mentally preparing myself for the fact that there will be 29380224927498 more fics of james bond and skinny white guy q sucking each other’s dicks than james bond and naomie harris aka [SPOILER YOU DICK]
but what about m
my god do you know how hard i ship it
(if you spoil this movie for me i s2g)
So my choice is to be heterosexist by refusing the denied gay possibility, or racist by refusing to follow the heterosexual script the film teases me with. I’m sorry, I am done being guilt-tripped for my gay male cathexis. In part because fetishizing race feels way worse.
(But I agree that M is the cruise liner of ships—holy god do I have a Dench fetish.)
PF, I’m not sure how the OP’s post is about guilt-tripping anyone, or fetishizing race, or requiring that anyone make a choice about who to ship. IMO, it’s pointing out the overwhelming and consistent trend that (with very rare exceptions) fandom ships white-cis-males with other white-cis-males—even if other characters of color have deep relationships with said white-cis-male (see: Rhodey/Stark, Arthur/Guinevere, Gus/Shawn). This leads to the detriment and almost-complete erasure of characters of color (particularly women of color) within the shipping world. Women of color typically get the short end of the stick when it comes to shipping, regardless of fandom, and I’m expecting the same sort of thing to happen with Skyfall. We don’t get to have the piles and piles of adoring art and fic and meta that other character pairings do—hell, Guinevere is married to Arthur, and I see more Merlin/Arthur stuff on my dash than I do G/A. I’m just a bit tired of this invisibility.
You know, that makes perfect sense to me, and I can really understand how fucked-up it feels to you. But still, when people call this invisibility out as a fault of fandom, doesn’t that implicitly accuse the rest of us of an ethical failing? Yes, I think it’s good for us to examine why we don’t get off on the kinds of diverse ships you describe, but I don’t think it’s that easy to make myself get off on them. Perhaps we should think about why writers who do cathect that way aren’t in fandom—which may be precisely for this reason, that there aren’t representations of their desires here. Hm. That’s a conundrum I don’t know how to address.
Well, but AGG is right: the first step is calling people out about it. After all, I think some people just haven’t thought about it. And sometimes, when you do start to think about it, you realize that it was a sloppy, assumptive oversight on your part, just running along the same channels you always have, and—say, why isn’t Shawn/Gus a thing? Why doesn’t Gwen get more love? Where the hell are all the Tony/Rhodey shippers? (*raises hand*)
The women of color issue in particular is so frustrating. Women in general tend to get sidelined in slash fic, and women of color get even more sidelined, accordingly. Femmslash isn’t my thing, but a place to start is, even if you don’t ship them, don’t erase them from your stories. Make them present. Give them LIFE. Fandom is recursive; what we read is what we think about. I’ve seen ships spring from the portrayals of characters in fandom who—hell, in some cases they don’t even exist in canon.