A Few Modest Proposals,�@by�@Jeanne.

"There is no prude like a reformed whore."

"In my young days when I was giddy and enthusiastic and carried away by the newly discovered joy of fandom I a) used fangirl Japanese b) wrote Mary Sues c) killed off the canon girlfriend so I could write yaoi d) had my willowy bishounen weep in each others' arms e) wrote prose so purple it was mulberry. It was great fun at the time but now I'm ashamed of it. Therefore *you* must not have fun doing any of these things or I'll pillory you before the face of fandom." I hope we can all see the problem with this one.

People who dislike Mary Sues say that the MS makes them feel embarrassed for the author. I strongly suspect that they're embarrassed for themselves, recognizing a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God character from their own head stories. Besides, the criticism ignores the rather obvious point that the author herself isn't embarrassed. She doesn't care if aspects of her psyche are showing, so why should we? People who argue that MS writers don't know that their psyches are showing are, I believe, deluded. Everyone here has taken Psych 100 and knows what a silver-haired lavender-eyed High Priestess is. Some people still want to read about her in a story- an English story, not a Japanese manga, where you'll find a lot of her too. If they really don't suspect at all that their psychic healer is an idealized version of themselves, well, god bless the child who's got her own. Such imperviousness to surrounding pop psychology should be cherished, not admonished.

Media and Paradigm, by Sabina.

If you're mad enough about animanga to like yaoi, there's a good chance it's replaced so-called Reality as your dominant aesthetic worldview.

Yaoi is a synthetic sexuality - synthetic in the Fantastic Plastic Machine sense - and its fans like it that way. 2D makes the fantasy pretty and removes the threat, so that even straight men can feel safe reading yaoi (and some do). Even rape is clean; even shota is clean. It's the sexual equivalent of cartoon violence. The djkas can throw in as much semen and saliva as they want, because it might as well be coconut-flavor glycerin or badly-jelled agar-agar. You can't tell by the drawing.

#10. Yaoi Happens

You don't need an intrinsic justification from the canon text, naturally, because yaoi has nothing to do with the canon characters (see #9.) You don't need to provide a justification within your own text. It's the Romeo and Juliet eyes meet across a crowded room followed by "Oh, he doth teach the torches to burn bright," followed by a bucket-load of angst. Classic.

The Great Yaoi Debate (Redux), by Nora.

This is the group, also consisting of self-professed fans of yaoi, which attacks it on the basis of its unreality. Not because of male objectification, however---because of its *gay* male objectification. They point out that yaoi is nice because it's great to see gay men given such open and sensitive treatment in a manga/anime genre... but they hate the way it handles gay issues. They express disgust at yaoi characters who insist that they aren't gay, while happily screwing a same-sex lover. They're annoyed by the preponderance of ukes who behave like women, and semes who *look* like women. They cheer when K-Y and condoms are used, instead of self-lubrication, and they offer themselves as information-resources for yaoi fanfic-writers who want to know "what it's really like."