Draco in Leather Pants
Feb. 2nd, 2023 08:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynling“Anthro Bowser in Leather Pants” is the first story I posted on AO3 when I joined back in 2012. I was sitting in a friend’s apartment, and we had way too much to drink, and I told her that I had a crush on Godzilla.
These days, “having a crush on Godzilla” has become almost normcore, but at the time we both thought this was very, very silly. My friend was like, How would having sex with Godzilla even work, and I was like, He’d have to be Anthro Godzilla, and she was like, Do you mean Bowser from Super Mario. I remember that we laughed until we were literally crying, but then I made a point of waking up bright and early the next morning (with no hangover, isn’t it great to be young) in order to write “Anthro Bowser in Leather Pants.”
And let me tell you. I don’t get kudos on that story every day, or even most days, but it sure keeps getting kudos more than ten years later.
Anyway, I was trying to explain the concept of “Draco in Leather Pants” to someone yesterday afternoon, and I had to fall back on the TV Tropes page: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DracoInLeatherPants
You can almost hear the disdain dripping off the words on this page. Every once in a while I forget that people like this exist, and it’s such a shame. Like, first of all, you’re missing out on a lot of fun if you don’t enjoy villain characters; and second, the absolute misogyny of this perspective is overwhelming; and third, these are the same people who take Batman seriously. Batman. Come on.
Also, I noticed the two hosts of the Dark Souls podcast slipping into this attitude when they talked about the game Hades, and I was like… Did no one ever tell them they’d have more fun if they didn’t insist on clinging to their weird adolescent “girls are gross” sexism? Like sure, ~~~Dark Souls~~~ is serious and mature (lmao), but if a game has art that looks like something that might be posted on Tumblr, then that’s childish and weird and cringe.
I think maybe I’d like to write more about this later this week, because it’s so obviously ridiculous. Or, I mean, it’s obvious to me, but I don’t think it’s so obvious to a lot of people who would go out of their way to say that they’re not sexist. Like, they would proclaim loud and clear that they don’t hate “girls and women” as a category, but then they have nothing but disdain for subcultural spaces that are primarily occupied by girls and women. And I don’t think they even realize what they’re doing. Like I said, it's a shame.
These days, “having a crush on Godzilla” has become almost normcore, but at the time we both thought this was very, very silly. My friend was like, How would having sex with Godzilla even work, and I was like, He’d have to be Anthro Godzilla, and she was like, Do you mean Bowser from Super Mario. I remember that we laughed until we were literally crying, but then I made a point of waking up bright and early the next morning (with no hangover, isn’t it great to be young) in order to write “Anthro Bowser in Leather Pants.”
And let me tell you. I don’t get kudos on that story every day, or even most days, but it sure keeps getting kudos more than ten years later.
Anyway, I was trying to explain the concept of “Draco in Leather Pants” to someone yesterday afternoon, and I had to fall back on the TV Tropes page: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DracoInLeatherPants
You can almost hear the disdain dripping off the words on this page. Every once in a while I forget that people like this exist, and it’s such a shame. Like, first of all, you’re missing out on a lot of fun if you don’t enjoy villain characters; and second, the absolute misogyny of this perspective is overwhelming; and third, these are the same people who take Batman seriously. Batman. Come on.
Also, I noticed the two hosts of the Dark Souls podcast slipping into this attitude when they talked about the game Hades, and I was like… Did no one ever tell them they’d have more fun if they didn’t insist on clinging to their weird adolescent “girls are gross” sexism? Like sure, ~~~Dark Souls~~~ is serious and mature (lmao), but if a game has art that looks like something that might be posted on Tumblr, then that’s childish and weird and cringe.
I think maybe I’d like to write more about this later this week, because it’s so obviously ridiculous. Or, I mean, it’s obvious to me, but I don’t think it’s so obvious to a lot of people who would go out of their way to say that they’re not sexist. Like, they would proclaim loud and clear that they don’t hate “girls and women” as a category, but then they have nothing but disdain for subcultural spaces that are primarily occupied by girls and women. And I don’t think they even realize what they’re doing. Like I said, it's a shame.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-03 03:47 am (UTC)Attitudes like this are so annoying to me. They just seem so... hm, for lack of a better word, anti-fun. Cringe is relative, but this school of thought really would have you think that even the slightest suggestion of creative expression is objectively terrible. How dare Hades have a bright, vibrant art style. Dark Souls is beautiful, but not every game has to have fifty (and only fifty) shades of gritty photorealistic grimdark in order to have artistic merit.
(You see this sort of thing all the darn time in visual novel subreddits etc., where so many people will aggressively opt to play games like Higurashi and Umineko with replacement sprites rather than the originals drawn by the games' author, as these original sprites apparently look too weird and childish to be "taken seriously".)
I've known people to never even go near the Artists' Alley at cons because, in their words, "fan art isn't real art".
I'm super pissed off by this current trend of reducing art to this dichotomy where either it's cringe and disposable, or ~high art~ and therefore ~valuable~. Most of the time, the art being thrown into the former category is made by girls and women, and I agree with you, I don't think these people do it consciously, but somehow the lack of self-awareness feels more insidious to me (although I'm not sure I can articulate why, I might have to think about it some more). I don't care if people don't like things, but there is something deeply conservative about an entire type of art being completely dismissed because it falls outside the very narrow box of what some self-proclaimed critic considers acceptable art.
I would love to read anything else you might have to say on this topic, as it's one I'm quite passionate about! So if you do end up writing more about it later this week, I would love to read it. In the meanwhile, I've tabbed and bookmarked Anthro Bowser In Leather Pants with every intention of reading it, because the title is delightful and the story of its inception is so delightful and I have always had the softest spot for Bowser, whether he's being evilly villainous or just playing tennis. :D
no subject
Date: 2023-02-04 09:38 pm (UTC)I KNOW PEOPLE LIKE THIS TOO. They're bffs with the "fanfic is for losers" crowd, and I feel so bad for them. Like, what did they see on LiveJournal that traumatized them so badly that they formed an opinion and haven't deviated from it in... Wow, it's been more than a decade since this attitude was mainstream, I think.
I also feel that there was a corrosive undercurrent of misogyny in the culture of the 2000s. These days, I'm ambivalent about labeling a piece of media as "problematic," but there was something sinister going on with the music and movies coming out of the US and the UK around ten to twenty years ago. I'm not sure what sort of crisis of masculinity was being expressed by sentiments like "Twilight is gay," but people sure weren't shy about expressing it.
I feel a little bad for elder Millennials in particular, many of whom understand that sexism in fandom is toxic but carry around the prejudices they unconsciously absorbed when they were teenagers and college students. That sort of nonsense is really difficult to unlearn.
Anyway, I haven't yet played Umineko, but I think the art style of Higurashi is one of its primary selling points. People on Reddit are entitled to their opinion, but their opinion is wrong. Haters gonna hate.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-03 07:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-03 08:45 pm (UTC)The person I was speaking with made this exact same observation. What he said is that, as an immigrant to the United States from Afghanistan, he spent most of his teen years in the late 1990s and early 2000s being very angry at the way he and his family were treated. He said he had trouble identifying with characters who were all good and all light and all friendship all the time, especially when they were assumed to be on the side of "justice." For him, there was an appeal to seeing "the bad guy" in video games and anime being actually very cool and badass, so he ended up clicking with characters like Sephiroth and Big Boss from Metal Gear Solid.
This guy is 100% straight and had never so much as heard about fanfic; but, speaking personally as someone who does write fanfic about villains, I think that being able to care for these "broken" characters is like being able to care about what’s "broken" in yourself and even learning to embrace it, figuratively or literally.
In other words: You are so, so right about this. Thank you for bringing it up!