Musings: Female characters in fic

Is anybody else tired of reading fics where the women (protagonist or not) are treated like shit? Because I am. Even if it’s for the plot, or the angst, or the romance, i hate reading about a women being rendered impotent again and again for the narrative and then have only as recompense a romance or a mildly happy ending, as if that were satisfying enough? Most times, those romances even start from that situation where the women has been powerless and I hate it with all my soul, I can’t stand it. I think, oh this fic has genderbend whatever character, it’ll be interesting to see how it changes, and what it changes it’s that it becomes an excuse to emotionally and psychologically torture those characters. It ceases to be about them as a person with some interesting studies of gender, to be about how horrible is to be a woman. It’s not, it shouldn’t be horrible, it shouldn’t be a synonym with being perceived or treated as leaser, it shouldn’t mean to be that you’re even more vulnerable to the evil in the world.

 I understand I have to only click and close the page, and most times I do; others I hold out hope that the suffering will bring a reckoning and then I’m let down again. I understand these stories are, more likely than not, how other people deal with their issues. I respect that. I’m talking about how they affect me, and if somebody want to talk about how they feel with me because I don’t have many who would understand in the real world.

I’ve never been specially oppressed for being a woman, living as a middle-class white girl in Spain, so I guess that privilege is why those fic don’t work for me, but I think that’s why it infuriates me even more. It’s a deep understanding of “that could have been me, if I were born in another country or some years in the past or in a retrograde family”; I shouldn’t have to feel lucky for being a woman who has escaped what shouldn’t exist. If I escaped it, why I have to deal in every damn piece of fiction with it. (Why I have to watch the news about murdering and reaping pigs?Why are still my sisters unable to be free in more than half the known world?) Why are people unable of crating AUs without misogyny and inequality? Sometimes I can appreciate a thoughtful critic of those issues, if they are handed well, but the way most times it becomes an excuse for wangst? I can’t. I really can’t. And really, I already know it’s shit you don’t have to convince me of it.

I’m writing this because I’ve just read a fic in where in a world where the protg is female, she is forced to marry one man who despises the protag (or so she thinks, and he does nothing to dispel the notion), and after getting pregnant with his child, and then plotting his murder (look i never said she was a saint or that he didn’t have certain reasons to hate her) he discovers she is pregnant, and because she has hide it, in the beginning (to not foster vain hopes, to still retain a bit of her independence after being tied with someone who she loathes an is loathed in turn being treated like a criminal) amenaces with killing her and the kid in that same moment, burying her alive, was my damn take on the scene, in the same tombs where his mother was ritually sacrificed after his father death. I exploded. Okey, I just wanted to kill that damn character. The disregard, the way he just implies with everything that her place is to be dead if she is not the perfect spouse and even then, that she only serves to be a wife. Gods how I loathed it all. I started crying. Should have looked more closely the warnings at the end of the chapter, or stopped reading a few chapters ago when I saw what attitude had the story towards its protag. That because she was morally corrupt the only way to be redeemed was to learn to be happily married with that man. The fic didn’t say so textually, but I can read between the lines. It was an attack not on the villainy of the protag but on daring to be a woman and a villain too, it felt like. Or using her femininity to punish her badness which felt equally bad.

I guess I understand now why people with other issues are so sensible to certain portrayals in fic or novels. Gods I hope to avoid making people feel so attacked by anything I write or say. This taught me empathy if nothing else, but really. I have always been fed up with these kind of fic (one of the principal reasons I can’t stand ABO or anything about pregnancies too) but today it was the gota que colmó el vaso, and I needed to share it before exploding uselessly in my home.

And really, fuck the patriarchy, and capitalism, and all those other shitty -ism, and up with feminism and equality!!