Couple of musings on Draco In Leather Pants and related ideas

[redwoodalchan]

 First of all...anyone who implies that Draco in Leather Pants is something that only women do, or that only applies to male characters, needs a good kick in the face. In fact, one of the fics I plan to spork down the road is an absolutely obnoxious DILP work--with a male Mary Sue and a female DILP (and the fic was written by a man too). So yeah, they exist and they're every bit as obnoxious as the more common (or at least more commonly-cited) version with a female Mary Sue and male DILP.

Oh, and here's another thing: I strongly suspect (though have no evidence to prove, admittedly) that if you were to take the sum total of all instances of Draco in Leather Pants and Ron the Death Eater across all fandoms, you'd end up with fairly comparable numbers of each (based on my own experience, RTDE is WAY more common in the Pokemon fandom than DILP, to cite one example--granted, Cori Falls and her ilk notwithstanding). Yet DILP receives almost all the attention and condemnation from wankier fans. What's even more annoying is that a lot of these wankier fans think ANY interpretation of the character that doesn't make him out to be pure evil is DILP, no matter how well-thought out. Apparently you can make N, or Grimsley, or Dawn (yes, THAT Dawn--I once saw a fic of her as a psycho murderer) a mustache-twirlingly evil bastard and everyone's okay with it, but the moment you try to argue that Voldemort might have been a victim in his childhood at one point rather than being an innately evil monster, well, you're just a stupid brainless fangirl who is obviously too besotted with Voldiecakes to understand how evil he is.

And before anyone says, "But DILP is so HARMFUL because it glorifies the villains' antisocial behavior," well, RTDE has the potential to be every bit as harmful, because its logical extreme is character bashing. Which part of Cori Falls's work was more obnoxious, her declaration that Jessie and James were the real heroes or her insistence that Ash was pure evil and deserved to be abused both verbally and physically just for not liking Jessie and James? Both DILP and RTDE have the potential to glorify antisocial behavior if they go too far--it's all to do with context.

Comments

[shamanicshaymin]

I agree, I've seen more of my fair share of female DILPs, like Mother Gothel from Tangled.

Apparently you can make N, or Grimsley, or Dawn (yes, THAT Dawn--I once saw a fic of her as a psycho murderer) a mustache-twirlingly evil bastard and everyone's okay with it, but the moment you try to argue that Voldemort might have been a victim in his childhood at one point rather than being an innately evil monster, well, you're just a stupid brainless fangirl who is obviously too besotted with Voldiecakes to understand how evil he is.

Dear god, no kidding. There's a HUGE difference between glorifying a villain and showing the gray areas. If it wasn't so, books like Grendel and Wicked wouldn't be as well-known as they are. RTDE is such a prevalent problem in fandom (Oh hello, Phandom and "Love Never Dies." *cough*) and even in original fiction, where characters are constantly depicted as OMG EBIL!!!!11!1 or selfish when in reality, they're more sympathetic than the leads. I can't think of a better example of how damaging both DILPs and RTDEs are than Cori Falls. Yes, it's annoying when she insists that two thieves are nothing but good and kind, but turning a ten-year-old boy into a dysfunctional manchild for not liking her favorite characters is horrific too. D:

[guardians_song]

It's hard to say. A confounding factor is that DILP and RTDE tend to occur in Dark-Is-Good fics at about equal levels, so it would be hard to tell whether it slanted more one way or another.

I think the reason DILP gets ragged on so much more is that people usually don't think the characters in question are canonically RTDEs. ('People who tag Dark![character] usually know they're writing a character as a murderous psychopaths for shits and giggles', is what I mean.)
With DILP, you're much more likely to see people defending the DILP characterizations as Really Canon Under It All. Then again, this may be because most people enjoy defending favorite characters more than they do bashing hated ones, so they simply devote more time to the DILP essays. (Certainly, RTDE essays are all the rage amongst HP fandom - RTDE!Snape amongst some canonfen, RTDE!Ron amongst Harmonians, RTDE!Harry with reason amongst anticanonfen, RTDE!Sirius + RTDE!James (+RTDE!Lily, at times) amongst Snapefen, etc.)