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Ive seen the worst kind of accusations from other shippers and I always try to not turn that into a factor in how I view that ship. It’s not always easy, but there are many possibilities to avoid content that bothers you. And there’s also way in which you can vent your frustrations privately, without making other people in the fandom uncomfortable or feel bad. At least that’s my approach to fandom spaces because I’ve been rage-baited and I myself exhibited toxic behavior in the past too many times and just try to not do that anymore because i want to try and be a positive force in fandom so that other people also have a positive experience with my account.

But also this doesn’t mean we can’t talk about more serious topics anymore. I want to have people talk about what makes them uncomfortable and what bothers them, in the canon and in the fanspace. I feel like esp the hellaverse fandom tends to overly go against criticisms of the show because of the harassment the showrunners get and it can be harmful to not allow any discourse anymore. I think having a pool of voices that just share their personal feelings will inevitably lead to tensions, but can also further a more mindful togetherness in general, even if it takes a bit of time. I’ve been in fandom for a long time and I’ve been on tumblr for a long time, too. Ive seen opinions that were consensus in 2014 now be examined way more critically by the majority of users, no matter if it’s about fandom stuff or if it’s about sociopolitical stuff. I think change can happen!

But that’s enough of that, I want to go back to shipping. I say this all the time but I want to emphasize it again:

I think the main reason why we gravitate towards one ship and not another is libidinous in nature and has nothing to do with anything based in facts or rational thought. That being said, theres nothing wrong with libidinous desire per se, we just need to be very careful with how we talk about our personal feelings. And sometimes these two things are not separated and instead get conflated.

In the past i hated a ship because of the context of one character having way more power and upholding way more violence over the other and it essentially made me so uncomfortable that I started ranting and raving about it, I made snide remarks and made friends so uncomfortable they stopped talking to me. I always think about this now whenever I want to say something about a ship I don’t like. But at the same time I sort of secretly liked a ship that was toxic and had a massive power imbalance as well and couldnt see why that made my arguments a little weird. also got way older, dealt with a lot of mental health bullshit and had to come to terms with how my brain ticks and how terminally online my structure of thinking got. I was very black and white and couldnt see my own hypocricy.

And then years later after some reflection and therapy I started shipping toxic yaoi all of a sudden, realizing how cathartic it can be to let go of all the moralism that has made my obsessive. thinking patterns go in circles and that I genuinely had way more fun shipping two awful characters with one another, no matter if one of them is worse than the other or not. And while this helped me break free from a cycle of a very unhealthy mindset, i now find myself on the other side of the discourse.

What I find interesting is that I think people don’t realize that they are lowering their standards for their own ships more and in turn often undermine the implications of power imbalance with their ship while still making arguments about power imbalance for the ship they don’t like, which imho if argued in a way that implies moral authority and weaponizes pseudo-intellectualism can be potentially dangerous. You can dislike a ship for the things happening in canon or how fans handle the ship in fanworks and that’s more than valid. But if I see people point things out that could actually be said about their ship as well in some capacity but they then try to argue why its not *that bad* with their ship, i see the same hypocricy i engaged with in the past. And im trying to be as neutral about this as i possibly can because I don’t ever want individual fans to feel attacked or misunderstood or targeted by what I’m saying, but I wished this was something all fans of all ships thought about some more. Sometimes when you kinda lowkey know your argument is weak you start obsessing over trying to make your argument sound stronger and if that then leads to accusations of bad behavior or bigotty that one part of the fandom supposedly exhibits more than the other, you easily start going into framing territory.

I hope I made my point clear and I hope I didn’t come off like I’m trying to undermine what depictions of dynamics of any kind can do to a person. I’ve been there, I have my own issues and I’m not an innocent. I rant a lot privately! And even then I know that I am not always right, because nobody is always right.