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aliasl · 5 months ago

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ok, I've been tagged in this enough times that i've finally read everything and feel like responding

FIRST, I admire your passion, @osakanone. But I'd advise you redirect that passion to enjoyment and not competition.

I DON'T want to insult you, but I'll just say: you seem young. The demographic you are counting as "shippers," and thus the units you are measuring popularity of the aforementioned ships by, are fanfic writers. It gives you numbers to work with, but it's not fair to say that the number of fics directly relates to number of fans of a ship. Writing is a huge undertaking that not every ship enjoyer undertakes, and not only that, it's a strange metric to focus on - what about fan art? What about DOUJINSHI???

Gundam, as a Japanese property, has its own unique fandom ecosystem. I'm an American who's been an anime fan a loooooong time, and I don't know all the ins and outs, but fanfiction doesn't seem to be a popular medium there. Rather, doujin is king.

And let's talk about fan works... Why do they exist? Because, despite how much you enjoy a piece of media, you see something missing. You don't transcribe a show when you write fanfic. It's a creative process. Talking about doujin - a visible, money-making part of fandom - that's an easy way for a mangaka/creator to see the popularity of their work; rather than a census (like Shonen Jump will do a weekly popularity quiz), you have Comiket. And so, Yoshiyuki Tomino rightly points out the fujos as the true, passionate fanbase - the fellow creators, not just the consumers who buy toys. But why do "fujoshi" exist? These "rotten women"? Because they see gay love where a homophobic, majority straight audience (by which I mean society) refuse to. And we won't get into a conversation about "fetishizing homosexuality" and "authorial intent." Maybe Tomino would have included explicit gay representation in his shows if he could, but... we all know that Gundam is not that.

Thus all the gay fanworks, in which fans make up for what canon lacks. And you probably don't all ship the same ships. Or agree on characterization. And anyway, "The work of many artists, designers, writers, even videos of events are just lost media because we didn't have the archival mentality adults develop" ....... When I was a teenager, I was saving jpegs of my fav yaois to my PC en masse. Archival ain't just an adult mindset; shipping isn't majority teenagers. If even the creators of fan works aren't holding onto their work and reuploading on modern, supported sites... that speaks to a lack of care, not just a lack of foresight.

FFN went to adult fanfiction.net or live journal or ao3, and it was up to the authors to transfer their works themselves (you DO NOT reupload someone else's work FOR THEM). So if they didn't... it was they who moved on. REITERATING AGAIN: the number of fanfics does not equal the number of shippers (and not just because one author could be uploading a hundred fics of the same pair - it's just not a direct measurement), but it was an easy number to point to when *checks notes ... can't find it, has to Google* "Sulemio" was pitted against Destiel.

Gundam Witch Mercury premiered in 2022!! Destiel became a ship in 2008!!!!!! With all due respect, it was not a fair fight nor is a Tumblr poll an accurate census. "urgh this is just a trend tumblr will get over it and go back to supernatural" I certainly have. I never got around to watching this Gundam show, though I've heard a bit about it - only great things. Meanwhile, I am still obsessing over Supernatural (and particularly Destiel) four years after the show ended, and over a decade since I started watching the show. I don't expect everyone to share my obsession. Tumblr may be the destiel site, but no one is enforcing ship supremacy.

It was a bad idea to start a fight over ships to begin with! Again, "Sulemio" has existed 2 years; Destiel has existed 16!!! It's just basic respect for legacy. You think I ship Spirk?? No. I never got into Star Trek. I don't find Shatner and Nemoy attractive or compelling, personally. But do I go kick the hornet's nest? No. This has transformed two molehills into an ugly mountain. Now, you're casting aspersions like Destiel shippers are "waspy Americans." As though it isn't also a global phenomenon (which just isn't impressive these days, with the internet. What ISN'T a global phenomenon?). Spn also has a female majority audience. We are not so different. Only in size.

So can we not make this about race? Or ethnicity? Or country? Or men vs women? Let's just not insult entire fanbases! You don't make yourself big by trying to make others feel small.

P.S. I never heard of Yukio Mishima before, but reading the Wikipedia page on his Forbidden Color book, without much context... why are we upholding misogynist, infidelious gays as great gay storytelling? You know the root of homophobia is male misogyny. All my homies hate gay misogynists.

tldr; nature is NOT healing. same shit, different day. there'll be peace when we are done, which is how you know we ain't done yet 🙄 😒

UPDATE: The Destiel/Supernats aren't taking this well -- explaining my reasoning for the history I gave, and why Destiel is not the big bitch of shipping that it thinks it is

An update to THIS:

"This is just a marketing thing, Gundam is a giant robot show, only men watch it!"

Gundam's fandom is silent majoratively feminine:

"But its not gay, its about giant robots!"

Gundam is very gay. The entire climax of the first story is a riff of Yukio Mishima lmao

The climax of the Amuro/Char arc of Universal Century Gundam (expounding from first Gundam circa 1979), Char's Counterattack is somewhat on the history of Japanese disillusion with liberalism which notably climaxed with the life and history of Yukio Mishima.

You know. THAT Yukio Mishima.

The one who wrote FORBIDDEN COLOURS.

It was so gay that the fanfiction inspired by it became its own damn anime:

And that's just Charmuro, let alone Charma or a billion other ships just in OG Gundam alone.

We've got This is before we get to Guin Sard Lineford and Yamagi Glimerton (both verrrrry gay), Tieria Erde (a genderqueer trans-coded character who transcends gender entirely in their arc) and a bunch of others.

Gundam was always gay.

"I don't see the numbers"

"That doesn't seem like much, Supernat is at least 2x this"

Sooooo the amount of content you do see isn't representative of how much even got written, given FFN had a huge content purge.

First, let's start with the relative proportion of users: If we're analysing the concept of fandom, we first have to look at who had access to the internet in the first place to publish works.

Yeah that's a pretty sizable difference.

Wing's fandom actually exploded in 2000, but got capped VERY early, distributing itself to fansites when FFN fragmented and collapsed.

Why?

Content purges!

"Isn't there some sort of online archive of this stuff?"

Sure, if you wanna dig through tons and tons of Angelfire and Geocities pages which have mostly disappeared. Otherwise, no! There is no archive of this stuff?

"Why?"

They've since rolled back on this but it means there's a massive amount of lost media out there, including the discussions on it and thus there's an entire history you didn't get to experience.

Its actually very difficult to reach people who've been involved, since it was so long ago that very few people remember, and a sizable proportion of that population have actually died.

"But what about SF fandoms? We have ancient records of stuff like Spirk!"

See unlike physical media like zines, when a server goes offline or there's a data-loss, or something like that there is no surviving copy of the thing in question.

The net result is we have this weird hole where content just vanished, and its now considered lost media. The work of many artists, designers, writers, even videos of events are just lost media because we didn't have the archival mentality adults develop.

You're not gonna hear about all the X-Files stuff or Frasier fanfictions or GW stuff because of these purges and the lack of physical media. FFN users were teens, not adults with resources like US/EU/JP SF fans, who had archival tendencies due to their long history.

So there is this supermassive black-hole in the history of fanfiction running between 1998, and 2008 and some of the only evidence of it are worksafe works and fansites which the owners have long since forgotten about because folks moved on. Moving on is a normal part of fandom.

So to those of you just saying "supernatural is losing to a pair of dumb anime girls" or "urgh this is just a trend tumblr will get over it and go back to supernatural"...

Uhhhhh no they won't, actually?

Supernat's fans mostly seem to be waspy Americans. Gundam is kind of a global phenomenon, one which has traditionally had a silent majority female audience, a vocal minority male audience -- and every time that majority has spoken up, its coincided with a content purge, or a TOS change that mysteriously biases American derived fiction over Japanese derived fiction.

Funny that.

tl;dr:

NATURE IS HEALING

#my fujoshi sister in christ #you spent so long trying to justify the numbers that you never stopped to ask if you should #let's not pit two bad bitches against each other #that said: destiel forever #sorry my favorite ship is white #and two “men”#I'm not convinced that makes me white supremacy misogynist #and I sure ain't waspy #supernatural #gundam #still might check out witch from mercury #but instead of attacking my ship #why don't you sell me on Sulemio?#ISN'T GUNDAM ABOUT HOW WAR IS TERRIBLE?#WHY ARE GUNDAM FANS STARTING FANDOM WARS???😵‍💫

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