#my sweet summer children do whatever you want couple throuple quintuple whatever non of it is real!!

[loptrcoptr]

I’m glad people are talking about this on good ol tumblr dot com, because I swear I only took a hiatus from this site for half a year, after a solid decade or so of daily tumblr use, and in that time I can already see an enormous change in attitudes toward shipping/fandom/interests in general that kind of worry me. So for those of yall who are young or maybe not so set in your ways…

your interests are your own and you don’t owe anyone shit. That includes explaining yourself for posting about your interests. No, no, babe. It’s your blog, it’s your rules, you do what you want.

You can’t judge a person by their tastes. Not just “don’t judge”, I’m saying you fully cannot. You can tell a lot about a person, sure, but you can’t know entirely what they are like and what their “morals” are based on the media they consume or things they are into. has a friend or partner ever told you about something they did in bed and you were like “wow idk if I would do that”. Did you immediately decide it made them a bad person and server ties?? No. That’s not how life works.

To be “interested” is not automatically to condone, and you can be fascinated with something without agreeing with anything about it. That girl on your bus who listens to serial killer podcasts and reads murderer autobiographies is not the same as a serial killer. One kills people, and the other is fascinated by it. it’s okay to inform yourself about taboo things because the taboo is inherently intriguing. The point is that you’re not out there breaking the social agreement and doing Bad Stuff. It’s kind of like saying anyone who’s into rape fantasy is inherently a rapist and that the existence of the subject is an afront to rape victims. But I gotta tell you, as a rape victim: go off queen, that’s your business. My lived experience is not relevant to your fantasy. No one’s is.

And for the love of all the gods I am begging you: there is no hierarchy of queer shipping that is more or less gay, makes you more or less gay for enjoying it, or makes you a disrespecter of the internet lgbtqiap2s+ community at large for enjoying it. I have seen so much of this type of shit in the last few months, and it genuinely frightens me. Sure, ship wars and anon hate and all that crap have always been a thing in fandom. However, this escalation into some kind of Queer Ship Pyramid of Objective Goodness is at best, whack, and at worst harmful to people’s self-worth and the next generation of kids coming online and figuring out their sexualities and identities. it used to be you just defined tropes, genders, gender identities, sexualities, and sexual acts in your tags and called it a day and that’s just… that. Now I’m finding this pattern reflected from old school anti-bi, anti-trans spaces; do not ship bi couples, they’re basically straight, even if one is trans, gender fluid, or enbi; shipping two hetero men is really just for basic straight women and is in and of itself an isolating act that ignores the needs of the queer community; ships that don’t include anyone who is trans show you have no imagination and that you are a disrespectful terf on the inside; ships that are monogamous are inherently Not That Gay, regardless of any identities or sexualities therein, because polyamory is the real pinnacle of queer evolution and something every queer person should aspire to. and I want to make it very clear that absolutely none of that is remotely true.

And it worries me that there’s this sliding scale of Nothing Being Gay Enough in fandom now. Like we’ve taken a good thing so far that now people don’t know how to enjoy it and still want that oldie but goodie gay-one-upmanship from the mid 2010s on tumblr: “I’m a better gay than you are, and I know that, because look at your tastes”. And I just hope that teens and folks in their early years of adulthood or early years of discovering their sexualities and identities know that none of that shit is real, and you are gay if you decide you’re gay, and it is not a ladder you have to climb, with monogamy, same sex relationships, and pan and bi identities on the bottom and only-trans cohabitational polyamory on the top. That is not how you support people, and it is not how you support yourself. what you’re saying is “my trans friend isn’t as trans as I am because I have two partners and he is monogamous”; “I’m a lesbian but im a better lesbian than my ex because her girlfriend is cis and mine is a butch demiboy”. This kind of shit is just an extension of the age old “you’re gay, but not that gay, because you’ve only slept with one person of the same sex, and I’ve slept with loads”.

You’re queer because you say you are, and the best way to be a queer ally to others is to not project your own self hatred upward and attempt to win an “uwu more oppresssed than u” battle online. The only person you’re fighting is yourself. It doesn’t make you less poly to read a fic with a monogamous ship. It doesn’t make you less gay to read a fic with a straight ship. It doesn’t make you less trans to read a fic where someone doesn’t have the same headcanon about a trans character as you do. your fandom preferences don’t affect your queer street cred, and it costs you nothing to ignore your friend’s ships instead of convincing yourself you’re better and gayer than they are. All that kind of attitude does is hurt you farther down the road. You’re not what you consume, and fic is for you, not for what you think will somehow make others online think you’re “gayer”.

(Sorry to bandwagon so extensively, op, this topic just concerns the hell out of me)

I really think everyone needs to truly internalize this:

Fictional characters are objects.

They are not people. You cannot "objectify" them, because they have no personhood to be deprived of. They have no humanity to be erased. You cannot "disrespect" them, because they are not real.