Something I think is neat and really cute about fanfic is that there’s a personal version of each character in it? Like, each writer focuses on different traits and qualities and even though there can be a hundred fics with the same character, they’re really not exactly the same.
So even if you and I are writing a fic with the same characters, they can still be uniquely different despite having the same core and they’re each dear to us personally as our take on the person.
I don’t know, I just think it’s cute that each writer cherishes these characters in personal and unique ways.
Honestly people who refuse to ship m/f ships because they’re “straight” or whatever are so fucking boring, like I don’t ship people based on gender, I ship based on chemistry. Shipping isn’t activism, you don’t get woke points for having the most “progressive” ship like this is supposed to be fun so fuck off with your fandom policing and get a life.
Anyway I wrote this as a bi woman who is tired of being policed on what ships she can support as a “good bi” and also as someone who is tired of all m/f relationships being labeled as straight. I like to have a variety of ships, and shockingly, not every gay ship appeals to me more than a m/f ship.
^^^^^^^^^
I think a good point here is and I’m gonna say this big…
Yeah, and you can also get tired of criticizing something you love. You can get completely fed up with it and decide, “You know what? Flaws aside, I love this thing, and I don’t have to waste hours of my life admitting its flaws to strangers on the Internet in order to somehow justify my love of it.” You can get sick of watching others gleefully tear it apart, for no reason other than that it’s popular and they hate that you love it. You can get sick of watching others tearing it apart with good intentions, too.
In the end, it’s just a cartoon, or a book, or a movie. It’s not that serious, and you can enjoy it without hyper-focusing on its flaws. You don’t need to justify your love of something to someone else, least of all a person you don’t even know.
writers: *intentionally write villain as sympathetic*
fans: *sympathize with villain*
the purity police on tumblr dot com:
For everyone on this post asking which villains I’m talking about/what kind: this post was written especially about the all villains that you particularly hate, and it was written to spite you, personally.
I might have mentioned this before, but developments I am genuinely glad of in fandom over the last couple of decades:
Way less bashing of canon female love interests in order to hook up two male characters – some of that is the advent of the OT3 as a solution to love triangles, but it’s just as common to have the canon couple break up amicably and realistically, or simply tweak things so that they were never a couple, but still like and respect one another as friends
The rise of the reader insert fic, which I’m convinced has taken the pressure off to create an OC for people who really just want to write self-insert fantasy, thereby letting them do what they actually want and (hopefully) helping to lessen the stigma around OCs for those who really want to create OCs
Linked to that, a decrease in the amount that the accusation “Mary Sue!” gets flung around, and intelligent criticism of how gendered the whole “Mary Sue” concept has ended up
Less pressure to “explain” how a character could end up with a character of the same gender in fic, when they’ve always been paired with other-gender characters in canon
A decline in the popularity of extensively mocking/dragging individual fics for bad or inexpert writing (such as through writing MSTs in response where the canon characters read and reacted to the fic), which, looking back, was a pretty shitty thing to do to writers just starting out
Much less likelihood of getting virulently homophobic comments on any given slashfic (”My poor [favourite character] isn’t GAY, how dare you!”)
And, of course, the shining glory that is AO3, an all-inclusive single archive that’s actually run and controlled by fans, meaning no hours spent paging through webrings to find one author who has four fics of that pairing you love and then reading them over and over for months, and no chance of waking up tomorrow to find all your fic purged because some internet company got a pissy letter
I mean, don’t get me wrong, fandom today is no picnic; it’s not like homophobia or sexism have gone away entirely (and to an extent they’ve gone underground, which complicates things), and of course we have the new puritanical backlash, which can sometimes be even more complex to challenge. But fandom back in the day was far from perfect, as well, and some of the ways things have changed are a real breath of fresh air.
As much as I sometimes pine for the olden days, all of this is very true.
Supercarrier: fandom flagship. Everybody and their dog ships it. The fandom is glutted with artwork and fic. You cannot escape this ship.
Dreadnought: massively popular. Nearly everybody ships it. You can, with dedication, in theory, reach the end of the AO3 archive for the ship’s tag, but it’ll take a long time.
Cruiser: pretty popular ship. Not everyone ships it, but everyone knows about it. Has a good amount of fic/art, and probably multiple ask blogs.
Frigate: just plain popular. Feels like it could use more fanworks. New people to the fandom might not know about it, but they’ll stumble across it sooner rather than later.
Gunboat: bit of a rarepair. It might have an ask blog or two. A couple big name fans ship it. Probably only takes a few weeks to get through the entire AO3 backlog, and one new fic gets added during that time.
Tugboat: rarepair. Almost never seen except as a side pairing to a more popular ship. You can usually get through everything on AO3 in a matter of days. You’ve forgotten what it is to be picky about what you read.
Rowboat: less than a dozen people ship it. You all know each other. You exist in an endless cycle of the same five people desperately producing art and fic and one person who constantly contributes headcanons.
Canoe: you are one of maybe three people who ship it, and there’s a not-insignificant chance you’ve never encountered those other two hypothetical shippers. You spend your days paddling furiously in hopes of keeping the ship afloat, dreaming of the day you upgrade to a rowboat so you can finally rest.
Submarine: Quite a few people ship it, but nobody wants to admit to shipping it. Will randomly appear and throw the other ships into confusion.
Pontoon: that random crossover ship with that one black dress character/trope/fandom everyone will ship with everything else. Has the potential to turn into a massive party until someone gets sick and everyone goes home.
Pedalo: That iconic bizarre crackship whose proponents claim they’re only into it ironically, but secretly they’re all dead serious.
Paging @amythe3lder for the pool noodle definition.
Barge: Not quite seaworthy, but buoyant in both the literal and figurative senses. Someone is always merrily drunktweeting about it at 11pm on Saturday night and then wistfully sobertweeting about it 4 hours later from their kitchen floor. The kind of ship that generates more playlists than fic. Artfully covered in trash and dirty laundry.
Raft: There’s two-to-four people who Ship It Hard and a few others who grab onto the side for safety when there’s drama on their usual flagship.
Barrel: There’s orphaned fic of it. There’s unsigned art of it. There’s headcanon asks on anon. Someone must ship it, but no one knows why or who they are. Your friend got a glimpse once before they ducked back down.
Pool Noodle: It’s just you, kicking your feet. You named the ship and wrote it on your noodle with a big sharpie. You tell people about it and are met with confused blinking. Most of the fics in the tag were either written by you or for you. You are caught between wanting to shout about how lovely life is on this floating scrap of whimsy and fearing that your noodle can’t bear much weight. Or worse, that someone will come over and dunk you, take your noodle and fwhap you on the head with it.
Scuba: Like a submarine, but it’s just you all by your lonesome, exploring the depths, possibly encountering more tentacles than anticipated.
“When someone is making money from fan labor, there is always an opportunity for censorship. When fans have to depend on someone else, that someone else might take something down that they don’t like, and we don’t have to think too hard about why they might not like it—maybe they won’t like it for copyright reasons, maybe they won’t like it for trademark reasons, maybe they won’t like it for content reasons, maybe they won’t like it for personality reasons. But there’s a sort of personal autonomy element to fandom that I think is a really important thing to preserve. Maybe not the only important thing to preserve, but a thing that matters, and I think that’s part of what mattered to the [Organization for Transformative Works].”
it’s very, very American. While there are certainly antis who aren’t American, many of them are.
I have a lot of theories as to why this is, but a lot of them are covered in this post: anti-shipping as the cool new trend (while it’s mostly about the age bracket of anti-shippers as of June 2017 (this time last year), it’s an americentric post talking almost entirely about US phenomena).
tl;dr version? anti-shipping is:
the natural result of growing up both LGBT+/queer and marinated in American-flavored Puritan Christianity/purity culture
with a side order of valuing safety over freedom
b/c you’ve always had freedom of information
but you’ve never known a sense of security
thanks to lifelong internet access
paired with post-9/11 paranoia.
add a dash of radical feminism/exclusionist thinking
never being taught how to think critically, and
zero education on sex of any kind, and
viola: anti-shippers.
someone* added these tags to their reblog of this post, which, uh: this is literally the basic, standard fandom anti-shipper position on ships.
Whether you call yourself an ‘anti’ or not, this is precisely what a fandom anti does: ‘throw down’ if they think someone’s ships are ‘abusive’, ‘pedophilia’, or ‘incest’ (generally with widely expanded definitions, hence the scare quotes).
it’s a pretty solid example of how this works, though:
tag op is 21: too young to remember a world before 9/11 happened or remember a world without internet access
tag op’s strong feelings about fictional ships suggests they flatten fiction and reality to equal levels of potential danger: classic black & white thinking structure that is strongly encouraged by American Protestant Christianity
tag op didn’t read this post with self-awareness and/or application of critical thought, much less click the link that the tl;dr list references
tag op feels justified in limiting other people’s freedom to use fictional ships to explore certain social/romantic/sexual dynamics, threatening to throw down over it.
this is because those social/romantic/sexual dynamics are not safe or healthy in real life.
even though ships are fictional, the safety of censorship is more important than freedom of expression or thought.
the concern is always about ships/sex fantasies: never violence/fantasies about harming others. this is the combined effect of purity culture and radical feminism in a society that glorifies and normalizes violence.
tag op will fight you for bad ships, because it is okay to fantasize about fighting people but not okay to fantasize about unhealthy fictional relationships
Anyway.
I have a lot of sympathy for antis because I think their lives often set them up to favor censorship and abhor education-as-inoculation, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re being jerks to fellow fans on the basis of assuming things about the core of their person because of what they ship.
fandom policing of this sort is assumptive, presumptive, and deeply damaging, both to the victims of anti-shipper cyberbullying and the anti-shippers themselves, who are encouraged in this abusive cycle hellhole behavior by emotional manipulation and coercion.
(I want to end this with a joke about how American this is, but assholes are everywhere tbh. Americans are just especially susceptible to the thinking patterns established by fandom antis at this precise moment in history because of the factors listed above.)
*if you figure out who it is, kindly be a decent person and leave them the hell alone.
In
America, sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world, it’s a
fact. ~
Marlene Dietrich
jinlinli 