Mayor of Meme Town - ==>

girls literally never get written.

You...are trolling, right?

Either that or you have never actually read any fanfiction in this fandom

right?

Seriously, if slashers could just take that one moment's consideration where they're incorporating a dude character in their story, ask themselves "hey, could a girl work just as well in this role?", and then choose the girl, this wouldn't be a problem.

How much John/Karkat do you read? Because I read a good bit of it and I hardly ever see anything about John being the only one to accept him or his blood color. Blood color is brought up occasionally but it's typically from Karkat's POV and, let's face it, he still rips on himself in canon even after everyone already knows and doesn't seem to care much.

NA -- that's fair enough. I don't mind the ~only the other half of the ship is there for him~ thing because that's a pretty popular trope in any ship fic. But yeah, ignoring the female characters when they're just as relevant as support characters is a problem.

I think you have two problems here.

1) slash
2) ooc fics

Certainly these things are not mutually exclusive but they aren't mutually inclusive, either. You can have slash fics that are not out of character.

I'm absolutely with you 100% on hating out of character fics. I would be disgusted if I read a John/Karkat fic that went like that. I would also be disgusted by a het fic that went similarly. Or a femmeslash fic.

If I were going to write your closing sentence over again, I would reword it though:

"It's a lot of convoluted OOC bullshit concocted specifically to make the characters behave the way you want them to."

Because I think John/Karkat can exist without erasing any female characters. I think it can exist without being ooc. Does that mean everyone writes it that way? Sadly, no. But that could be said for any pairing.

Except they are written. Really, it's not that hard to find. Do you even read slash fic at all?

Okay just stepping in to note that the kink meme is not all of fandom or even the center of fandom. It's popular, yes, but no more so than AO3 and tumblr. You can't just troll through the kinkmeme (which has a lot of quality, I admit, but is often lowest common denominator due to the nature of it's function) and be like: "THIS REPRESENTS ALL OF FANDOM 100% TRUE REALITY."

If you line up the most popular John/Karkat fics in the fandom - urbanAnchorite's stuff, half_life_wolf, Promstuck, Never Trust A Troll, Mostly Harmless - or look at the really popular artists like shelby or geromy or shatterstag or owlpellets or inverts you find stories in which the girls appear in large roles as well as fans who adore the girls and draw/write them pretty frequently.

There is a subset of Homestuck fandom that is only concerned with slash/male characters and there are quite a few John/Karkat shippers in that leg of fandom. But there are also Dave/John, Dave/Tavros, Gamzee/Tavros and Sollux/Eridan shippers ect. and none of them ever get the shit that the John/Karkat fans do, esp. since most of the John/Karkat fans who actually get shit are the ones who hang out in the main part of fandom and write/draw/love the girls. The slash only fans are off in their own little corner doing their only little thing and never have to deal with these complaints or this stigma.

So it's inherently bad and wrong to ship privledged people (white males) together, regardless of whether it's a canonical/plausible ship or not. Okay, got it.

Have fun waging war on something that's been a cornerstone of female fandom since the 1960's and Star Trek. Maybe you should try fighting forms of sexism that are actually hurting people in real life?

Slash in general is the problem.

Slash in general is the problem.

Slash in general is the problem.

Slash in general is the problem.

Slash in general is the problem.

Okay, are you serious? There is a certain problematic mindset that goes on within subsets of the slash community that I'm quite familiar with, but that does not mean the very act of slashing male characters itself is inherently problematic. The misogyny that goes on in slash circles is very similar to the bullshit that goes on in het circles as well (in other fandoms at least).

But you're also missing my point which is that these complaints and this paternalistic "but dear don't you understand shipping two boys together helps the patriarchy because some fans behave very very badly" attitude is rarely even lobbied against the people who actually do behave badly. The reason a lot of John/Karkat shippers complain is because it's mostly the ones who ship het, ship femmeslash and like the girls who get the brunt of all this anti-popular ship backlash wrapped up in feminist critique and they get annoyed because they're being judged on implicitly moral grounds for things they aren't actually doing.

And it is just popular ship backlash otherwise people would be complaining more about all the graphic revenge fantasies Gamzee/Tavros fans used to come up with re: Vriska or that a lot of Dave/John writers don't seem to realize Rose and Jade exist (up to the author of their most popular fic admitting that she doesn't like them) or that there are Eridan/Sollux fans who hate Feferi desperately despite the fact that their entire ship hinges on her existence. I never see anyone talking about that shit when discussions about the HS slash fandom comes up except briefly in passing because everyone's more interested in being buttmad about John/Karkat even daring to exist like it's so unusual for a "most popular" ship to emerge in fandom.

My point was that it is not morally bad to slash and it's not morally bad to like John/Karkat and the "problem" of the female characters being erased or bashed in fic and art is not the fault of the people who usually end up on the receiving end of discussions like this. If you want to discuss the problems in the Homestuck slash community, then discuss them. I'm not a terribly big fan of it myself. But at least identify what the actual problem is. :/

I have read through a lot of this meme and respond anon pretty frequently so I'm aware of the discussions that go on here and while what you've said is true, the vast majority of the criticism and tooth-gnashing lately has been directed solely at John/Karkat.

The point of this thread was: why do John/Karkat shippers complain about the hate they get lololol they are the most popular pairing and also they deserve it for their shitty sexist pairing lololol

And I was trying to explain that the reason they get upset is because accusations like the ones in this thread do not apply to the mainstream of John/Karkat shippers who most certainly do produce fanworks about the female characters considering John/Karkat is also really popular among het and femmeslash fans but the mainstream are the ones who get all the nasty backtalking about it. No one takes this shit to the door of people who write creepy, Vriska-hating, yaoi-seme-Karkat fills on the kinkmeme. They whine about Shelby not liking their pairings.

You took my points individually and interpreted them as an attempt to derail when I was actually only trying to point out that there is a very large part of the Homestuck fandom that is not at all girl-inclusive. The problem with John/Karkat is that it has a foot in both worlds: the sexist slashers love it, but so do a lot of other people who have nothing to do with the problematic trend we're talking about here. Using it as shorthand for the ~*~prime example of problematic pairings~*~ when its popularity is partly due to the fact that it appeals to everyone is intellectually dishonest.

I find these conversations incredibly frustrating because while I agree with a lot of the issues re: the sudden surge in nonsensical m/m pairings and the lack of femmeships that aren't Rose/Kanaya and the sexism in parts of the slash community, there seems to be this oddly willful ignorance here about the actual composition of the Homestuck fandom and what people actually ship/write/draw in it. Either that, or people here actually do only read the kinkmeme. In which case, I would suggest you stop reading the kinkmeme because it's making you miserable.

there we go ladies and gents it has come full circle, slash is now problematic no matter what other ships you ship simultaneously

and if you're the same anon for above cavilling for hetero ships because it 'empowers' the female character you are sounding way too close to GET ALL THIS HOMO OUT OF MY EYES esp with your 'john is no homosexual'

unless you're the type who wrote three hundred words of femslash once where two female characters bloodlessly held hands and felt SO ALT just look at all this brutal f/f where nobody fucks because god damn most types i've ever seen use the word 'whitecock' have never written anything with two girls together that didn't read like they were doing it out of sheer smugass martyrdom

guy/guy not necessarily a recipe for white cock in a fandom that gives equal weight to the bookend moirail ship of kanaya<>karkat and if they dump all karkat's friendships they're generally not good writers anyway, so why are you judging this ship by its lowest common denominator rather than the stuff touted as good examples of the pairing? because it's that that's the measure of a fandom, not its dreck.

Sorry. It certainly wasn't my intent. I'm uncomfortable carrying on arguments like this anon for various reasons that are difficult to explain and probably mean I shouldn't bother in the first place. If anything, I figure saying stuff publicly damages my rep more than sways people to my opinion so I didn't really think anything of it. I apologize for my terrible etiquette and will keep my opinions anon in the future.