This has to be the most essay comment I’ve seen on this site but I read the entire thing and I agree completely. I’m panromantic and being a pretty feminine looking trans guy people just assume that I’m a girl which is quite frustrating when I’m trying to date people especially men. They just assume I’m some weird cross dressing gay freak who wants to trick them into dating me. This makes it really hard to bring it up and tell them the way I identify because I’m scared of being rejected. I’ve had people who curse at me for making them believe I was a girl, I’ve had people who fetishize me, and I’ve had people who say they accept me but they still call me their girlfriend. Many of them are scared of dating me cause it would make them gay so far I haven’t found one guy who has actually liked me for me. Many of them can’t look past my appearance and gender to actually get to know me it sucks how they just assume I’m like this just to trick them into liking me but yeah sorry for ranting but I just hate how lgbt relationships are fantasied
So there really are signs of what intelligent life on this site lol! Thank you for sharing your opinion, I think a lot of the younger audience, who are also usually heterosexual, needed to see this. I don’t think they truly see the reality of being LGBT. Also, it’s true how this is becoming an epidemic for young girls and your comment delves deeper into Xiao Yi’s explanation. Anyhow, I’m really happy I came across this comment! There needs to be more like this <3
They're bashing the author because they don't want to admit is the truth and that a lot of them are exactly like that, they don't want to admit that their views on gays relationships are based on a fetish and that they prioritize their fetish over respecting the LGBT community.
Everytime I point something wrong (in a nice way, not throwing hate) in a yaoi/shounen-ai because is disrespectful to gay people and is obviously wrote that way for an author who see gay people as a fetish (like treating the "uke" as a woman even if he identifies himself as a male) I get a lot of hate and angry responses of fujoshis who don't care for gay people more than for their fetish.
I mean, is not wrong that you want to write yaoi/shonen-ai but it wouldn't kill you to just be a tiny more respectful towards the LGBT community would it? Is really not that hard.
thank u for putting it here and very well put especially the fetishization of lgbt+ ppl. i also really loved that xiao yi addressed it and we know this is directed for wang wang but its also a way to inform the viewers/fans and i love that djun made it like that. fetishization of lgbt+ ppl is a really common problem in the bl/gl fandom in where other ppl sees fujoshis/fudanshis as trash. even tho that term means entirely different, mostly for other ppl outside the bl/gl fandom, they view it as a negative thing. ive seen ppl being attacked on twitter just because they identified themselves as a fujo/fudan, its really messy.
Okay, so I personally don't understand why some people are bashing the author for including Xiao Yi's speech. I thought it was great, probably one of the few rare instances in which fetishization of LGBT people, particularly gay men, due to the popularization of the BL/yaoi genre gets discussed. And the way it was discussed was pretty good! Because by using Wang Wang as the archetype for what most people would associate as the "fujoshi," I would say that Djun does exaggerate her behavior to really make her feel probably what most gay men feel when confronted with a person that does fetishize them simply for being gay: annoyance. I'm a lesbian, so my views aren't always align with gay men in terms of romantic endeavors, but I can at least have an understanding in the realm of fetishization because in my personal life, I have had men - particularly straight men - who sees me as nothing more than a walking semi-desirable sex fantasy with another woman (to put it in that terminology lol). And Wang Wang is doing that towards Yuyang and Li Huan, seeing them as a real life fantasy explored without taking in considerations of their very personal struggles and viewpoints. We must also understand that while she does mean well, she's doing it from a very selfish standpoint like Xiao Yi said, that it was done out of her own self satisfaction rather than the party involved.
Such a behavior isn't harmful in terms of fictitious enjoyment but once you take it out of the realm of fiction does it gets "icky." Here's a really good excerpt on the issue that I found, and while it doesn't use the terminology yaoi or BL and instead referencing the slash community, the sentiment still stands:
"I’m not speaking from atop a horse. I had breakfast in a hotel a few months ago and saw two college-aged guys at the next table talking, like young people do, loudly enough to grab my attention. They were holding hands and making plans for the day and sharing dumb Internet jokes, and one of the boys had love bites all around his neck. I haven’t considered college boys sexy since junior high, thank you very much, but those hickeys set something off in my brain, and suddenly I was wondering things about these boys’ sex life together. Inside my head, a voice was singing, “They’re so cuuuuuuuuuute!”
I don’t believe that any single fantasy is innately wrong, but my little departure into those boys’ private lives was indicative of a dangerous pattern of thought. To many people, it often seems that women in the slash community have decided that “gay sex” is always sexy, that queer is always cute, and that we can take ownership of the gay male experience by writing about it and reading each other’s writing.
I briefly mentioned this issue in something that got passed around Tumblr a couple times, and I received a number of private and public messages from people claiming (it’s the Internet, so who knows) to be gay men who had wanted to share unpleasant experiences from their participation in the slash community. Some personal friends echoed these complaints. Specifically, these men indicated that straight or bisexual women had repeatedly asked overly personal questions about their sex lives, treated them like adorable puppies instead of humans, and attempted to co-opt the gay male experience or even elevate allies over actual gay men."