Sorry for jumping on an old comment, but I can relate to this so badly it's almost painful. My fandoms are just about all video games too, and...yeah. I totally feel your pain.
Dragon Age fandom is especially weird and frustrating to me, because the 'verse is so very female and queer-friendly, but the same tired heteronormative tropes keep coming up over and over again in the fandom, especially wrt Wardenshipping. I tend more towards queer polyshipping than straight up femslash in all my fandoms and DA is no different, but it gets really facepalmy to feel like some kind of wacky maverick just because my Warden isn't a) a fucking fem!Cousland b) in a monogamous het ship with Alistair (sorry, I've been flamed by one too many obnoxious fem!Cousland fans, can you tell? lolsob). Apparently a city elf mage in a quad with Alistair, Zev and Leliana is too much for some people to deal with, much less garden variety femslash. I'm an Anora/Cauthrien shipper and the general reaction I get to that is "whoa, I never thought of that, interesting!" Which frankly baffles me. Yeah, they don't really share any on-screen time, but Big Bad's Daughter/Big Bad's right-hand knight is a no-brainer to me, people slash dudes for much less all the time. But when it's two women, the ship is so weird and unusual to people. This in a fandom where dudes with little to no screen time/plot importance have whole fanclubs devoted to them (I'm looking at you, Cullen). I just don't get it.
And you would THINK it would have gotten better with DA2, since it's much less heteronormative in terms of the plot-centric romances, but everything I've seen is all LadyHawke/Anders all the time (with the occasional Anders!slash and Fenris creeping in second with either gender). I've been shipping the shit out of LadyHawke/Fenris/Isabela and it seems like I'm the only one--the only Isabela-centric fics I've seen have been male!Hawke/Isabela. And what about Aveline/Isabela? If they were guys, they would probably be the most popular slash pairing, the way they fuss and fight but are secretly best buds who are fond of each other. I've heard people say it's because of Aveline/Donnic being canon, but again, I don't see canon het ships getting in the way of dudeslash pairings. Makes my head hurt, it does.
In my experience, it really depends on the game/fandom though. I'm a YuRiPa shipper and I've never had trouble finding good fic for it. And in Tomb Raider fandom, femslash seems to be way more prevalent than het especially since the Crystal Dynamics reboot (Lara/Natla seems to be hella popular since Anniversary, and Lara/Amanda is also really popular, both ships are heavy on FoeYay which helps), but I think that's because it's one of those rare series where there's a comparative lack of compelling dude characters. In most cases though, video games seem to be worse off than traditional western media fandoms where femslash is concerned. Which makes me a sad panda.
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Date: 2011-05-26 07:15 pm (UTC)Dragon Age fandom is especially weird and frustrating to me, because the 'verse is so very female and queer-friendly, but the same tired heteronormative tropes keep coming up over and over again in the fandom, especially wrt Wardenshipping. I tend more towards queer polyshipping than straight up femslash in all my fandoms and DA is no different, but it gets really facepalmy to feel like some kind of wacky maverick just because my Warden isn't a) a fucking fem!Cousland b) in a monogamous het ship with Alistair (sorry, I've been flamed by one too many obnoxious fem!Cousland fans, can you tell? lolsob). Apparently a city elf mage in a quad with Alistair, Zev and Leliana is too much for some people to deal with, much less garden variety femslash. I'm an Anora/Cauthrien shipper and the general reaction I get to that is "whoa, I never thought of that, interesting!" Which frankly baffles me. Yeah, they don't really share any on-screen time, but Big Bad's Daughter/Big Bad's right-hand knight is a no-brainer to me, people slash dudes for much less all the time. But when it's two women, the ship is so weird and unusual to people. This in a fandom where dudes with little to no screen time/plot importance have whole fanclubs devoted to them (I'm looking at you, Cullen). I just don't get it.
And you would THINK it would have gotten better with DA2, since it's much less heteronormative in terms of the plot-centric romances, but everything I've seen is all LadyHawke/Anders all the time (with the occasional Anders!slash and Fenris creeping in second with either gender). I've been shipping the shit out of LadyHawke/Fenris/Isabela and it seems like I'm the only one--the only Isabela-centric fics I've seen have been male!Hawke/Isabela. And what about Aveline/Isabela? If they were guys, they would probably be the most popular slash pairing, the way they fuss and fight but are secretly best buds who are fond of each other. I've heard people say it's because of Aveline/Donnic being canon, but again, I don't see canon het ships getting in the way of dudeslash pairings. Makes my head hurt, it does.
In my experience, it really depends on the game/fandom though. I'm a YuRiPa shipper and I've never had trouble finding good fic for it. And in Tomb Raider fandom, femslash seems to be way more prevalent than het especially since the Crystal Dynamics reboot (Lara/Natla seems to be hella popular since Anniversary, and Lara/Amanda is also really popular, both ships are heavy on FoeYay which helps), but I think that's because it's one of those rare series where there's a comparative lack of compelling dude characters. In most cases though, video games seem to be worse off than traditional western media fandoms where femslash is concerned. Which makes me a sad panda.