Viewpoint MxM Pairings are my least favorite demographic

[Jack is Back]

I am a gay male here to back you up. I get the feeling you're probably already gotten a lot of hate already so I'm going to give my stance.

A lot of people who write MxM are not male. There are some who are. But a lot aren't. There are some who write it who are lesbians. It's just the facts. But you don't need a male to write MxM. You need someone who has a shred of awareness for relationships and the male perspective. Most people throw that out the drain or pretend they know what that means.

I think the bigger problem with MxM is that most don't understand ANY relationships and assume a MxM relationship is something more. That because you are "gay" your relationship is suddenly perfect. When I thought I was straight I had several hetero relationships. Most of the time... they're very the same. Being engaged in a real homosexual relationship I see a lot of people who write from a very limited experience. What you have described happening IS a real problem, it's just not because of the writers not being male. It's more of an issue with excessive fluff/smut in the RP community in general. Nobody wants a real relationship, they want the dollar store knock off brand.

 

[rae2nerdy]

It’s the pretty lampshade phenomena. People write basically cardboard cut outs that run through a checklist of specific activities. There is no real effort put into writing actual people in a relationship.

even if you don’t want to tackle “difficult” topics and want to keep things “fluffy” you can still make an effort to make the characters relatable as people.

Relatability is what makes romance an interesting genre to read. If I don’t relate to your characters I don’t care about their relationship.

To clarify I am not meaning relatable in the sense that the reflect my loved experience. I am talking relatable in that they feel like actual human people who are doing whatever.

 

[ashwynne]

So.... I’ve been roleplaying various romantic relationships for about 12 years now. In that time the two relationships that had the most depth, complexity, and authenticity were both MxM. They both happened unplanned and out of the blue though, which leads me to my main takeaway here:

I think most romance RP’s struggle with this issue.

People romanticize romance, and while there’s definitely fetishizing of MxM relationships out there, the number of MxF roleplays I’ve encountered that are all of the things you mentioned in the OP are staggering. I would posit that it comes down to being unlucky with partners rather than anything remotely related to the orientation of the characters/players involved.

Someone devoted to character development and writing realistic, deep, relationships is going to enjoy that regardless of the pairing dynamics they prefer. Likewise, those who only want to write fluff or don’t care for development/angst are going to want that regardless of pairing as well.

Is it more prevalent in those who gravitate towards MxM? I would personally argue that it probably isn’t. There just tends to be a much broader pool of MxF preferring roleplayers to choose from, so you can sift through them more easily to find someone compatible with what you’d like to write. But I’d suspect that ratioed out you probably have an equal proportion of MxF and MxM roleplayers that want “realism” in relationships vs those who just want fluff.

 

[Superfly47]

Never done a MxM. I prefer to be female and only do male when partner wants to be the female or when we double.

 

[Kylesar1]

I've dealt with people who are willing to RP ANYTHING so long as it's a MxM pairing. They quite literally don't care about anything in the RP except for it being a MxM pairing. That screams fetishism and to me it reflects that the player isn't gonna contribute much to the RP. They just want to play out a gay relationship. Chances are, they're not gonna contribute to the world, they want to be dragged along in every other aspect except for the relationship itself, and that they won't think for themselves.

 

[rae2nerdy]

Kylesar1 In fairness that’s a common issue with pairing/ship based roleplays in general. I have had multiple partners in the past that only cared about the pairing. Mostly they just write out their personal fantasy for a relationship. Then they expect you to slot into the role of their love interest.

So I don’t even really consider those to be “romance” roleplays as you aren’t really writing characters or relationships. You are basically doing the written version of smooshing Barbie dolls together.

If a partner asks for romance and can’t fully describe the relationship they want beyond (boy likes girl) than I am not writing it.

 

[VALEN T.]

tbh i don’t think there’s anything wrong w only wanting to do m// bc there’s sm ppl who only do m/f.

i do get the fetishism part tho but u can’t rlly know who’s who online so as long as it’s done maturely n realistically and not just oMg bOys lOve uWU i think it’s fine.

from my experience ppl on sites outside of rpn don’t rlly want to play lgbtq+ pairings as much so as some who’s open to any gender pairing, i’d get mainly requests for m/f rps n it starts getting boring after a while so on rpn i can ask for lgbtq+ rps (m// or otherwise) and actually find partners easily too