#antilena

Honestly I feel like shippers who act entitled on social media became this way because, among other reasons, the writers and casts of tvshows were overly nice to them and not allowed to say ‘enough, I’ll block you if you insult me’ or even a simple ‘we are only celebrating canon couples, fanon combinations are infinite and we can’t address them all, so we won’t be talking about those’. Instead they had to be as nice as possible, whether it was because they didn’t want to alienate fans and lose money or because they genuinely cared doesn’t matter in this context. More often than not it’s just because they are being taught that if they don’t say yes they’ll be ‘cancelled’ by fans who are using real life issues and criminalizing actors, and they also know that nobody will dare backing them up to avoid getting in trouble with the network, or with whoever is telling them that the customer/fan is always right. You can’t tell a customer to go the hell if you are working at Starbucks and even less so in public, like on twitter, because good luck getting hired if you treat fans like ‘crap’. Doesn’t matter that they deserve it, people in charge want money and the money comes from all people watching the show, nobody should be pushed away by an actor who is trying to protect their mental health by standing up to bullies, the actor has to smile and wish them a nice day like a Starbucks cashier and allow more abuse, so that the customer will return. There are some exceptions, some people are allowed to respond, just like some cashiers can, but it’s not the norm. The norm is now writers walking on eggshells because how dare them say their story is their damn story. It’s actors not allowed to have an opinion or to explain what they are trying to portray because they will ruffle feathers. So this teaches these fans to keep going, and the more these fans gain approval the more the writers and cast bend. I remember Jennifer Morrison during ouat retweeting a fan who made, if I’m not wrong, tea-bags which were dedicated to the canon couple she was part of, and she, as a real person, was accused of supporting rape culture because antis had decided that her character’s canon boyfriend was a rapist, even if it wasn’t shown on screen (but he made references to sex! and is a pirate! so he had to be!) and therefore JMo showing that she liked her canon ship meant that she was pro-rape, not exactly a light accusation. Then they proceded to harass her so she’d say how much she liked the tea dedicated to their fanon couple - (involving a female canon rapist just to add irony). And to be clear given the nature of her job Jen wasn’t allowed to say she didn’t like that ship, because that would hurt their feelings, wasn’t allowed to say it’s a fanon ship and that she wanted to discuss canon things, wasn’t even allowed to ignore it, she’d be attacked even more than she already was. Hell, she was accused of homophobia (and of gay panic by people who clearly don’t know what that means) because she didn’t pose for photos with the other actress they shipped her with often enough (they shipped her character Emma with Regina, who was played by Lana Parilla, and shipped her with Lana), nor did enough offscreen things with her. It was clear that Jen and Lana weren’t close in real life and that the fans made it worse - but why would it matter how they feel as people, right? They had to dance like moneys for the fans. If Jen didn’t sit close to Lana it had to be because she hated that the fans would ship them or their fanon couple, not because as a human she has preferences. (Btw, if people are being weird about you and your coworker, it’s totally fine to feel uncomfortable and step away).

Sounds familiar, if you are from the Supergirl fandom? It’s the same people, yeah. The ones I mentioned at the beginning of this post. That’s why I said that it’s not ‘lgbt fans’ it’s literally the same people over and over, they just happen to project on wlw couples. But there are other fans like this as well and they have their own mlm and mlw couples to harass people for.   The Supergirl cast was literally harassed by fans who wanted Kara and Lena together. Eventually during a group interview they sang about how Kara and Lena were just friends and had a laugh, which btw is a great way to fight bullies, to let them know their words can’t hurt them and they will be laughed off, and, as far as I know, to this day people who don’t know the behind the scenes will only hear that the cast of Supergirl mocked a lesbian fanon couple and its lgbt fans, cruelly, laughing at them for daring to ship two women. Homophobic monsters. All except the actress who plays Lena who was visibly upset (in the story of course, in reality she laughed too). Several public apologies had to be made to make up for this evil act. They weren’t allowed to explain or defend themselves after (because of the new rule that if someone is hurt by your behavior, explaining yourself means you aren’t apologing and you are abusive). They had to take in more abuse and shut up. Real life consequences that started from abusive tweets going unpunished and made them risk reputation and jobs, as well as led to actually lgbt people who may have looked up to them being told what ‘they had done’ and be hurt by this. Context didn’t matter, even if it’s al that actually matters because it completely changes what you saw. People genuinely believed/believe the cast was that horrible and that was cruel out of nowhere, more people have joined the fandom and bought into it, confirming their own bias whenever they watched the show and saw only what they wanted to see.

So these fans got to demand attention and to have the writers change the show for the loudest fanon ships, and to insult anyone who doesn’t feel like doing so. Not only unpunished for this but sorta rewarded for it. Sure, some shows didn’t cave and didn’t make their ships canon, but the cast had to learn how to be submissive or accept online abusive behavior. OR leave social media in a world where you need it to work, like many were forced to do. And these fans got told over and over that their feelings were ‘valid’, their ships amazing, and got even angrier because if that’s the case why not make it canon? Or got told ‘not going to happen’ and started spreading the notion that there was queerbaiting and the show should be boicotted.   This is becoming a common way to react to all shows/movies with sequels, these shows are an example and in a way the place where it started and grew, but now it’s everywhere.

And I want to take the writers and say: just make a ship canon because you want to or tell them it’s not going to happen and stand by it, no more of that ‘equally valid, equally important, have to entertain all shippers’ crap. A fanon ship is not going to be equal to canon ones, it shouldn’t get equally talked about nor be included in every sentence about ships, and there is nothing to apologize for about that. It only exists in these small online places, you go talk to casual viewers and they won’t know of it, it’s not the same. And while we should all have more representation we don’t get to chose which characters get together, we don’t get to write the story. Shippers should learn to handle the truth if they haven’t yet, learn how to handle disappointment, like get a ‘you can ship who you want, it’s amazing you are so invested in our show! However x and y are the canon ship and we don’t plan on making the other one canon, I’m writing x and y together’ and leave it at that. And it should be more than possible to just say ‘this is not what I’m writing, I’m sorry’ if fans insist they are being baited because two characters look at each other. “You ship isn’t canon, it will never be canon, they told you this! So no, shippers of that fanon couple don’t matter now, they are talking about canon and your fanon ship shouldn’t be up there with the others’ “Telling me that I don’t matter because I demand to have my fanon ship constantly brought up is triggering me and making me suicidal, everybody matters all the time!’ is a take I actually read and people apologized for how ‘harsh’ they were being. The concept there was that you can never tell a person they don’t matter in a specific context, they have to matter, in all contexts. You don’t know how much of their identity and will to live a person has attached to a ship or a fandom, and you don’t get to say those words because they may be too fragile to take it (forget the fragility of those bullied every day by these people who can’t take consequences or the truth). Except that there are plenty situations in life in which you won’t matter, and that doesn’t mean that you don’t matter as a person in general. Your neighbor won’t have to think about your feelings on divorce before getting one, you don’t matter there. You still matter as a human being, in general, your life still has meaning, but you won’t and shouldn’t always be acknowledged in every situation that exists around you. And if you can’t understand this concept, if you think your opinion has to matter in all contexts and you have to be given some kind of shake of hand over it or your entire life won’t matter, because you must be important in every context ever, you shouldn’t be engaging in fandoms, you should be getting medical help asap, not making your ability to exist more fragile because it’s dependent on strangers validating you over a ship. You are putting your entire existence in the hands of a fandom, and that’s not only unhealthy but impossible to end well. Go to therapy and if you can’t afford that yet then don’t become a part of groups that require you to tie your identity to them.  

Your feelings matter in the sense that you can ship what you want, not that you have the right to demand a response or approval from other actual human beings. My feeling that Jemma and Fitz from AoS (super beloved couple by fans and writers) are terrible for each other means a lot to me, I’ve been super invested for years in that show, wrote essays on why I don’t like this couple (and tagged them properly to respect the shippers), but you know what? This means nothing to the writers and that’s okay. I’m not important to them, I should not expect to have my feelings catered to with tweets that mention fanon couples I like and that ‘acknowledge’ flaws I see. I didn’t harass anyone on twitter, and I certainly don’t think that if I had shipped Jemma with someone else I should have been mentioned in canon-related tweets because ‘every ship is valid’! I didn’t expect fanon couples like Will and Alice or Flynn and Lucy (OUATIW and Timeless) to be mentioned everywhere just because some people loved them and therefore we had to be catered to: I shipped it but I sure as hell didn’t expect to make it real or to change the entire creative process of the people behind the show because I was screaming about it. I don’t expect people to pat my head and tell me what a lovely ship it is and discuss it every time is brought up on twitter. But the majority of writers/casts is trying to be submissive now so they don’t get in trouble and you can literally see posts of fanon shippers laughing about how they are in the right and they will be able to break them. And personally I think these shippers deserve actual real life consequences. No attention to your ship, which wasn’t real anyway, less screentime for it, more direct responses with ‘nope not gonna happen’ and ‘I made it, they are not real people, you can read in that scene what you want but know that’s not what I’m making it and therefore it’s not real’. No actors trying to make these people feel better. They don’t need to apologize for ships not happening or for not shipping them or for wanting to talk about their actual work. People will survive even if the writers don’t tell them just how important and incredible their fanon ship is, even more so because you are not teaching them that this is a correct way to interact with the world and they’ll learn not to expect anything. They have to learn that they may not get what they want even if they ask nicely, and that regardless of that they cannot harass people. They also have to learn that crying wolf by using very real dramatic issues like homophobia and misoginy should have consequences, I’ll say it again: if you publicly accuse me of being pro-rape because I like something made for a fiction couple I get to take you to court.

Also the bullshit of ‘oh my god those mean adult men in the cast are ganging up against a teenager’ said about adult men responding without sugarcoating (but also without insulting) to the hundreth ‘teenager’ who is insulting them, part of a group of people who insults them daily. Teenagers learn how to be adults also by learning consequences to their actions and that they don’t get to say everything they want the way they want, shouldn’t we reinforce this? Or should we let bullies free to online-harass adults every hour of every day? In the end Supergirl the cast by the end was so blatantly pissed to the point that some of them started snapping again, possibly because a guest star kickstarted it (sometimes you need one person to speak up and then others can), and those shippers didn’t get their ship to be made canon, thankfully, because it was way too unreal, but they still got treated better than they deserved. They learned that they can get something if they behave like that, and have the hope that doing worse will get them more.

And I honestly want to go back to writers and cast interacting less with us, to less twitter, less socials, because even if it sucks to lose that privilege it’s better than to let it become a tool in the hands of abusive people. If people can’t, as a group, learn how to use something responsibly, and the people giving it to them are not allowed to react properly, then that something has to be taken away from them. It’s ruining shows, literally, because usually these people have misread, willingly or by accident, everything from story to characters, and to cater to them means that whatever you were doing following your instincts and making a linear story will get messed up, the story will get out of track, the characters will be weird.