Ships aren’t food, they’re not exercise, they’re not even a nonfiction book or a classic novel. A steady diet of LGBT+ ships with no age or power gap won’t make you emotionally or mentally any healthier. It won’t teach you about how actual relationships work and it won’t prevent you from getting into an unhealthy relationship.
Unhealthy ships won’t ruin you. They won’t corrupt you, they won’t destroy your understanding of actual healthy relationships or erode your morality.
Your fictional diet isn’t your actual diet. There’s no organic vegan gluten-free ship that will fix a single goddamn thing.
Relax. Enjoy yourself. Read whatever fiction fascinates you, tantalizes you, engages you. The content doesn’t matter much for your health, but the joy it brings you might.
Also? While it’s good to find out, and cooperate with, what your body wants and needs (just as you should read things that bring you joy, whatever those are) – being obsessed with purity in your actual diet isn’t a healthy thing either, it’s an eating disorder.
Seek out the things that nourish you! Don’t sacrifice them on behalf of judgmental people who have never cared for your well-being.
This holds true if you have a food allergy – this holds true if you are an obligate omnivore. Thriving is a good deed, for yourself and for others.
That’s exactly what fandom purity wankers are like – the grocery cart police.
And try new things! You don’t grow if you only try what you already know you like – food, fic, people, ideas, book genres, TV shows, anything!
It’s okay to ship characters because of their canon interactions.
It’s okay to ship characters because you think their personalities mesh well.
It’s okay to ship characters because you’re curious what it would be like if their situation was different than what it is in canon.
It’s okay to ship something for coping reasons.
It’s okay to ship something purely because you like how the characters look next to each other.
You don’t need a proper reason to like a ship. Just have fun shipping it.
It’s okay to ship characters because they’re be a raging trash fire together and you’d like to see how that would play out. It’s okay to ship them because despite appearing very different, they have that one thing in common that means they get each other. It’s okay to ship characters because the time travel and culture clash involved would be really fun to explore and involve terrible puns. Just go for it.
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…
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.
the “this is your house I’m not making you sleep on the couch” “yeah but you’re the guest you take the bed” conversation between ur otp right before they share the bed reblog if u agree
From now on I will only accept love triangles if they end in:
Polyamory
The main character rejecting both love interests and staying single
The two love interests giving up on the main character because how hard is it to make a damn choice?
4. The two love interests realizing they love each other more than the main character and the main character getting together with someone that wasn’t even part of the triangle proper.
5. All three characters realizing they’re better as friends and going go kart racing
jinlinli 