#i like learning how people got into mcyts that got popular in 2020 & 2021

[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

[tommyarewethebadguys]

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