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Weird. I enjoy reading straight relationships just fine. Just not when they're bad and shoehorned in and superfluous to the plot, like a lot of Hollywood movie romance subplots.
What you might be seeing is that a lot of gay relationships in fiction are quite low effort, because they're being written cynically as representation slop, or because they're written by people who aren't gay (I would be fucking shit at writing straight romance, I don't know the internal experience of the courtship at all) or because they're being written as a wish fulfilment by the kind of gay authors who didn't have a social life.
The issue is not that the gay relationships I see are not genuine enough (with the solution being to consume even more genuine LGBT media), it is that they come at the cost of things I actually want to read about. Whether it is the main focus or just the spice, I enjoy M/F romance in my media. Gay romance does nothing for me. Possibly it’s just a relatability thing, but I imagine this is why representation is such an important point for activists - most people want to see themselves in their stories. I believe you when you say you enjoy straight relationships, but I still would bet that on the whole, gay people don’t get as much enjoyment out of them as they do homosexual romance. I understand why they’d push for more and more representation, but it doesn’t change that their tastes are adversarial to mine.
Most of the examples I gave came at the explicit cost of a hetero ship that the story had previously pushed, sunk after years of fans aggressively pushing for the gay alternative until it became canon. Yang/Blake in RWBY is a pretty obvious example of this. Homestuck was even more egregious; by the end of the story it seemed like every character not named John Egbert was in a gay romance, or about to be. I would call these changes anything but cynical (the creators probably felt strongly about their inclusion by the time they did it), but they ruined big parts of the story for me nonetheless.
Somewhat related to this subject is something I’ve been wanting to write more about for a while. Non-toxic straight relationships in media where the man takes the role of protector and emotional anchor while the woman is more emotional, soft, delicate, in need of protecting, etc. are a lot harder to find these days. This has been stigmatized heavily from decades of feminist criticism, so writers tend to avoid depicting women that way with men. This type of pairing has not gone away entirely, though - the only time you see it is when the writer makes the man into a woman. Historia and Ymir in AOT, or the relationship between the two researchers in this SCP are the examples that come to mind right now, but if you keep an eye out for it you’ll see what I mean. You can probably find counter examples in anime, obviously, or in Western media if the couple is toxic, breaks up, someone dies, or is otherwise sunk.
To preempt the what does this matter response from other people reading: abandon the reigns of cultural criticism at your own peril. Much of what people believe about the world comes from the media they consume. Fandom culture is upstream of future creators. LGBT people are active and relentless in pushing for what they want, and as a result the media landscape has gotten much, much gayer in the last decade. Your family, friends, children, coworkers, etc. will all be influenced by media to some degree, so it’s something to take seriously.
Or in other words, you want an actual romance that makes sense, not a religious screed about how much the author loves LGBTesus.
Christian media has the same problem; ironically, by writing something competent it also tends to cease being explicitly Christian media ("Lord of the Rings is evil because it has witchcraft") even if it was written with that exact intent (again, LoTR being a blatant example of that).
The most prominent Homestuck alumni has arguably done exactly this in his games; as despite what the LGBTesus-worshippers will claim "LGBT themes" in the game are completely-to-almost-completely absent (so no "I'm So Oppressed" scenes for the fandom to get off on, though this reaction is baited a couple of times) despite the fact one such relationship is prominent in the story and the main character is of indeterminate sex (it makes thematic sense for them to be a 'they'). One does notice that it may arguably be creeping into certain areas, but you have to go digging for it, it's played for laughs (and remembering that ghost writers carry their religion with them in a way this author does not), and there's a roughly equal amount of casual blasphemy if you're paying attention.
That's just called being selfish, though. I get that an explicit pillar of that religion is that these people get to be that way because Muh Oppression, but as always it remains the case that they're not making representation better, they're just
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I don't know, I don't get particular enjoyment out of straight or gay relationships, most media I prefer isn't really improved by relationships though. Stories well told in my opinion strip out most things that aren't critical and romantic relationships are either very critical to the story or should be basically minimally addressed imo. And if it's a story where the relationship is critical, which I probably wouldn't want to read in the first place, I'd probably prefer it to be something more relatable like a straight relationship.
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I feel like this came up in the previous discussion too, but there is the almost uncontrollable null hypothesis that it's still all subtle social conditioning (since it seems that disgust responses towards interracial relations were once similarly common but now I wouldn't be surprised if even a bona fide KKK member would struggle to muster visceral disgust at a WM*F couple making out). Of course if true this is a boon to the progressive case for deep social engineering.
Why would social conditioning be the null hypothesis?
Well, a wordcel beloved of many here once quipped that the sovereign determines the null hypothesis, and the current sovereign surely is not on the side of aversion to homosexuality being natural or inevitable.
More prosaically, if what you are seeking to prove is that homosexuality is unnatural, then the outcome that gut responses are not against it due to nature is a null result.
Not nature is not the same as socially conditioned though. Theres other options.
Not to mention I don't think you can socially condition people into finding things gross, well besides on an individual basis like a clockwork orange but that wouldn't scale. Disgust reactions seem very visceral and deep seated.
I can't, society at large surely can. Apart from the examples that already came up, there are the food cases of raw fish, animal meat, insects, milk and a variety of fermented products, of which I'd wager the majority of humans on the planet experiences disgust reactions to at least one of. How does your model of disgust reactions as something natural explain that?
Pretty easily, it's easy to train yourself out of a disgust reaction but almost impossible to train yourself into one.
So you figure every disgust reaction that exists in humans [in significant numbers] is natural for all of them? In that case, it seems like you are positing that the state of nature is to be disgusted of quite a lot of things, perhaps enough that human functioning is very nearly impossible without training yourself out of some of them. If nature requires that you train away some of your disgust reactions and society determines which ones, is it really fair to say that the ones you happen to keep are all natural and not socially conditioned? I don't know if that helps the case for "gays bad because it is natural to find them disgusting", either.
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I am extremely skeptical of this model. Every single person I've seen try to use Fleet Phospho-Soda had been permanently marred, both by its own taste and anything else they ate near that time, and that's two exposures and a single very bad day.
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