I think one reason canon het pairings are broken up to make slash pairings is that canon het pairings tend to involve the main characters. :-)
As for the rest, well... there's an argument in favor of slash that I've seen now and then about how it's hard for women to identify with the female in a het romance, because those characters tend to be idealized and so there's a disconnect between her fabulousness and your dumpy reality, but when both characters are male there isn't the whole 'trying to identify physically and failing' thing so you can jump straight to emotional identification and also skip over various ugly gender-related power issues.
This has always read oddly to me, because A) I don't try to identify physically with any character; for me, it's all about internal reactions, B) slash does NOT get rid of ugly gender-related power issues, it just codes them one layer down from the surface, and C) it's not as if the male characters in romances aren't just as idealized as the women.
...
I seem to have wandered off on a tangent; sorry. You're right that the idea that female characters must be portrayed as paragons would require most canon characters to become wildly OOC in fanfiction. I'm inclined to suspect that what the original poster was reacting to wasn't any specific incident, but a lot of times that people called one story or another objectionable because it made a female character do something stereotyped or stupid. Even if each individual protest is valid, they can probably start to seem annoying en masse, especially once you filter out the particulars of each case. And that rant had the feel of something that had built over time.
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Date: 2008-12-24 03:34 am (UTC)As for the rest, well... there's an argument in favor of slash that I've seen now and then about how it's hard for women to identify with the female in a het romance, because those characters tend to be idealized and so there's a disconnect between her fabulousness and your dumpy reality, but when both characters are male there isn't the whole 'trying to identify physically and failing' thing so you can jump straight to emotional identification and also skip over various ugly gender-related power issues.
This has always read oddly to me, because A) I don't try to identify physically with any character; for me, it's all about internal reactions, B) slash does NOT get rid of ugly gender-related power issues, it just codes them one layer down from the surface, and C) it's not as if the male characters in romances aren't just as idealized as the women.
...
I seem to have wandered off on a tangent; sorry. You're right that the idea that female characters must be portrayed as paragons would require most canon characters to become wildly OOC in fanfiction. I'm inclined to suspect that what the original poster was reacting to wasn't any specific incident, but a lot of times that people called one story or another objectionable because it made a female character do something stereotyped or stupid. Even if each individual protest is valid, they can probably start to seem annoying en masse, especially once you filter out the particulars of each case. And that rant had the feel of something that had built over time.