#Even though tbata not how I asked the question

[familyofpaladins]

hhhmmmm, a good point to bring up

What I mostly meant by gen fics contain ships was, for example, say the fic/story is about a (or a couple of) younger character(s) going on an adventure, but their parents are married and very much in a relationship in the background. Like they are there and present in the fic. But the fic isnt about them

(Using an example off the top of my head, it's like if you were reading a fic for the Sonic movies. And it's about Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles fighting Eggman or some other villain, but Maddie and Tom are there as protective parents. They're married. they're a ship, but just because they're there doesnt mean that it's a ship fic.) Does that make sense?

As for how to vote for your "plotty" fanfic. I've seen a lot of other people mention in the tags that they dont specifically look for ship or not ship, they just look for good premise in general. So they voted equal since ship or gen ddint really matter. So I guess you could ask yourself if ships are an important part (either to include or exclude) when choosing your plot focused fanfics.

I'd say that your "romance driven" fic would be ship, even if it does occur in a larger plot, since you said the romance is the driving force

Saw a poll thati implied people only read fanfiction for shipping. And I KNOW that's not true. but now I'm curious to what the ratio is

Ship fics are referring to any fic that is about two or more characters and their romantic/sexual relationship, where the story revolves around that relation ship, or takes a good chunk of the story

Gen fics refer to any fic where the main plot/story is NOT focused on the romantic/sexual relationship between two or more characters (gen fics can include ships, like if there is an established relation ship, but the fic is not focused on the ship)

The main point though is, do you go looking for ships, or other reasons

[etirabys]

The nice thing about eudaimonia, well-living, is that to a limited extent you can just trust the natural sea of social incentives to guide you right. Ape social life with tight interconnections for survival produced screwy but overall altruistic instincts and social norms. High dividends from cooperation (or costs of defection) plus high mutual surveillance plus long memory means humans generally have the inclination and capacity to benefit others and will repeatedly do so in interactions.

So this means we have the nice property that cultural evolution will make it such that people in different countries will converge on claiming to value honesty, generosity, happiness.

So if you’re born, inculcated however you’re inculcated, and then attempt to view the world as newly as possible to see what better way of thinking and living can be found – that is, try to establish an ethics for yourself – and wonder how you can find ways to think & act that are morally better by some process that physical reality can ever validate as being superior... if you commit yourself to such a stupid, stupendous task – this seems like an relieving thing to notice. That human bio & cultural evolution has these properties.

Frans de Waal gets at this a bit in The Bonobo and the Atheist, whose interesting thesis-essence is mostly captured in the first few chapters. This book does not attempt to explain what morality is from the inside – that is, establish an ethics or a way-of-discovering-ethics – but merely describes how the moral norms we find intuitive arise from material conditions of nature in primate species. TBatA does not ask or answer, what is moral? But rather, why do we feel and question that we call morality?

If you’re a phil program burnout who understood a little bit of Wittgenstein and decided never to make phil a major project again, this is the right question the ask.

That is, if you think that answerability is a crucial condition a question must meet to be worthwhile. That eyeless, heartless flux of matter, and the lowest-level statements we can compose about it – reality – is our only oracle, whose howling storm-voice across a sea we collect in fragile, gritty shells so that we can distill an echo out of it that we call truth. My curiosity and need for answers outweighs the satisfaction the storm-voice can give me. Hence, back to ethics. Back to squinting at my friend’s synthesis of Kant and letting unfortunately small fraction I digest percolate. Back to making malformed queries.

My justification for trying to answer ethical questions – which may be a post-hoc justification – is that they are not questions we pose to answer, but questions that we pose to guide or refine a process – such as living while trying to be good, i.e. living eudaimonically. I know why I as an animal have the impulse to be good, I have accepted a few major premises* that make me intellectually/ideologically as well as instinctively aligned with the project of goodness, and I have unanswerable questions whose asking will keep me on that path. So, the practice of answering ethical questions with the innate or cultural logic we are equipped with, and iterating on both questions and answers depending on our current values – is of instrumental, non-literal use in a way asking an answerable question is not.

* I’d label them Universal Valuation (everything that thinks and feels, I value), the Prior of Symmetry (the axiom/decision that there is nothing special about you or your loved ones for being you or your loved ones), and the principle of Inherent Desirability of Values Iteration (changing your ethical beliefs after thinking about them is more desirable than leaving your ethical beliefs as is, even though nothing about the universe will validate any aspect of about your evolution. That one’s definitely a leap of faith for me).