#Slash Shipping

[mushi-shield]

[hildegardladyofbones]

Ship dynamics I need to see more of

Jester X King but the power dynamic is flipped. The king is the jester's fool.

Painter X muse but in a "I have to know them carnally to depict them accurately" way

Two awful creatures that only deserve eachother. Each other's mutual end.

Weapon of mass destruction X someone with no morals. The sweet-sweet potential for objectification this one has

Two artists that only speak in art terms with each other, confusing everyone else. Colour theory is what gets them going.

Artist X sponsor. Very different from artist X muse, because the non artist is interacting self indulgently. "I monetise your drug habit and you create era defining masterpieces" sort of relationship

[herefortheships]

I feel like a lot of modern ships are missing the "zest" that ships used to have years ago like around the mid 2000s to around 2017-ish. Especially the gay ships.

And I KNOW I shouldn't complain at ALL. Because, after all, we finally have couples that are openly gay (or bisexual, too) from the start, and we get to see them develop without the wondering of "but COULD this happen? Are they REALLY? ARE they going to go there?"

... And, I think I just figured it out in this silly little post. That's what's missing. The wondering, the passion. The question of "will they? Won't they?" We are given couples that we know are going to end up together because, either the show itself is ABOUT these couple falling in love, OR the two are just the gay characters in the show so they simply end up together with minor complications.

To some extent, you could say that gay ships are being treated as straight ships in TV shows nowadays, but truly I don't think so? They might be treated as straight ships within the romance genre (I guess you could say, Good Omens, to give an example, is romance genre despite the fantasy elements: it's a fantasy-romance).

I think that's why ships like Destiel were (and continue to be) so popular: There was chemistry and passion that spawned between them naturally, without the show being a romance or being about them falling in love. They weren't put there with the intention to show the audience a gay romance; it just happened. The show wasn't a romance show, but there was romance in it, like there usually is in any TV show, and it just so happens that this time, the chemistry and "will they? Won't they?" question happened between to male characters (or male presenting, in Cas's case).

One of the selling points of the romance genre is its predictability: the characters must end up together. Maybe the issue then is all on me and the romance genre just isn't for me. But I don't think there are gay ships happening naturally in shows within other genres, and if they do, you know something will happen because it's the only gay characters in the room.

The unpredictability; the question of "will they? Won't they?" is the zest that is missing. It's something we've only gotten as an accident in shows and between characters where it was never intended.

Get what I'm saying? I don't know if I'm expressing myself properly. I think this topic needs a proper essay 😅.

To summarize, I just feel like ships today are kind of "too easy"? And even bland to some extent. I don't know. Maybe I just need to get used to this, coming from the hyper-analytic Destiel fandom, where it was commonplace for us to deconstruct scenes and look at all the little details to find the subtext and point at all the evidence that Destiel was indeed intentional, because, that's kind of what slash shipping used to be. It all existed only in the subtext, and it was all entirely valid as well. (I believe that subtext is still a very important part of the story and it's just as canon as the irrefutable text we can see and hear on the surface of the story.

I would like to see gay ships that develop naturally, within shows that are about anything else, where we get to speculate if it could happen or not, "will they, won't they?" and all that, as it's so commonplace to do with hetero ships.

[hislittleraincloud]

Well damn.

Really didn't see this coming, even though I knew he had problems.

I used to make fun of my ex for her 1D obsession, though she knew I wasn't really serious and it was all in good fun (I was and am a sarcastic ass). So my experience with this dude up here was making Wattpad book covers for my ex's 1D stories. 💀 One of them was about Payne, so I had to stare at his face for a couple of hours in Photoshop.

I don't remember the names of the stories, nor did I read them (even though she offered) because if I recall, they were RPF, and you all know how I feel about that stuff. I don't remember who he was paired with, but back then there were a LOT of slashers in the 1D community for some reason — "Larry" (Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles) was the most popular 1D ship at one point. But as the linked article states, kids really need to stop shipping real people because:

Do those Larry stans sound familiar? 💀 They should.

This poor young man. I don't know of his struggles, only that he was a drinker. I'm sorry that 31 was the end of his line. R.I.P.

ETA: Obvs. everyone has demons and his were numerous. It's still sad for his fans and family who loved him.

[t1gerlilly]

I’m so mad I can’t see straight.

Unlike most normal horny people I didn’t start shipping slash ships because they’re hot. That’s irrelevant to my Demi ass. I started shipping slash because it was transgressive and I was so f*cking sick of the sexism at work that I wanted to write something that would horrify my coworkers.

Slash fic of their favorite franchises seemed like just the ticket.

I’ve never looked back. And I’m still in the same job and still just…enraged by how people treat me. Like there are some days where it physically hurts I’m so pissed.

I get why people riot. Why they tear down the world they’re in, even if it only hurts themselves.

Some days it feels like the world needs a cleansing fire or a tsunami or a flood to wipe the world clean.

[midydoof]

This was my request fill for the One Piece Fanwork Exchange back in April that I posted on AO3. The zosan prompt was "two pining idiots"

I've been debating for months whether to post it on tumblr since long vertical comics often don't look good in the thumbnails, still not sure I'm too happy with that bit.

[hislittleraincloud]

Jesus Christ, where to start with this mess.

@hislittleraincloud there is a LOT wrong with shipping platonic friends.

Newsflash: In the cases of Potter and Wednesday, we're all "shipping platonic friends", even after they've paired up in canon (Harry/Cho, Ron/Lavender, Romione, Hinny; Weyler, Enjax, and presumably Bianca/Lucas). The same could be said of any fandom on Earth that does not necessarily take place in wizarding/outcast schools. That's what fandom is about. We explore all ships, big, small, fluffy, and degenerate...because it's fiction. Fiction offering escapism, and offering deeper perspectives than the cursory character images we're gifted onscreen.

But go on.

I can make a long post about it later. But for the time being: don't forget that children at the ages of 6 to 10 are watching Wednesday.

I haven't forgotten, but I can tell you that 6 to 10 year olds aren't participating in this chronicaly online fandom bullshit (and if some of them are, they need to GTFO fr, because fandom is not for children). I know most of the young fandom here are being fed adolescents are children, but they're not. Adolescents are going through a rough hormonal change that will affect the entire rest of their lives; some do it early, some are late bloomers like Enid. They are very much different from kindergarten and elementary school children, brain-wise.

But lemme tell you what the average child sees when they watch Wednesday: They see two friends/best friends. Kids at that age are still adjusting to our colorful world, and socially (in America at least) are still clueless about things like The Cramps' version of "The Goo Goo Muck" being about oral sex and the whole visual 'joke' of a blowjob regarding Enid and Lucas; they just hear a funny, creepy-ish song with a danceable beat and see a girl who accidentally spilled something on her date. (Adults have been putting Adult Jokes in children's fare since the dawn of animation. See: OG Warner Brothers cartoons, Animaniacs, the Muppets, etc.) They're hardly thinking in subtexts or double entendres because their brains are still grappling with reality, they're still trying to learn how to read and comprehend what they're reading. Subtext is usually taught when children start maturing into young adults when they can start to question and understand the complexities of language and communication, and for me it was in 9th and 10th grade.

Is Wednesday then inappropriate for kids that young? I wouldn't say so, since they're ignorant of the subtext that the older adolescents are taking from it. Kids are resilient, more resilient than we give them credit for, and some kids adore dark n' creepy (because they ARE dark n' creepy 🫠). But it is rated TV-14, and it's always up to the parents to parent their kids as they deem appropriate. If they think that their kid can handle the gore and the teen love stuff, then that's on them.

But no parent should ever let their elementary-aged child participate in online fandom. Even if it's just uploading stories to AO3 under supervision. There's a good reason why a lot of sites say you must be at least 13 to join. And I'm talking this kind of fandom shit right here *gestures all around me*, not like...an official Star Wars website for young fans. I've seen so many cute little kids at cons with their parents who are all involved with fandom in one way or another, but this here is a cesspool of twisted ideas that they can't fully understand and aren't meant to fully understand.

These kids are exposed to daily se*ualizition of two girls( all over social media), who are portrayed as an embodiment of a sibling-like friendship.

Once again, kids aren't supposed to be here in fandom. "All over social media" is part of fandom. The kids you're worried about aren't here, and if they are, they're not supposed to be.

(ETA: Now realize that was a huge wall of text and added the cut.)

You may be queer, but you grew up in an era where platonic friendships were celebrated in TV and films, and everyone respected them. Children were allowed to be just kids and just friends for long years before they started thinking about romantic and sexual relationships.

Don't tell me what I am or what I grew up in. I've got 20 years on your ass, and the reason I can tell YOU what era you, your peers, and your generational subordinates (Z) are living in is because I'm living it too, and am capable of the comparison.

I grew up in an era where social media didn't exist, and none of us had a camera/video camera with us wherever we went. You know what we did as kids, though? We played doctor with each other (a lot like how it was depicted in Afterburn between young Wednesday and young Xavier). With each other and our plushies and other dolls. (And in my case, it was also playing gynecologist with the life-sized blonde doll my grandma sent me one year. I was the same damn age that you saw in the previous Face Reveal post.) Our parents didn't freak out over it, either, because none of it was sexual; going to the doctor was never sexual or sexualized for us kids. It was common and healthy curiosity. That was our "kids being kids" in terms of transactional discovery, but today someone somewhere would scream about how their children were sexually assaulting each other when the worst thing that even happened most of the time was a pants drop.

We had more freedom to act like little assholes, we got punished for it when we were way out of line/someone got hurt or traumatized, but I can't even pretend that we were completely shielded from 🏳️‍🌈 in the media. I was 6½ years old when I watched the first gay character on primetime TV (Steven Carrington of Dynasty; my mother liked Dynasty, Dallas, and Falcon Crest, so that's what we watched). I thought both actors who portrayed him were cute but then was educated on what gay men were by my mother. But instead of immediately feeling disgust, I was a kid who just understood that men can be with other men the way they were with women. It was no big deal to me, even as young and lacking in social connectivity as I was.

The internet, social media, and irresponsible parenting are making people so fucked in the head. Sometimes people are too suggestible, and when one person says something that is patently false, it will just be accepted regardless because they fear losing that shred of connectivity.

And then under that huge hive mind they're unable to recognize what the rest of the world outside of that mind sees. Millar & Gough and their writing crew set out to tell Wednesday's story of how she went from hating people and having no friends to tolerating people and having friends.

But lemme address this "you grew up in an era where platonic friendships were celebrated in TV and films, and everyone respected them" assertion of yours directly:

Like I just said, we didn't have social media. But we had print, and the first Captain James T. Kirk/Spock slash fan fiction was published fifty years ago this month. It was called "A Fragment Out of Time" by Diane Marchant. So for at least as long as I've been alive, NOT "everyone" has respected the celebrated platonic friendships in TV and films. "Fans" have always been freaky like that, and that's fine (I mean, I've mentioned it before, but I wrote my own fucking Purple Rain fan fic sequel 40 years ago, but it's lost to time/my parents probably tossing it...imagine how many others like me wrote fan fic that was just never published or shared anywhere). The only difference is now, we can communicate with others in ways that we only dreamed of before, and we can go out and find our peoples to commiserate, create, and share.

You are my peoples when it comes to a het ship like Wavier, but you are certainly not my fucking peoples when you keep doing things like saying "there is a LOT wrong with shipping platonic friends" while using ONLY slash/LGBT ships as your examples.

That's homophobic behavior.

I don't necessarily ship Wenclair, but I can appreciate the less obnoxious people who do, i.e. the reasonable people who know when they've got their ship goggles on. I support peoples' right to ship who/what they want, but shipping does not come without criticism. I get the criticism all the time, I'm an easy target because Wenovan is That Ship that only few will publicly sail. You get the crit because Wavier/Wenvier involves White. It's time that the Wenclairs also faced some crit, but you're fucking doing it wrong and it is heavily laced with homophobic intimation, so I'mma tell you one last goddamn time: KNOCK IT OFF.

This generation, however, doesn't have that option 🫤. Since every friendship in every show and film gets se*ualized. How is this OK?

This generation that's as strong on shipping as the Wenclairs also had their schooling and social development absolutely fucked by COVID, as well as being influenced by so. Much. Confusing. Shit. Online (which is also fucking with their social development).

None of y'all understand the separation of actors and characters because identity politics is suddenly taking a front seat in everything we do. And a lot of it revolves around gender and sexuality. People/humans have had their hangups about sexuality, but right now it's worse since the kids are objectifying the actors by meddling in their personal lives and aggressively dictating who they're permitted by fandom to be friends with (that much we can agree upon). It's a Mean Girl mentality to get cliquey and tell someone, "We don't like him, you need to stop hanging out with him!" As a former girl, I've seen girls do this to people for little to no reason at all. Anyway.

You feel like you're being inundated with gay ships and disrespect for 'platonic' friendships, but it's nothing new and has always been present in modern fandom. Don't use "because of the kids!" as an excuse to call a ship disgusting or wrong. That's not and has never been how it works in fandom. I was most active in Potter when Ortega was born (💀), and when you were in grade school. I think I can recognize when someone is couching (though not very well) their own homophobia behind the veil of concern, and if you can't see that you're being homophobic, then cycle back up to the beginning where it's about Ron and Harry.

You don't know the consequences of this phenomenon on young minds who unfortunately, never understood the value of building human friendships before they move on to more intimate relationships.

I do know because we're seeing it right now, however: I will agree that it's a massive, massive leap for someone like [Millar & Gough's and Ortega's canon] Wednesday to go from having zero friends to having a girlfriend. THAT'S not how THAT works, either. But at the same time, that would mean that we can't ship Wavier or Wyler either. If you want to respect real Wednesday canon, then by the end of Season 1, Wednesday still isn't looking like she will be partnered with anyone, let alone the werewolf who left her to deal with Xavier while she went to go make out with her boyfriend (canon Wednesday can't even bring herself to apologize to Xavier for fucking up his life because she doesn't ever apologize like a socially adjusted human would).

But fandom's fan works aren't absolutely required to respect canon (unless it's something like an official screen-to-page novelization of a show with a robustly nihilistic narcissist as its main character), you know that. Everybody should know that. We make shit up all the time about the characters, properly objectifying them as the fictional objects that they are. Sometimes studios can be irresponsible and try to play into fandom like they have with the queerbaiting in Wednesday promos/merch like Mejia's book, forgetting that online fandom is fractured and separate from the more casual (and youngest) public, non-chronically online fans.

Stop worrying about the kids who aren't a part of our fandom and start worrying about how the fuck you're coming across in your arguments. Sincerely ask yourself whether you hate the ship because of a fat chunk of its fandom fans and their delusional behavior around it, or if you just hate the ship because you find LGBT shipping distasteful.

Because from where my fat ass is sitting with your additional Harry/Ron comments, you're sounding increasingly like the same moralists* we've been fighting for decades, and I don't wanna fucking fight you. But I will.

@hislittleraincloud there is a LOT wrong with shipping platonic friends. I can make a long post about it later. But for the time being: don't forget that children at the ages of 6 to 10 are watching Wednesday. These kids are exposed to daily se*ualizition of two girls( all over social media), who are portrayed as an embodiment of a sibling-like friendship.

You may be queer, but you grew up in an era where platonic friendships were celebrated in TV and films, and everyone respected them. Children were allowed to be just kids and just friends for long years before they started thinking about romantic and sexual relationships.

This generation, however, doesn't have that option 🫤. Since every friendship in every show and film gets se*ualized. How is this OK?

You don't know the consequences of this phenomenon on young minds who unfortunately, never understood the value of building human friendships before they move on to more intimate relationships.

[devine-fem]

“they are not gay, they are just the most important person in each other’s lives…” what are you LITERALLY SAYING TO ME?!?!?!?

[clay-tries-his-best]

don't tell me i was the only one picking up on the Miguel / Peter B. vibe...

[ao3demographicssurvey2024]

In the AO3 Demographics Survey 2024 - an unofficial demographics survey of 16,131 AO3 users - the "Mature" rating was ranked most enjoyed by consumers, while those posting works most frequently posted "Teen and Up". Only 16% of those who had posted works to AO3 said they had never posted M/M, while 69% of consumers "Strongly Enjoyed" M/M works.

To see more analysis, including transcripts of all the data shown on the graphs, please view the full results on AO3 for both ratings and relationship types.

[edogaii]

madcom 13 leaks thank you krinkels. my sick son deiford i love you so much we have to put you on SO many pills

[mushi-shield]

[theloopus]

gay 70s copaganda thesis is actually about the inherent homoeroticism of the western genre and the cultural image of the male cowboy it borrows from. or as Susan Sarandon once put it, "They got their guns out because they couldn't get their dicks out"

[beeqisch]

idea by @thief-of-eggs idk if thats what u imagined but ahaha first thing that came to my mind tho (while i was in the middle of drawing this one of my friends said "tim cloning kon" and i died a little bit)

[die-auster]

You can order a commission and follow me on my Ko-fi.

[mashedmangos]

I love this scene