The jihad against "coomer-bait" is dangerously analogous to the feminazis bitching about the "male gaze." "Why, oh why, would you ever have a character in fiction you could imagine yourself being sexually attracted to???"
In 2005-06, a friend's wife joked that she could see me writing terrible HP fanfiction, to which I retorted, "screw you, girlie, I'd write
awesome HP slash fiction. Wait, I've never actually
read any slash fiction." This semi-chance exchange led to me stumbling across a LiveJournal community where the best writers tended to hang out, and changed my mind about romance fiction. It
can be done well, even very well.
I also remember it was where the SJWs first popped up, declaring that their slash fics objectified gay men ("colonized" wasn't quite current), that they were misogynistic because they didn't write femme slash, and especially the complaints that few in their fics practiced safe sex or even prepped the anus before boinking. (
Why straight women would be interested in anything but het and m/m slash, they never explained, nor why they should be interested in the, ah,
grittier details of anal sex, when they tended to elide the details even of straight sex.)
I've been up close to two fandoms in their early stages: MLP:FiM and Harry Potter. ('05 was when the HP books were still coming out, and the movies had just started, the sweet spot where the fandom was growing, but still comparatively literate.) HP was female-heavy, prose-oriented, and relatively deficient in art. (
Here is the page for
Underwater Light, a huge fic, and you can see how amateurish the fan art is for it.) MLP, piggy-backing off the furries, was male-heavy, made tons of high-quality art (from explicit to G-rated fluff, and everything in between), but about the best pure prose I ever read in it (some comics were very good) was the fic by a LessWrong writer,
Friendship Is Optimal, about a pony-themed, paperclip-optimizing AI.
A lot of the new Malfoid stuff is rather shallow,
shōnen anime girls dropped into the HP universe. They don't hold a candle to the old HP slashers, who re-cast Slytherins from mustache-twirling villains into Bismarckian
Realpolitiker, self-possessed and utterly dedicated to tradition.
It is my impression that the Malfoid denigrators are the same people who chew out fanfic writers, especially slash writers. I do not believe we are in a culture war; rather, we are the defensive party in a purely political war that happens to be spilling over into culture. The intersectional feminists, AKA intersectional Marxists, AKA Commies are trying to re-base our entire culture on race and gender communism. We will be lucky if we win this war, given how poorly we've fought it up to now.
Opposing fan art is loser talk. One, we can't win, and two, if a section of the anti-SJWs insists on fighting the Gooner War, A, they will lose, and B, they will also lose us the fluff writers, the vanilla writers, and even the anti-SJW gooner artists and writers.
We need to put forth our ideal, not just endlessly criticize the (by now old) New Left. Art is the best tool for this, and alienating sympathetic artists, even fanfic artists, will lose us everything. The idealizing impetus is so strong, I can think of only two works that sufficiently, honestly address it. One is the poignant Nesmith/Malthesar exchange towards the end of
GalaxyQuest, and the other is a 70K word treatise on what the author describes as the true Demiurge:
Indeed, that scathing criticism which Sophocles passed, however anciently on a contemporary, remains no less familiar than significant,—“He paints men as they are: I paint them as they ought to be.” It is aside from the mark that in imputing such veracity to Euripides the singer of Colonos was talking nonsense: the point is that Sophocles saw clearly what was the one unpardonable sin against art and human welfare....Then, when the Attic drama came to flowerage, the actors were masked, so that their features might display unhuman perfection; and were mounted upon cothurni, to lend impressiveness to man’s physical mediocrity; and were clothed in draperies which philanthropically eclipsed humanity’s frugal graces. In painting or sculpture, where the human body could be idealized with a free hand, the Greek rule was nakedness: in drama, where the artist’s material was incorrigible flesh, there was nothing for it save to disguise the uncaptivating groundwork through some discreet employment of fair apparel. Thus only could the audience be hoodwinked into forgetting for a while what men and women really looked like...And so to-day, as always, we delight to hear about invincible men and women of unearthly loveliness—corrected and considerably augmented versions of our family circle,—performing feats inimitably beyond our modest powers. And so to-day no one upon the preferable side of Bedlam wishes to be reminded of what we are in actuality, even were it possible, by any disastrous miracle, ever to dispel the mist which romance has evoked about all human doings; and to the golden twilight of which old usage has so accustomed us that, like nocturnal birds, our vision grows perturbed in a clearer atmosphere. And we have come very firmly to believe in the existence of men everywhere, not as in fact they are, but “as they ought to be”.
— James Branch Cabell,
Beyond Life.
