Uke hate

I've ranted a few times about this here but I'll be on it again because it's something that really bothers me:

to go straight to the point, people - mostly girls, considering that they are fundamentally, although not exclusively, the target audience of bl manga - are conditioned to repulse traits commonly attributed to femininity. we grow up being told that being sensitive, vulnerable and/or delicate, be it physically or mentally, is root for inferiority. take the phenomenon where women consider themselves superior because they're 'tough' and 'totally not like other girls!!', for example: it's a direct result of some men's undermining view of women and their femininity, and the perpetuation of that through their policing over other men - "boys can't be feminine! femininity relates to womanhood and womanhood is weakness!" so yes. we're kinda told to hate everything the majority associates to women from the very start, even when other genders should be free to express themselves however they want (but that's a different question).

because bl is predominantly made by (straight) women, their stories and the characters are written from a woman's perspective of what gay folks are supposed to be like. sometimes that ends up in a rather lacking representation. not always. it's just that they tend to apply that bottoming > submission > 'woman' of the relationship / topping > dominance > 'man' of the relationship formula that's... really fucked up and is not how gay relationships work at all. that happens a lot, though, and the author ends up portraying the uke through traits they associate to women. listen. feminine men are wonderful. but there's a huge difference between a gay male character that embraces his femininity and a gay male character upon whom the author projects the expectations of a straight relationship. the former is good representation; the latter is pure ignorance.

with that explained, some people here pull this bullshit of dismissing ukes for every single thing they do because 1. they believe """real""" men have to be cool and tough and ripped with an 8 pack (and they are wrong!); 2. they believe feminine traits makes lesser a men (again: wrong!), because they've been told femininity is restricted to women and, for that, women are weak.

it's true that, in some cases, it's really a matter of badly-written characters being obnoxious for the sake of drama. still, even then people are less likely to forgive a badly-written uke than a badly-written seme for all the reasons I cited above. the least they could do is get their heads out of their asses and learn to appreciate works where the authors do get their representation of gay couples, especially the ones with feminine characters, right.

thanks for coming to my ted talk.

I'm glad I'm not the only one

please hold more ted talks

I'm glad to have come to your ted talk pls invite me to more

okay but recently I saw an uke being hated on bc he liked the seme?? like isn't that the whole point of the story like wtf is he not allowed to like him??

rip all those typos dsfdhfh
I meant "male character who embraces" / "feminine traits make lesser a man" / etc sorry it's early