm in an xmen comm for slash fics. I joined it years ago...but haven't actually read anything on it for a long time now. I don't really know why I haven't left lol (I just realized that I was still part of it) but to anyone looking at my profile, it looks like the only thing I care about when I read all kinds of fic on the xmen kink meme (by all kinds, I mean slash/femslash/het/gen - I'm very picky with kinks lol). So, I mean, just looking at communities people are in, doesn't really mean anything. I'm not making excuses for my reading/fandom-ing habits bc fandom is where I go for fun rather than worrying about issues, but just trying to show why something like that isn't necessarily a good indicator.

[the-beanster.livejournal.com]

(it wouldn't let me post the whole thing)

And again, I don't want to point fingers, but I just read what's available. If the majority of fic is slash, then that's what it is. That, obviously, doesn't mean anything since I barely go out of my way to (anonymously!) prompt anything in kinkmemes and such, so I can't absolve myself, but...I'm a lazy bum. I like looking down a list and clicking on a fic and reading it. I don't really feel like going out of my way to find something. My favorite Harry Potter pairing is Ron/Hermione and two of my fave characters are Luna and Bellatrix, but...I don't care enough about HP to go joining comms for it. I care a lot more for something like Thor, so I went looking for comms. And they just happen to mostly have slash - altho I adored Jane! So, just bc I'm in a fandom that's heavily dominated by slash doesn't mean that I don't cheer on female characters or adore het pairings, you know? I just don't think that fandom is a great indicator for what people are like. Esp for someone like me, who's mainly a lurker, fandom is definitely not everything that means a lot to me.

I don't think there was a logical flow to any of this so...yeah. Sorry. Whatever came into my head, got typed lol.

But yes! I mean, if I was given a fun and easy primer, I think it would help. And omg, they sound adorable! (And Pique/Shakira is the greatest thing ever.)

[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!

[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.