In sickness, we find health- Sick Bargain

I was scrolling through Tiktok comments and... I've seen quite a bit of ship shaming. Things like "I hate that pairing," "that pairing creeps me out," "Why would you pair them?!" And other comments which might make someone feel like they're being attacked.

You can definitely tell who are younger users and who are older users. Younger users have never lived through many of the stages that shipping and the development of fanfics went through, including serious shipping wars.

You can almost always see this on posts where videos or comments mention two male characters being paired for one reason or another, and specifically certain pairings of the *ahem* blood related varieties.

Example:

People were talking about shipping, and someone mentioned Wincest (which I recall being very popular for a long time), calling it creepy, and then commenters mentioned Thorki and called it incest.

My mind is going "wait...what?" In the sense that I've read a lot of Norse mythology as well as novels written with Loki as the main character (non-Marvel) and went through the mental list how Thor and Loki are never depicted as blood related in any of them. Loki was always depicted as being brought to Asgard (usually brought in as a "blood brother" through a pact or something like that.) But he's never referred to as being actually blood related to Thor in any way.

My mind then went through the process of going through what I remember from the Marvel characters and still boils down to them not being blood related. Even when "adopted," Loki was basically a spoils of war and rebelled when he learned the truth.

Only Thor still considers them ADOPTED brothers.

Then, I realized... I'm desensitized to most pairings in fanfics because my brain separates characters in them from the original source material so I tend to read fanfics as stories with characters who happen to have similar appearances and names to characters from books (I mean some are so well-written its not difficult to separate the fanfic from the source material).

Add to the fact that in college, I had a classmate who constantly threw random crack pairings at me. And I mean REALLY random pairings. They'd read new fanfics and then go on and on about them.

I guess I'm trying to say... a lot of pairings don't bother me anymore, but freaking out about the ones I don't like will not change the fact people pair who they want to.

I mean... they're fictional characters. Not a lot of characters are based on real people unless it's stated, so... why are people ship shaming?

Either way... unless the original author openly states they don't like fanfics being written, it won't stop people from pairing who they want. You don't have to ship shame others just because you don't like the characters as a pairing. If you don't like the pairing, JUST DONT READ IT. MOVE. ON.

It's not that difficult to just keep scrolling. ESPECIALLY on Tiktok, which is a scrolling platform. You'd do the same thing on AO3 if you see a story with a pairing you don't like, would you not?

On that note, to my knowledge, only ONE AUTHOR openly stated they didn't like or want fanfics written about their characters, and that was Anne Rice. So all fanfic sites basically banned them (yet there was if I recall the forbidden archive website, which was ALL fanfics for Anne Rice's characters. I remember reading about it).

And a lot of books that became popular also started out originally as fanfics.

Also...people have an issue with certain ships between male characters, yet when it happens with hetero pairings, it's okay? Like enemies to lovers? I've seen that being shamed, too.