#say it with me folks. we're not anti the ships. we're anti the writing that never fully explored anything satisfactorily

[aroaceleovaldez]

you're like the first blog i thought about ranting on this to but it drives me up the wall that some people treat any criticism aimed at tsats2 as being anti-ship or avoidable via just "not reading it". i dont think they realize that we're talking about a bigger issue of soulless commercialization and heavy quality downgrade of a franchise, not like. about an indie author publishing a fan book lmao

'i'll read it anyways haters gonna hate' crowd likely largely funding richard's mediocrity is sad.

I think part of it may have to do with a.) a lack of distinction in recent fandom culture between "Fandom" and "Audience" (alongside other recent fandom culture attitudes as well) and b.) so much of Rick's brand is built up exactly on parasocial behavior that a lot of fans get caught up in it. [under cut cause this got long:]

Re: The first, more recent fandom culture tends to treat "Fandom" and "General audience" as wholly equivocal. Because of this, the concepts tend to bleed into each other in a way we haven't quite seen before fandom became mainstream, and as a result we get a kind of Worst Of Both Worlds situation - a bunch of very passionate fans who have no community, create little to no fanworks themselves (only consume), and only engage at a surface level with the source material. Their only "fandom" community hub is the source material and official social media and they don't have a concept of how to exist outside it, unlike folks who are more used to older fandom culture and are self-sufficient. They have the passion and identity of classic fandom, but none of the depth, and so threats to the source material feel like threats to their community as a whole. They also just don't seem to understand that different subsections of the deeper fandom community are engaging with the material on an entirely different level, or they don't understand why they're doing that. They see no need to because they're never actually engaging with the community or source material beyond a surface level. Functionally they don't have a community. And mainstream media is actively encouraging this because it's profitable for them - they're reaping all of the rewards of fandom, minus the fact that because of the lack of actually community and support structures the entire "fandom" will only have a shelf life the same length of the source material. But at the same time this means they don't have to worry about quality or etc, because this extremely passionate side of their audience will just take anything thrown at them and it'll phase out almost immediately. It doesn't need to be good, it just needs to elicit some kind of reaction on social media. Any publicity is good publicity type stuff.

This lack of true community plus the parasocial emphasis the RR company has tends to make these types of fans double-down. Rick and co. are explicitly advertised as being both part of the "community" and integral to it. And when they've built Rick (and co) up as this moral paragon critical to both part of their identity they're very passionate about and what little of a community they have, any attack on him feels like an attack on themself. Particularly when so much of the publicity and marketing surrounding Rick right now is about his alleged activism when a lot of the criticism about him and the series is actively calling that into question with his unaddressed internalized bigotries. Acknowledging that what Rick is saying and promoting himself as versus his writing and actions don't always line up and pointing out the bigotry present in his work forces people to acknowledge and think about performative activism, which can make a lot of people very uncomfortable! It's forcing them to acknowledge "Oh, even if I'm saying all the right words and calling myself an ally, I am not immune to being bigoted if I don't address my internalized biases. My actual behavior matters." and that especially can feel like a personal attack. Especially in today's western landscape of media consumption being viewed as a moral act in itself.

I suspect this is why a lot of the retaliation against criticism of Rick and the franchise right now is "Why can't you just have FUN? You're just trying to hate for views. Don't take it so seriously! It's not that deep!" - they not only have no interest in engaging deeper in the material, but don't understand why others would, and doing so jeopardizes the foundations of what they consider the fandom. They can't fathom anybody legitimately having these criticisms (particularly not anybody who would ACTUALLY consider themself a "fan" - because their perception of "fan" is themself) because they're so resistant to digging deeper into the media/source material or the concept that anyone would for any legitimate reason (because as long as they keep it as "it's not that deep!!! it's just fun! just enjoy it you wet blanket!!!!" and take things at their word, they can feel secure in that performative aspect and not have to unpack it), and acknowledging that those criticisms exist and are valid means they have to acknowledge the franchise is flawed and imperfect, so they presume the claims are entirely superficial and the individual has ulterior motives rather than, yknow, doing what fandom does: diving deeper.

[separatist-apologist]

I once went to one of their inbox to tell them to please stop tagging elucien if their posts is just about bashing elriel and they basically told me to f*ck off and they can "do what they want" or whatever. I swear, these are the same little sh*ts that would complain about Elriels tagging elucien.

It's the fact that it's always the same 5 people that have literally no hobbies but complain about Elriels. They're lurking in the gwynriel tag too. They're covering the sweet content we're looking for with their bullshit posts.

"Look what these Elriels say-" NO I DON'T WANNA LOOK CAUSE I DON'T CARE! WHY ARE YOU STALKING THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE???

I don't want to see the hurtful stuff they say about Lucien and Elucien, nor do I care about their theories and Interpretation. I blocked the elriel tag and some elriels so that I won't have to see their posts. Heck, I'm avoiding acotar content on Tik tok and Twitter just so I won't see anything elriel and anti elucien related. If I wanted to see anti elriel content, I'd go to the anti elriel tag. It's that simple.

The thing is, I also tried to be more open to the Elriel ship. I'm very confident in Elucien, but should Elriel be endgame then I want to be okay with it. However, these little shits that constantly shove statements from toxic elriels to my face make it very difficult for me. It brings me back to "Elriels are so toxic" thoughts.

Sry for the long rant. It just angers me.

Babe, I once told people to stop taking the bait and they told me to get off my high horse so I feel you on that. Is it getting on a high horse to say that not everything on the internet is made in good faith and by answering obvious trolls...you give them the fight they want? Wow you sure showed them.

But at its core, LB said it best. It's not a bipartisan system and you actually can't tell anything about a person based on the ship they like. If some folks had any self awareness they'd realize they are literally no better than the people they claim to hate and for every one person hyping them up, 8 others feel discouraged and burned out from all the negativity. A fandom can't sustain itself on pure spite- you need people who passionately love the series enough to draw art, write fic, create headcanons etc etc, and to that end you have to let go of the utter boring obsession with what is and is not canon.

I took screenshots of that post, and one person said "the author wrote it that way for a reason???" and to that I'd say, she wrote enough to make elriel a very popular ship, too. Are we picking and choosing? Are we saying you're not allowed to ship something if it isn't canon? No more Neris, no Rhysta, no Casslain, no Azris? And who gets to decide what is and is not canon? Someone on that post was discussing what "true" eluciens are, which excludes me along with a vast swath of other people.

I didn't elect any of these people to decide what I was allowed to write about or commission art for- Like the cherry picking so people can be faux outraged and then take screenshots of one of the most popular artists in the fandom, with a VERY distinct style to create a victim narrative that allows them to feel good about bullying is just overdone and boring at this point.

Anyway, I'll always advocate for blocking people and creating spaces that feel good. And I'll continue saying that if you hate something that much, you should stop engaging with it. No one is ever going to change my mind about elucien, I'm confident in my choices and even if SJM doesn't go that direction, I'll still be writing elucien like idgaf. The constant looking each other up to talk shit reeks of insecurity and boredom. Couldn't be me.

[kai-atlantis]

CW: pedo mention, suicide

I have a request. And this may get me blocked or hated even more by the AF community:

Can we stop the aminosity towards A/H shippers? Anti culture is celebrated in our fandom now, and like, cool if you don't ship anyone, but many of you on this platform find a way to literally bully or harass fans who are openly A/H. I also used to get endless inboxes of anon hate and harassment, even so far as telling me to 'KYS', or calling me a pedophile.

Let's make something very fucking clear: Redirect your issues to Colfer instead, because he wrote the 6th book. HE wrote the kiss. HE wrote them having feelings for eachother. Yes, as kids, a lot of us attached to this. Maybe it's from shared trauma, maybe it's a comfort place. Whatever someone's reason is for shipping, they DON'T need to explain themselves, or be made guilty for their preferences! Instead of harassing A/H shippers as if we spun the oldest celebrated ship from midair, how about you complain about damn Colfer?! He's not a poor innocent Irishman that had nothing to do with it. Give me a break.

Now, your hate and despise of the ship DOES affect other people when you go into the Hartemis tag and write on shippers' posts, literally heckling and harassing them. You know who you all are. I haven't checked it recently, but around 7 months ago, it was filled with HATE. HATE. AND HATE. I saw one very celebrated user telling Hartemis shippers to kill themselves. Honestly. If you look folks, it's there. Fuck that. If being an anti means you support hate and harassment, get the fuck off my tumblr lol.

I have had so many, SO many people come to me in messages to discuss A/H. I have had younger fans, literal kids, message me with art and explain they didn't feel safe posting it to tumblr because of the antis and hatred of A/H. ARE. YOU. KIDDING. ME. Do you know how angry this makes me? This is disgusting behavior, that children can't post their work without an anti yelling at them they're supporting pedophilia.

Which do you think is more harmful?! Supporting A/H? Or isolating young teens or kids and making their work and art feel worthless and unwanted?

Btw: none of the A/H shippers call our ship Hartemis. That's a you guys thing, lol. We like A/H. They don't need a ship name so it's easier to mock.

In short, leave people alone. Stop intermingling your personal issues into other's lives. Don't like Hartemis? Leave the fandom then! You tell us to gtfo, so you can as well! 😬 I really dont have anything inspirational or nice to say here. I'm disappointed that such a tiny fandom has been literally split apart in half, and half of them are not allowed to interact with the other.

We're so tiny, guys. We literally don't have to isolate each other. I was so depressed when I first joined tumblr and got so much hate, and to know there are kids who are messaging me, revealing they're getting hate? That they're scared to post? To rant and rave and ramble like the rest of us? It's disappointing. It really is.

CW: pedo mention, suicide

[lamentationsofasinner]

best things abt cornwall: ( a very unserious post)

1: PIRATE FM!!!!

i'm not even joking, johnny off pirate fm raised me. and their little segments, omg! i'm so good at where are we to it's not even real, and daytime in the duchy is the best programme ever. and before you ask, pirate's been bred into me. so much that ik their hotline number. 01209313900 just in case you were wondering. and you can get a pirate windscreen sticker. genius.

2: falmouth packet

i'm from falmouth, and when i tell you that the falmouth packet is the most quality piece of journalism out there i'm not exaggerating. the reports from the truro crown courts are just TOO FUCKING GOOD and the headlines are so overwhelmingly shit! i kid you not, one week the front page was 'pig becomes stuck in house' . journalistic gold.

3: the blanket hate of tourists!

this is a hate shared by every single cornish person, even though tourism brings in shit tons of money to our communities. we all gripe and bitch abt your quba sails coats and your teslas and range rovers and god help you if you have even the slightest northern accent. i am praying for you as i write this.

4: poldark

i'm going to keep this short and sweet. WHEN HE GOES OFF RIDING TO TRURO HE IS RIDING THE WRONG FUCKING WAY!!!!

5: david fucking barnicoat.

let's face it, if you're from falmouth, you either love him or you hate him. basically, david barnicoat is the local busybody, but we love him sm. he also used to do a very good column in the falmouth packet abt the shipping movements at the docks.

6: the pronunciation of fowey

some ignorant twats pronounce fowey 'foewee' because they're annoying and stupid. these people are so prevalent that studies say that the pronunciation of the place is literally changing. pronounce it FOY folks!

7: regarding anywhere beyond the tamar as 'foreign'

if you're not cornish, you'll need this explained, but the tamar is the river between devon and cornwall, and there is an ongoing joke between the cornish that anywhere not in cornwall is foreign. my lovely gorgeous amazing friend eliza is from exeter and i call her a bloody foreigner. btw we're not being offensive, it's a joke before people start getting all anti-discriminatory.

8: we laugh at your clocks that say 'dreckly'

we don't actually say dreckly anymore. merchandise has cruelly robbed it from us.

9: TRAGO

absolutely fucking brilliant department store, and the best one is in falmouth, not newton bloody abbot. it may be in a castle, but you can't find a fucking thing in there. you can buy anything in trago (the falmouth one) because it is just too good. but they sell the randomest shit, like in the sports department, you can buy guns and crossbows. like wtf. buuuutttt, they have the best christmas display, that is set up in like late september, so your perception of time is all fucked up. honestly, when they set it up for the first time it feels like november. i forgive them tho because they have a little train THAT GOES ROUND ON TRACKS. INJECT IT INTO MY VEINS.

also they have the best advert on pirate ever. *headbangs* wHaTeVeR yOu wAnT -DUH DUH- wHaTeVeR yOu LiKe -DUH DUH-

TRAGO IS LIFE

thanks very much for listening to my totally unserious post abt cornwall. david barnicoat, you won't be reading this but if you are, i'm sorry!

[ilikekidsshows]

Basically, the issue that's causing the anti-Dadrius folks is the same thing that caused so many issues in the Miraculous fandom, the Gravity Falls fandom, etc.: past generations thought "everyone who disagrees with me is wrong". Today's generation thinks, "everyone Secretly Agrees with Me Already, but some psychological dysfunction is preventing them from seeing things properly". So, today's fans are obnoxious because they don't think the rest of us are wrong, they think we're Brainwashed (TM).

I have seen the argument that some people online think that they're so correct that everyone does agree with them, but is just hiding it for whatever reason. That they're using the argument that: "you have no reason to trust anything a stranger online tells you," to justify completely making up everybody else's personality. But I've mostly seen that attitude in people who think: "Maybe we shouldn't act like asses 24/7 when online," should always be answered with: "This is the internet! Everybody's an ass!" while the fact that someone just politely asking them to be less of an ass should already be evidence to the contrary. "Everybody else is an ass, so I am justified." Basically, they feel they're so correct, they don't actually write any proper counterarguments despite being the one to start the argument.

There is more to the tendency to try to pick fights in fandom spaces, though. I feel stuff like tag-bombers and post-hijackers are a result of more people online disregarding the concept of personal space, even in a digital space. Like, how often does someone defend hopping onto someone else's post with something combatative with: "You posted this publically online, so I'm justified in arguing with you," completely forgetting the possibility that the post might be trying to reach like-minded individuals? They definitely show the Everyone Secretly Agrees With Me attitude in viewing this behavior as okay when they're called out on it.

These people also actively stalk the tags used by people who disagree with them to find posts to argue with, or just post their opposing takes but tag them with the tags used by the people who are guaranteed to disagree with their posts. They often play coy ("I used the ship tag because I'm talking about the ship no other reason I swear!"), but tag-bombing is about picking fights. Basically, everything is treated as an invitation to debate, every topic as something suitable to debate over and every other fan as a willing debate partner.

I've seen people lamenting how we no longer use phrases like: "Don't like, don't read." Basically, fandoms can no longer just accept that one group of people thinks this way and another group of people thinks that way and if you feel too strongly about mutually exclusive takes, you probably should avoid each other for the sake of having a lighter fandom space. Shipping wars have always been a thing, and could get pretty ugly, but these days people seem to feel so strongly about everything and feel the need to prove that they're correct more often than before.

For many, it used to be enough to privately think you are right and chuckle with your like-minded friends over how everyone else is wrong, but now you have to prove that your way of thinking is actually the most logical one. Like you said, these people think that the only reason anyone thinks differently from them is that they don't know any better and they just need to be educated, because, surely, if they knew all the facts, they'd agree with the "obvious correct take".

Some fandom behaviors have gotten more exhausting, is what I say.

[sanktyastag]

genuinely so confused with people who hate show!darklng. show!darkling is as much of a part of oppressed minority as book!darkling is but with even more 'validation' for his purpose, and i see people still hate show!him saying "oh but he is very bad in book" but then i see them rooting for book m*l LIKE HOWWW [i do kinda understand with those who dislike book!darkling but im still as baffled when when they root for book m*l]

ah, the good old darkling vs mal debate, lol.

in all honesty, i think whether someone prefers mal or the darkling when they watch/read SaB really comes down to how different fans like to engage with media.

i really enjoy politics, moral ambiguity, and fiction as a tool to examine real world oppression. as a result (and incredibly predictably to every single person who knows me) my favorite character is the darkling, because his character is a great lense to examine those different aspects of the series from. but, let's be honest here - both the books and the show only engage in politics, gray morality, and discrimination and oppression against minorities in like... the most surface-level way possible. if you're not already prone to getting over-invested in those fictional aspects, there's very little incentive to do so - because both the books and the show only set the darkling up as a focal point to examine those concepts in book 1, when alina thinks he could possibly be a good person. as soon as the darkling is revealed to be an eViL mAnIpUlAtOr, quite literally all of the nuance is stripped from his character, and we no longer engage with any valid points he may or may not have.

which means, if you're not super interested in socio-political worldbuilding, or you don't really want to examine war from a philosophical or moral standpoint, the books and show won't make you, and so it's nice and easy to just view the darkling as the amoral antagonist who needs to be taken down. i honestly don't blame fans for not liking him in the books, because the books don't... really want you to. and the show does pretty much the same thing. the show stops sympathizing with the darkling the second baghra lets the truth drop, and so every single thing he was previously shown to care about is now framed as the manipulation of an evil, calculating villain. so if a fan looks at the darkling, sees all the evil shit he does, and doesn't want to look past all of that, in order to critically examine his character, and the biased way he's viewed... i mean. yeah. then they wouldn't be a fan of his. they're more than justified in that, in my opinion. "this character is interesting, you just have to look past all the nonsensical extremist, stupid bullshit he does that harms everyone around him" isn't going to be a universal opinion, and i don't blame them for not wanting to go out of their way to sympathize with an uncompromising, murderous bastard who doesn't really respect anyone else's opinions other than his own (which, i think, is true even of show!darkling, although he feels worse about the fact that he's screwing people over. like he might cry about it, but he's still going to go forward with his plan, regardless of who objects). there's a reason darklina fans spend so much time writing about what they think would have been a more satisfying or interesting character arc for the darkling to go through - because canon absolutely doesn't do him any favors. like at all.

and on the other side, there's mal. i actually like both show and book mal, even though i don't think book mal was always handled incredibly well. i think he's a fairly sympathetic character with phenomenally bad coping mechanisms, and that the story spends essentially no time actually exploring his negative character traits in a meaningful way, which means, again, that we're given a character who the audience is tasked with doing most of the legwork for, if they want to like him. just like darkling fans very rarely excuse every single thing he's ever done, i don't actually see mal fans defend all the shit he pulls - beyond when both sides are baiting each other, in which case everyone seems to say the most black and white shit i've ever heard. but that's just kind of how online discourse works, so i won't judge people based off that, lol.

i think most fans of book mal seem to take his character, examine his negative traits and where they stem from, pick how they, personally, would like to see those issues addressed, and then put in the work to give him and alina the breathing room to do go through that character growth together.

so, by and large, i think fans of book mal and show mal just have different concepts that they find interesting or satisfying to explore in the media that they like. i obviously can't speak for others, but generally with mal and alina, i do think it's an interesting coming of age story, and has a smaller-scale, trauma-focused approach to the over-arching, wide-scale moral dilemmas that i focus on when i think about the darkling and alina. they're two flawed characters, thrust into a horrible situation, and they're desperately trying to get through it together, while fighting for the happy, peaceful lives that no one else has ever cared about them achieving.

so, yeah. in the end, i think it's really about what a fan wants from the media they consume. there's not really a wrong answer, in my opinion. it's only when people start judging each other over their fictional preferences that things start getting rocky, which is something that both darkling/alina shippers and mal/alina shippers could probably be better about, as needlessly antagonistic posts are prominent in both ship tags.

[olderthannetfic]

the whole tiffany g mess has a lot of things one could talk about, on "both sides" of the issue if that descriptor is applicable, but i wanna use your inbox to rant about all the folks flooding out of the woodwork to say "why do you want to compare being queer to being a pedophile so badly?"

queer ppl are NOT the ones tying pedophilia to queerness, the CONSERVATIVES ARE. sorry to spam caps but guess what? THEY DON'T CAAAARE. they don't fucking care that ur one of the "uwu my blorbos only kiss and hold hands unlike those nasty fics" gays. they find you just as disgusting and reprehensible as the dirty queers that write sex scenes between two 17-year-olds and books like Call Me By Your Name!! (not that there's anything inherently wrong with CMBYN, i just know it gets shit on by antis a lot). the Don't Say Gay bill was literally being passed around in conservative circles as the "anti-grooming" bill bcuz they know most ppl outside the main discussion will hear "all we want is to prevent children from being hurt :)" and not think twice about being against it. we're protecting the children, who cares about any negative repercussions that come from this!!

ppl love making fun of queer terfs that get eventually get their faces eaten because they didn't realize the conservatives they side with on anti-trans laws will turn on them for similar reasons, yet at the same time, they close their eyes and plug their ears singing lalala every time a fandom elder warns them that every single strikethrough happened because people went after "illegal" content first and it snowballed from there

sorry for the vent, i'm just so tired of no one listening to literal goddamn history. you don't have to like the "gross" content. most fandom elders and newbies alike think it's reprehensible! but you give your enemies an inch and they'll sprint with it for a mile!

all i'm saying is that ppl don't get the right to come crying if they get their way and their precious "wholesome gays" start getting treated exactly like the "illegal" stuff when dozens of people warned them of this happening ahead of time

(and the real kicker about my frustrations? i'm aroace and dabble in platonic found family shit 97% of the time, and more often than not avoid ship stuff even if it's sfw. surprise! not every anti-censorship person is a weirdo predator these ppl love to claim we are!!)

--

[aelaer]

I came here to say thank you for your dedication on writing stephen-centric fics (especially the whumpy/angsty ones). There's a lack of fics out there with stephen being one of the main chars that don't involve the author putting him as a 'plot-setter' to give other characters more 'spotlight'. I love all marvel characters, I really do, but sometimes when I try to find anything to read from the Stephen Strange fandom or alike, it never really fulfills my craving/reaches my expectations. Especially with ironstrange being an extremely famous ship. :/ I may come out more of like an ass on this one, but I really hate fics that make Stephen ooc just bcs. I dunno. To give their fav char the stage? And ppl praise those fics. Say they were good. It's super annoying tbh. I'm probably just biased, idk.

So yeah, thanks for writing your fics. I would really have given up on this fandom if it weren't for you. Real grateful.

k;efw;ijogrz;ogzihoggdio grd <33333333 Thank you! Whenever I am having a writing slump or just a bad day, I try to think of messages like this instead of negative thoughts. People taking the time to just say nice things, it's just -- real nice.

Always great to see another fan of Stephen whump around. PEOPLE, he's so whumpy! Tony and Peter get wayyyy too much whump in fics where the three show up, and in Loki & Stephen fics, it's usually Loki getting the whumping treatment. Whumping the *competent doctor* is way, way more fun. Trust me. I know there's a lot of whumpy writers in the MCU, give Stephen some of your whumpy love. Please. And then tag me after you're done writing it, thank you!

Also, you opened a can of worms with that last comment, because I agree with you and it's been like, a year since I made a comment on this on tumblr, so it's about time I made another one, ahahahah.

Warning: superrrr critical of anti-character writers/Civil War Team Iron Man Only writers below. Sorry if you, the person reading this, are included in that group. I just don't think it's good stuff and bad for the fandom--and my blog, my opinion space sorta thing. But this doesn't mean I think you're any less valuable, or less moral, as a person. This is still just fiction we're talking about.

There's definitely a segment of IronStrange fics that make Stephen OOC. I'm thankful that it's not all of them, but there's still enough to make a Stephen fan just annoyed. It's one reason I refuse to read non-Team Cap friendly fics, or any fic labeled "Civil War Team Iron Man", because 9 times out of 10, Stephen's just a prop character in those instead of a character with his own agency and beliefs. And usually Tony's made into this perfect messiah type character which is just *weird* for a guy who did make his fortune off weapons, like the writers are willfully ignoring that. And beyond that, Tony's definitely a flawed char, which is one reason I enjoy him as a character. Exploring his foibles is one of the best parts of writing from his POV. So making him perfect as anti-fics/Team Iron Man fics tend to do? Not my cup of tea.

There's a tendency to make Steve's character stupid or a bully which is just more bad writing, even worse than what Endgame did to him (talk about bad writing). Folks can write what they want, but I have yet to read a good anti-character-fic that keeps the characters true to their characters instead of serving as some sort of mouth piece for the author which is just poor writing. It may be popular, but there's a *lot* of really badly written books in the NYT Best Sellers, so popular doesn't mean good!

Also, it's not to say that these writers aren't capable of writing better, as I will see their other works and see that, yeah, they can write in a more nuanced POV or have a technical ability that's already present. But they've surrounded themselves with opinions and meta that fit their mold and their mold only and, well, handicap their own growth and their talent by sticking to OOC characterizations. It's their choice, of course, but I find it baffling because they stick to it for *years and years* and I'm still of the opinion that that's not healthy. It's 2022; Civil War came out 6 years ago. It's time to expand your horizons, and probably rewatch the film because you don't remember it as how it really happened if you're still sticking with the old, tired tropes these fics tend to have.

I did almost leave the fandom at one point and delete all my fics in a dark place at the end of 2019/beginning of 2020 (before the pandemic) because I was so tired of this trend to only IronStrange and the amount of vitriol in many of those stories. Thankfully other senses prevailed, and I got some outside assistance that helped make me realize that I still had a place in fandom, even if my opinion was a minority opinion. And asks like yours let me know I made the right choice in sticking around.

[nneefa]

That anti-sasuhina is down criminal for hating on creative works but ... there are some sasuhina fans that bullied a friend of mine (we're both on sasuhina fandom) some members are just absurd in their headcanons that we can't have another.

I’m not saying that there aren’t any SasuHina fans that aren’t downright vile and wretched. I know because I myself have encountered them too, but I hate this idea that the Naruto fandom - particularly the SasuSaku fandom - perpetuates when it comes to SasuHina:

that we’re all comprised of Sakura Haruno and/or Naruto Uzumaki haters (when some SH shippers love and treat them with more care than Kishimoto could ever dream of); that we’re all art thieves or that we don’t condemn art thieves (when there are art thieves in every single fandom ever made and that, contrary to stupidly popular belief, we actually do condemn plagiarism); that we all ship SasuHina out of spite towards canon (when most SH shippers are multishippers, never mind that some of us just like what we like without thinking about what is and isn’t canon, and even if we did ship SH out of spite, why does it matter when it doesn’t directly affect or harm anyone); that we just loves us some adultery/infidelity plotlines, or whatever other inane nonsense they seem to pull out of thin air, when that couldn’t be any further from the truth if they ever bothered to actually search for a decent SasuHina fic.

There are all sorts of shipping fandoms within the Naruto fandom that do this, but somehow, it’s only exclusive to SasuHina and we’re all labeled and painted with one brushstroke as the worst of the worst, by every stretch of the imagination, when the ship and fandom are literal blips on the radar in comparison to other fandoms.

It’s a shame that your friend was bullied, even worse that it was over something as harmless as shipping, but this sort of behavior is not exclusive to the SasuHina fandom, and I’m tired of us being generalized like we all are. The same thing can be said for SasuSaku or literally any shipping fandom within the Naruto fandom; in fact, the bullying from anti-SasuHina folks is so awful that we can’t even upload our fics onto AO3 or fanfiction.net without some douchebag leaving an unwarranted, disgusting comment under our stories before proceeding to tell us to kill ourselves because we deigned to write about a ship they dislike. Twitter is crawling with these kinds of people to the point where they tried to ruin SasuHina month - an event that’s been going on for more than a decade, mind you - for no other reason than to be assholes, because Hinata is “a big titty monster with an ugly husband” and Sasuke is “Sakura-sexual that doesn’t have eyes for a weakling like Hinata.” It’s all sick stuff.

As for headcanons: we can all believe whatever we want to believe, and the only way our headcanons can affect someone else is if we want it to. Hell, my headcanon is that Sasuke and Hinata would’ve understood one another on a level that far exceeds the relationship he has with Sakura had Kishimoto ever allowed them to interact with each other, platonically or romantically. I staunchly believe in it, no matter how stupid or absurd anyone thinks it is, no matter how much anyone disagrees with it, and no one can convince me otherwise, and it shouldn’t bother anyone that I do believe it to the point where they feel like it’s okay to insult me about it, because it doesn’t impact anyone’s life in any way, shape or form. And that goes for you anon: you can have whatever headcanon you desire.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: we cultivate our own experiences on the internet. Some of us like to torture ourselves by intentionally looking up stuff we know will piss us off, but at the end of the day, we are in control of what we do and do not want to see; and if something as small and insignificant and harmless as a headcanon over a mf crack ship can rile a person up so bad that they feel the need to bully and bash real life human beings, then they need to gtf off the internet and go touch some grass, because it’s never that serious.

[vintagedean]

Is it weird that whenever I see an anti!John post, I always assume that they're Destiel shippers? Because 9/10 of the time, they are. Which is weird because plenty in the fandom likes John as a character -- we see him as he is/was, as he was written; a broken man. Our voices we're just drowned out by crazy LOUD shippers. --- Here's my wholesome Dean&John headcanon w/o context. --- youtu. be/BsuY9lHxg88

idk if its weird, because i feel like you’re probably right. i ship daddycest, a bit of wincest, and also am a bonafide destiheller, and i def think john in canon is pretty terrible. i might have been more sympathetic before the episode where we learn he let dean get arrested and sent to the boys home for shoplifting food for him and sam, saying let him rot, like, that’s a line for me personally. i think destiel folk probably prioritize dean over john for shit like that (dean saying things with dad got “dicey” to sam in s14 also comes to mind) and so that gets reflected in fandom spaces. and bc their ship has nothing to do with john, just dean, there’s more space to be anti-john in their posts. 

i can’t speak for anyone else who isn’t in the destiel fandom, since i’m in it myself, but for me i just put aside my canon gripe with john for the sake of the ship and the fic, just like i put aside my real life problems with incest when i read or write daddycest/wincest. and i agree with you--john is very complicated and very broken, and that’s interesting to explore. it’s interesting to humanize him in depth, given the show really does nothing to engage with the contradiction that is john winchester, they just rubberstamp his supposed goodness and act like he...like he didn’t make his children feel like shit, leave them alone for weeks on end, let dean repeatedly suffer for crimes likely committed in service of keeping his brother fed and clothed, and then consistently treat them like tools instead of people when they were adults. 

idk, you probably didn’t mean to unlock all this with me, but i have a lot of thoughts and issues and love for john. i resonate with dean and sam, and i resonate with their choice to forgive him despite his flaws. that said, i also find it incredibly aggravating that the show itself disregards its own canon re: john. that it brushes aside the shit john did because jeffrey dean morgan is just that hot and cool and good at acting and genuinely close with j2. 

i don’t think my otp being destiel makes me more critical of john, but i think, as i said above, that destiel folk are just more invested in breaking down what makes dean so tragic, and like...a solid 75% of that is the damage john did him as a kid. whereas wincest/daddycest folks (i assume that’s the divide being drawn here?) have a bigger investment in both characters, that allows more room for humanizing and thinking about john outside of dean. if that makes sense? hope this doesn’t come off as wanky or ship war-y, but it IS an interesting dynamic that you point out, that a lot of john hate comes from that corner of fandom. i feel in an interesting position because im in both segments of the spn fandom. 

eta: i also think this is why i WANT to write a fic where john isn’t a garbage father. i want to explore what it would like for him and dean if their childhood wasn’t so traumatic. if he’d TALKED with them about mary, if he’d TALKED about this feelings and let them talk about theirs, if HE’D taken time to work a steady job every now and then to earn enough money to keep them fed and clothed before he quit to go hunting. i wanna know what a real partnership (insomuch as an incestuous father-son relationship can be real) between john and dean would look like if dean wasn’t holding on to years of repressed shame, guilt, and anger because of things john said/did/taught him. 

SECOND ETA: OMFG I FORGOT TO CHECK THE YOUTUBE VIDEO AND FUCK PERFECTION dean sings this under his breath whenever john’s in a mood and it always pulls out the faintest of smiles lmao.

[asynca]

I don't remember if I asked you this already, but I just this year figured out that I am a Trans straight guy. If anything, this discovery's not helped my mental state, but we're working through this. A big part of why I feel less secure in myself after starting to figure out my transness is that on the internet, I am primarily part of wlw fandoms. I'm more than aware that wlw treat these fandoms as safe spaces away from men, and I'm not sure how my role in the fandom has changed as a (1/2)

(2/2) as a result of me now presenting as a guy online. Even now, I’ve started to get unhappy people telling me that they don’t feel like I have a place in these fandoms. I want to feel like I do, but I don’t know where. (Additionally, I feel weird about being much more drawn to wlw ships than strait ships. Is this me being a creepy dude? Is this internalized transphobia that’s keeping me from completely seeing myself as a guy?) thanks for taking your time to read my confused little ask.

You may have asked it - I’ve answered an ask like this before but I think it was a while ago. 

First of all, fandom is not a ‘woman only’ place. It’s not an anyone-only space. It’s a space where people get together to enjoy someone else’s creations and characters and use them to inspire their own creations, to continue the stories, to analyse and breakdown themes in the subject media, etc, etc. Fandom is literally just a big group of fans, and you are a fan, so you belong in fandom. While fandom should remain respectful and constructive - it’s also not anyone’s safe space. People can make little corners of the fandom and blogs that are safe spaces, but fandom itself in not an exclusive space. 

If you get people saying otherwise to you, mute/block them. If you’re a fan who wants to connect with other fans to enjoy media and consumer or create content relating to it, you belong in the fandom. 

Secondly, and I’ve said this numerous times, it is fundementally okay for straight cis (or otherwise) guys to enjoy media about lesbians. You like women, there’s two or more of them right there in that media. You’re allowed to enjoy it and you’re allowed to like the women and be turned on by their relationship. THAT IS: as long as you don’t write/draw them women as sentient sex toys, as long as you respect their personhood as characters, and generally just behave in a respectful non-gross manner about the media and the fact it is portraying the sexualities of real people. 

I know three guys who create media (including erotica) about lesbians that is widely enjoyed by lesbians themselves. So not only are these men enjoying lesbian relationships, they’re going out and creating MORE content for people (mostly women) who like the relationship between two characters. Men can add value to fandoms about lesbian characters if they’re respectful of the characters and the lesbians who like the characters. 

A lot of this hatred of Yaoi/Yuri fandoms (where straight girls obsess over gay men or straight men obsess over gay girls) is because there is a certain category of fan who removes the personhood of a character, disregards the fact gay men and lesbians exist and are real, and literally reduces gay men or lesbians to sexual items for their own titillation and entertainment whilst disrespecting real queer folks when their behaviour is criticized (or just disrespecting queer folks in general). 

You can enjoy gay characters in a way that is not at all like that. It’s possible to enjoy lesbians as a man in a respectful and constructive way without acting like they for your sexual satisfaction. And if you do enjoy the media in a respectful way: GREAT. You have nothing at all to feel bad about. 

I don’t think it’s internalised transphobia from what you’ve said. I just think there’s a lot of (understandable) anti-majority sentiment in fandoms that you have to navigate around and be mindful of. 

In short, you can enjoy any sort of relationship as any sort of person as long as you treat the characters respectfully and don’t reduce them to hot bodies for you to jack off to. 

ETA: Whoops! I nearly forgot! Congrats on figuring something about yourself out, and I hope whatever path your transition takes it’s smooth and easier than you expect

[jameswrites]

Nah that's not what's going on at all.

Picture this. I'm 19 and I'm living with my dad who, trigger warning for I*ncest and r*pe folks.

And I wrote a fanfic that was two adults. But those two together weren't popular. So this lady in her 30s says I wrote one "clearly as a child" and she started a campaign to get me fucking doxxed after saying that how I wrote this made me look like "someone who writes like a child molester".

That's what this lead to was me getting doxxed by some shitty lady online because I wrote what I wrote and they could "prove" I was a bad person and deserved it because my other writing "proved" I was a "pedophile" because I wrote about Homestuck. When I was 19 and has been 17. But there will be no 16 year olds characters written about! Absolutely none! Good thing the moral police was there to dox someone about their ships because they weren't the correct ones (that were still underage, this is Homestuck after all) and they were there to make sure I learned the error of my ways!!#

I write dark fic, and it used to be darker. I shouldn't have to expose my past and the shitty things people do to be allowed to write things that are violent. I shouldn't even have to say what it fucking is! We have game of thrones on tv and people love that shit and it has rapeand incest and murder and all sorts of stuff and we're not wringing our hands saying it'll corrupt youth!

We have Ao3 doing good work archiving all fiction so that purges that happened to often gay and lesbian fandom literature can't happen anymore and people from countries with huge censoring coming in so they can even read gay things, but somehow you clown nuggets can't see how that's a good thing and go in to try and sabotage the website as if clearly tagged sensitive material somehow came into your fucking house and stole your heart.

Did you know that IT by Stephen king had a fucking giant orgy scene? Did you know that IT involves all the kids? Gosh I read that on my actual fucking library at 10. How messed up is that...that I wasn't ducking given the ability to not read that since it was not very good.

What's that!on ao3 the standard is to tag things like that? So I could have avoided reading the entire thing and seen these really useful tags to know that bad shit beyond just child eating alien was inside?

People aren't going against the big media. People are going against the smaller players. The fandoms. The "ships". Individuals.

If you say I'm "pro-pedophile" to my fucking face in person I can promise you that won't end well. But I'm 1000% against this rampant moral handwringing and panic that if we let people write things that are "problematic" in fandom that the world will end and everyone will assume that it's suddenly ok.

I mean I plan to get married but I'm not planning to have a red wedding.

Its the same garbage fucking thing every few years and I'm honestly tired of it. If you disagree with these paragraphs, if you believe censoring of fiction should take place (just in fandom, mind you, but boy does it grow when the social culture around it does re:China) if you believe that anti is just anti pedophilia and doesn't act cultlike when you're in their clutches (go Google how top leave anti circles, I'll wait) then you are not someone who it is safe for me to interact with. I don't want you interacting with me because that's the group that got me doxxed, hypocritically, and that's the group that labored a stalking and harassment campaign against my older sibling.

So block me.

what is an anti. what the christ is an anti anti. can you kids use your words please im falling behind

[greensaplinggrace]

#say it with me folks. we’re not anti the ships. we’re anti the writing that never fully explored anything satisfactorily

genuinely so confused with people who hate show!darklng. show!darkling is as much of a part of oppressed minority as book!darkling is but with even more 'validation' for his purpose, and i see people still hate show!him saying "oh but he is very bad in book" but then i see them rooting for book m*l LIKE HOWWW [i do kinda understand with those who dislike book!darkling but im still as baffled when when they root for book m*l]

ah, the good old darkling vs mal debate, lol.

in all honesty, i think whether someone prefers mal or the darkling when they watch/read SaB really comes down to how different fans like to engage with media.

i really enjoy politics, moral ambiguity, and fiction as a tool to examine real world oppression. as a result (and incredibly predictably to every single person who knows me) my favorite character is the darkling, because his character is a great lense to examine those different aspects of the series from. but, let's be honest here - both the books and the show only engage in politics, gray morality, and discrimination and oppression against minorities in like... the most surface-level way possible. if you're not already prone to getting over-invested in those fictional aspects, there's very little incentive to do so - because both the books and the show only set the darkling up as a focal point to examine those concepts in book 1, when alina thinks he could possibly be a good person. as soon as the darkling is revealed to be an eViL mAnIpUlAtOr, quite literally all of the nuance is stripped from his character, and we no longer engage with any valid points he may or may not have.

which means, if you're not super interested in socio-political worldbuilding, or you don't really want to examine war from a philosophical or moral standpoint, the books and show won't make you, and so it's nice and easy to just view the darkling as the amoral antagonist who needs to be taken down. i honestly don't blame fans for not liking him in the books, because the books don't... really want you to. and the show does pretty much the same thing. the show stops sympathizing with the darkling the second baghra lets the truth drop, and so every single thing he was previously shown to care about is now framed as the manipulation of an evil, calculating villain. so if a fan looks at the darkling, sees all the evil shit he does, and doesn't want to look past all of that, in order to critically examine his character, and the biased way he's viewed... i mean. yeah. then they wouldn't be a fan of his. they're more than justified in that, in my opinion. "this character is interesting, you just have to look past all the nonsensical extremist, stupid bullshit he does that harms everyone around him" isn't going to be a universal opinion, and i don't blame them for not wanting to go out of their way to sympathize with an uncompromising, murderous bastard who doesn't really respect anyone else's opinions other than his own (which, i think, is true even of show!darkling, although he feels worse about the fact that he's screwing people over. like he might cry about it, but he's still going to go forward with his plan, regardless of who objects). there's a reason darklina fans spend so much time writing about what they think would have been a more satisfying or interesting character arc for the darkling to go through - because canon absolutely doesn't do him any favors. like at all.

and on the other side, there's mal. i actually like both show and book mal, even though i don't think book mal was always handled incredibly well. i think he's a fairly sympathetic character with phenomenally bad coping mechanisms, and that the story spends essentially no time actually exploring his negative character traits in a meaningful way, which means, again, that we're given a character who the audience is tasked with doing most of the legwork for, if they want to like him. just like darkling fans very rarely excuse every single thing he's ever done, i don't actually see mal fans defend all the shit he pulls - beyond when both sides are baiting each other, in which case everyone seems to say the most black and white shit i've ever heard. but that's just kind of how online discourse works, so i won't judge people based off that, lol.

i think most fans of book mal seem to take his character, examine his negative traits and where they stem from, pick how they, personally, would like to see those issues addressed, and then put in the work to give him and alina the breathing room to do go through that character growth together.

so, by and large, i think fans of book mal and show mal just have different concepts that they find interesting or satisfying to explore in the media that they like. i obviously can't speak for others, but generally with mal and alina, i do think it's an interesting coming of age story, and has a smaller-scale, trauma-focused approach to the over-arching, wide-scale moral dilemmas that i focus on when i think about the darkling and alina. they're two flawed characters, thrust into a horrible situation, and they're desperately trying to get through it together, while fighting for the happy, peaceful lives that no one else has ever cared about them achieving.

so, yeah. in the end, i think it's really about what a fan wants from the media they consume. there's not really a wrong answer, in my opinion. it's only when people start judging each other over their fictional preferences that things start getting rocky, which is something that both darkling/alina shippers and mal/alina shippers could probably be better about, as needlessly antagonistic posts are prominent in both ship tags.