it’s giving me whiplash to have the anti-yaoi, anti-fujoshi crowd be crying about fujoshi being homophobes when not that long ago the positions were completely reversed.
Modern anti-fujoshi have a very….. short perspective on this issue, because when I first read BL manga, the general public opinion on gay romance and gay erotica was that it was gross, weird, sinful, and dirty because it was gay. That was it – straight manga that also had tropes of incest, rape, underage pairings, all of that shit was fine. girls who read that kind of shojo manga were normal. fujoshi were freaks because they read the same stuff, but with (shudder) gay men. Anti-fujoshi thought BL was bad because it was gay, and fujoshi were gross and kinky because they liked it.
Some fujoshi responded by reasonably explaining to the homophobes that actually, gay people aren’t gross or weird. and when that inevitably failed, most just went “fine, fuck you. You think it’s gross, weird, sinful and dirty, fine – I like it anyways. Suck it.” fujoshi did a lot of the work of normalizing slash ships on the internet by putting gay content everywhere, all the time, and refusing to be ashamed. the culture was far from perfect, but it was also much less homophobic than fandom at large. which is why so many queer millennials ended up in the fujoshi crowds, if not necessarily using the term for themselves.
fujoshi: telling homophobes to fuck off since before these kids were born, probably
Antis act like they’ve had no political awareness from before maybe 2015, so at this point I just assume that the vast majority of them are actually that young, and really, that’s being kind to them. The only other option is that they’re homophobic, misogynistic adults who know exactly what they’re doing!
I think the anti fujo crowd may also be FORMER fujos who are cringing at their past behaviour. They think they acted stupidly when they were young and so they have formed a backlash against it now.
That may explain why they take it so personally.
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