"The world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life!" —
Aunt Ida,
Female Trouble
Some people are fans of
Slash — the
Shipping of two same-sex characters from a fandom together. Some people take this is a little further though; they don't just like Slash but also dislike the idea of
Shipping two opposite sex people together, even if those suggesting the shipping are themselves straight.
This is a subculture-within-a-subculture; these people are often both a
Yaoi Fan and a
Yuri Fan yet reject heterosexual pairings. This can range from people who merely prefer to pair off every character they like with another of the same sex to the more extreme people who appear to argue that writing slash is a politically liberating act. Occasionally it can be an unexpected by-product of backlash against the addition of
Mary Sue Original Characters just to pair off canonical characters.
The extreme versions are the kind who write hate mail to authors for daring to give their male shipped characters a wife, and impose
Die for Our Ship on any female character who so much as has sexual tension with one of "their" guys, often in the most sadistic and humiliating ways. They also don't seem to want to listen when many real gay people point out the fanfiction they're writing is highly stereotypical and doesn't really reflect reality (not that all Het Fic does this either, but there you go). Mind you, more extreme typical
Yaoi Fangirls might engage in this sort of flaming as well. There are also those who are just tired of the ubiquity of het romance plots in all variety of fiction and the tropes that go with them, particularly the stereotyping of everyone involved. This has been known to scare artists away or outright refuse to draw yaoi or yuri.
Counterintuitively, there may be a homophobic element to this trope in some cases; straight people who subscribe to the notion may feel that their own sexuality is threatened if they find a work that includes a member of their own sex arousing. This is one of the reasons for the
prevalence of lesbian porn aimed at straight men; viewers don't need to
worry about being turned on by another guy.
One thing about people who think
Het is Ew is that they may not engage in
Die for Our Ship as much; instead they Ship the person
"in the way" with a different person in the cast who is the same sex as them - i.e. if they Ship Bob and Dave, but Alice is Bob's
Canon girlfriend, they write fics about Alice realizing she actually loved her best friend Carol all along, rather than about Alice dying in a house fire. This isn't universally true, but not uncommon either. Basically, when these fans write
Fan Fic,
Everyone Is Gay.
It's worth noting that this is a fan-reaction Trope, dealing with the preference of a number of slash and yaoi fans to read about only homosexual relationships. It's not about in-universe anti-heterosexual feelings expressed within a work of fiction.
Depending on what circles you run in, this can actually be a joke, usually about why they don't write "gen"
* "general"
fic.
See also
Het.
In-Universe examples only please, and remember, this is about a specific attitude towards heterosexuality, not just homosexual pairings.
Examples
open/close all folders
Anime and Manga
- In Vandread, the main characters are from two different planets, one male and one female. They find the idea of even working together distasteful, let alone anything more intimate than that. Well, there is one girl who wants to have a baby with one of the males, but it's just from the fame it would give her. She clearly doesn't understand the mechanics.
Fan Works
- Due to the limited amount of food that can be produced on clouds, the Grand Pegasus Enclave in Fallout: Equestria actively encourages homosexuality to keep the population numbers down.
Film
- Aunt Ida provided the page quote in Female Trouble, where she begged her son Gator to "go nelly".
- The 1992 short film Gayniggers From Outer Space shows space aliens arriving on Earth and "liberating" men by exterminating women to create a homosexual utopia led by a Gay Ambassador.
Literature
- The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess has this as its main trope. Long story short, Earth is overpopulated and gay people don't breed, so heterosexuals face discrimination everywhere.
- The surviving veterans of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War find themselves in a society where everyone is both gay and a uniform shade of light brown. This began as a government policy of encouraging homosexuality as a method of limiting population growth, and became the standard once humanity began reproducing exclusively via Uterine Replicators. One female character at this point even mentions thinking about men's genitals in contact with her makes her mildly disgusted. They offer to switch the main character's orientation through a minor surgery, but he declines, knowing that his orientation is incompatible with everyone which forces him to live in abstinence. The soldiers under his command take to nicknaming him "the old queer."
Live-Action TV
Theater
- The entire premise for Zanna, Don't!. Somehow, all of human history had been like this. It's... weird.
Webcomics
- Summer from Moon Over June finds it repulsive that anyone would ever engage in heterosexual sex; however this is mostly because she is a raging misandrist who finds gay male porn almost as disgusting.
- Hatsuki is a straighter example (no pun intended), having a large collection of gay male porn and a strictly lesbian love life.
- She doesn't seem particularly grossed out by het sex, it just isn't her thing. At one point we see her working a phone sex line for some extra cash and not being unduly put off by a male customer.
- Almost the entire cast of Amazoness.
- Zii in Ménage à 3 enjoys watching porn for the cheesy dialogue and absurd situations, but she only likes either lesbian or gay porn. She finds het porn's focus on "money shots" rather distasteful.
Web Original
Western Animation
- Tripping the Rift centered an episode around a planet that pretty much had this as its Hat, to the point where heterosexuality, bisexuality, or any of the many available options out there in the great big universe was punishable by death.
- Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World have had plenty of this, playing it for laugh, especially from resident Fag Hag Condie Ling (who uses the term "breeder").
- Drawn Together shows an alternate future where Wooldoor's show has turned most of the world gay, and the "breeders" have been driven underground.
- On South Park, the men in town decide to destroy the future immigrant population by having a massive gay orgy, hoping to make the entire world gay to wipe out the species. It Makes Sense in Context. Kind of.
- Played with in an episode of King of the Hill. Luanne and Bill begin working at a trendy new hair salon, but none of the female clientele want Bill near them until he starts pretending to be like the only other male hair dresser on staff, who is Camp Gay. Bill's clients even mention how "unfortunate" it is he's gay and how they'd love to have a boyfriend like him. The minute Bill admits he's not gay everyone becomes immediately disgusted. To them he was "interesting and unique" when he was gay, but straight he's just a "sleazy barber".
- In one episode of The Simpsons, after Homer marries every gay couple in Springfield (for money), he initially reacts with disgust when someone suggests he should marry straight couples.
