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Draco in Leather Pants
“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.
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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.