#bring back squick

I'm with you. These concepts didn't exist when I entered fandom. I'm still trying to figure things out.

All I know is that the phrase "these turtles are underage and brothers" is something I never expected to see with my own eyes from when the antishippers infested the Ninja Turtles fandom. I got accused of being complicit in pedophilia and threatened with a purging or whatever they thought would scare me. This is a fandom based on a parody, with animal humanoids that barely have human type biologies, let alone ones that can be compared to humans. Do you understand how ridiculous this sounds? I just typed it and I'm completely baffled.

From what I gather, the anti side is desperate for control over something, anything, and flailing for the flimsiest straws they can grasp. The pro side appears to be chilling, playing with fictional representations of the human (ish) condition, occasionally declaring little wars over which ship is better. Really fun analytical threads. Sometimes I feel squicked by a ship or a theme, so I stop reading.

And the neutrals - I guess that's me - are standing off to the side passing around popcorn.

*hands you popcorn*

In conclusion, I have no goddamn clue, but I'm here for the ride.

I have been extremely lucky in my life that I have no triggers that I can identify. Nothing that would produce a physical reaction beyond a shudder or a wince or covering my eyes in the case of a horror film, etc. Nothing that would throw me into a mental spiral or a bad memory. If I do have anything that could be considered a trigger, it doesn’t appear often enough to make itself known.

But boy howdy, I have squicks. There are ships whose dynamics I consider squicky. There are plenty of fiction tropes that squick me, from common fandom explorations to seriously dark stuff. And I mute liberally to avoid seeing that content.

But the last thing I’m going to do is pass judgment on anyone who does enjoy that content. For one thing, as we’ve had to say to antis over and over and over, what people enjoy in fiction is never a one-on-one parallel to what they enjoy or do in real life. For another, tastes change. There are some things that I would have considered squicks twenty years ago when I first got into online fandom, but don’t now. There are things that I still consider a bit squicky, but will read from authors whose style I know.

And I am especially not going to tell anyone that the way they enjoy their fiction is wrong. If you are not attacking others over what they do in fan content, no matter what it’s about, then you are a pro-shipper. Doesn’t matter what your personal tastes are; the key element is that you leave others alone if you disagree with them.

For any who don’t: NOTP is a shipping shorthand for the pairings that you look at and just say, NOPE to, as in you don’t ship it lmao! The reason doesn’t have to be relevant, you can literally say that a pairing is your NOTP just because you don’t like the pairing.

Any time you see a post talking about the fandom term ‘squick’ (which means to strongly dislike a thing, without moral judgement) there are a dozen or more responses to that post saying we need to bring back squick. I agree, but the problem with those statements is that no one talks about how. 

Before we do that, let’s think about why squick went away. 

It didn’t. Not completely. But it fell into disuse to such a degree that there are fans today who don’t know what the word means or that it ever existed. I don’t know for sure why squick fell into disuse, but my own theory is that fandom as a whole is really bad at explaining itself. There is a general assumption in fandom that “everyone knows” various things, but if no one actually teaches new fans about those things, then we’re relying on them to just pick them up on their own. Sometimes they do, but just as often they don’t. 

I learned squick from context, but that was back in the LJ days of the late 90s and early 2000s. All of the people I was talking to back then were English speakers from North America and so it was easy to glean a meaning based on how the term was being used. Fandom is a lot bigger now, and people are talking cross-culturally with fans who have different first languages and so defining our terms is more important than it used to be. It might feel unnecessary to you, but spelling out your acronyms or defining fandom terms in a post can make the difference between a new fan knowing what you’re talking about and not. 

Which brings me to my next point: how to bring squick back. 

The only way for a word to become popular is for people to use it. New words are constantly being coined and old words are constantly falling into disuse and it all comes down to whether or not those words are actually used by actual people in their actual lives. 

If you want squick to come back, use squick yourself. 

But like I said above, those of us who use these fandom-specific terms that aren’t in any dictionary are going to have to do the work of making the meaning clear. When you use squick, either explain what it means or make the context easy to understand. You can even link out to the Fanlore page on squick. Not everyone clicks on links, but the curious ones might.