#fandom amatanormativity

[rjalker]

it never fucking ends

[ID: The meme of Garfield standing in front of a poster, thinking, "Huh. I wonder who that's for". Garfield is labeled, "The majority of people in The Murderbot Diaries fandom, including other aroaces who'd rather give allos permission to be bigoted than have solidarity with other aroace people". The poster reads, "Please fucking stop erasing touch averse and nonpartnering aroace people's extremely scarce canon representation". End ID.]

[heartless-aro]

The thing is, I don’t care that much about the actual act of someone shipping aromantic characters nearly as much as I care about the biases and amatanormative beliefs that underlie so many people’s decision to do so. The problem isn’t that individual people ship aromantic characters sometimes. It’s the fact that shipping aromantic characters or expressing disappointment that a character is aromantic and thus “can’t be shipped” almost seems to be the default in fandom spaces. Aromantic representation, especially nonpartnering aromantic representation, is treated as something that will “ruin people’s fun” (see: the Hazbin Hotel creator explaining why she won’t say whether or not Alastor is aromantic).

And yes, SOME aromantic people can still date or have non-romantic partners. But the fact that some people are so vehemently against the idea of fictional characters being nonpartnering is still something to be questioned.

Because, really, that’s the crux of the issue. It’s perfectly fine if people like the idea of an aromantic character being partnering or romance favorable. In fact, it would be wonderful to see more characters written as partnering and/or romance favorable aromantics. But when someone ONLY shows interest in characters being partnering or favorable aros in response to those same characters being interpreted as nonpartnering, it often comes across less as a desire to have representation for partnering and favorable aros and more as an opposition to having representation for nonpartnering aros.

[walterthemelon]

I think that some of y'all need to realize that your ship does not have to be cannon. In fact it is in fact more fun for it to not be cannon. It is not wise for one to spend all their time going SEE THIS SHOWS THAT THEY WERE HINTING THAT MY SHIP IS ACTUALLY CANNON AND NOT YOURS. Enjoy shipping but don't do conspiracies SVP

[chickenleafs-world]

Was tempted to put this on the last post ranting about dating sims, but those were more general and these are more specific to me.

I hate how many visual novels/relationship games have sex/implied sex/kissing/accepting a confession integral to the good end, even when romantic love isn’t integral to the plot. It opens it up to the people only interested in one/a few/no love interests. As an Aro/Ace, I sometimes want a story driven game/visual novel focused on building relationships and character study *without* having to use the “make an oc and rp your ass off” method. As much as I don’t want queer routes to be relegated to implication/friendship, I also don’t want all het routes to be locked behind romance. Playing romance games for the plot gets really tiring after the billionth time pretending you want to kiss the love interest so you can see the end of their arc.

It sucks that alloromantics (and to a lesser extent, allosexuals) have the monopoly on intimate stories. Even saying I’m aromantic but a fan of any number of otome franchises makes people doubt either my status as a fan or (more commonly) my status as aromantic. I try not to mention it because it’s awkward to explain how in the world a romance game is appealing to an aromantic. It’s become a meme when people say they’re playing a romance game “for the plot” but some of us genuinely are. I wish I could just say “these are for another target demographic” and play something else, but there aren’t really many games with the same appeals but no romance.

I know some people are gonna think “why are you complaining that dating sims have dating” but that isn’t the issue I’m having here. Asking devs to just make games marketed solely at Aros is obviously unrealistic, we’re a tiny market that won’t even all be interested. But is it always that hard to give a little bit of optional changed dialogue that lets us have the same experience minus the romance? Again, romance has an unfair monopoly on stories and games about intimacy and relationships. I have to complain about dating sims because dating sims are the closest thing to the genre I want to play. It isn’t fair (and is indeed quite limiting to the art form) to insist that aromantic people aren’t allowed to want representation in the media we consume just because there’s no precedent for representation.

[if-loki-was-a-fox]

not to complain about ultimately negligible things that probably no one else even knows have discourse around them but like. duo name haters kinda suck and I'm so petty about that. they have terrible arguments and no joy or whimsy tbh (and I think some of them genuinely just don't see the value platonic relationships /extra-petty)

"It's not creative enough! they're all so boring!" it's literally seeking out a narratively or aesthetically compelling element of their bond or relationship arc together that can serve to represent them in a cute or satisfying way, in what world is that less creative that taking half of each's name and smashing them together?? (sure some of them are genuinely just reaching at straws, but that doesn't means they all suck, and as long as they still function it's fiiiine. just make up your own if you hate one too much, see if it catches on)

"It's not recognizable enough! You don't know who it's about unless you're in the community already!" as if redscape, redwood, shadowrot, treebark, moonrot, peskyrot, and any cobbled together combo of random looking letters and syllables in standard ship names don't have that issue. (The names for these things are more for the fans to be able form a community around and tag anyways, not everyone needs to immediately know them all)

Not even to get into the fact that having a tag specifically for the platonic dynamics is a life saver when you just want to see platonic content at at the moment / for that group (/sincere). Sometimes my aroace self gets really fed up with the sex and romance everywhere and if the platonic tags didn't exist I would've become a bitter and resentful dragon and eaten y'all years ago (/silly). As is, with the platonic duo tags existing, we can coexist peacefully and it's great! (/sincere)!

[carolperkinsexgirlfriend]

The problem with amatanormativity is that even though it's RAMPANT in Fandom spaces, none of you know enough to even be able to recognize it, much less address it at all.

[darkandstormydolls]

I’m going to be honest, sometimes being on the DBDA fandom is hard for me as an aroace

Now, most of my experience in fan spaces has been with American Girl, and since the doll characters are all preteens, we really don’t have shipping and things. So I really wasn’t ready for what I stepped into getting into DBDA stuff on Tumblr

Thing is, everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, ships Edwin and Charles. And now, not finding anyone agreeing with my ace Edwin headcanon was annoying, but that’s fine. But the entire fandom agreeing that of course the two of them must be in love? That’s hard for me

I mean, Charles has literally said that he doesn’t think he likes Edwin romantically, but he’s still the most important person in the world to him. And I love that. I thought that they were a perfect example of a QPR, and that’s really rare. I’ve only ever seen I think two other QPRs represented in fiction, and those were both in books (If It Makes You Happy and Not Even Bones). So for me, it was really important to see characters in a show that’s so wonderful in so many other ways represent this kind of relationship.

So it’s really, really hard for me sometimes, to see everyone else saying that of course they must be in a romantic relationship. For me, it can be really invalidating. Lots of aspec people struggle with feeling like they’re missing out because of allo- and amatanormative society making us feel lesser for not feeling the kinds of things that our society prizes above all else. And then, when you think you finally have found a piece of media that represents the kind of relationships that you can have, it’s wonderful and really validating.

And then you realize that everyone else in the world thinks that of course it must be a romantic bond. Of course Charles is in love with Edwin and doesn’t realize it.

But maybe he isn’t. The fact that Charles always looks for Edwin in a room, smiles whenever he sees him, says he’s follow him to the ends of the earth? That’s not explicitly romantic. And I see posts gushing about “oh my goodness look at the way that they look at one another” and… I look at my queerplatonic partner that way sometimes. I love them deeply. My mood lifts every time I see them. And we’re not romantically linked. Because we have a different relationship, one that’s just as deep and meaningful as a romantic one can be

And I’m not trying to tell anyone that they can’t ship who they want to. I’m just saying that it can be hard to see a beautiful relationship of a queerplatonic couple be only ever interpreted as romantic

[poibynt]

Not to stir shit but. Yes, romantic relationships are prioritised in fandom. Yes, this is is part of amatonormativity. Yes, a-spec coding is often ignored for the sake of romantic parings. BUT I think people, especially a-spec people, need to watch it a bit when they talk about this stuff bc recently I’ve been seeing more and more takes edging towards “non romantic relationships or media that does not have romantic parings as a focus or “encourage” shipping is inherently better” which starts so slide into “romantic relationships bad and gross & all shipping nasty” which can get a bit homophobicy.

I know that a lot of us are a bit fed up but I’m begging y’all to understand that a-specs just like everyone else in the queer community are not immune to falling into anti-queer mindsets or being queerphobic against other identities within the queer community and that online fandom spaces are deeply queer spaces with a long history of shipping as a way to safely engage with queer experiences when you can’t do it openly or IRL. To degrade shipping bc it’s gross and frame all of it (which is very very often queer pairings) as downgrades from pure and untainted nonsexual nonromantic relationships is kinda fucking questionable!

These spaces need positive & healthy relationships to sex and romance because queer people and society at large needs those things and yes that includes acceptance and respect for a-specs and a deconstruction of amatanormativity & allonormativity but it ALSO includes a-specs managing their own online experiences so they can engage with sex and romance as much or as little as they want & respecting and understanding the allo queer community. Want more non shipping centered fandom experience? Well friend you are on the curate your own experience website! Make what you want to see, manage who you follow and what tags you have blocked. There’s nothing wrong with discussing amatanormativity and allonormativity in fandom spaces. I think it’s important. But please, you are not immune to the propaganda. None of us are. Try not to swing too hard in the other direction bc nothing good will come of it.

[coffee-at-annies]

🥰 🤠 💗 for the ask game!!

Fic Reading Ask Game // Open

🥰 what tropes do you gravitate toward?

I tend to gravitate to ship tropes first because in fanfic it tends to be short hand for the plot. Like the plot is mutual pining with a side of slow burn and a falls first b falls harder and then at the end they kiss. There might be a grand arranged marriage regency romance or an enemies to lovers space au around that but at its core the relationship and the romance is driving the plot. AUs are worldbuilding set dressing (which I love) but they inform the story they don’t effect the story. So it’s a balancing act for which I’m more excited about. There was a while where I was reading through the idiots to lovers tag because man that’s what I wanted, two people that are just stupid for each other. I’ve also done dives into the non-traditional omegaverse tags, always a different sex, alternate universe - magic, etc etc. I probably do gravitate most towards aus as a high level and then decide based on what the ship is doing cause that’s the plot being pitched to me. I love spec fic. I think it’s so fun. I know omegaverse is a bunch of junk science. I know cisswap gets a bad rap as being transphobic. I know *gestures at hp aus* but like they’re fun. It’s all fun. “What if we took these characters and moved them to the left, what then?” is so so interesting to me. I love when people lay out a premise and then meaningfully think about it. However the shit has to be interesting. I have to care about the ship and what they’re doing. If they’re perfect little robots the entire time, that’s not interesting. It’s a balancing act.

🤠 favorite au genre?

I love AUs. If it’s weird and left of center gimme all of it. I’ve always love a near-canon au which is everything is the same except this one thing. Maybe that one thing is magic, maybe that one thing is Sid is a girl, maybe that one thing is vampires, I don’t care I love alternate universe - this specific change. At the same time I love genre aus. I love these are the boys but they’re in space. I love we’re in a magic urban fantasy town and Sidney is a witch and Geno is new in town. It really really depends. I go through phases with fandoms where I find a niche au and then read everything in it. For example one of my favorite niche aus in dc comics/batfam is reverse robins!aus. Its so edgy and dumb and there’s a lot of delicious angst thrown my favorite character’s way because you get the Tim+Damian hate relationship but flipped to mirror the original Dick+Jason relationship and then you get to give Tim all the angst Jason has of dying and coming back different. Delicious and delightful. For hockey probably my favorite AU is goalie nesting. I fucking love nesting man. I’m hit or miss sometimes on omegaverse but this is technically separate and so so delightful. Bury that goalie in a pile of blankets, sweaty disgusting game worn jerseys, and whichever teammate you think looks hottest on top of him and call it hurt/comfort. Yum.

💗 a fic you’ve reread again and again and why!

Okay so actually I forgot one of my favorite aus is soulmates since I haven’t been in the mood recently. Yeah yeah I know I’m a bad aroace person cause soulmates are inherently amatanormative and reinforce heteronormativity and compulsory sexuality and the idea that it is normative to want to be in a romantic relationship and all that jazz. I just like it. I like the idea of what if two people were puzzle pieces who fit together perfectly. Then also what if they fit together and it wasn’t perfect and they have to work at it anyway because relationships take work. Anyway this is a preface for one of my favorite hrpf fics that I go back to when craving that feeling of home with the old team. It’s SidFlower platonic soulmates, SidGeno romantic relationship set during the 2016 season. It’s so delightful and homey. It’s one of the fics I keep coming back to whenever I want to recapture what I love about hrpf.

[nerdfighterwhatevernumbers]

I'm aro and amatanormativity is bad but fandoms going 'there is no heterosexual explanation for this' is so not an issue. yeah fanon is annoying but most of the time i see this joke it's specifically in shonen fandoms and like. The thing about shonen is that it doesn't prioritize platonic relationships, it prioritizes male relationships. And if male characters exclusively have shallow relationships with women and meaningful ones with men it makes you go 'why is this man ONLY passionate about men' and an obvious reason is 'gay'

Write a gendered difference, get a gendered answer

[theguardianace]

the pjsekai fandom would be greatly improved if people would learn of the concept of amatanormativity and the fact sometimes people can love one another deeply without being romantic in nature and without invalidating the love they feel towards another

[rjalker]

Aroace people who have made it their goal in life to give allos permission to be aroacemisic are so fucking infuriating. I hate you personally.

"well I'm aroace and I think it's okay for allos to erase canon aroace characters :))))) it's totally fine and good and harmless for aroace character who are explicitly repulsed by romance and sex and relationships of all kind including QPRs to be shipped in every way, including romantic, sexual, and QPRs :))))"

[ID: A screenshot from Fallout 4 showing a Sole Survivor labeled “Sloan Bree” in the dialogue camera, their skin lit up red on one side from a fire and green on the other from the Pip-boy light, with a large explosion in the distance behind them, with their dialogue edited to read, “Are you prepared for the kind of death you’ve earned?” End ID.]

[exilley]

I hate that post that went like "people who say gay ships are too pervasive in fandom don't have a grasp on reality and lost sight of the way oppression operates in society" when really critiques about fandom's obsession with romantic queer shipping seems to be directly tied to an inability to view non-romantic (or even non-sexual) bonds as having the potential to be queer at all. It's not homophobic to discuss potential amatanormativity and i think it's very telling when you project your own limited notions of the complexity of the world onto expressions of lived insight that would contradict or challenge your worldview

[starcanwrecked-confessions]

Hey, og anon here

First off Pufferfish I'd like to say this IS NOT the most normal ship you've gotten hate on. It's an mlm ship between a president and vice president with a 13 year age gap (and said president use to be a horrible person to the vice president).

I don't care about the age gap that much (especially since by the time we get to the end of APV they're both old enough where it doesn't matter) but what frustrates me abt the ship is that not everything has to be romantic. And before ppl start saying "omg you hate mlm!" I still would not have shipped it if Benjamin was a girl. In fact I would have not shipped it even harder.

Can't two people just have a close bond? The amatanormativity the Starcanwrecked Pulp fandom has frustrates me to no end.

And also, maybe its just me seeing this but I thought they'd be more of like mentor-mentee bros you know. Apparently not

Im not gonna get mad if you ship it or whatever, just probably gonna block the tag and tell people to tag it with my block tag when they rb it.

Ok, yeah saying they are the "most" normal ship I've gotten hate on was an exaggeration

Sure not everything has to be romantic but literally nobody is saying that, or saying that you have or everyone should ship them, in fact I've only seen like two people talking about the ship and I've seen one person saying they see them having a brotherly relationship instead

You are allowed to view them however you want, no one is pushing it on you

[deastrumquodvicis]

fandom: HEY HERE IS A SHIP YOU'LL LIKE! I KNOW, BECAUSE IT'S A VERY POPULAR SHIP! WATCH THESE CHARACTERS MAKE BEDROOM EYES AND STAND TOO CLOSE, THEY'RE OBVIOUSLY DOIN IT me: that's very amatanormative and it so happens that I do not in fact ship that ship for a number of reas-- fandom: THEY SHOULD FUCK! THEY SHOULD SHOW IT TO US! THEY'RE DEFINITELY FUCKINGGGGGGGGGGG RAW AND SLOPPY AND HERE'S PROOF me: no that's just people being friends and weird directing choi-- fandom: THEY'RE FUCKING!

[if-loki-was-a-fox]

On a more personal angle, of myself through the different fandoms

I think it has more to do with joining Tumblr than the fandoms themselves, but the one thing I do miss about my time in the Genshin fandom was how unserious everything was. We just vibed and did whatever

Dream SMP onwards I've felt a lot more pressure to get characterization and themes right, and never do anything just for the sake of cute or silly or wtv. Just this vague looming sense of judgement all the time that I picked up somewhere along the way that I could really do without and have been trying to unlearn as of late

One thing I really don't miss about my time in the Genshin fandom was the weird dichotomy of "you have to ship this guy with this other guy because everyone does" vibes vs The Homophobes. Because for some reason that was also a thing, at least on Hoyolab in 2020-2021.

Also the weird character age shipping discourse thing. The Lumine/Childe shipping discourse where no one could agree on which of them was too old for the other was kind of hilarious ngl

... I also got far too much of my sex ed from the memes in that fandom (that's where I learned about balls! Don't ask me how I didn't know about them before then, I have no idea). It was probably the most horny fandom I've ever been in actually, now that I think about it.

I've never once considered the possibility of accidentally stumbling across NSFW fanart when trying to find references for an MCYT, but it was common knowledge that that was all you'd get for certain Genshin Characters. You couldn't look at the Hoyolab fanart page without seeing several shirtless dudes, and you couldn't google Mona without seeing her but and boobs all over the place

Warrior Cats also had less pressure for accurate characterization ime, but that might've just been because the parts of it I interacted with just didn't care about canon at all, it was entirely fanmade clans full of OCs with their own storylines divorced of canon. Also it was on Scratch, and everyone there was like 6-12 years old and the worst crime they could conceptualize seemed to bee tracing art. There was a lot of drama around tracing art, actually

I was also still in the Catholic Christian part of my life at that time, and was in an odd space in learning about queer people of not being queerphobic per se, I never really was tbh, so I did like everyone else's gay kitties in their own Warriors games, but I never made any myself and generally coded everything to be exclusively heterosexual. Which was truly a tragedy in hindsight, almost makes me want to make a new one someday, with considerably less heteronormativity and amatanormativity

I also honestly wouldn't mind returning to the DSMP fandom to explore the new more open mindedness to shipping that's been coming about with the fading popularity, tbh.

I'm still intensely aroace, not terribly interested in joining in with general shipping culture, and don't particularly like many of the individual new ships I've been seeing coming about, but I do think it's very interesting to watch and I wouldn't mind seeing some more variety on beeduo and emduo interpretations specifically.

Plus I'm just glad we're all getting over that specific toxicity 'cus it was really cheapening the platonic wonderland it could've been if it weren't such a coerced phenomenon. I hate it when people only do nice things because they're afraid of judgement, rather than just because they like doing them

TMA has also been pretty interesting, with the number of fics exploring relationships and sexuality through a lens of asexuality thanks to Jon's canon ace-ness. I'm solidly not into reading sex itself, but the contexts surrounding it can be pretty interesting to me, and TMA feeling like a safer, more ace friendly place to take some peeks at it has been a nice reassurance that I'm not secretly a prude, and let me see all sorts of different ace and non-ace angles to the whole thing, which is great for my curiosity

I'd love to take some of this nuance with relationships in fandom and fiction as a whole that I've picked up and take it back to Warrior Cats again ngl. If I suddenly get over my project commitment issues there is a good chance I'll actually go back and make a new Warrior Cats game or simulation, either back on Scratch for old times sake, or maybe even with actual coding and stuff to practice that some more, now that I've got some experience with that

It would be kinda neat to make one of those Warrior Cat Life Games the ones so popular back on Scratch, and weave it full of themes about the varieties in relationships and love and family and queerness and stuff,,

The differences in cultures and behaviors between different fandoms is so fascinating to me, I love just musing on the various differences

Back in my Warrior Cats phase on scratch there was barely an single fanart of canon characters, everything was original characters and original clans.

During my time in the Genshin Impact fandom people would play with the various canon character elements to make new characters but there wasn't quite the level of wholly divorced from canon stories there.

There was shipping tho! An absolutely unhinged amount of shipping. Every single character who wasn't a literal child had at least one, maybe two default/mainstream ship partners that most people shipped them with, then a handful of rarer ships as well

Then I moved to Dream SMP 'cus I heard that it had a lot of platonic relationships that were so popular that they made it into the top 100 ao3 ships multiple years in a row, and I was getting pretty romanced out by Genshin at that point so it seemed like a perfect choice.

And it was! Dream SMP had the best platonic relationship representation of any fandom I've been in before or since. But it has the dark flipside to it, where the reason was partially because the fans were freaking off the rails toxic and hostile to the mere suggestion that any character might ever be attracted to another

The Hermitcraft and Life Series are better with platonic relationships than Genshin Impact, but nowhere near as good as DSMP, with the return of a handful of mainstream ships, but not the pressure to have a ship for every single character

Then there's the fascinating ways MCYT fandoms had every characters' designs and even species up in the air and it's common place to just make any random guy part any random animal, which is incredible fun

But then OCs in the MCYT fandom are a whole other thing, as they tend to come most in the Warriors style where they come out of fanmade servers and tend to be fairly divorced from canon most of the time, only generally inspired by the setting

And now in the Magnus Archives fandom we've got the canon ships, with one specific one vastly dominating the whole fandom to even more extremes than any singular Genshin ship ever reached, which I've gathered is a pretty common experience in other fandoms but this has been my first time actually experiencing it first hand

And TMA has a similar thing with Warrior Cats where it works really well as a set of world building that can be shoved upon other fictional characters for some fun AUs, which was never really a thing with MCYT (though I think it kinda was with Genshin Impact, to a degree, where people would draw other characters in Genshin splash art style and assign them Visions and all that.)

Warriors is by far the most extreme of these, up with My Little Pony in terms of how you're almost guaranteed to see at least one fanart of the characters in any fandom drawn as warrior cats/ponies

And then there's the popular AU types! Genshin Impact was chock full of highschool AUs. Dream SMP had Foster Family AUs and Superhero AUs galore (especially with SBI), but it also had a smaller Humans Are Space Orcs / Alien AUs phenomen that I've not been able to find again in my other fandoms since. I never read enough Life Series and Hermitcraft fanfic to get a good grasp on their popular AUs, but various flavour of Modern AU with the characters assigned random jobs seemed common, and they had a lot of Superhero AUs spawned by HoTGuY. TMA is mostly everyone is happy AUs, like No Paranormal Nonsense AUs and Happily Ever After Post Canon AUs, but also a whole heckin' lot of Time Travel (usually fix-it fic) AUs, which is something I never really saw in the other fandoms

I don't have a good ending to this post as there's no real point to it, it's just me babbling about fandoms