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Notes -
True Detective Night Country
There is a culture war internet discourse happening around HBO’s newest show True Detective Night Country. The discourse can generally be summed up as follows: HBO newest show TD Night Country is the 4th season of an anthology mystery/crime miniseries. The first season came out ten years ago and it starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as two detectives searching for a killer in Louisiana. The plot does not particularly matter, but the show is widely viewed as one of the greatest single seasons of TV ever. Speaking for myself, I agree with this assessment. I return to it every few years and I am still impressed at how good the acting, story, and cinematography are.
Fast forward ten years…two mediocre seasons (2 and 3) were released, and HBO announced the release of True Detective Season 4, co-named Night Country. Season 4 stars Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as two detectives unravelling a murder mystery in Alaska and people were very, very excited for this season. Prior to release, Night Country received overwhelming critical reception from TV critics. It currently has a 93% Rotten Tomatoes score (RT can be gamed, but the 93% score shows the general reception).
I was also very excited for this show. Critics were calling it the best season of True Detective since season 1; some were even saying it was better than season 1. With these very lofty expectations, I watched the show as it was released, week by week.
By episode two, I knew this show had problems. By episode four, I knew it just wasn’t very good. By episodes 5 and 6, I was hate watching. Many people have reviewed and discussed the show’s problems much more eloquently than I. This video is quite good and sums up the many many problems the show has:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=y2TCOd_YZF4
What I will say is that the show is simply…boring. It is a six-hour miniseries and at least 70% of the show is filled with boring relationship drama (the remaining 30% being focused on the actual…criminal investigation). The characters are uninteresting, low stakes, and unlikeable. The easter eggs paying homage to season 1 are like a frying pan to the face in their obviousness. The story carries no emotional weight, has major plot holes, and the ending is unsatisfying and bewildering. It’s bad. I would not recommend this show to anyone.
Now here is where the culture war comes into play. Online, fans of the True Detective series are panning the series. Go check out the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, it is a paltry 61%. The True Detective subreddit is especially critical of the show. People are especially disappointed and confused given how critically hyped it was before its release.
But what has happened is that many critics, podcasters, even Issa Lopez, the director, are blaming the backlash on sexism and misogyny. They say that male fanboys of season 1 are brigading review sites and review bombing the show. They are saying that the viewers dislike the show because it features two women lead detectives and that viewers can’t stand the lack of masculinity that was so integral to season 1. Even the professional critics who have dared to post their negative opinions on Twitter are being called misogynistic.
The problem with this read is that…the show sucks. It’s just not good for all of the reasons I’ve listed above. It’s extremely frustrating to see people called misogynistic and “anti-woke” for criticizing a show with two women leads. I find it particularly unfair because other detective shows with women leads, such as Mare of Eastown or Sharp Objects, were fantastic. It didn’t receive the critical backlash because those shows were actually good. We now exist in a bizarre universe where a magazine like Rolling Stone overwhelmingly praises the show while a magazine like Forbes pans it.
I’m not one who normally gets involved in the culture war, but I found this discourse particularly egregious. I don’t know what the future of this series holds, but I’m hoping someone at HBO sees the light.
Update: Issa Lopez has been hired to write and direct season 5 of True Detective. Whoosh.
A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that season 1 was made by Nic Pizzolatto, season 4 was made by Issa López.
I think men and women think differently about stories, media and what matters in them. This is over populations of course, exceptions exist. There are male ways of telling a story - plot-focused, rational, consistent setting, character agency, combat, violence, progression and character advancement. Then there are female ways of telling a story - character-focused, plot doesn't necessarily make sense, emphasis on emotions and romance. Great writers can appeal to both but that's hard. You can tell I don't really understand or appreciate the female side of things.
I think this is most obvious with the weakest, most unrestrained authors. If you go on FFN or spacebattles or webnovel, you find stories about men advancing their position with hard work and clever tactics. They fight and overcome enemies and court women, sometimes getting a harem. In the case of Harry Potter stories, there's a trope of Harry Potter hitting the gym, using some rituals to get stronger, taking control of his money from Dumbledore and getting a harem of hot Slytherins. If you go through and search by likes, that's what you'll see.
Meanwhile on female dominated places like AO3, you find endless romance and homosexuality. Putting the ocean of Harry/Draco to one side, there's a huge emphasis on shipping. Who do people end up with? Are there love triangles? Can there be more love triangles? Angst, rape, therapy? Plot is unimportant in and of itself, character relationships are exciting. There are even tagging features so you can search for exactly what ship you want. Often they take characters out of their world (not mechanically like an isekai) and reimagine them in a different setting - they could be at a normal high school together. Just to make sure there's no combat. Or they make up this 'soulmate' mechanic where people can write words on eachother's skin. It's a whole other world to male fiction.
Now if you're like me you might feel a little cringe at the male power fantasy stories. I imagine most here have more exacting standards of taste. But you'll feel revulsion at 370,000 words of:
Or:
Who cares about this stuff? Well, apparently women like it. I blame the influence of women on Star Wars. George Lucas's Star Wars was telling a male story, Kathleen Kennedy was telling a female story (boy does AO3 love Rey/Kylo). It's less obvious at this higher level since it's not out in your face but it is still there. Likewise in True Detective, I imagine.
Wasn’t FFN ridiculously female-dominated? I know early Harry Potter fandom was. A casual google doesn’t turn up much, but consider this thread where Redditors suggest 22% men is unusually high.
Point is, I think the gender balance within platforms is going to be swamped by the history of those platforms. Like Ao3 specifically refusing to ban certain taboos. At best you get a chicken and egg. Which came first: the forum dedicated to spaceship combat, or the audience of turbo-autists?
Mind you, I don’t disagree with the basic premise. The median masculine story is wildly different to the feminine one. And the 80th percentiles are probably mutually incomprehensible. Try to cite specific examples, though, and you’ll immediately run into Sturgeon’s Law.
Maybe FFN used to be female dominated and maybe they do dominate the boards I don't know or care about (Supernatural, One Direction). Since when has any man written a fanfic about One Direction or Twilight? But that subreddit discusses fanfiction generally, it seems to be mainly talking about AO3. I'm just talking about the FFN website. I don't know anything about Wattpad.
Harry Potter is the biggest board on both sites, FFN's top Harry Potter stories are extremely male. That's where HPMOR came from, just take a look and you'll see. Even the smut on FFN leans more toward male fantasy than female fantasy.
I can't emphasise enough that I was picking the absolute best of what each website has to offer. Yes, the second most popular fic on HP AO3 (451K works total) is about Hermione suffering, getting chained up and raped by Draco. It was translated into about 20 languages, including Welsh. They really like this stuff! The contrast with HPMOR is staggering, everyone who ever objected about HPMOR being cringe should have to read some of this. Then they can understand the full horror, the enormity of human variation.
It still never fails to impress me that one of the more well-known movies in the 2010s is literally just Twilight fanfiction with the names changed.
What do you even consider "male fantasy"? I'm pretty sure that "Hermione gets raped by Draco" is mostly a female fantasy (written by women, for women); while I'm sure you could self-insert as Draco I don't think that's the point. Yaoi fanfic is also female fantasy; you can tell because the dom/sub dynamic is pegged at 11 from the first word (the stuff that's actually intended for gay men is... different).
If nothing else, I'd consider yuri fanfic to be mostly by/for men; women aren't as interested in lesbians as men are. Most MLP fics (both porny and not) were probably written by twentysomething men (I don't think the target demographic for the show is that interested in seeing Pinkie Pie turn Rainbow Dash into cupcakes or meme about "Applejack pregnancy scare").
I still don't understand why people consider this unusual. "I can imagine attractive character from the show doing the sex to me in a way I don't have to feel otherwise morally conflicted about liking, also doing something nasty but not catastrophic to the character the reader is supposed to identify with means he would like me more than her" is arguably one of the more vanilla fantasies (and the more extreme variation of that, being "also, the self-insert doesn't survive the encounter", is an overwhelmingly-female favored fetish anyway).
What never ceases to amaze me is that there are three completely different types of gay male smut available for all kinds of genders and orientations. There is gay male smut aimed at straight men, otokonoko, which is exactly the same as regular smut aimed at straight men except that the "girl" is a little flat and has a certain extra hidden in "her" underwear (the infamous Boku no Pico is a prime example). Then there is gay male smut aimed at straight women, yaoi, which is exactly the same as regular romance aimed at straight women except that instead of a guy and a girl you have a seme and an uke. And then there is the gay male smut which is actually aimed at gay men, bara, which I know little about because trying to read it triggers my disgust instinct (by contrast, yaoi is just boring, not disgusting, and otokonoko is hot).
There is, unfortunately, not yet a genre of gay male smut aimed at lesbian women. But we can dream.
Take this with a grain of salt, as it’s mainly something I’ve just heard floated around in weeaboo haunts, but apparently, a significant proportion of fujoshi are actually lesbians; supposedly, yaoi gives them a way to explore non-heterosexuality in a less personal setting. If this is true (again, absolutely no reason to think that it is), then yaoi would serve the role of “gay smut for lesbians” as well.
Interestingly, I’ve also heard (again, based on screencaps of Japanese polls posted on imageboards) that a significant number of yuri fans are straight women. This is a priori somewhat surprising, but fits with surveys I’ve seen of Japanese yumejoshi (women who enjoy things like otome games and other genres involving extremely handsome men romancing a female self-insert) highly ranking certain female characters (with masculine/“princely” demeanors) as among their favorite and most attractive characters. (To put this in perspective, this would be like various otokonoko characters (better known in Anglophone circles as “traps”) ranking among the most beloved girls in a poll of male anime fans. From what I understand, this is very much not the case, with traps largely being relegated to “niche interest character” status, although who knows, maybe some of those otokonoko characters who have achieved “meme” levels of status might fit the bill.) The common cause of these two phenomena (that is, straight female interest in yuri and yumejoshi interest in “handsome” female characters) probably is just the usual “women are all bisexual” theory.
In the 90s-00s (western) fujoshi were what was called Fag Hags (mostly sexless women who hang out with gay men for a vicarious thrill), and were the reason I never went to any anime convention. For anyone reading who doesn't have experience with the subculture, google "yaoi paddle" and you'll instantly understand.
Yuri fans in the west have had a strange evolution. The ones into cute slice of life haven't changed much, but every scanlator of yuri porn I ever met has decided he's a lesbian in a man's body sometime in the last 8-10 years.
Interesting thread
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Playing actual gay male (typically though not always softcore) porn at Certain Types of lesbian meetups was a thing for a while, although from my understanding it's fallen out of popularity. This sometimes reflected complex gender stuff -- especially in the 90s, the line between butch lesbian and FTM was a lot blurrier than today -- but just plain lesbian fujoshi is definitely a thing.
The official story is that femmy gay guys in 90s porn were more appealing and nonconfrontational to women than the fake boobs and long fingernails (why!?!) of a typical porn starlett, and in the recent era female/female porn either filmed or (more often) written for female interests has become more widely available. But given fanfic worlds or spaces in the furry fandom (cfe SkylarShibe/RedfeatherStorm for a lesbian's take on f/f as discrete from f/m and m/m), I'd expect that there's other social and political pressures playing a role.
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Fascinating breakdown, thanks, I never really thought about it this way. This actually slightly clears up one of the bigger mysteries I've pondered for years while hanging in degen-adjacent spaces - the memetic insistence of how traps/femboys are totally not gay. It's impossible to take the egregious contradiction on its face (there's not even a fig leaf like with e.g futa - you are literally fucking another man), and I presumed it was mostly cope, but from this point of view it apparently is a valid and intended feature, I'm just too normie to see it.
I now have several more interesting mysteries to ponder, chief of which is what is the overlap with loli mentioned downthread, and whether or not this is basically a, for lack of a better term, culturally evolved substitution where
degensconnoisseurs can openly lust after femboys (which are considered based and mostly retain the uh, required body type) instead of lolis (which are heavily stigmatized even in degen-adjacent spaces). It would explain a lot of things, it can't be just the bi-curiosity in the water supply.Further ramblings from downthread:
Apologies for the Reddit link.
It's actually kind of interesting to me that, from a certain point of view, you go from 100% masc to 0% masc and then back to 100% masc- from "I wanted a woman and got a woman as far as I know" (full masc) through "pretending not to notice the cracks" to "the illusion is obviously broken but we're fine with it anyway" (totally not masc) to "not even bothering to keep up the illusion" to "this isn't meaningfully distinct from being gay but that's what I wanted anyway" (full masc).
Having sex but putting aside it's not the thing you actually wanted/having to put extra effort in to enjoy it is probably the least masculine thing you could do more or less by definition, and the middle position on that graph is the one that symbolizes that the most.
I think our words for how people think about gender are probably still pretty bad here; that's why we can point out that "traps are gay" is incoherent as a concept but not actually be able to explain it any better than that language allows us. Actually, I'm doing the same thing with what "masculinity" is above, too, but this isn't yet the effortpost it needs to be to do this properly.
Futa is honestly really weird and doesn't tend to line up with traps/tomgirls at all; the latter tend to have an intentional de-emphasis on both kinds of secondary sexual characteristics whereas with futa they're both on absolute full blast all the time (proportions range from the large side of normal to wildly exaggerated). Maybe you get a slight hourglass and exaggeration of pecs into breasts with a trap (the meme is "draw a girl, call it a boy" but only the low-effort traps are done like that), but with futa you usually get a wasp waist, massive breasts, and a dick half as long and just as thick as their arms.
I only say this because I've noticed that the portrayal of traps tends to be more immature/loli-adjacent than the characters that surround them- their faces tend to be rounder, their outfits tend to be closer to what a child would wear or slightly out of place in that direction with respect to the rest of the cast (if applicable), and the context and memes around them is more immature and more evocative of a loli than a "proper" grown woman (the "boys are the best girls" thing, as opposed to normal male sexuality... which is more likely to pattern-match to futa anyway).
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I think bara is a fascinating glimpse into what superstimulus for gay men must look like- it's bizarre on a good day, and I've seen some examples that look downright alien.
For that matter, I think the same about yaoi more generally since it focuses on massive hands, very tall and triangular heads, and emphasis on facial features women themselves try to accentuate.
And then we have the otokonoko body types, which are basically just slightly taller lolis (no hourglass figure, small cute face, usually dressed in a manner more suggestive of a girl than a woman but without the outright childish attitude to match) that straight men can use as reasons to be less conflicted about liking that body type.
On that note, I'm not convinced Boku no Pico is otokonoko. I think shotacon creates a corner case for the categories; I'm pretty sure that not only was it yaoi (that cover picture is the exact opposite of otokonoko dress, lmao), but it was yaoi intended for straight men. That paradox is probably half to blame for why it's still a meme (and the other half is that famous reaction video).
Is there a genre of lesbian female smut aimed at gay men? (For that matter, is there a genre of lesbian female smut aimed at lesbians?)
There's a very funny horseshoe(?) effect with shota, isn't there? Where it circles back to being totally the domain of gay men: even the plot of Boku no Pico is a standard gay summer hookup that Milo would reminisce about.
I wish it was still the 00s internet so we could do an Aella-style Hot or Not poll on this stuff without half a dozen groups trying to cancel us.
It's media involving gay men, but meant for ostensibly/otherwise straight men (there's way too much of it for the opposite to be true).
Which means that either "it's gay" is missing something important, "the audience is straight" is missing something important, or both are. (And if that's the case, what's missing, why is it missing, and how come nobody notices?)
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Eh... that's definitely a thing ((and I'd argue that a lot of penetrative gay porn is superstimulus for gay men in a way that straight porn isn't for straights, for simple practical reasons)), and sometimes hot because of the thing, but there's also a tendency to emphasize the extreme variants in what escapes into more public spaces. Bara as a genre can cover everything from your overmuscled aliens to 'probably a little more muscled/chubbier than practical or realistic' to 'JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Extra' to 'this is a twink, with facial hair'.
... there's definitely stuff that fits that category, but it's an absolutely tiny field, and it tends to either be focusing around gay men who are going to turn out to be bisexual transwomen (cfe here for a pre-transition piece if you're logged in, cw: explicit f/f lesbian; will also warn that artist is great at giving very unusual kinks), or a side effect of an artist that mostly works m/m getting commissioned or otherwise roped into stuff outside of their normal focus (eg, Braeburned has 1 f/f piece ever, and if you didn't pay a lot of attention it'd be easy to miss that the top has breasts).
I don't think there's a named genre.
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Harems, casual consequence-free sex with very attractive women. More emphasis on physical activity, less on emotions. Zero angst.
Go read a couple chapters of Manacled. It is weird and unusual. It's not about the sex. The sex happens in about 5 lines where Hermione's super ashamed and humiliated about it. It is not written to arouse. The writing is good and I'm intrigued by the premise of this mysterious secret... but the actual content of the story is pure suffering (there's a heavy Handmaid's Tale influence). It's mostly about angst and severe trauma. I'm guessing that it's the ultimate 'I can fix him' fantasy where Hermione subdues this super-evil, hypercompetent Draco Malfoy with her wiles.
I broadly agree, but it's not that simple. Here's what top 30 games by "weighted rating" on f95 are (I've tried to be liberal with the definition of "harems, casual consequence-free sex with very attractive women"):
Out of 30 games, we discard 3: one for being made by a self-declared woman about a woman, one for being about futas and one for being gay. Three more are too fucking weird and I don't feel adequate to classify them. We're left with 24 games, out of which:
The two genres are more evenly matched if we take only the top 10 games.
Interesting, I guess I could make excuses like 'games need some kind of conflict to be interesting'. I don't really know anything about lewd games though.
I guess I was trying to describe the platonic ideal of male sexual fantasy. On a three-axis chart of 'high quality vs low' 'male vs female' and 'vanilla vs weird', not much would be firmly clustered around the male end. The most popular and best products will have broader appeal - Katawa Shoujo for instance, it's not just about sex either. Even within the male area, there's a certain tendency to cover all bases and all tags - consider Project Harahel. Extremely male oriented but it puts in the weird stuff like vore too, as an option. It fits the male fantasy (as is obvious visually) but that's not all it has to offer. And it's not just about sex but power too.
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This is completely normal for female erotica. It's what gets women off. From "The elephant in the living room":
And from the comments of "Reaction 101: The reactionary red pill on women.":
Good point, the actual point of diversion in the story was Draco manning up and killing Dumbledore early in book 6. Some Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder and a Killing Curse out of the blue dealt with the most powerful wizard on the planet. He then goes on to hunt down and personally execute a good number of the remaining anti-Voldemort rebels under a false identity. He's got everything: aloofness, alpha energy and a secret identity.
I'm mildly sympathetic to such a manly, proactive character. In contrast, Hermione has a panic attack going down the hallway and spends most of the chapters I read plotting and failing to kill herself. She's exhibited no agency thus far, she gets chosen to be with Draco and the plan is that after she gives him 3 children they'll send her off to be bred by others. Instead of fighting in the war, Hermione was a Healer, undoing curse-injuries. She got the most passive, feminine, supporting role imaginable. Things happen to her.
And these women love the story! It's in all these collections:
If there's one thing that Jim and co got right most of all, it's that sex differences are very great. Completely different mindset.
I'm going to tattoo this on my forehead for the next time my girlfriend suggests we watch a Victorian period drama jfc
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Counterpoint:
The shift to women creators and LGBTQ+ lead actors might be coinciding with a dismaying shift from GenX to Millennial entertainment production. My favorite hobby-horse, MLPFiM, was created by a woman several years my senior, Lauren Faust, and it has a GenX worldview behind it, contrasted with the Millennial storytelling of its biggest contemporaries, Adventure Time and Steven Universe. Those are shows which delight in subverting the Hero’s Journey, and also pioneered the wide acceptance of the “bean-mouth” rubber-hose stylized animation trend.
Consider also the Cobra Kai series which leaped from YouTube to Netflix. It has been a tremendous accomplishment because it takes its farce seriously and yet doesn’t skimp on powerful character development. Film schools should be studying this phenomenon for the next decade. The creators were born in 1977 and 1978.
There are plenty of millennials writing manly stories. They're all over Royal Road since traditional publishing and media frowns on that kind of thing. There's plenty coming out of Asia too - Three Body Problem series for one. The series puts great emphasis on plot, combat, advanced technology and creative problem solving. The whole series revolves around idiotic/evil women who do their best to wipe out humanity, only to be mostly foiled by heroic male efforts. Or my hobby-horse, Reverend Insanity where our based sigma MC rejects all romance in favour of acquiring more power. It's funny to see readers show up, feel like they can see a ship coming up only for the author to pummel them with 2000 chapters of 'no, it makes absolutely no sense for the most sociopathic man and woman on the planet to pair up: their relation is purely platonic and dominated by blackmail, betrayal and exploitation - and by the way, the power of love is strong but not unbeatable'.
The thing is that female storytelling is seen as more classy than male storytelling. They're choosing less-acceptable-to-men authors and creators of all ages. Kathleen Kennedy's no blue-haired millennial. Ryan Johnson's no millennial yet he felt free to go on a random tangent about how capitalism was so terrible in his Star Wars movie and nobody at Lucasfilm objected.
I don't know much about MLP but it is a very girly show, by design. I won't say that girly media can't be good or attractive to men. But even Equestria at War shows the fundamental differences between the sexes. They found a setting that was basically derived from horse puns, secondary to the characters and turned it into a world of blood, death and industrial warfare. What's so specifically Gen X about MLP, isn't it just a well-made creation generally, something that entertains both sexes?
Gen 4 is Gen X girly ("girly isn't anything out of the ordinary; guys could engage with these things too but simply choose not to"), not Boomer girly like Gen 1-3 ("girly means absurd immature diabetes fuel") or Millennial girly like Gen 5 ("girly means 'that which alienates anyone who isn't a girl'").
Gen X girly is also referred to by "cute girls doing cute things" when the context is anime. Fooling around, story stakes, and conflict resolution in a way typical to girls, basically; something that boys know exists but don't have the time or opportunity to explore.
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I've never watched an episode of True Detective from any season, but Freddie deBoer has complained several times that even the first season suffered from being deficient in these areas - the plot hints at a bunch of things that end up being irrelevant and the solution to the mystery is contrived and arbitrary.
Freddie's not wrong that Season 1 had its share of bad lines and eyerolling moments, but it also had tension, and stakes, and an interesting structure, and terrific characters. The episode where Rust goes back undercover is one of my favorite episodes of TV.
I'm not blind to its flaws, but relative to Season 4 it might as well be The Sopranos.
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