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I read a lot of slashfic as a young cis man, and i scoffed once i found out how many women were writing slash; stories that made straight male characters gay for each other. in recent years i started thinking of this as a defensive, reclaiming process, but i wonder if i'm wrong
my theory was: there's so many men in mass media (movies etc. that by their nature are more likely to be known to many people than obscure, perhaps better-written works are) that suck, it's cathartic to overwrite their personality with one that has vulnerability, etc.
i learned in my mid twenties that the language (body and verbal) that men use has far more meaning to people who aren't cismale. even a character that doesn't have any kind of intimacy-related plot in a movie can still produce an aura of "oh this guy treats women like shit"
so my thought was, by taking men that everyone knows, who are part of you and all your friends subconscious pictures of society, and forcing them to have vulnerabilities and feelings, this lessens the everpresent "background radiation of [a woman's] life", as david willis put it
but idk, i didn't talk to many women about this, and I'm not very connected to modern pop media. What little filters through to me, it seems like maybe there's a lot more male characters in movies nowadays that aren't just completely, viscerally awful and cold?
it seems like there's so much of it now, covering basically everything. i was originally looking at this in 2002 and I wonder if the motivations behind slashfic have changed for a lot of people between then and now.
like, I was playing Apex Legends, and my friend took Mirage for the first time, and the first sentence out of his mouth I immediately said "wow he's like a marvel character"
there's this archetype in movies now, it materialized in the early-mid 2000s I feel like? the man who's extremely uncertain of what he's doing and always tripping over his words and that's Mirage.
and it feels like whenever i see anything from a modern movie all the male protagonists are like that, and they seem like they'd have to be pretty unthreatening
