(Fair warning: it’s been a day and I am tired, so I am not guaranteeing spotlessly outlined and supported discourse here, but have some thoughts anyway .:)
Today I saw a post going around in explanation & support of the prevalence of slash writing/reading amongst women in fandom, and I understood a lot of what it was getting at. I’ve written more than enough of it myself to spend half of the essay kind of wryly nodding along. Tangentially, though, it also made me marvel again at how in Critical Role circles, so many people jumped right on board with the Percy/Vex relationship even if slash was usually their thing. It pretty clearly made a difference that this show had a vibrant, interesting, engaging female character involved, whose ownership of her own sexuality (often kind of a loaded phrase, especially when it’s getting thrown around by male writers) was not only confident and take-charge but downright playful. She was evidently enjoying herself, and so was Percy, and it’s amazing how much such a simple thing helps. But what I think is also interesting, and somewhat unique to the circumstances of the show, is that this came out of a collaborative creative exercise. This wasn’t the result of a single author’s idea or fantasy; this wasn’t something you could say was an exclusive product of either the male or female gaze. This was the work of two people who both brought things to the story and supported each other’s arcs in general along with the relationship specifically. And it showed. I think some of that mutual effort even sneaked into the characterization despite themselves, which is to say “despite Taliesin’s tendency to shit-talk Percy every chance he gets.” 😉 (Compare any of those comments to how Percy acted with Vex when it really mattered. Specifically, when it really mattered to her.) To borrow a quote, they really did fill in each other’s gaps in a lot of ways.
And then in the face of all that you got fans saying things aloud like “omg, I actually care about a het relationship, what the hell” and I’m still sitting here thinking, “It’s funny how that actually can work when the character dynamics aren’t completely fucked up, isn’t it…”
(There’s probably a related conversation to be had about Vaxleth, how that developed, and the amount of attention it got, especially in relation to how attached – in a much more typical way – fandom got to the idea of Vax and Gilmore, but again I say “I am tired” and will save that one for later. 🙂
What was the rule again? The amount of slash produced for any given fandom is inversely proportional to the percentage of engaging and complex female characters? Hence why most anime fandoms are full of slash, and critical role kind of isn’t….
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, too. Like, every now and then someone new wanders into the tag, probably coming from a slash-writing or -reading background themselves, looks around, and is like, “wait a second, why are all the most popular pairings het? Why is no one shipping Percy and Vax? This fandom is weird.”
Which really, really just goes to illustrate, like you pointed out, how rare it is to have a complex, playful, and sexy dynamic with a female character who has actual agency in it. Suddenly the het-ness doesn’t even matter, the ship is just so much fun.
(Also Percy will forever exist in the conflict between Taliesin convincing himself Percy’s a bad person, while also doing everything in his power to make sure Vex gets the focus and attention she deserves. People in general and Taliesin in particular seem to think we’re all just liking Percy because we’re conditioned to like fucked up, tragic, revenge-obsessed assholes and overlook their every flaw. Fuck that noise. We like Percy because of the way he got over his shit and the way he treated Vex.)
Overdressed & Underappreciated 