I'm probably gonna get yelled at for saying this but sometimes something isn't a real problem in fandom, you just learned a Japanese word describing a general fandom practice and got scared and decided it meant 'The Bad Ones' of that practice

Meta
Title:	untitled (first sentence is the title of this article)
Creator:	raptorific
Date(s):	14 August 2023
Medium:	Tumblr Post
Fandom:	pan-fandom
Topic:	Western media fandom
External Links:	I’m probably gonna get yelled at for saying this but..., Archived version on Tumblr
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

I'm probably gonna get yelled at for saying this but sometimes something isn't a real problem in fandom, you just learned a Japanese word describing a general fandom practice and got scared and decided it meant 'The Bad Ones' of that practice is the first part of an untitled meta essay posted to Tumblr by raptorific regarding fujoshi, the fanworks they create, and how they are perceived in western media fandom as of 2023.

The most common variant of this post includes an addition by bigbigbigtruck in their reblog, which was more seen than not by Tumblr users. Fujoshi meta referenced in reblogs include The possibilities of research on fujoshi in Japan by Midori Suzuki, Boys' Love: The History and Transformation of BL in Asia by The Japan Foundation, New York and the rise of the danmei fandom by ColeyDoesThings

Topics Discussed in Meta and Reblogs

• Fandom terminology and its origins
• Fannish Drift
• Racism towards Japanese fans and Japanese-media fandom
• Why Slash (or in this case, "Why BL")
• "Fujoshi" and related terms used by transphobic fans
• Sexuality of Female fans in fandom and how it is shamed in fandom spaces
• 2000s western anime and manga fandom
• Anti-BL sentiments by authors in the queer YA scene

Essay

I'm probably gonna get yelled at for saying this but sometimes something isn't a real problem in fandom, you just learned a Japanese word describing a general fandom practice and got scared and decided it meant "The Bad Ones" of that practice

Whenever you see someone being like "we don't mind when women enjoy or even create m/m content, we just hate fujoshis" you are being racist. If you mean "I hate the way some female fans treat gay men like fetish objects" then say that, and we can have a conversation based on that, but "fujoshi" is, I cannot stress this enough, just a word for any woman who likes M/M content, for better or worse. It may have started out as a reclaimed insult (by the way, the insult was based on "liking gay shit makes you perverted and sinful," not "please respect the humanity of gay men") but it does not make a distinction between The Good Ones and The Bad Ones. You just decided to True Scotsman it and that the English word for that should describe The Good Ones and the Japanese word for it should describe The Bad Ones

Same goes for the people I saw just the other day whose discord server explicitly disallowed "Yaoi" but said that M/M content was allowed. What they meant was "M/M content is allowed as long as it isn't pornographic and fetishistic." What they actually said was "M/M content is allowed, but M/M content is strictly forbidden," and expected you to understand that the Japan-Adjacent term has porn/fetish connotations while the English-language term for THE SAME THING refers to the "normal, non-perverted" version.

It'd be like if you used the word "cartoons" to refer to all Family-Friendly animation, regardless of style or country of origin, whether it's Japanese or American or French or whatever, and used the term "anime" to refer to all animated pornography regardless of style or country of origin. There's plenty of animated pornography that isn't Japanese! There's plenty of anime that's not pornographic! But this is the sort of thing you do when you say shit like "obviously women can read stories about gay men, but NO FUJOSHIS"

Reblog by bigbigbigtruck

THANK YOU

i don’t do fandom these days—in large part because so many people can’t behave and do shit like this—but anti-asian racism AND sex negativity has surged high in original m/m comics and literature too and it’s super creepy to see coming from self-professed progressives

Additions by raptorific

There were several additions by raptorific in the notes, most replying to other fans directly. A few became back and forths, largely regarding origins of terms.

Screencap attached to this addition, and this meta directly addresses it. Circa. 15 Aug. 2023.

So like, I understand where you're coming from with these tags and it is terrible that people are calling trans men that (first and foremost because Fujoshi is a gendered term that decidedly does not apply to trans men or in fact any kind of men, the use of "Fujoshi" on trans men is intended to misgender them as women)

But the thing I need to make absolutely clear is that even if nobody ever called trans men Fujoshi, even if it was only ever directed at the cringiest and most privileged straightest whitest women in fandom you've ever seen, it is still wrong, and sexist, and homophobic, and racist. Yes, even if it is one of Those Ones.

The fact that it's become a favorite plaything of a different group of bigots and is now being directed at a group of men it doesn't apply to is entirely irrelevant. Even when used exactly as you described it before it got picked up by transphobes, it's still racist to have the Cringe And Bad women in fandom get the Japanese word for "women into slash shipping" while the Cool And Appropriate women in fandom just get to be "women into slash shipping."

The issue you're bringing up doesn't really apply here because the problem in your issue is "transphobes see trans men as women" and the issue in my post is "fandom nerds see asian people as primarily a Porn Thing." Addressing my problem wouldn't solve or even change yours, because transphobes are perfectly comfortable misgendering trans people in English, too.

Again, absolutely terrible that trans men are catching strays on this one! But like. This is a post about a general attitude in both media and western society writ large to associate Asian people, languages, and cultures as intrinsically sexual, pornographic, and predatory, and how this is reflected in the fandom practice of using Japanese fandom terms instead of English ones to convey "Perversion" and Terminal Horniness.

And I know you obviously aren't saying the anti-asian racism only matters because trans people are taking splash damage from it, so please don't think I'm explaining all this as a lecture to you, your tags just reminded me that it's worth saying that this practice in particular is still bad even if it WERE, in practice, ONLY applied to The Bad Apples

Reblogs

for what it's worth, yaoi is a very old doujinshi term (originally meaning something similar to "plot? what plot?", it was an abbreviation for "no climax, no point, no meaning") that is super out of date and really not in modern use with regards to the actual genre. boys' love/BL is the broad genre term for all M/M romance-focused content, for anything from "high school boys chastely holding hands" to "hardcore omegaverse smut"

so technically yaoi does have implications that "M/M content" doesn't... but it's used so broadly in english-speaking fandom that people apply it to any japanese M/M... and then decide that that means it means the Bad Thing anyway and denigrate it for that. (and BL also gets treated as the Bad Toxic Genre compared to Our Wholesome MLM Romance too)

#fandom bullshit#otherwise a very good post but#as much as i think we can all a good pass the yaoi joke#the linguistic drift when it comes to people actually trying to seriously talk about BL (badly)#is also really frustrating

I don't even understand how the meaning of these terms got SO SKEWED to the point of queer people and women even using the terms that way?

I know a HUGE part of it was terfs, as they've admitted multiple times that they use fandom to recruit people and many transmascs discovered themselves through m/m content, but like...one quick google search leads to multiple sources about the origin of these terms.(...)

I'm still looking for the Japanese-language derogatory term for a dude who is likely hetero and fetishizing WLW. Is that not at least equally as much a problem to be discussed? Why is there no term for that...or for either, and in English? I'm finding an intersection of racism and misogyny, here, and one that relies on decontexualizing the term and its works from the contexts and the statistical findings (there are gay men who write yaoi while using feminine pen names, and a non-zero percent of gay men who read yaoi in addition to or even preferrentially to bara.)(...)

Omg thank you for pointing this out. I never noticed.

When people started using these terms in english fandom spaces they were mostly used by non asian fans who were doing weird japanese fetishism. Guys on message boards saying I'm not a weeb I'm an otaku where 95% of the time that means they're a white guy who wanna move to japan so they can marry an imagined stereotype of a submissive japanese woman.

I do think the way these words were mostly popularised by weirdos explains a lot of what you described but it absolutely doesn't excuse it. Let's not let fetishists poison our relationship with language you guys.(...)

If you’re calling out a problem English speaking women do then call them fag hags. We had words for it before. People are just to scared to say it so they’re using a japanese word that has a different connotation to try to skirt around having an English conversation about it. Fujoshi culture is a a part of a wlw culture in Japan. Straight women who fetishize gay men are a completely different issue.

….and, for those either too young to have been around then or just lucky enough not to have run into it:

At least in certain circles, in the ‘90s and early 2000s, “anime” was absolutely seen as being all pornographic, while “cartoons” or “animation” were the terms for SFW animated content.

Was thinking about this post again and I think another victim of the ‘the English word is good but the Japanese word is the Dirty Bad version of it’ thing is doujin/doujinshi. Doujin is literally just fan produced content (primarily zines) but I keep seeing people act like it means porn only, and act like doujin events like Comiket are just porn conventions. Doujin stuff covers everything from zines, art books, fan-games, recipe books, cosplay photo collections, train photo collections, I even saw there was someone selling *fonts* they made at Comiket, but look at the kind of reactions you get when people say ‘-famous artist- started out as a doujin artist’ (even though most do…?) I know a lot of this is because the type of content that is typically scanned and distributed online/resold at ridiculous prices at western conventions tends to be the smut, but it still makes me sad when people act like this.

Meanwhile there’s plenty of 18+ zines out there created by western fans but no one acts like the word ‘zine’ automatically means something pornographic.

#^^THIS#queerness is not perverted#sex is not perverted#liking those things is not perverted#you do not need to justify liking x thing you feel ashamed of by distancing yourself from the ‘bad others’ who enjoy x ‘incorrectly’#it is hidden a manifestation of homophobia/sexism/racism etc (conservative purity culture)#it only perpetuates those ideas and hurts the ‘bad others’ who are people who’ve actually worked through that internalised bigotry#it doesn’t need to be a dichotomy#if sex makes you uncomfortable/ you want a space free of it that’s fine#but when it’s veiled bigotry and purity culture that will only hurt people so make sure your own motivations are clear

#yea back when i was pirating anime when i was 15#shonen ai jsut mean owo wholesome gay boys#and then yaoi was like 'more than kissing and holding hands' like stemy#and then you go on this webside back when the twitter people where here#and there'D be DISCOURSE abotu all shonen ai and yaoi content being vile and evil#and fetishising and bad#and you know the amount of people consuming male gay content#being queer women#geese louise#queer women i know that call themselves fujoshis for writing crack fics abotu anime boys#idk idk idk idk#in my defence its post 9pm and this post gave me Thought but i lost it

#just like what you like man as long as you’re not being weird to irl people about it#I’ve had so much anxiety as a fem person liking a mlm ship. it’s not worth it#be respectful to real people that’s what really matters

#moreover there are also fudanshi and fujin#so no fujoshis is both racist AND misogynistic#because it constructs SPECIFICALLY a category of Bad Women (which i repeat. does not exist)

#screaming this into the sun so it soaks up my lamentations and beams them right back into some of yalls stupid brains#the amount of discords ive been kicked from for defending this exact sentiment is crazy

#yep the internet at large not just fandom has this racist view that japan is uniquely perverted and pornographic#and also what i have seen within fandom is the automatic assumption that ANY japanese artist must secretly be a pedophile#this is something that was so insanely prevalent in the deltarune community#like. in your performative activism to look like the good guy you're just being...racist

Loosing my mind because genuinely I was under the impression because of how people used the words that fujoshi and yaoi just referred to gay fetish content. Thank you for the explanation and correction :) will recorrect the definition in my head.

#i have had bad experiences with creepy women when i identified as a gay man but yeah not sure what led me to believe that fujoshi was the#right term to use for that.#probably the mounds of lgbt discourse i used to get in#anyways also reblogging this for my moots#actually glad people explain and talk about this kind of stuff though becauze I’d have no idea otherwise ty OPs#also was anyone else ever in spaces where people thought yuri was a good thing but yaoi was bad#or was that just me idk

#i was at a convention panel and they described fujoshi as#“girls who fetishize yaoi”#in complete seriousness#and i.

i understand the message but in japan yaoi does mean porn. its an older term by now but it does mean porn. it was basically the japanese MLM/slash equivalent of "PWP". it got adopted into western fandom language to mean all MLM content. most japanese people will say BL (boy's love) rather than yaoi esp now adays. it is still dumb to say "no yaoi but MLM content is fine" because you should just say "no NSFW content" rather than yes, implying western stuff is automatically safe from porn

#the way this pervades like. professional writing spaces too lmao#I work in YA pub and uh. there are. Prominent Queer Authors who do this shit all the time#like. god forbid queer men express sexual interest in each other and god forbid that’s written by anyone who isn’t white lmao

#yeah like. the western distinction between yaoi and BL/shounen-ai is made up by us#they both mean the same thing#and i think it’s interesting that some people decided we needed a separate name for the sexual stuff#one that started out as a category to help people find things#and then became this term associated with people who are somehow uniquely nasty and sinful and untrustworthy#there’s literally nothing wrong with being horny#and nothing wrong with being horny in an appropriate space#and if worries me that new people in fandom are learning that there’s something sinful and wrong about their own sexuality from the get go

#remember when the take was that if you're a woman enjoying m/m content you're automatically fetishising it#because due to your gender it's “not for you”#all lesbian porn category style#interesting that they've allowed for this divide between Bad and Good#almost like the call is coming from inside the house......

#it will literally always be so crazy to me how people will point to how things are done in the west and be like#“see! this is the GOOD and MORAL way to go about it! because we're not being FREAKS like those in the EAST!”#and not see how blatantly white supremacist that is#our sacred m/m vs their sinful yaoi etc#the heartstopper writer pissed me off so bad i wont lie

#truth#Westerns stop taking words from foreign languages and talking over native speakers about meaning of those words pretty please#like if you really want to make yet another derogatory term for women with hobbies you don't approve of at least don't steal words#but actually maybe just give up on it altogether we have more serious problems than women enjoying fiction#knives has opinions