LGBT Novels Question

[ohko]

there is a whole discord server of us dedicated to that task.

Is this the TGS server or is there another one?

 

[Sabruness]

As someone that writes gender-bending stories that are actually a thinly veiled font for cracking trans lesbian eggs, I'm happy to buck that trend and to say there is a whole discord server of us dedicated to that task.

. Trans GB GL is top notch on SH. I havent read one yet that didnt have me squeeeeeeee'ing within 10 chapters at the useless lesbian fluff.

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On the relationship dynamics in GL, if i had to put titles to what it prefer i'd say i like femme/femme and femme-tomboy/femme

 

[TotallyHuman]

Rather than a serious topic I was wondering about there being so many gay and trans novels in comparison to lesbian and bisexual novels and thought it’d be fun to see what hypotheses people could come up with.
So, what possible reasons do you think cause this?

(Edit: If this is in the wrong section, oops)

Gay = homosexual
Lesbian = homosexual woman.

 

[gaylolis]

What??? Can you give some examples rofl? They all seem like pretty common one-catch phrases to me

Or was it sarcasm...

Genre Shounen Ai - Novel Updates

www.novelupdates.com

these ones are pretty dope. i prefer this kind anytime to the uninspired one which includes: nine, strongest, and solo.

things like turing's law, blabla volts electrocutes you to death, how many tomorrows there are, stone age husband raising journal, and my teammates are all crazy seem like an interesting one.

or maybe like, i saw so many titles that made me ugh, they look good in comparison.

 

[PrincessFelicie]

Is this the TGS server or is there another one?

Nope, another one! Trans people only though I guess you can DM me if you fit that critera and want in, and I can ask the others if they're okay with you joining.

 

[Moonpearl]

That's because Boys' Love and Girls' Love are genres, and the "Bisexual Protagonist" tag is just a tag. If you have a story focusing on a bisexual woman and her romance with another woman, that's part of the genre "Girls' Love".

Basically, Girls' Love doesn't mean lesbian, it means woman x woman.

It's actually kinda interesting to me that you say that, because I honestly don't remember reading a single story with a butch and a femme.

Like, Uke/Seme are super common in BL, but Butch/Femme are actually very uncommon as far as I'm aware.

Rather, the butch/femme thing is a real turn off for me, so I'd shy away from those like plague. I remember @Moonpearl once recommending a classic GL with this dynamic (I think it was Utena, but I may be misrembering) before, but I just couldn't ever get into even trying it out exactly because it had a Butch/Femme dynamic in it.

But uhn... I start reading new GL manga all the time and I genuinely don't remember seeing it even once... It's a lot rarer than the Uke/Seme dynamic AFAIK.

And well, to me one of the biggest appeals of GL is having 2 Female Leads that I can relate to a lot and care a lot for, while both get a lot of spotlight and focus on themselves. With neither being the clear MC of the story... Having a butch and a femme would totally ruin this for me because I wouldn't be able to relate to the more masculine girl at all! It would ruin the whole point to me! >.<

I think you have it a little confused. Butch and Femme are descriptors/identities for sapphic women that relate to their presentation and relationship with femininity; they have nothing to do with your role in a relationship.
The terms you're looking for are still Uke and Seme, or Top and Bottom.
Although it's true that Butches are often expected to be Tops and be very assertive, many Butches are bottoms and very soft/sweet people. I also usually see Femmes being Tops in GL.
Kase in "Kase-san..." is, for example, a much more typical Butch to real life.

(Also, to address the theme going through this thread in general, Butches are not like men. Not at all.
And my love for Butches and Seme/Top women also has nothing to do with men.)

Not everyone fits into the Butch and Femme labels. Personally, I don't try to define myself by them at all.
Utena is a clear Butch in the sequel film, but she's much murkier in the TV series. All we know for sure is that she's a tomboy trying to adopt a man's role.

And while Utena and Anthy have very strict prince and princess roles, the truth is actually that...

Spoiler

Their dynamic is intentionally neither healthy nor natural. A big theme in Utena is that gender roles are toxic to everyone. Utena thinks that she's escaping them by taking the gender role of a man in her life, but it's just as harmful to her and the people around her as a man acting it out would be. Nobody can be truly revolutionary until they reject the whole system and break the cycle of abuse.

The real beauty of Anthy and Utena's love isn't the roles they play, but how they fall in love with each other in the moments that they drop their guards and speak to each other as themselves and as equals. Later, they overcome the system together.

 

[AliceShiki]

As someone that writes gender-bending stories that are actually a thinly veiled font for cracking trans lesbian eggs, I'm happy to buck that trend and to say there is a whole discord server of us dedicated to that task.

*shakes pompoms* Keep up the great job!!!! \(^^)/

why make them bisexual if throughout the story they're only gonna be attracted to a single person?

Oh, I can totally relate to that!

In my last novel my MC was going to be bisexual, though from beginning until end, her only love interest would be a girl... I was only going to show she was bisexual through a flashback with a previous relationship with a man.

But at that point I thought... "Why?" And I couldn't find an answer, so her previous relationship was with a woman.

More seriously: I started reading GL manga so much at first because it usually didn’t palatte-swap men out with women in yuri romances. And on appearance alone: I haven’t seen a lot of Japanese women in manga depicted with cropped hair... so even when ‘masculine characteristics’ are heavily loaded into a character with not a single ‘feminine’ element present aside from technical ‘sex’ and ‘general appearance’: at least they don’t always have to *look* ‘the part’ too.

That said, there were some examples for sure. Strawberry Panic (my first GL outside of western TV) for instance: there is a (horse riding) character who is some shy girl’s ‘prince’, and the character just has nothing else going for them. Any one of those ‘princely types’ who feature in ‘all-girls-schools’ have a solid chance of following the ‘butch/femme’ pattern in manga form. Sometimes with ‘long hair’, and certainly usually with more hair than the properly ‘butch’ portrayal in the USA is, but otherwise identical personality-wise/interest-wise to what an identical male character might have been.

Still: I’ve seen much more of that particular pairing IRL than I’ve ever seen animated, drawn, and on the TV all put together. I honestly haven’t seen anything *written* with the Butch/Femme dynamic in *years*.

Oh yeah, some of those certainly do exist, I won't deny that!

I was just saying they aren't the norm at all! ^^)/

That's because Boys' Love and Girls' Love are genres, and the "Bisexual Protagonist" tag is just a tag. If you have a story focusing on a bisexual woman and her romance with another woman, that's part of the genre "Girls' Love".

Basically, Girls' Love doesn't mean lesbian, it means woman x woman.



I think you have it a little confused. Butch and Femme are descriptors/identities for sapphic women that relate to their presentation and relationship with femininity; they have nothing to do with your role in a relationship.
The terms you're looking for are still Uke and Seme, or Top and Bottom.
Although it's true that Butches are often expected to be Tops and be very assertive, many Butches are bottoms and very soft/sweet people. I also usually see Femmes being Tops in GL.
Kase in "Kase-san..." is, for example, a much more typical Butch to real life.

(Also, to address the theme going through this thread in general, Butches are not like men. Not at all.
And my love for Butches and Seme/Top women also has nothing to do with men.)

Not everyone fits into the Butch and Femme labels. Personally, I don't try to define myself by them at all.
Utena is a clear Butch in the sequel film, but she's much murkier in the TV series. All we know for sure is that she's a tomboy trying to adopt a man's role.

And while Utena and Anthy have very strict prince and princess roles, the truth is actually that...

Spoiler

Their dynamic is intentionally neither healthy nor natural. A big theme in Utena is that gender roles are toxic to everyone. Utena thinks that she's escaping them by taking the gender role of a man in her life, but it's just as harmful to her and the people around her as a man acting it out would be. Nobody can be truly revolutionary until they reject the whole system and break the cycle of abuse.

The real beauty of Anthy and Utena's love isn't the roles they play, but how they fall in love with each other in the moments that they drop their guards and speak to each other as themselves and as equals. Later, they overcome the system together.

Oooooooooh! *hugs*

Yeah, I never tried to understand what exactly is the butch/femme thingy, so thanks for clarifying! \(^^)/

 

[Moonpearl]

Oh, I can totally relate to that!

In my last novel my MC was going to be bisexual, though from beginning until end, her only love interest would be a girl... I was only going to show she was bisexual through a flashback with a previous relationship with a man.

But at that point I thought... "Why?" And I couldn't find an answer, so her previous relationship was with a woman.

But another good question is, "Why not?" Bisexual women are real and a real part of the sapphic dating scene. Also, there really needs to be more stories showing bisexual people in happy and committed relationships, to stop that insane fear that a lot of lesbians have that all bi women will leave them for a man...

Besides, people's orientations affect their day-to-day lives even when they're in committed relationships.
For example, as a pansexual woman, I enjoy playing a lot of otome games and I can share that as a fun hobby with my straight sister. My lesbian girlfriend doesn't see any appeal in them, though, and galge games are so different (and so horrible) that she won't play those either. So, she doesn't understand that sort of game at all.

There's also the generally observed fact that lesbians are more likely to U-Haul (get too intense too soon in relationships and end up moving in together) while bisexual women are more likely to have past experience and be more level-headed.

And, if you want to go into the nitty-gritty of crappy realism, bisexual women have to worry about whether women they date or like will be biphobic, have to suffer under a lot of hatred from both straight people and gay people, have to deal with being viewed as a plaything for men and a tool for couples to spice up their sex lives, and can suffer from quite a lot of alienation from other LGBT+ people (which apparently makes them the most likely to be trapped in abusive relationships, due to less support).

Basically, there's more to orientation than who you're dating and writers could really use that to their advantage.

 

[AliceShiki]

But another good question is, "Why not?" Bisexual women are real and a real part of the sapphic dating scene. Also, there really needs to be more stories showing bisexual people in happy and committed relationships, to stop that insane fear that a lot of lesbians have that all bi women will leave them for a man...

Besides, people's orientations affect their day-to-day lives even when they're in committed relationships.
For example, as a pansexual woman, I enjoy playing a lot of otome games and I can share that as a fun hobby with my straight sister. My lesbian girlfriend doesn't see any appeal in them, though, and galge games are so different (and so horrible) that she won't play those either. So, she doesn't understand that sort of game at all.

There's also the generally observed fact that lesbians are more likely to U-Haul (get too intense too soon in relationships and end up moving in together) while bisexual women are more likely to have past experience and be more level-headed.

And, if you want to go into the nitty-gritty of crappy realism, bisexual women have to worry about whether women they date or like will be biphobic, have to suffer under a lot of hatred from both straight people and gay people, have to deal with being viewed as a plaything for men and a tool for couples to spice up their sex lives, and can suffer from quite a lot of alienation from other LGBT+ people (which apparently makes them the most likely to be trapped in abusive relationships, due to less support).

Basically, there's more to orientation than who you're dating and writers could really use that to their advantage.

Oh, I agree that the "why not?" is a good question, but uhn... I worried that it would confuse my readers and that it might make them think that maybe my MC was not in love with the girl that was constantly rejecting her advances, but instead kinda playing around and not giving some serious thought to the relationship...

I didn't want to give this sort of impression, so I decided to not go for it... >.> (on a side note, it is kinda annoying that I even had to consider that, as I'm bisexual myself, and I shouldn't have to worry about giving my readers a wrong impression by portraying my character as bisexual.)

As for the other aspects, all are pretty valid, but I was writing a medi-fantasy story, so most of the modern day concerns we go through don't really apply! >.<

Not that there aren't issues due to sexual orientation, but they are of a different nature IMO.

 

[Kldran]

I've often felt that a lot of gender bend stories use the gender bend and character background as a way to have their cake and eat it too, through a kind of Schrodinger's main character. It's common for these kinds of stories to never properly address the change, because doing so would require observing the main character, and actually figuring out if they are now a boy or girl, instead of leaving it open to interpretation.

 

[weakwithwords]

girls, boys, and Hideyoshi

Beautiful Boxer (2003) ⭐ 7.1 | Action, Biography, Drama

1h 58m | Unrated

m.imdb.com

Having recently mentioned The Matrix in another topic made me recall that The Wachowski Brothers are now simply known as The Wachowskis.

 

[ohko]

But another good question is, "Why not?" Bisexual women are real and a real part of the sapphic dating scene. Also, there really needs to be more stories showing bisexual people in happy and committed relationships, to stop that insane fear that a lot of lesbians have that all bi women will leave them for a man...

Besides, people's orientations affect their day-to-day lives even when they're in committed relationships.
For example, as a pansexual woman, I enjoy playing a lot of otome games and I can share that as a fun hobby with my straight sister. My lesbian girlfriend doesn't see any appeal in them, though, and galge games are so different (and so horrible) that she won't play those either. So, she doesn't understand that sort of game at all.

There's also the generally observed fact that lesbians are more likely to U-Haul (get too intense too soon in relationships and end up moving in together) while bisexual women are more likely to have past experience and be more level-headed.

And, if you want to go into the nitty-gritty of crappy realism, bisexual women have to worry about whether women they date or like will be biphobic, have to suffer under a lot of hatred from both straight people and gay people, have to deal with being viewed as a plaything for men and a tool for couples to spice up their sex lives, and can suffer from quite a lot of alienation from other LGBT+ people (which apparently makes them the most likely to be trapped in abusive relationships, due to less support).

Basically, there's more to orientation than who you're dating and writers could really use that to their advantage.

Ahhhh I’m getting off topic but I can relate to this so much!!!!

 

[Yorda]

Bisexual sounds like it would be difficult to write because you would need to have a love triangle, or something else, to really show the MC or supporting character as bi. Otherwise, if you don't specifically give effort to make their bisexuality a core point of the story it would likely just become a hetero or homo story with their bisexuality being irrelevant.

 

[AliceShiki]

Bisexual sounds like it would be difficult to write because you would need to have a love triangle, or something else, to really show the MC or supporting character as bi. Otherwise, if you don't specifically give effort to make their bisexuality a core point of the story it would likely just become a hetero or homo story with their bisexuality being irrelevant.

Well, I get what you mean, it's part of why I didn't make my MC bisexual, but...

At the same time, having representation is fine, isn't it?

 

[Moonpearl]

Bisexual sounds like it would be difficult to write because you would need to have a love triangle, or something else, to really show the MC or supporting character as bi. Otherwise, if you don't specifically give effort to make their bisexuality a core point of the story it would likely just become a hetero or homo story with their bisexuality being irrelevant.

But small, seemingly "irrelevant" details are what help to build well-rounded characters, so it's not a waste?

There are also a lot of really subtle and non-intrusive ways to make it clear that a character is bisexual, like having them comment on an attractive celebrity they like, mentioning a past ex in a casual way, or owning bisexual pride merch.

 

[Deleted member 40682]

Most women like men, and so they probably just ask themselves, ‘what’s better than one incredibly sexy man?’, and they answer just how most men do about women: it’s *two* of them... *having sex*!

‘100%’ they’re just putting themselves into it for sandwiching’s sake. What else could possibly explain the whole ‘uke’ and ‘seme’ behavior where gender roles/expectations are completely the same as straight romance? What else could explain why most people write lesbian couples as having ‘the butch’ and ‘the femme’?

I understand that to some extent from a biological perspective, and all the more since I prefer my men manly, and my women womanly. So it’s all the more strange to live in a world where straight women like to bully effeminate men, and straight men like to be dominated by masculine women... but they seem to make it work.

Whether they’re straight or gay: people are *weird*. :D

Omg I would love to read a romance where traditional gender roles are switched and the female protagonist is manlier and takes on the traditional male gender role while the male lead takes on the female gender role!