Romance and Love in fanfics · 10:48pm Jan 27th, 2016
I do enjoy romance stories. If you have seen my list of stories I have read, 83 of the 241 stories I have read, and 3 of the 7 stories i started to read and gave up on are tagged as "Romance". You can say that I enjoy romance stories (as much as CSquared may be disappointed in me for it, and annoyed that I talk to him about them). So I will often read one of 2 ships. Big Mac and Cheerilee is one. I like this ship. I am writing a story about this ship, and if I hadn't left my hand written notes at home I might have published it by now. The other ship I read is not because I support the ship in the slightest, but because thinking about my 2 favorite characters cuddling is adorable. That would be Fluttershy and Applejack. Again, I dont support it, I just like romance stories and I like those 2 characters. One thing that I have read in several of these fics is about AJ's family being against homosexuality. Most of the stories have her family supporting her, but many do not. In basically all of them there is some fear in coming out as gay. This really bothers me in the stories.
While in the real world it is common to be nervous about coming out as gay, it does not make sense in Equestria. What we can see from the show is a majority of females, much of the time. In the real world we have closer to an even ratio of males to females. It only makes sense, however, that in Equestria homosexuality would probably not be at all rare, especially among mares. I think it would be a generally accepted thing because it would be necessary. There is need for intimacy in most peoples lives, and I will make the assumption that the ponies in the show are the same. There would only be two ways for the majority of ponies to fill their need for intimacy then. Either each stallion would have to be with several mares, or mares would have to be together. So if ponies had a problem with any sort of sexuality, I would say it would be two colts together, but I feel like this sort of double standard would be unlikely. So my opinion on romance and love in fanfics is to stop treating it like humans in the real world. Remember that this is not exactly the same society, even if a lot of their customs are based in ours. It would not make sense for some of their behavior.
DISCLAIMER: I am not defending discrimination or anything like that against anyone in the real world. I am stating that if we look at this from a logical perspective rather than trying to say it is the same as our world, then the discrimination makes even less sense than in the real world.
So I'll start off by pointing out I'm not intending to be argumentive; everyone's entitled to their opinion, and I do think the idea that Equestria wouldn't have a problem with homosexuality is completely valid. But I think there's more worth thinking about here, so I offer two counterpoints.
The first is on the balance of mares and stallions. It's worth keeping in mind here that MLP is a show made for a female demographic, particularly a young one. It's designed to be relatable to them, with male characters often being relatives to the female ones since many of the girls watching the show do have brothers and what not. I don't think this necessarily reflects Equestrian society (or rather, it doesn't have to within different interpretations of it), in the same way that a show made for males will often have a disproportionate amount of male characters, even if it takes place in the real world. I personally envision Equestria (or at least, Equestria as I write it) as being a fairly even mix of males and females.
Secondly, and I hope you'll excuse me for talking about myself with this one, I think it's important to note that a lot of authors start writing pony stories because it's less intimidating. I know I did. We can hide behind an avatar and a screen name, and not have to worry about people we know IRL judging our creative efforts. It makes it easy, but there's already a fan base to provide critiques and provide valuable encouragement. But many authors still want to tell stories that reflect their real life experiences. I wrote my first novel about Twilight and Fluttershy being afraid of coming out as gay, because that's important to my life. For many, it's also a way to address their own fears and insecurities.
Again, I can completely understand your decision to not read those types of stories. And I understand that you weren't saying people shouldn't write them, but rather that you didn't understand why. I just hope that my rambling at least shed some light onto the thought process that leads to people including any and all manner of real world issues in pony stories
3813976 You make valid points. On the first one, I have kind of thought of that. Obviously with the mainly female demographic they would show more females. My only counter to that would be background characters. To be fair, though, I guess I dont look that carefully.
And on the second point, I agree completely. Although I dont have any stories on here, I do write, and writing from experience is a very useful thing. I understand that is why people write homosexuality not being accepted in Equestria, it just always strikes me as off, enough for me to have written a blog about it. It is kind of like certain ships don't make a whole lot of sense to me, or when there is a bit of dialogue that I can't imagine a character saying. They just take me out of the immersion for a moment.
But regardless of the points, I really wanted to hear other opinions on this. One of my friends sent me PM's about this blog, also disagreeing, but with different points.