⚪️ · 1mo
tennie the posts from a few days back really got me thinking about my own personal biases and my relationship to myself along with what i impress upon the little caricatures i ship. ill out that im transmasc and that it’s a feature i often impress onto hj for a multitude of reasons both in similarities with gender expression that he and i share and also my own personal desires to see him put in a situation. but im 100% sh biased and prefer bttmhj. the more i mull it over, the longer i move away from the thought of “fans want their faves to bottom” and more towards “shippers impress their interests onto both parties”. to me it’s less about self inserting and more about breaking apart the self and pushing those parts against each other.
that's an excellent point and i find it to be true for myself as well!! one of the things that draws me to secnghwc is his masc side and although i'm hj biased they're both important to me and exploring their, as you put it, caricatures in fiction has helped me work out things about myself and both of them were part of the process, topping or bottoming or domming or subbing
i still think there is a chunk of people who possibly uses their fave as y/n placeholder and at times it also seems as if the top can be just about anyone so the picture they paint of them is less important. there's another thing i've been thinking about which is, i wonder if the resistance that some people have to seeing their assigned top as a bottom could come from reinforcement of patriarchal values of masculinity where Of Course the man that carries masculine qualities they desire couldn't possibly [insert "emasculating" value such as "have a small dick"] because why would they be attracted to a man who is Less Man? like a couple weeks ago a friend made a tweet that was obviously a joke about hj having a small dick and someone slid into the replies with pictures to say he was well endowed but it was so besides the point and irrelevant to the joke, and i've seen this type of behavior be true very often (none of this is exclusive to any group of fans)
