One by One

But despite this, some people persist in treating shipping and fandom engagement, not as fun things to share with other people, but as a chance to Get A Good Arade In Having The Most Perfect Interpretation Of The Narrative, A Thing That Is Both Normal To Want And Possible To Achieve. As such, the idea that they can't definitively prove their ship or narrative interpretation to be Definitively Correct within a subjective critical framework distresses them - and so, instead, they reframe the debate as a moral one. Rather than arguing, "You can't ship X/Y, it's not as supported by the narrative as X/Z," they'll say, "It's immoral to ship X/Z; the only moral choice is X/Y." But because the works in question are fictional, the only way to make the moral proclamation relevant is to assert that fictional preferences are always the same as real ones: that there is no salient difference between liking something in a story and wanting it in real life. Shipping and fandom analysis thus become proxies for real-world morality - and yet, inevitably, even among people who share this illogic, shipping wars still continue; they just happen along moral axes instead of admitting to being based in subjective analysis and personal preference.

Which is how we end up with absolutely unhinged fandom arguments like "it's incest for those two unrelated people who weren't raised together to be in a relationship because they call each other sworn brothers," or "that ship is forbidden because one of them is 18 and the other is 17, which is an adult dating a minor and therefore pedophilic." It's got nothing to do with actual definitions of incest or pedophilia, let alone anyone defending them; it's an ass-backwards attempt to morally justify a particular ship or ships by discrediting all the others. That's it. That's literally it. And yet this way of thinking has become so widespread that it's legtimiately metastizing into genuine social malaise, incorporating elements of TERFism and Evangelical puritanism in a way that's causing actual, tangible harm.

Extra link here because i am not confident with tumblr mobile's embeds:

like yes that was an axis power, but they did not give two shits about the jews?? wwii was. complicated. japanese fascism was heavily influenced by european thought, but it was focused on japanese issues.