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okay as sort-of a mini-post here are the things I like about phaidei, who are the second ever Big_HYV_yaoi to get me:

• both extremely beautiful to me. 
• themed so much around: diasporic nostalgia vs exile vs myth of return vs migration [...] like i genuinely think the most criminally underrated part of their ideological mishmashes is that phainon simply does not understand why mydei would ever give up on his homeland and make his people assimilate, when he so badly wishes to return/restore aedes elysiae and go back there... like guy who cannot move on vs guy who will always leave things behind him [...] 
• THAT PHAINON LITERALLY IS DESTINED FOR GREATER THINGS. MYDEI IS THE FOOTNOTE AND PHAINON IS THE PERFECT VESSEL/THE DELIVERER/THE NAMELESS NAMED HERO... one thing about me is that i love outsized narrative importance imbalance. which is not to say that mydei is not important to the story but he is essentially the solider and phainon is the promised chosen one. until he's not. and now i just really hope amphoreus does not fumble but the bag is looking sooooo sweet right now.
• hunk4hunk greek tragedy yaoi where they are DOOMED. phaidei is lowkey only good because of the DOOM. the fact that this is only transient that they're running on limited time that there is no forever and barely a promise of tomorrow the fact that it ENDS. well... it's good to me. that's the flavour. they're literally a normal couple who gets along well except for the fact that it cannot and will never last. rip.
• i like that mydei is a cool stoic guy who is honest and reserved. and phainon is the exact opposite of that where he has 10000 million different facades and flashy smiles and cool gestures and is a funhouse mirror of himself and what he thinks he should be and wants to be and actually is to try and stop and distract from reaching the core where there is a shattered sense of self ... it's good. 
• they'll act like it's not true. but i do enjoy prince who grew up with only responsibility and none of the luxury and only for the latter half of his life vs nobody orphan from nowhere who is taken in by a rich benefactor and then raised and shaped for Such A High Status. everyone's like oh it's rich prince noble man x poor peasant boy. but it's not. it's literally not. the game goes out of it's way to spell out how it's not. down to mydei having most fucked up childhood imaginable [and probably still a decent amount of fucked up given, Sparta] while phainon lived idyllically in his village as a farmer's child until he didn't. like. sorry nothing in this world i hate more than the spoiled brat mydei fanon take... HE WOULD FUCKING NEVER.
• i also hate when people end up being pro-military/police by having mydei/eurypon be military or ex-military or whatever in canon aus, like we can do better. like we can definitely be more creative and woke about this. actually there are so many things that phaidei ao3 does that make mydei into a kaveh-esque figure and this is why i hate haikaveh ship order. like... be normal. read. and i will admit that some of these people are literally kavethammers so i can't blame haikavehers for this one totally. BUT THEY ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM. as is anyone who is a regular victim of HYV_big_yaoi. not me tho i have taste.
• also if anything mydei is the alhaitham to phainon's kaveh. stoic serious guy who is never going to say the right thing vs. guy with 3492083483 psychological problems that will not hear the words you said in the way you said them. anyway so as u can tell im a fan of the fragile psychologically troubled high specs visual seme x normal stoic handsome guy uke... 
• mydei's fertility symbolism. like yeah i'll get that guy pregnant. and yes my worldbearer with 4 arms will be the one doing it. i guess i kind of like that phainon is both odysseus and telemachus while aglaea is penelope and mydei is a different unrelated to the story guy altogether in that he's ares/achilles/orestes... yeahhh... Yeah... i like that.

recently I read 2666, watched the pitt, read a couple book reviews on the world socialist website, which was interesting and at various points very moving, but i need someone to tell me what opinion to have about it, I read some Chirstian Gerlach, stuff like that.

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NO ONE IS OUT THERE WRITING FANFICTION ABOUT MOTHERS!!!! 

I keep going down this rabbit hole of like, clicking through random stantwt accounts and really it just makes me hate everything. like I hate it when people don't agree with me, and I hate every iteration of stantwt drama unless it's so dumb that it's funny as fuck, and like I hate it when people like idols I don't like! have better taste you fucking freak!!!

so I think I will stop doing so. but sometimes, really important things that I would have never seen otherwise do show up.

like, this heejin/chuu tweet. like sorry for being a freak rpser who wants girls to kiss but I have been so invested in this pairing since that penguin thing? though obviously, like every other ship I randomly latch onto, it's not as popular of a ship. visually, the reasons are obvious. since they are both the cute pretty ones and around the same size. this is also why nyukyu is not the top tbz otp. also why it took 2 years of nonstop on-camera freak shit for renhyuck to get fandomly acclaimed. I think, especially in terms of rps - fandom perception actually matters more than canonity, because your main source of ship content isn't from the Real People in question, but the fellow shippers. but the double-edged sword of fandom is fanon and fanon, as you may realize, Is Bad.

...

like, in the case of heejin/chuu!!! the lack of a 'hot'/'tall', dare I say 'masc-passing' [less girly?] in the pair is what turns fandom off from it. though I am using the ao3 tag popularity as a metric LOLOL. and it's not like f/f ao3 is booming so it's a pretty bad metric. but, still it's the same reasoning with renhyuck popularity and why pre-hot sauce, where people really could not ignore it anymore, they always got 'they're such good friends!' tag, the way nomin and markhyuck are soooo popular. and why noren and jaemren are constantly in renj's searches even though they're clearly not...whatever is going on with renhaech. like no offense but the fandom need for reasonable opposites and/or reasonable dimorphism [LOL] in their popular pairings is sooo.

though I think for the same reason, dotae being as popular as they are freaks me the fuck out and also makes me happy. imagine both of you are the neurotic type-As and you both bottom in your most popular ao3 ship [JAEHYUN?] and STILL make it to top10 ships in the tag. THAT IS SO BEAUTIFUL. TO ME.

I think I will keep saying more out of pocket ship like this because um, I simply can. also it's like, something that's been bothering me for a while. literally, ao3 is not a good metric OR reference for anything. I will say so right now. it is however, the one I have and therefore will be the one I use. I think that the need for this 'dimorphism' shows up most in the fiction as well. like fans don't tend to look at on-camera moments and go like 'omg! renjun was totally being the bottom here and haechan the top!' like yes, I do substitute top/bottom for girl/boy but I don't use girl/boy as a signal that means renjun is going to be the soft cute one of the half and haechan is going to be the manly bad boy. HONESTLY, I'll say it right now. renhaech is suuuch a bad example to use for this comparison because like. um. they're Like That. just generally. renjun emotional, sensitive, aries girl of the pair and haechan is the mischievous, charming, teasing boy of the pair. like to compare them to a [bad] fandom acclaimed ship, it's like leo/calypso from pjo but with more depth because they are #Real_People.

my use of 'dimorphism' here stems from concept of sexual dimorphism in biology, which is just when males and females look different. I'm just using it to necessitate that for a ship to have mass fandom appeal, there has to be a kind-of 'opposites' factor to them where they have to fit well into distinct 'tropes' to make for ease-of-access shipping. which defeats the purpose of shipping imo. but I will digress.

probably what is the best example of forced dimorphism - nomin! I think the twitter crowd, or the twitter crowd that I know off, thinks of them differently. but ao3 is still rife with babyboy soft jaemin x bad boy jock jeno so. I will also say, the difference in twitter crowd perception is that jeno just has to be slutty jock bottom. it's like, almost always a top/bottom thing, where it does somewhat matter who bottoms, but for people who genuinely don't care about the sex, it's about who's being pursed/who's the pursuer. you know, not to use severely outdated terminology, but the concept of 'erastes'/'eromenos'. I think it just stems from how relationships in the media have been portrayed - usually, it's the girl who's the main character and who's feelings the love story revolves around - and that's what affects top/bottom perceptions. since in cishet sex, the girl does 'bottom'. if I really had to pin down a reason, yeah it's heteronormativity, but it's specifically that - if we're talking about sex specifically - the girl is the erotic focus. it's hilarious that men like don't make women come because so much porn is about how good the girl feels. that the sexual acts are being done to the girl. like make that make sense!

sorry that this literally isn't coherent or organized, firstly I am not here to write actual essays. just my stream of thought. second. GODDDD it makes shit soooo boring. this isn't just in fanwork. it's sooooooooo rife in BL and it's sooooo boring because of that. there's like 3 character archetypes that the uke will always be, and then 3 character archetypes that the seme will always be. and even when you have like seme-like uke, and uke-like-seme it's not as groundbreaking as it seems ever. the problem is just that it's trope-based writing, as opposed to character-focused writing. which makes sense, so much of this work [fanwork, manga, webtoon] is like such a fast-paced, quick-delivery thing where the writer just needs you to recognize that this is this character and that is that character and then just dump the story on you.

wrt to dr specifically. it's just renjun. because he does have so many female traits and traits that align with typical uke/girl isms, then ends up getting portrayed as those things. but like the way those traits manifest in renjun [softness, seriousness, emotionality, sensitivity, stubborness] are so different than how they tend to get written.

and I mean. haechan...if u know what ao3 has done to him...loool hopefully miss idolrapper never reads this. but all the time I think about how she so badly wants haechan to get fucked and have whoever's babies, but like when u read her haechs!!! he is literally not the sassy femme gayboy bottom other popular markhyuck authors portray him as!!! and to be clear, she still writes him with some of those tropes in mind, but it's so much easier to spot where it's really Haech! because he does have some of those traits, and her love for him shines through in portraying them as they are versus like, the 'sexy' trope other authors want him to be. like you can have both!!! ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb is the perfect example of it! to be clear I have never really been into bottom hyuck, which I think is clear, and a lot of the time knowing that the author wants a specific half to bottom tends to ruin the experience of a fic, but like. idk reem's hyuck has always been perfect. so literally no matter how turned off I am by both top mark and bottom haechan, this fic is still like. soooo perfectly encapsulating of them both.

but also. I think fic is sooo badly written in general recently that dimorphic characterization is literally a symptom rather than the cause. anyway like, looking at the most written ships in the nct tag really reallyyyy proves that popular fandom ships tend towards this kind of difference. anyway Idk it's just a collection of thoughts. hit that like button if you enjoyed. subscribe, comment, uhhh please don't post on twitter. etc!