#part of this may ALSO be that i just dont really ship cleo with anybody much

[rambles-about-minecraft-ocs]

how about clethubs for the ship game? :]

hmm id say clethubs makes sense to me but it doesnt super compel me? im like. pure neutral on it. i think that might be because i havent seen much life series content, so i havent seen a lot of the interactions that i think made the ship more popular - i understand what happens in most of the life series, i know the basic beats of each season, but ive only ever watched scott and grians third life POVs in full, and a decent chunk of rens. outside of those few third life povs, i watched a handful of episodes of most of the last life povs, including bdubs, etho, and cleo, but never did finish any of them. while theres certainly room to ship them outside of the life series, a lot of the content ive seen for that ship tends to be based around what happened there, so with my relative lack of knowledge, i just havent been pulled in

there might also be a layer to it due to the fact that i dont ship poly ships that much? like sometimes i do. they can be really fun! but usually i tend towards monogamous ships. idk why. but i know that i ship cleo/bdubs, bdubs/etho, and cleo/etho separately more than i really ship clethubs, and i like. only barely ship cletho (is that the ship name? i think thats the ship name-)

[aroaceacacia]

@kipp-your-secrets oh you sweet summer child /j

by 2019 discourse I'm referring to the great hermitblr shipping war, which I will roughly describe for a person who isnt familiar with that

in 2019 hermitblr was harshly divided into two camps: the shippers, and the non-shippers & everyone else. (For the record: I joined Hermitblr in September or October 2019. There may have been more conflict before then, but I wasn't there for it.)

shippers were people who shipped the hermits (as characters, not irl content creators); non-shippers very much did not like it, and had a stance of disliking real person fiction/rpf and "irl shipping". you often saw non-shippers using the meme "that's a human person".

the situation was worsened because at the time I dont believe shippers had a common tag they used (nowadays ship content is found with #hermitship or #hermitshipping, iirc), and non-shippers would be very upset by seeing ship content in the main tags, and by the fact they were unable to filter it out. oftentimes I personally would see more non-shippers upset about the shipping than actual shippers? but maybe thats just me

things got Nasty, I dont remember a lot of the details of specific discourses but I do remember the very divided environment from that time period. non-shippers tried to create a new "shipping free" main tag; there were also instances of non-shippers spamming hermitship tags, and I think death threats or threats of doxing being sent to people on both sides?

The real worst of it was that a few hermits were caught in the crossfire. joe caught wind of the situation and talked about his thoughts on shipping on stream (hes fine with it) ended a video with the reminder "dont make death threats on tumblr". cleo also got a tumblr, and people somehow dragged her into the middle of all the bs discourse. when asked, cleo said she didn't mind being shipped, and non-shippers disliked this fact so much they harassed her off of tumblr, despite her Repeatedly telling our community to just learn how to block each other and block tags and move on with our lives.

it started dying down at the end of 2019/early 2020 and the close of season 6, and then the new wave of fans from season 7 and the demise 2 game that was organized in may (which was the formation of the hermitblr discord server) really helped to serve to reunite hermitblr as a community again. (me touching hermitblr discord in may 2020: nature is healing /j)

nowadays hermitblr has learned to simply Not Interact with things they dont like, and people have learned how to categorize things correctly. I'm glad we've found a kind of community peace after all the toxicity and negativity, but I'm sad we had to go through all that hell to get here.

I bring it up re: hermittwt in particular because a lot of the attitude there about the prospect of hermitshipping sounds EERILY similar to the logic used by non-shippers during this 2019 discourse era, and even by people who look down on RPF shippers in other fandoms or in other parts of the MCYT fandom on Twitter in particular. They're not bad people, it's just that that little line of logic in particular gives me war flashbacks /j. Makes me nervous about what could happen, what they might say/do to hermitshippers, especially with the way twitter fandom has been handling these sorts of situations the past 6 months or so - not that I think anybody is actually sharing hermitship content on Twitter in the first place.

I think it's also important to note that there is a hermitcraft fandom on twitter and has been long before "hermittwt" existed; hermittwt in particular is a group of people who have adopted aspects of stan culture in their fandom experience for hermitcraft, meanwhile there are absolutely still people who dont engage with that and enjoy hermitcraft on twitter. I dont think "hermittwt" is the name for All hermit fans on Twitter the way "hermitblr" is kind of a catch all for all the hermitcraft fans on tumblr, because theres such a strong cultural divide between hermittwt and the rest. (I'd actually say that what I've seen of hermitcraft twitter pre-hermittwt is probably most similar to the subreddit in terms of behavior, but I dont have the best memory, so I could be wrong.)

for the most part I think hermittwt is a decent group of people but sometimes I think that, by the nature of being a community built around hermitcraft through the lens of stan culture, they fundamentally misunderstand past established hermitcraft fandom norms, how the hermits interact with that fandom, and the natures of the hermits themselves

the hermits are not necessarily going to have the same perspectives of (what is considered) oppression as stan twitter; where gen z american teens would see the use of an ableist slur in any context as ableist, an older person might not if it were in the context of "discussing the history of this term, not using it to disparage anybody" (especially if that older person were a white cishet man, like most of the hermits). that person might not even know that there are slurs which have common use shorthands beyond the n-word (ex. f slur, r slur being pretty common).

It sometimes feels like hermittwt understands that the hermits are Adults in a way that most other popular streamers/content creators right now are not, but they dont fully understand what that entails. they dont understand that some of the hermits will have a different perspective, or a different mindset, even if its flawed, due to the nature of a rapidly changing culture; or that, alternatively, the hermits are adults who can and have asserted their own boundaries in the past, and who have stated that if there is a problem they can handle it on their own, and instead hermittwt seems to invent boundaries for them. (the hermits tend to follow the principle of "I pretend I do not see it", if they see it at all; hermitblr had to learn this the hard way in 2019.)

dont get me wrong; I dont at all think hermittwt are bad people. I just think that trying to stan the hermits is going to cause strange results, because the hermits dont interact with fandom the way dream smp members do, for example; there is no acknowledgement of fanon, or casual construction/enablment of parasocial relationships. sometimes it feels like hermittwt is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, forcing a subsection of the hermit fandom into a format that doesnt quite work for it

I'll reiterate: I dont think they're bad people at all. but I do think its reached a weird point when somebody is complaining about/calling out xisuma for saying the full r slur as an example in a (well meaning but flawed) discussion of how words change over time ,, when xisuma is a neurodivergent man himself