#but instead of attacking my ship

[aliasl]

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

[transmechanicus]

Tumblr users will see a post and be like "Is anyone going to replace every key word in that until it's communicating an entirely different concept more relatable to me?" and not wait for an answer

[grandwretch]

one of the many reasons I love Rachel's POV is that she just does not get Marco. Not at all. Jake and Tobias know hes putting up a front more often than not, and Cassie especially sees right through him, but Rachel buys the mask. She even thinks, originally, that Marco might be against fighting just to annoy them. I'm not even sure that Rachel ever really understands how deep Marco goes down the rabbit hole.

Like, I don't think she's doing anything that Marco doesn't want her to-- She isn't being mean or anything. I don't think it's because she dislikes him, or because they're constantly fighting. Marco is doing this on purpose. He puts on a mask with everyone, but Rachel, especially, and she buys it hook, line, and sinker.

And it really makes you think, like-- How long did Marco and Rachel know each other before his mom died? Is she basing her assumptions off a boy that doesn't exist anymore? Is that why Marco keeps up the front with her, or is it because she's the most popular, the prettiest, and the strongest? Did Marco have a crush on Rachel before his entire world fell apart? Is that why he's desperate for her to never realize it did?

[dye-it-rouge-et-noir]

"For particularly important things, it's always more reassuring to write them down like this." - Zhang Beihai

[ID in alt text]

[katyspersonal]

Thinking about that time when a popular artist was a prick to me personally (claimed that I "baited" them for a conflict when all I did was pointing out something in lore contradicting their claim, without any rudeness or condescension, and basically told me to go hang out with other autists instead of bothering them) but the reason I blocked them was not that, it was the fact that they've admitted on not even caring about the source material and just using scraps from it to do their own thing. Priorities hfngkfngj

[amarriageoftrueminds]

I've been trying to read pre-war stucky fics recently and I've got to say... it's depressing how many fics depict a situation where Bucky is essentially like those miserable sitcom housewives who work a full time job on top of doing doing all the cooking and cleaning and mending etc. for a husband who does nothing but snap at them, and never expresses any gratitude or remorse for making things worse?? 😥

[girakia]

*sees lack in peni and margo fanart* tsk. Gotta do everything by myself

Also traditional bc spiderverse changed my life and I'm copying the way miles's sketchbook looks in my sketchbook. Spend the last two days drawing like this I feel peak

[great-tusk]

ughhh I need to stop having mental breakdowns over little things.

[everrsilly]

shipping billford instead of billdip feels like shipping kleinsen instead of treebros but in 2024

[utilitycaster]

this is just a curiosity question bc i was going through your caleb tag the other day and saw that you said that vax and caleb are each other's types, and i was wondering if you'd be willing to elaborate on that?

Vax canonically was in love with a powerful redheaded spellcaster. Caleb canonically had feelings for a prankster, and seems to be attracted to a fairly wide array of physical types. Both are bisexual. It means that they would fuck each other.

If it helps I believe the original context was a jokey question of "if the Mighty Nein and Vox Machina characters played by the same actor fought each other who would win" and this was my answer.

[landonkirbyappreciation]

I’ll never understand why the writers chose to alienate not just Landon, but Landon fans too basically. Like it had already sucked being a Landon fan in the legacies fandom, with all the relentless hate Landon got and we got as Landon fans. But then not even halfway through the show, the writers decided to join in on the hate too. Which was so clearly reflected in the way they treated Landon and had the other characters treating him, and the narratives regarding Landon’s character. As well as the way they would validate totally false anti Landon arguments that came straight from haters. (Which ended up making absolutely no sense whatsoever in the show because none of it actually applied since it was made up by people who just wanted to hate on Landon.) They’d support crap that antis would say, would bend the narrative to prop up their biased and hateful opinions, and even added in some lines that were practically taken word for word from anti Landon/Handon tweets. Which all just fueled more hate from antis. So not only were Landon fans dealing with the hate in the fandom, but we were seeing the same garbage repeated in the show as well, which made everything even worse. At least before we could still enjoy the show for the most part, even though all the hate in the fandom sucked. But once the writers joined in on the hatred, there was no escaping the Landon hate at that point. And not only did the hate become rampant in the show amongst the characters and the narrative, but we didn’t hardly get to even SEE Landon in the last two seasons. Like even trying to enjoy the bare minimum of just seeing Landon, we couldn’t even have that. Because the real Landon was gone for the majority of season 3 and then was hardly in season 4. And by then there were no fake Landons either so we hardly even saw Aria. Like I still don’t understand how a TV show can get to a point where fans of the leading man are desperate for him to simply show up throughout a whole season?? We really went episode after episode hoping he’d be in it, and we either got nothing at all or only a few minutes of screen time that did nothing good for his character. We had next to nothing to even watch in the end, and the little we did get was horrendous. The few episodes where Landon did get more than a few minutes of screen time, it was all centered around screwing him over even more. Basically every moment of screen time he got (or didn’t get) was an insult to his character. The way he was treated, the narrative surrounding him, the messaging, etc. it was all completely insulting. And it made being a Landon fan absolutely miserable. And on top of all that, the writers also strung us along (surely to keep us watching so they wouldn’t lose any more viewers) by having Landon trying to escape limbo for most of the season, making it seem obvious that he would eventually, and also teasing that he would be the one to bring back Hope’s humanity (even more reason to believe he’d escape limbo). And then when they didn’t give us that and instead changed the narrative to Landon suddenly being content to stay in limbo, they then baited us with a Handon reunion and “big Landon stuff coming.” Only to give absolutely nothing but the very worst for Landon in the end. It’s just crazy how the writers hated Landon on so many levels that they clearly hated Landon fans as well.

[tikiki05]

Me, very clearly in my bio + my pinned post: I’m anti-Ghostflower and have no intentions of debating anyone over it, I came to tumblr to meet like-minded people and have an echo-chamber and have thought provoking discussions about our grievances with the ship, more power to you if you’re pro-Ghostflower though so long as you don’t harass anyone over it :))

Certain Ghostflower shippers;

Again, I know there are nice and pleasant Ghostflower shippers out there, I just haven’t interacted with a lot of them! But I have faith they exist!

[ribbonbonny]

THEYRE HERE!! AND IVE GOT NOWHERE TO FUCKING PUT EM 🔥🔥🔥

[polyshowtime]

got the sudden urge to rebrand my main carrd when i'm supposed to be sleeping UGGHHH

[fen-the-space-dragon]

Mmmmmmmmm… your honor, they’re gay.

[k-roi]

“Why don’t you ship Aonung and Neteyam?”

RESPECTFULLY, I dont ship a*nunete simply because someone getting with their bully is a popular dynamic (think drarry), which makes sense for Lo’ak and Aonung, or Kiri and Aonung, but for the older brother of the one being bullied, as protective as Neteyam? Have you seen Neteyam interacting with Kiri and Lo’ak, not to mention Tuk?

Realistically, it’s impossible to convince someone in real life that Neteyam would ever get a crush on Aonung because of this flaw. He might be friends with him as a sense of duty or respect for his abilities, yes, but it would be a character flaw for him to fall in love with his precious sibling’s bullies. Neteyam looked so angry when he found out what Aonung did to Lo’ak, he was probably beside himself with worry if he would survive, knowing his younger brother is kind of a klutz and a little bit dumb about when to retreat.

The scene where Neteyam drags Aonung by his queue is actually a great threat against na’vi, because it’s one of the most important places of their bodies/can cause brain damage/if damaged won’t be able to connect to animals or eywa again. It wasn’t a cute walk-you-like-a-dog moment, it was a threat against his life for the threat against his little brother’s life. He would also be disgusted/annoyed that Aonung only respects him because he has normal na’vi four fingers anatomy. Neteyam highly respects his dad, taking pride in him being so important, ex. Toruk Makto, and loves his siblings whole-heartedly with the same features as his father. He’s no traitor.

also something to note