G O D I remember the days tumblr got so anti-fujoshi if you dared call yourself one that rottenboysclub and a few of us in the Asia crowd were having arguments almost every other day about it
the thing i don't really get about these arguments on either side is that the origin of the word is constantly being brought up in terms of overseas fandom. where it originated, yes, but western fandom... is not overseas fandom and things developed differently here, whether from misunderstanding or lack of exposure
like knowing the origin of the word is nice and it's good to have especially if it makes someone a better person. but for example their claim that some ppl believe fujo is reclaimed from "please respect the humanity of gay men" ??? who in the world has ever said this or believed this
coming back to this after a few minutes and coffee to clarify that ofc i fully believe/know it can be racist when used against eastern fandom bc... yes, obviously. but i would not compare calling the primarily white straight cis western audience the same. does that make sense at all
the reason it's racist is it assumes people who like the japanese thing are all sex perverts who view gay men as sex objects, as opposed to the superior western MLM shippers who would never because they like wholesome shit not japanese sex pervert things.
and it also gets into the weird purity culture discourse as well, of heartstopper is better than things with sex in them. all BL is definitely fetishistic and in no way reflects the culture it comes from and is just there for women to jack it to, which also women shouldn't be jacking it to anything, just ship uwu pure boys.
and if you have friends that use it for just, BL/MLM shippers who simply hate women, you guys might want to consider using a term that wasn't already in use in eastern fandom.
Most of the folks I know who use fujoshi as a term are like... yeah, they're big on various anime but also people who are like. spn or hannibal or omfd shippers. mxtx shippers. webtoon series. etc. like yeah it gained popularity during the surge of animanga content but i dont know a single person in current who would use it only for that anymore
oh no for sure. the thing is when people say fujoshi (neg) they think they mean 'people who fetishize MLM and are icky abt it' but the post is saying 'fujoshi becoming a term for The Bad Ones because it's the jpn term for "mlm content enjoyer" is kinda racist because it plays into OH THOSE WACKY JAPANESE PERVS'
I think the main point of the post is that, while western fandoms have adopted these terms from Japanese, western fandom had also consistently used them negatively
yea i don't think the post is abt friends who use it for themselves and each other neutrally/positively it's abt people who treat fujoshi as shorthand to mean The Bad MLM Enjoyers
yes i understand that but i was saying the people i know who actively use the term fujoshi use it to mean "gay ships in general" and the people who use fujo (neg) against them also do not specify that they mean "japanese media is gross specifically"
the word fujoshi in western fandom has not meant "anime only" for a long time from my perspective which is WHY i was like "oh we're having different fandom experiences, i see"
ah. i mean that's still kind of the idea of the post which is that like. when you have two terms that mean the same thing but one is in japanese and you use the japanese term to be THE CRAZY PERVERTS
laughs sometimes plurk makes things hard, it's alright. I think we get it now, it's the different fandom experiences things. You've got friends who use it /pos meanwhile my assumption from broader fandom discourse was it was /neg
and also [self description] vs [people using it to describe THE BAD ONES]. in any case, the post is right, the latter practice is unfortunately pretty wide-spread.
i'm more saying even the people who use it /neg dont really use it to specify japanese media anymore bc BL fandoms are too broad for that nowadays... and the folks who earnestly use it tend to lean hard into the "yes i AM a crazy sex pervert try and stop me" thing which i do think complicates things a little
like the solution is for people to understand what they're referring to. I don't think there's an issue for people saying: I like BL [referring to BL, a thing they like and understand what they are talking about]. But using loanwords without any idea of the context does in fact run straight into these issues
i was just surprised you seem to have never seen the proship folks who go "yes i AM a degenerate" bc i see that pretty often if the debate comes across my feed
i have seen those guys personally I DO THINK IT STILL. KIND OF SUCKS TO AUTOMATICALLY ASSUME THE JPN TERM IS THE DEGENERATE TERM just because it's. being weird about japanese people in a way that clearly is like not registering in peoples heads
i'll admit it's only like halfway registering in mine but i think it's because i have difficulty attributing "fujoshi" to "japense person specifically" the same way i wouldn't attribute a french loanword to french people specifically i guess
I engage with twt fandom almost exclusively from JP and SE asian fandom accounts, and haven't seen shipper used in JP but it might just not be in my fandoms specifically. I mostly see like 成人済腐, fujoshi, or just 腐 (it's the rot from rottenwoman) still.
ah apparently shipper is becoming more popular in general fandom spaces since engagement with f/f and m/f between fandoms is getting more popular, i guess?
yeah it's less "fujoshi are Japanese" and more "the Japanese language has this connotation (regardless of the nationality/ethnicity of the person described)" like Tori said
and I will say like. etymology-wise the term 'fujoshi' in the west got negative connotations BECAUSE the people who first picked it up were terminally annoying. so there is technically a base source that isn't just 'when you describe it with the Japanese word it sounds more gross'
I think misogyny actually has a lot to do with it because if you look at the word OTAKU, which had the same timeframe of "annoying westerners pick it up and behave incredibly terribly about it," people don't even use it as a serious insult anymore
because enjoyment of Japanese media has become mainstream so people just call each other otaku/weab the same way 'nerd' has stopped being a serious insult
people could literally also make posts like "people who identify as 'fujoshi' in the west when they're not even Japanese are the worst" or whatever which in fact was basically what the discourse was back in The Olden Days
m/m shipping has also become mainstream but instead of becoming a sarcastic endearment like weaboo or otaku, fujoshi evolved into a dividing line of "we're not like THOSE m/m shippers, we're not gross" while losing any relation to the original implication of also being weirdly fetishistic of Japanese culture
which is kind of the problem imo. ppl use it as a shorthand and assume other people will be using it as a shorthand for the same concepts but it represents about a billion different concepts at this point esp because frankly most of the people who use fujoshi in eng-speaking fandom at this point are either 1. Asian (not Asian-American, like SEA mostly)
so the argument keeps happening over and over because people are arguing over entirely different connotations and half of us are bringing in old baggage that newer people aren't even aware of.
like I'll drag my own side here and say it has been a LONG time since I saw someone try to argue that fujoshi is homophobic because it implies liking the gays is "rotten" but the defense will still counter that it was actually coined to describe women as unmarriageable literally every time
yeah it was an old misconception ppl used to have but at this point people have explained the origin of the term so many times I don't think anyone has that misconception anymore.
i keep thinking while reading this plurk about the people i've seen who straight up say with their whole chests that all Japanese people are gross degenerates and Japan is the origin of all pedoshotaloli shit ever and they're justified using fujoshi as an insult because only cringe ciswhitewomen use fujoshi ever
like obvs not everyone who keeps parroting fujoshi as "these are the bad m/m fans" are like that, but there's a core of people who are knowingly and aggressively like that and are spreading this shit purposefully
^ yeah. The people who we usually confronted on the subject were of this mindset, just basically speaking down to Japanese BL fans/Asians in general who used "fujoshi" to describe their involvement with BL and just being heavily racist about it.
there's also a shitton of evidence of terfs connected to using fujoshi as an insult against transmen (they're actually just disgusting fetishizers who want to be boys for fetish reasons see) which is kind of an aside but. it's definitely related. to the spread of the fujoshi as an insult shit.
I WAS THINKING ABOUT THAT the fujoshi getting used as a slur against trans men thing. I feel like I just started seeing that recently. is this because of the Boyfriends webtoon
a girl in love
: IT'S BEEN HAPPENING FOR A WHILE, THERE'S LIKE.... wholeass documentation of it for years so i dont think it's a response to boyfriends it's just like. it's been simmering for A While.
but yeah it's been used to pretty much write off any defense of anyone liking m/m content especially if they say "actually i'm a boy? so uh. stop calling me a gross fetishizer?" it'll get met with calling them a liar/fujo/You Just Want To Be A Boy Because You Like Yaoi
which is probably one of the biggest reasons i've taken so fucking long to settle into "oh i'm gender fucked" because it's like "oh i like yaoi, this means i'm just being a gross fetishizer when i look at a buff himbo and go man i wish that was me"
im genuinely really curious what kind of circles you guys run in/if it's a larger consequence of being like neck deep in BL specifically because a lot of this is like. new to me in the "yeah i could extrapolate this happening due to people being fucking awful but i have experienced either nothing of the sort firsthand or the direct opposite"
this is just like the first result when i google "fujoshi anti-trans" and i haven't clicked any of the links here because i ddddddo not want to actually read this rhetoric again, but it's just one [collection of links] out of many
i see it out in the wild occasionally but i also try really hard to not read too much drama shit these days i just know it's Been Happening for a while
there's a person who's been writing a whole thesis on this kind of thing who has an even more comprehensive list of Known Terfs, their talking points wrt fujoshi, papers on fujoshi as a cultural phenomenon and its spread to the west etc etc but it is 94 degrees out right now and i can't remember their twitter handle for the life of me rn
i'd say the "circles i run in" is pretty much just like, people who talk about the exclusionary/purity culture rise in fandom a lot and how a lot of the core is people like Terfs spreading this shit as a way to stamp down on queer people
ye the weird transphobic terf discourse with m/m has def been around for years bc it cropped up as a "AND ONE MORE THING" addition to "anime created disgusting pervert transwomen you can tell because they enjoy pornography with women in it"
anyways the anti-trans shit is kind of a side-step from the original topic but like, not by much. it still absolutely carries the connotation of "fujoshi is an inherently disgusting term created by an inherently disgusting country" so it's like. yes.
also the misogyny aspect is like lol. lmao because I hadn't actually seen examples of the specific "fujoshi are the BAD mlm likers" thing before now, but now that I have they all smell like it's just straight up borrowing the 4chan anime dude usage of fujo to be mad about girls liking those girl animes with boys that are too unmanly sexy and are for girls
i avoid basically any groups on twt that actively labels themselves pro/anti bc when i WAS running in those circles myself my tl was constantly full of them fighting each other and it got me dragged into shit more than once i wasn't actually involved in
i just see a lot of "both sides are bad" and it's very exhausting to me personally cause a lot of the time people will write off an actual issue because "oh this is just more anti vs proshipper nonsense"
I do def run in more proship/proship-leaning circles. I'VE ONLY HAD ONE TWITTER FRIEND LIKE ALL MY LIFE WHO WAS AN ANTI AND THAT WAS SOMEONE I COULD STILL BE LIKE :HANDSHAKE: GURO WITH SO,
God of Brats
: tbf i'm a "both sides are bad" person pretty openly because my time in orv fandom has only EVER burned me when violently proship circles are involved and some of the behaviour i've been seeing from them is uhhhh. really really insane. like actively doxxing teenagers insan
i mean when people go "oh you're in more proship circles?" i can only think, well. yes my friends generally agree that exclusionary/reactionary rhetoric is Bad so yeah. technically i am in proship circles by virtue of "sometimes a thing that talks about how insane the reactionary fandom rhetoric has become gets reblogged into my eyesight"
yyyyyyyeah I'm not big on the "both sides are bad" thing because that's like going "well all feminists are bad because some of them actively want men to die"
but my point is more that the people on both sides who take it to extremes are both equally shitty and both of them do equally shitty things to each other. i watched people get violently bullied out of fandom with transphobic harassment because they expressed very minor discomfort (on their side acct) with some of the porn that got filtered onto their tl
both sides DO have bad actors and both sides also have sane people actually. I just don't interact with the sane antis much because [checks notes] my pinned on twitter for years was "does woundfucking count as hurt/comfort"
i watched someone else actively hunt down kids on twt they disagreed with and talk about looking up their schools and talk about reporting them to their real life parents for "harassing people online"
i recently watched a whole smear campaign someone ran to their 10k followers against some zine mods accusing them of harassment, doxxing, and general unspecified anti behaviour on the basis of "they don't ship my ship"
i'm comfortably seated away from both sides of the issue because. i want to believe i'm a normal fucking person and i don't have to assign myself "proship" in order to show that i think transphobia and harassment is wrong
censorship is absolutely a human rights issue and i was not saying it wasn't, but i was saying- like kaz did- that bad actors exist on both sides of the issue and the greater majority of either side is not engaging in this shit
what I am saying is that calling both sides equally bad because they both have bad actors/assholes is effectively saying that an anti-censorship/anti-purity culture movement is equal to a movement that believes in censorship because people take things too far
which is why i equated it to feminism, because there's STILL people who even if they believe in women's rights will go "but I don't like feminists because of [extremists]"
there's a difference to me between the real life consequences of both. the chances of me walking down the street and being harassed for, for example, drawing incest is incredibly slim compared to someone trying to harass me for looking like a woman
ok let me put it another way then. the anti rhetoric is a branch of the larger issue, which is censorship that targets women, people of color, and lgbtq people
people won't harass you on the streets for drawing incest, but they sure want you to be. and it's a thing that has actually been effective real policy in real life, such as in florida
i mean, the degree of abuse people get on the internet over things like drawing badwrong pictures is still incredibly traumatic, and i have seen antis attempt doxxing and try to get people fired over their art, so it's hard to say that online harassment is somehow less real
the online harassment fucking sucks but that's not the stuff I'm talking about, I'm talking about the spread of harmful ideas like "kinksters shouldn't be allowed at pride"
"women who like m/m content are fetishizers, and if they say they're trans they're lying, trans people only exist in this very specific way that I find acceptable"
Hamlet 3.3.87
: yeah, i never said this doesn't happen. like i was pretty staunchly disgusted with anti shit while i was in genshintwt but having been on the other side of things now through the crimes of like, liking women, i'm kind of embittered about both sides in general. i understand bad shit happens when bad people do things
though honestly i might just shrug and give up here because in all honestly i'm losing steam and i don't actually disagree with you much in the first place
fwiw i'm not angry or mad i realize i might come across as that, though i am somewhat frustrated because i feel like i'm not being understood which is always [waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah]
fwiw im coming from a fandom angle of i am surrounded by people who absolutely hate women and you can tell which is like. lord help me i may kill someone today
lol. lmaobecause I hadn't actually seen examples of the specific "fujoshi are the BAD mlm likers" thing before now, but now that I have they all smell like it's just straight up borrowing the 4chan anime dude usage of fujo to be mad about girls liking those girl animes with boys that are too unmanly sexy and are for girlswhat CLOWNi am surrounded by people who absolutely hate women and you can tellwhich is like. lord help me i may kill someone today