Compare and contrast.

[randomness]

Thought for the late night, partly inspired by a face-to-face comment by rmd about gay regency romances mostly being written by and read by women, and partly from a post by digitalemur called Fun with YAOI, or things I come across at work:

Is there any similarity in this kind of man-to-man fiction mostly created and read by women to the girl-on-girl photosets mostly being photographed by and viewed by men?

Note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaoi has a useful overview of the yaoi phenomenon.

Comments

[apintrix.livejournal.com]

I cannot resist pointing out that the female characters you list are arguably *actually* annoying, and the reaction against them may not be female criticalness of other females, but annoyance at yet another pathetic anime girl. The way Kaoru's abilities and strength are underused by Watsuki is a betrayal of her early established character, and you must expect a negative reaction on that front. Miaka is pretty dull. I tend to think most of the characters in Fushigi Yuugi are pretty dull too... but she's one of the worst offenders.

A couple counterexamples: look at, say, Ouran High School Host Club-- hardly cut and dry on gender, but a great female protagonist. This is a fandom rife with slash (and het)-- of course, again, hardly cut and dry as it invites it. You list Naruto's Sakura, I assume as versus the tendency to slash Naruto/Sasuke; what about another big Shonen Jump series, One Piece? There's a lot of slash in that fandom too, but women also tend to like like the women crewmembers, particularly Robin.