#i knew the tails would absolutely be an issue but this is arguably much worse of an outcome hrngh

[antirepurp]

mild problem encountered: he's too fucking tall

[natsubeatsrock]

The Other Side

Because I’ve had this post on my mind ever since I’ve seen it. Also, this one from a while ago.

During FT Month, I made a post about the fact that I'm not comfortable reading Gruvia arguments. A lot of people who liked and reblogged my post did so with the notion that that was a good thing. The arguments for Gruvia are so bad, it makes sense that I wouldn't want to read them. It's a good thing that I can't stand to see any.

Except that's the opposite of what I meant. 

I'm actually annoyed that I can't stand to read Gruvia arguments. Because part of the reason I'm able to do so many of the posts I do is that I look at what people say about ships and the series and argue for or against it. It doesn't help that I can only barely do that for arguably the most vocal fandom in the series.

One of the most annoying trends everywhere is the idea that people have to be on one or two sides. You're either with us or with them. Of course, this has always been a thing, but it feels a lot worse here in the states with Trump making it near impossible to consider that maybe the other side might be right on something. Not that the majority of people on this website are helping. (Can't you tell that I'm a moderate?)

This thing feels especially terrible in volatile fanbases like Fairy Tail does. Forget that the concept of multi-shipping is unpopular anyway. The conceit that anyone is a fan of a ship is enough to be labeled as a terrible person who, depending on your ship doesn't. As easy as it is to demonize the Big 4 shippers for this, I've seen this from people on all sides of the fandom.

Heck, I've been a victim of this. When I questioned why we could support the University of Gruvia (yeah, that was a thing) and not a ship week for Albis, I got called a fake Albis fan who only wanted attention for Gruvia to go to Graytear and Graylu. When I thought that a comparison to Gruvia and an abusive relationship in Rave was weird, I was called a hater who didn't actually read Rave Master. (To be fair, I did get the relationship comparison wrong.) And more recently, my opinions on the Galuna Island arc made Gray fans think I only don’t like it because I don’t like Gray (which I don’t) and garnered me my personal favorite insult, which I’d make my title if I cursed.

And unfortunately, the place I've been seeing this pop up the most is in anti fandoms. The fact that Nalu and Gruvia weren't handled well but were popular made it easy for people to talk about how it failed to appeal to them. But since the ending of the series, the less reasonable vitriol that was always part of the fandom became almost the main portion of either tag. 

You're probably never going to see people make posts about why fandoms don't agree with each other like I did with Gruvia. I doubt we'll comprehensive explanations for why ships that are popular (in addition to, and not primarily, their fandoms) aren't as good as people think like I did for Nalu. Honestly, I'm not even sure how many more essays I can do like those.

One of my personal favorite essays from high school was a paper about abortion. Instead of arguing why the arguments for it are bad (I went to a Christian school), we had to come up with explanations and evidence for arguments both for and against abortion. So no matter what your arguments are, you had to give good reasons for why people would have these arguments. By the end of the paper, we were supposed to understand what the main issue of the debate is.

Aside from the actual vagueness of our teacher over the assignment, this was an understandably awkward paper to write. Because not only do you have to look up arguments for the side of a hot-button issue that you disagree with. You have to come up with logical deductions for why they make sense, which is harder than it may sound. By the way, you have to be as nonpartial as partial. It defeats the purpose of the assignment if you go at it from the angle of "And here's the other sides' inferior arguments." 

However, there is a lot of good in doing this kind of thing. If you do it right, you're able to empathize with the side you disagree with. You see why people would be on the side that they're on and get an idea of where they're coming from. At the same time, if you're on the other side of the argument and understand why people think the way they do, you can better come up with counters for why you disagree with them. If there is a point in the argument that you can knock out, you can convince people why you have the view you do. And of course, you have a better understanding of why you are right to have the opinion you do. 

My big issue with fandom thought, as a whole, is that it can lead to demonization of the other side. We don't agree with the other side because we don't understand them. But why should we? We know they're wrong, to begin with. Why even bother trying to understand where the other side is coming from if we already know that they’re wrong? 

There's not a whole lot of discussion between people who disagree with each other. There aren't a whole lot of people on either side interested in the others' views. And if they do represent that group, it's more likely than not a misrepresentation, ranging from misunderstanding to purposeful strawman. You're not going to see a lot of people able to understand an argument they disagree with. And, if I'm perfectly honest, when it comes to stuff like my "Comedic Relief" miniseries, I wouldn't be shocked to find out that I've messed stuff up about the Gruvia fandom's arguments myself.

One of the more recent, "stop being antis" post got to the heart of the matter. OP was mad that anti posts were showing up in the Nalu tag because they wanted to " to be in an echo chamber full of love and support for my favorite OTP ship". My conflict is that I don't know how to deal with that kind of sentiment anymore. One of my favorite early posts to make was a post making fun of the sentiment that there shouldn’t be an anti-Nalu tag. But considering that, not too long ago, there was a controversy over someone claiming that Nalu was worse than anxiety attacks, is there anything they could have learned about why people don't like their ship from most of the stuff coming out of the current anti-Nalu fandom? 

And let me be crystal clear on this point. Nothing, absolutely nothing is wrong with people saying they don't like something. You can meme for or against whatever you want. I think it's perfectly healthy to have anti fandoms and anti-tags. I've been a large advocate of this and anyone who would accuse me of otherwise doesn’t know much about me. (Again, wouldn't be the first time such a thing has happened.)

That being said, I can't say that I'm personally happy with the way that the anti fandoms for Gruvia and especially Nalu are now.  Because my most recent big anti-Nalu post was a satirical look at arguments for Nalu that have happened over the past year. Despite probably being one of the harshest things I’ve written for this blog, it’s fundamentally different from most of the stuff in the tag now. Not just because it’s satire, but because it’s talking about arguments and giving grounded reasons to not to like or agree with Nalu fans rather than just hating on fans for admittedly understandable reasons.

I wanted clear-cut endings to ships regardless of whether they were in my interest because I knew open endings would make the situation worse. And wouldn't you know, it's gotten worse, in part because people on both sides think they're right and the other side is wrong. And now that everything is set in stone, no one has any real reason to see anyone else's opinion if they think it's wrong. So, this will probably get worse as time passes before it gets any better.

In Conclusion:

Look at what a mess we’ve made.