#—ship wank

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

First of all: if shuggy got together I assume it would be after buggy got over his feelings of inferiority

But there are people who believe buggy is not worthy of shanks, I recently saw ask asking if he was to ugly and it’s popular reason to dislike shuggy in favour of other shanks ships.

I wonder about buggy reaction if he heard people talking like this in universe? Would he be angry at shanks? He does seem like someone who would blame shanks 😭😭

oh, i shipped kkg long before it was cool, i am very familiar with anti-ship arguments that boil down to "but X is so ugly, how can you ship him with Y?!" those arguments are just as superficial now as they ever were, and i really don't care to engage with them. if your reason for shipping one pair over another is "they look better together," that's fine, you do you, that's your business. but that's not why i ship things.

that said, buggy being angry at shanks for being… what, too pretty for him? is hysterical. of course he'd blame shanks for any disparity in their looks.

(not that i think he considers them to have any such disparity… he's sensitive about his nose, sure, but that's not about its attractiveness, it's about it being weird. i think buggy thinks he's hot shit, and he's surrounded by people who agree with him.)

[hekateinhell]

psa

[the-bar-sinister]

It's not pedophilia or inherently predatory to ship an adult woman character with an older adult male character.

It just isn't.

You can be grossed out about it all you like, and you don't have to ship it.

No one is saying you have to like age gaps.

But every time you call it "pedophilia" or "illegal" what you are doing is you are infantalizing adult women and removing them of their legal and social agency.

Calling an adult woman being shipped with an older man inherently predatory is misogynistic.

[rosesradio]

*toxic in this context is an umbrella term for anything considered unhealthy in an irl relationship (examples: age gap, power imbalance, incest, general toxicity, etc.)

*elaboration in the tags is appreciated but please be respectful of others or you’ll be blocked, thank you!

[clownfessionsofficial]

"DNI if you ship ILLEGAL ships!!!!!"

Tell me you suck cop dick without telling me you suck cop dick

[holyfreaks]

sorry but the "trying to get rid of us" part.... like we were here from literally day one. you came into OUR house and decided the show was about something that it's not. also, even if we weren't here from the beginning, we deserve to be here every bit as you do. why are you trying to gatekeep fandom, when it's always been for the freaks. especially on the incest family horror show

[exhuastedpigeon]

Some of y’all talk about shipping almost like it’s your religion and it’s so wild. Why are you out here trying to evangelize your ship? What are you a white missionaries in the 1800s trying to convert people?

Do you honestly think going on anon in people’s inboxes telling them the way they view a character is “wrong” is going to change someone’s mind? Just let people like what they like and you can like what you like. Your ship isn’t any less valid just because not everyone likes it.

It’s okay! Go outside, take a walk, get some fresh air. You’ll feel better.

[slothyykittee]

I hate when this happens I hate when this happens

Also posted on twitter!

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

You would get more likes with mishanks than with shuggy. Mishanks ff is more popular. Mihawk is actually a great character but he’s a hidden gem so I guess you could miss those details about him. But if you reread you have to focus on him! He’s important to shanks just like buggy! It’s the best op ship and I love how he’s more equal and understanding to shanks than buggy

😑 it's a good thing i don't care about how many likes i get, then.

[catgirl-catboy]

[qprstobin]

I'm gonna be frank, Eddie just does not give me the impression that he was bullied all that much in high school to me. Especially as he got older, like he was the school drug dealer, he was not getting beat up by the same jocks who were going to be buying from him later that week. It just doesn't make sense to me!

I'm not saying he was never bullied at all (personally I think he was probably bullied by the people in his grade in like middle school, but leant more into the satanic image by the time he got to high school (which is when the satanic panic wouldve been starting) and people became more afraid to mess with him or it stopped when BS started dealing) or that people can't headcanon and project onto pm. It's fandom, do what you want lol. I've just gotten to the point where fics lose me whenever they claim Tommy/Steve/Jason was going around beating the shit out of him or shoving him in the halls every week or the like. Eddie just does not give the impression that he is scared of the jocks normally. He looks down on them and thinks he's better than them! He taunts them openly in front of everyone and pontificates on table tops.

I think if you take it in that context too, it makes the town turning on him more sinister? Like obviously, satanic panic was only growing at that point, and it was within the last year or two they started pointing at metal and D&D as recruiting centers for satanic cults. (Eddie also like an asshole is walking around with a satanic symbol on his jacket - peak edgy teen in the middle of a moral outcry.) But while people might've been afraid of him, and most definitely talked about him behind his back, that's worlds away from mob violence. The change was startling, even if Eddie might be able to see it on the horizon.

Idk to me that's more of what the hunt the freak line was about. The knowledge that they could turn on you and would if you gave them a reason (or if you want to go with the Eddie is closeted interpretation - if he got outed). I think he probably has been called the freak for a while but honestly I think he's proud of it at this point.

Obviously all of this is up to interpretation, I guess I've just gotten to the point where a lot of the popular fanon interpretation doesn't feel like Eddie to me anymore

[the-bar-sinister]

"But why does it matter if they're attracted to more than one gender-- they're already partnered with (character)!"

Ya'll are so fuckin' monogamous.

[goneforawhileever]

'Sibling Coded'

People calling some relationships ‘sibling coded’ nowadays make me roll my eyes because this idea that people can't fall in love because they're good friends is strange. Like I get it if the show goes out of its way to define the two of them being nothing more than platonic besties (ItaKugi for example, the show beat that ship over the head with a shovel and shot it behind the building), but sometimes it's just two characters that are good friends that have enough in common to feel as if they could one day fall in love, which is the core principle of shipping after all, but some human in the top percentile of dickheadery will scream in your ear that they're 'sibling coded' and should NOT be shipped because it'd be WEIRD!!!! (even though they're the ones that projected a sibling archetype onto the pair, solely them.)

Another variation of this is sometimes worse lol people will see two characters with straight up undeniable romantic implication in the series but will die on the hill that they're just friends or sibling coded (We all know at least one of these)

[shsl-fujoshi]

Being an anime fan is like "my favorite ship is huge in japan and there's a ton of art of it. If I mention this ship on tumblr people will tell me to kill myself."

[madlori]

I'm asking this to you because you're the only person I know who's been around fandoms for so long — do you find this shipping-situation weird? I've been in many fandoms but I've never really seen this insistence on there being only one acceptable ship for a character and encouraging the idea that anything other than the norm is almost sacrilegious. Almost every big fandom over the years have had multiple conflicting pairings, take for example, Marvel. Even works of media that have a canon romantic pairing have had fans who ship others with the leads (that was what shipping was tbh) and no one has ever shown up to their doorsteps with pitchforks in hand, at least not that I'm aware of. So I guess I'd really like your opinion on why you think this is happening now? Have things always been this way, just not in plain sight? Is this just the new fandom culture that is developing now with the influx of younger people? Or is this fandom an aberration where a group of people are so used to being the majority that they simply aren't taking well to things not going their way?

I've been thinking about this today, and I'm still not sure what I think.

I've been in fandoms with a hugely dominant ship before. I've been in fandoms that had ship wars. I've been in fandoms with a lot of peacefully co-existing ships. I'm not sure this fandom is really all that different. To answer your first question, no, I don't find it all that weird. In fact I sort of expected it.

Let me tell you a story about the Brokeback Mountain fandom, which managed to have a ship war despite having really only one ship, the canon ship. So BBM fic fell into several broad categories, the biggest of which were fix-the-ending/canon divergence fics and the straight-up AU fics (I wrote one of each, lol). Post-canon fics weren't as common, because you had to deal with one half of the canon pairing being...well, dead.

There was a post-canon fic that gained a lot of fans...and when I say "fic" that's really an understatement. It was a SAGA, and I don't use that term lightly. It was a series of like...6 or 7 epic 100K+ word fics and it was over a million words total. The author would put out more than one 5K chapters per DAY. I'm still in awe of this woman's output. But it was the content that created the issue.

(Brief recap for those who have not seen BBM - two ranch hands in the 1960s, Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) spend a season herding sheep together, have sex, form a bond, then separate to go about their expected hetero lives but get together for fishing trips every year or so to have sex and spend time together. Jack wants more, Ennis is terrified. Both marry and have families. Eventually Jack dies in what is implied to be a gay-bashing but who knows, and Ennis makes his peace with the love he'd felt for him)

The saga picked up a couple of years after the film's events. Ennis decides to tentatively explore what being queer means, goes to Laramie, finds a gay bar, and very cautiously enters. Through a Series of Events he gets mixed up in an assault there and befriends a local sheriff's deputy, who is also gay. They begin a relationship.

Now, this series was COMPLEX. A huge cast of characters, a long and thorough evolution of this relationship, a lot of angst over Jack's memory, and it really worked for a LOT of readers. The new love interest she created was a really great character.

For others...it did not work and they hated it.

The animosity between fans who loved this saga and those that did not grew pretty heated. This was like '05 so there was no twitter or tumblr, this was all on LJ and dedicated fandom forums (some of which banned discussion of this fic for this reason), but there was doxxing and namecalling and real vitriol.

I guess my point in all this is that when there's strong feelings, some fans will find a way to be horrible to each other.

I was in the Sherlock fandom, another fandom 98% dominated by one ship. There were other ships, but somehow they seemed to co-exist mostly peacefully barring some snide remarks and rude comments (I could be wrong about this, if you asked someone who shipped a non-Johnlock ship they might have a different answer). No, the insanity in the Sherlock fandom was not ship-war-related.

I was also in the Criminal Minds fandom, which has a whole bunch of disparate ships and no ship wars that I can recall.

Then there are other fandoms, like Avatar, with TERRIBLE ship wars that are still going on.

I don't think the situation in 9-1-1 is as unique or different from other fandom wanks as has sometimes been asserted. I think terrible fandom wars are sort of inevitable, whether they're ship related or not. But for what it's worth, here are some of my thoughts on what's going on here.

A loooooong time (5.5 seasons) with one very dominant non-canonical queer ship. No other ship really ever approached the level of saturation or devotion of Buddie.

A pervasive belief that this ship might possibly become canon. That's a feature a lot of other ships do not have.

A lack of intense devotion to any of the other love interests. BuckTaylor was never a challenger to Buddie. Neither was Eddie and Shannon, or anybody else. It's hard to fight when there's no worthy challenger.

But now? BuckTommy is not only canon, but it has a lot of fans. It's a threat. And it's not only a threat in a feelings kind of way (as in, people like a thing that is not the thing I like and it makes me upset) but there's a perception that it's an ACTUAL threat, as in if people like this ship and promote it, it could cause it to become a permanent relationship (the degree to which fan response actually affects how the show unfolds is...debatable).

I do not personally think this is the case, but some fans strongly believe that Buddie could still happen if it weren't for BuckTommy. So if you're still wanting Buddie and believe it will or could happen, the existence of an alternate love interest represents a direct obstacle to that happening. That's a heck of an incentive to hate that competing ship. I get it.

That...might be a somewhat unique situation. There's a fight now because there's a challenger who might actually stand a chance.

This goes along with what we saw in the immediate aftermath of 7x04. I read someone else say (apologies, I don't know who it was, feel free to @ me if it was you and I'll credit you) that the early post-7x04 enthusiasm and acceptance of Tommy reflected the belief that he was temporary. A lot of folks thought it was just a way for Buck to get with Eddie, like, very soon after that. But the more time went by, the clearer it became that this was not the plan or the intention. So the mood soured for those who were still pulling for Buddie.

Other fandoms I've been in with a hugely dominant ship...Sherlock and X-Files are the two that spring immediately to mind...there was never a challenger with any legs. X-Files fandom wank was between the ship and the...lack of ship, shall we say. But a concrete, tangible "opponent" makes a fight so much more visceral, doesn't it?

I do think there's been a fandom shift towards needing ships to be canon that I don't really get, but it's there. There's been a lot written about fandom culture in the last ten years, the breakdown of boundaries between fans and creators, the access to those creators, a sense of ownership/entitlement, purity culture, obsession with shipping "correctly" (which leads into wanting things to be canon for the validation)...these are all newish features. So pile that on top of 9-1-1 having a longtime single ship that's legitimately threatened for the first time in its existence by a competing canon ship and it's kind of a powderkeg.

No wonder it's caught on fire.

[thepastneverforgets]

it's just so funny. because prior to season 7, buddie was my favorite ship; the one i kept up to date on the most on ao3. and ive been in fandom for over ten years, so ive read a lot of fics for a lot of mlm ships. and all my former copaganda show ships literally paled in comparison to my love for buddie. and then s7 happened and i cant even check their fic tag without being immediately putt off by some nonsense 'tw: tommy mention' tag or the millionth break up to make buddie happen fic that centers around villainizing tommy now, instead of an unfortunate random third party woman.

now seven seasons later, and im spending all my time reading bucktommy fics that pretty much erase eddie from the narrative and puts tommy in his place instead. or fics that take that dumb wacky tommy is a spy theory and do something fun with it. and it's so great, honestly. it's endearing and charming and well-written and centered around just ignoring the character the author doesnt care about, instead of writing him into an irrational ooc asshole.