#because fuck shipwank

[bylightofdawn]

Get to bed early she said? HA HA HA HAHA 2:45 am later.

Though in my defense, a loud thunderstorm blew in and I am a baby when it comes to thunder so I can never call asleep if it's like storming like crazy.

I've also been having too much fun on tumblr but it's fucking late. I did break down and meander to AO3 and immediately hyena cackled because out of 121 fics, 79 of them are tagged Edgin/Xenk.

I know that's going to rustle some people's jimmies. I already saw some person vague posting about how ugh they love a character and have to suffer through wading through those dirty popular ship pairing for content on said character.

At which point I just rolled my eyes because 1) why vague posting in a PA manner? 2) Why piss on other people's enjoyment because you aren't enjoying it? Exactly what does your being a negative nelly about people enjoying things you don't like bring to this sphere except you making it about you and your dislike? Sure technically, they're complaining on their blog and they are entitled to their opinion so I will concede that point. Well here's my opinion and my point posted on my blog.

Let people have fun. If you don't like it, don't interact. And if you HAVE to interact because you want that content of said character then you kinda signed up for yanno....interacting with said content so why are you bitching about it?

Okay, I'm going to bed for real. I'll prolly wake up to hate notes about this one but eh, ask me if I care?

[burr-ell]

@arkhamarchitecture replied to your post “Wow people are being so weird about the fact that...”:

shit, i didn't even watch most of campaign 2 and i'm guessing there were a lot of people who didn't like Caleb/Essek because Caleb/Molly had remained popular for fucking AGES after Molly died

​funnily enough, shadow/gast is actually enormously popular! i don't know if wido/mauk stans were quite as opposed to it as wido/jest stans were, but if memory serves it's got the highest number of fics on ao3; it's quite a juggernaut. generally the big target for shipwank from c2 was fjor/ester, followed by beau/yasha. (which makes me glad that i wasn't following the campaign at the time, as i generally enjoyed what i saw of both from the twoshot.)

[theliterarywolf]

Aww wolfie, don't you just love it when Western "fans" who rush in at localized content completely misrepresent and almost borderline purposefully ignore original culture context just to freak out and throw in all the problematic labels??? How very not progressive of you /s. I got some Twisted Wonderland merch bc I like the art of the characters, but damn, can't wait for all the "hot takes" and over sensitive people freaking the fuck out, and doing stuff like slapping random LGBTA labels on characters, and then getting mad when said characters don't do "LGBTA stuff" instead of just chilling with their HC's. "What this guy looks very feminine and is super vain about his appearance? Must be canon trans, no cis man could ever be this focused on looking good!" Or how people are gonna throw a fit bc the characters based on "Lion King" aren't black enough, or that the "Aladdin" characters look "too stereotypical" in their clothes or something. (On that last one, it'd deffo be ironic if that happens bc even the "White" characters don't wear "accurate" clothes either, like the Vain guy, Vil Schönheit, is wearing some weird Kimono even tho he's based on Snow-White a German fairytale, his last name is "Schönheit" and first name is Vil, which is a Chezch name, not German, so I guess #Mixed-ethnicity?) Also, the designs of the characters is made by the artist of Black Butler, so I wonder if they'll bring up the stupid (and disproven) runmor that she was writing Yaoi with BB. (Yes disproven multiple times, it's a Western only rumor.) And then start talking that it's bad to like the series because of that rumor.

Oh, the whole 'why aren't the Lion King-inspired characters black' discourse already happened. Similar to people calling the game fatphobic because the Ursula-inspired character was chubby as a kid but lost weight when he got older.

It's just that, thankfully, they were squashed/ignored for the most part. With more exposure, though, I could easily see that kind of discourse spreading further.

I just have to wonder what shipwank idiocy will pop up once the western fanbase becomes cancerous. It has a lot to live up to in the face of the Genshin Impact western fandom's 'These characters are sworn brothers, so if you ship them you're promoting incest -- No, I don't want Chinese fans explaining to me why I'm wrong! Fuck you!' and the sentient Cookie game western fandom's 'Dark Choco was a preteen when Milk was just dough! If you ship them as adults, that's pedophilia~!'

[anti-anti-a-la-bi-bi]

"Professor Layton drownout" was that STILL GOING ON????? OMG I left Layton fandom well over a year ago because they literally COULD NOT stop whining about ships they hated daring to continue to exist elsewhere are they STILL DOING THIS (I wasn't even into those ships myself but OMG the shipwank was annoying. Also the fandom had a LOT of Exclusionist and TERF artists lurking in the tags. I'd keep blocking them and more and more would show up). Layton fandom truly will never change it appears

No, I just went through the tag to block the few that haven't blocked me yet. They can fuck off for wasting the moderators' time and energy. The ace attorney fandom is equal levels of annoying. Took me ages to find a roleplay partner who didn't shoot me down because I didn't bash problematic ships.

[fycarmensandiego]

Man its not even that i wouldnt be interested in the older content but you acting so high and mighty about this is so fucking annoying you sound like someone who lives for fandom only and cant enjoy media normally so im unfollowing rather because you just sound like a self important prick

see, here’s the irony: the fandom is actually ruining the reboot for me. in and of itself, i really like the reboot, but the tumblr fandom is so aggravating that i can’t enjoy it. for instance, when watching s2 for the first time, i was cringing every second jules or gray was on screen, even though i like them both as characters, because i knew i was going to see enormous amounts of shipwank on tumblr.

on a related note: here’s what i’m trying to say for those of you who only care about the reboot. put yourself in my place. i know imagining what fandom is like for someone other than yourself may be a new experience, but do try. in the “old” days, like a year and two months ago, it was very easy for me to see anything related to classic carmen. there wasn’t much, but if there was, i could find it! now if anything classic carmen gets posted, i literally never see it because it’s buried under pages and pages of stuff about the reboot - some of which is cool, like fanart i’ve reblogged, but a lot of which is ship warring and other nonsense.

THAT’s my problem here. the fandom i’ve loved for two and a half decades - longer than many of you have been alive - is getting buried under this toxic mess of ship wars and navel-gazing and harassment. and yes, i see the irony here as i am also being Angry Online! so be it!

[agoddamn]

I don’t really enjoy defending the Voltron dev team because I think there’s a lot to be rightfully critical of, but the catch-22 they were in with Shiro is so obvious.

S7 production: they don’t know if they’re gonna be able to air the gay version of the Shiro and Adam scene or the Good Pals one almost until the show actually drops. ~Anonymous source~ aside, this is proven by the fact that alternate hetero subtitles were accidentally left in when the season dropped. I don’t know how everyone’s passing around that article with HAH I KNEW THEY LIED when multiple VAs stated that it was a struggle getting Shiro’s sexuality approved and we have actual, physical evidence of a hetero version of that scene existing, corroborated by the VA who participated in it? Is everyone so desperate for grudgewank that we forgot that happened?

S7 production: because they don’t know what’s gonna be allowed, the rest of S7 cannot be written with Shiro and Adam as explicit lovers. All of Voltron’s episodes drop at once--there’s no such thing as “ok we’ll see what the reaction is and then we’ll adjust the rest of the season from there”. So they killed off Adam to avoid the Schrodinger’s homo situation that had inadvertently been created. Voltron was produced at breakneck fucking speed and they didn’t have the time or resources to animate two different scenes banking that Shiro/Adam would be okayed. From a position of unknowns, hedging their bets and killing Adam was the best choice. They could even squeeze some extra drama out of his death for Shiro, who notoriously had absolutely nothing to do in the plot by this point because he did not exist in the initial draft. His mourning Adam was incredibly tiny, but without it he had literally fucking nothing written.

S8 production: well, fuck. The good news is, they got to make Shiro/Adam explicit. The bad news is, they hadn’t planned this far ahead. The writers struggled continuously with integrating Shiro into the story arcs after his planned death, and the Adam situation was only the latest chapter. The fandom had hyped themselves into a frenzy with the canon gay reveal, and then driven themselves into a berserker rage with Adam’s death, erroneously accusing the writers of Bury Your Gays even though Shiro was very much alive.

S8 production: so now what?

That shitty article declares the wedding should have been cut, but come the fuck on. Have a little respect for my intelligence. You and me both know that if the wedding had been cut, the fan rage would have been fucking NUCLEAR. 

In the alternate universe where they didn’t make that wedding epilogue, that same writer would be pounding out another article about how Lauren and Joachim LITERALLY gay-bashed him by not giving Shiro a boyfriend after killing his last one. They’d be accused of trying to un-gay Shiro. They’d be accused of implicitly saying that it wasn’t acceptable to have a gay character in a children’s cartoon. It would have gone on and on and on, burning any goodwill they accumulated with the Adam reveal and far deeper besides.

Shiro needed to have a canon gay relationship to allay accusations of homophobia. Problem is, S7 dropped when S8 was already mostly done. It wasn’t possible to rewrite the whole season to shove a natural, organic romance in there. Fuck, guys, they couldn’t even figure out what to do with Shiro at all for three whole seasons before that! They weren’t gonna suddenly pull a rabbit out of their collective hats with this. It was never possible.

The only option was shoving Shiro with a minor character and scattering a handful of scenes of them glancing at one another throughout S8. Was it a shitty option? Yes. Was it the least bad of what was on the table in front of them by that point? Also yes, because do you not remember the sheer toxicity of Voltron’s shipwank or what? Shiro never could have had a “realistically developed relationship” at all because he would never have been allowed a relationship with a main character after the ugly, abusive nature of the fandom revealed itself.

So.

A relationship (an undeniable, unambiguous one) had to happen.

It could not happen with a major character.

Marriage (the fastest way to render a relationship completely unambiguous) to a minor character (all members of Team Voltron were aggressively off the table) was the only possible solution.

It sucks that this is how it ended up and that it was so unsatisfying and that they weren’t able to write themselves out of the corner they ended up in, but Voltron’s writing was consistently mediocre. They never had the tools to solve this problem. Fan expectations were never possible to satisfy, and the fact that 20,000+ people are still passing around obvious salty falsehoods for an excuse to further vilify the showrunners six months after the fact should make that obvious.

[withinadream27]

1, 4, 5, 19??? The ask box meme (you don't have to answer the last one, if you don't want)

I’m putting this under a cut because it’s long, and also to give y’all the choice as to whether or not you wanna engage with my salt xD

1. What OTPs in your fandom(s) do you just not get? 

Lol, I’m having more trouble thinking of what counts as “my fandoms” than thinking of OTPs.

Ahh, for Les Mis, I find a lot of iterations of Courfeyrac/Combeferre, Eponine/Combeferre, Courfeyrac/Jehan, and Montparnasse/Jehan pretty bland. A good writer/artist can sell me on them, but there’s not a lot there that I’m passionate about.

IDK if anyone who follows me watches Timeless, but it’s a show with 3 leads (Wyatt, Lucy, and Rufus) and the shippy part of fandom is 90% Wyatt/Lucy. I…do not like that ship much by themselves. I “””get it”””, I guess, it’s heavily-shipteased at this stage of canon, but Wyatt/Lucy/Rufus OT3 or bust!

I have 10 million more fandoms, but those are the only ones with popular ships I don’t actively ship

4. Do you have a NoTP in your fandom? Are they a popular OTP?

Do any of you Wolf 359? Do you remember the earlier seasons, before Kepler&co got introduced and like all of the shipfic was Eiffel/Hilbert? I absolutely cannot stand fluffy Eiffel/Hilbert. (I’m so down for them as weird hatesex, or as noncon, but alas, that is not how most of the fandom shipped it.) Possibly people are still writing fluff about those two, but I think most people moved on to Kepler/Jacobi. I don’t really care except insomuch as it limits my fic-reading choices, though.

5. Has fandom ever ruined a pairing for you?

I’ve never stopped writing a ship because of how fandom does them, but there are definitely ships where I won’t read fic about them unless it comes highly recced (see: Enjolras/Grantaire)

19. What is the one thing you hate most about your fandom?

Fucking pseudo-SJ shipwank and antis, always. (I mean, some of my main fandoms don’t get that bc they’re rare book fandoms with like 5 members, and thank the Lord for that, but wherever it’s present it is a Plague.)