#shipless

This is not to say that I do not love shipping. In fact, for me, it means quite the opposite. I love most ships I see! And those I do not, I am more than happy to let sail on by without comment, I’m not a monster.

What it means, though, is that I do not write ships, for I am no great wordsmith. No indeed, what I do for fandom is I am a librarian, in that I organize. I am a tool maker, for fandom is a tool-using animal (ask me about my Tumblr mass tag wrangler). I am a keeper, in that I look after information in chat and database, that there may always be a record. Fandom needs bots to do the work, and I am happy to provide my services.

And so that is where our journey begins, with a younger version of me, and the mistakes they have made. It’s a long story. An old story, for I am old. A story of loyalty. A story of betrayal.

Perhaps even a story of redemption.

What I am trying to say is that I have history, friends.

But perhaps it’s been long enough that maybe I’ve been forgiven for my transgressions.

Maybe it’s been long enough to allow the healing to begin.

All I know for sure is that everything you are about to read is a complete and utter lie in totality. But like Elim Garak would advise, all of it is true, especially the lies. And if you recognize anything here, shut up no you don’t who are you a cop come back with a warrant.

But anyroad. The story behind why I, biot08, (in)famously, do not ship. You’re already beneath the cut, but I’m warning you now, this is a long one, so strap in.

***

I started, as many did, in Star Trek. I was too young to know what shipping was. I did know that Kirk and Spock and McCoy were at the very least very good friends, and of course I understood that Riker and Troi were hot. Data was my favourite, but that should be obvious.

The internet hadn’t been invented yet, so my interactions with fandom were restricted to conventions, but it was formative. I learned from the cosplayers and the art sellers and the panels and, well. It was early days, idyllic.

From there I moved on, as DS9 came into being (did I mention I am old? I am old), and Babylon 5, and Delenn and Sheridan were very cute, but still, I did not create, I merely consumed, and that which I consumed was mostly that which was provided.

My next fandom was my first brush with what I would call -fandom- fandom. You know. Interacting with fans. Creating and reading stories, made by fans. Being fannish.

I say ‘fandom’, but you have to understand, I AM old. When you read ‘fandom’ I imagine many of you imagine long Tumblr reblog chains and archive dives into Ao3. What I am seeing in my mind’s eye though are miles of IRC logs, threads on BBS forums, and the glittering light of countless Geocities pages, all blink-tagging gently in the soft glow of CRT.

Basically just before the internet would be invented, which I am pretty sure occurred somewhen around 2006.

This fandom, my first real deep dive into -fandom-, was Megaman, because of course it was Megaman. We were… a strange fandom, even by fandom standards. We mostly interacted via IRC - a chat medium; imagine Discord, but worse, but also more open, but also worse -, but this would be my first brush with my future destiny. I helped maintain the bot, as a fellow, more sophisticated bot. I knew the commands. I could pass the Turing test. I eventually even archived the logs that were generated.

Now, something you need to understand about Megaman is that it is a video game from, I don’t know, the 60s or 70s, and it was made before video game makers re-invented characterization (this independent re-invention, by the way, is why 9 out of 10 video game protagonists are angry white men; the industry is still evolving the idea of what a ‘character’ is to this day, and frankly, they’re not very good at it, but I digress). So you basically had blue bot, red bot (who was super cool and was my favorite), teenage emo blue bot, and then teenage red bot who was either also emo, or maybe he was a big brother sort, or perhaps a super cool manly man, or he was a girl (ponytail and … asset lights), or maybe he was a hot blooded fighter, or maybe just an antihero, it really depended on which game you were looking at. And there were no girl bots, or rather there were, but they weren’t fighters, because, well, I don’t know why because, I guess the video game industry just hadn’t figured out how to make other genders yet.

This is where I first ran into Original Characters, or OCs, because with such a rich and inspiring list of characters to choose from, it was more palatable to make your own cool robot. This is also where I first ran into shipping, because of course I did, I was a teenager. I mean, I think we actually called it ‘cybering’ at the time, but whatever you want to call it, we sure did a whole lot of it.

And it was pretty okay, actually. Some drama, but you can’t have fandom without drama. Some shenanigans. Some really excellent stories that would have been lost to time, if not for people like me. The data mongers. The loggers. The Keepers, and this is where, at last, I found my niche in fandom.

I moved on, as one does, as we grew older, and the robots stopped being so cool, and more importantly, most of us found other fandoms which had either more interesting premises beyond ‘fighting robots fighting’ or more interesting characters (which was honestly just -such- an incredibly low bar to pass).

(I mention in passing here that I did move onto a multi-universe fandom at some point in here, and I owe much to it, but it’s not really part of this story; but to the friends I made there, I have not forgot you, but you were not really part of my downfall from grace, so I shall merely mention here that I have been touched by my relationships with all of you and move on)

Finally, I at last moved on to the fandom that would be the beginning of my end. The fandom that would be the first step on the slippery path down to my fall.

I speak of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

The internet was new, but shiny, and we used it. And I had brought my skills from other fandoms with me. I still did not write, but I did enjoy what others did. I wanted to be a part of it all. And so I did what I do which is to say I went into tooling. I made a friend, BlindStar_25 (all names changed to indict the guilty, i.e., me), who helped me get into the right spaces. She taught me how to edit a wiki. She got me into the good IRC servers. Basically, she got me work on the docks of canon, and taught me to tend to canon, to document it, to nurture the tools that would be needed to launch all the ships. She nurtured in me a gentle curiosity, to really dig in to what we were seeing and reading and watching, because sometimes it required keen analysis to tease out good canon.

“We respect all ships,” she told me once, as I was learning how to handle page tagging. “But it’s important that we provide a foundation that those ships can be built from. We can’t make them use it, of course. But it’s got to be there, and we make sure it is. And that foundation is canon.”

Halcyon days. I took to it readily, and grew, as a bot, as a person.

These were some of the first times I saw ship to ship combat. Mighty ships with tall mizzenmasts and powerful weapons taking shots across each other's bows. I was young, and did not understand. Surely each ship would be healthier if they would sail by each other unmolested? Surely it would be easier to transfer crews if those crews were not violent enemies? Surely energy wasted on ship to ship combat could be better spent on ship maintenance and upkeep (and maybe updating some of those long running storylines I was eagerly keeping an eye on)?

I asked one of the mods about it, a friend of mine from the Megaman days; x_Avatar_RockYou.

“Why is there so much in-fighting in the A:TLA fleet?” I sent him over the chat system.

“Because fandom loves drama lol,” he responded. “Stick to canon. You’ll be safe.”

I believed him. So I stayed on the docks, managing the canon, and watched the ships from a distance.

I remember often, others would try to catch me in the crossfire. I have seen some truly hot takes in my time.

‘Aang is a monk! He can’t be shipped with anyone!’

‘Jet is hot and I bet Zuko would love that’

‘Eww Iroh is old don’t ship him!’

‘Zuko is a bad boy, and we all know girls like Katara go for the bad boy.’

That last one would be the start of the trouble, but I didn’t know it at the time. For my part, each ship seemed to want to try to twist canon to their own purposes. And I held the canon, as I tried to cool the fires between various ships.

‘Well you see, if the air nomads operate the same as the other tribes, then air nomads have children that become air benders, so there probably isn’t vows of chastity. And besides, if you look at this time stamp in this episode, Aang clearly turns red in response to Katara, so even if he -has- taken a vow, he still has feelings’

‘That’s not supported. By any episode. The two haven’t even met yet’ (that was in the future from this point)

‘That’s terrible please don’t be terrible’

The last one, well.

It’s easier when shippers don’t try to force canon into their armaments when it’s not warranted. It’s easier when people just build their ship as they want. If they must, I’d prefer they sail for the golden waters of alternate universe rather than try to force canon into shapes it isn’t.

But that’s not how the A:TLA fandom operated at the time.

And I was there when it all went to hell.

It was the episode where Katara almost healed Zuko, due to circumstances, but didn’t, also due to circumstances. The details aren’t important now, and those of you who are in the fandom know what they are. For the rest of you, you just need to know, this really sort of cemented (for the time being) the adversity between the two characters. The soft moment between Katara and Zuko was a contrasting event to what was about to happen, not a defining one. I thought it pretty clear. I was not in charge of those wiki pages, though, so I ignored the event.

At least until a message came in from x_Avatar_RockYou.

“Need you online, we have an emergency!” He said.

I frowned at the message, but I reported to the docks all the same. I figured it was something dumb, like someone dumping all the passwords in the database to plain text or maybe I would need to write a script to fix a bunch of suddenly-dead links.

I did not think the canon would be at risk. That’d be ridiculous.

I was met by flames.

The Zutara ship had sailed into port, on fire and firing wildly. It was a maelstrom of activity. Vicious insults and accusations were being flung back and forth with no compassion or humanity. I think I saw someone run screaming down the pier, naked and on fire. Some of the other ships had come in as well, and one in particular, the Kataang, was blowing broadsides into Zutara with a level of viciousness I didn’t realize it was capable of.

The wiki was practically inaccessible. Every chat channel was a waterfall of accusation and counter-accusation. I manned my station and checked the logs.

What I saw would shake me to my core.

Zutara had managed to get an admin on their side, and the page for the episode was just an utter hash of chaos. Deep long poems extolling the deep and obvious love Katara had for Zuko were being written as fast as they could be deleted, and being replaced with screeds on how Aang and Katara were the OTP, and repeated attempts by other wiki maintainers to keep the piece accurate were being swept aside by a tidal wave of wishful thinking. The character pages for every character were also on fire as the crews of each ship smelled the blood in the water and were going for the jugular, each certain that their particular edit would be the one that would go unnoticed once the fiasco was over.

I got another message from x_Avatar_RockYou. I was one of the trusted ones being asked to investigate who exactly was behind this vandalism, and also to quickly pull a backup for said investigation. In a few moments, he said, he would initiate the Groundhog Day Protocol.

Rollback and lockout. The article for the episode would be lost until one of us could rebuild it, and in the meanwhile, our documentation on the canon would be out of date.

If you know, you know. If you have ever been one of us, you understand. We’d rather have given up our flairs on our user pages than have our data be out of date for more than, say, maybe half a day.

Okay, we were kind of lazy, don’t @ me.

Still though. I did as I was told. I quickly pulled the logs, just moments before the wiki was brought down for ‘maintenance’.

The ships continued to fight, each one on fire, late into the night and into the next day, but the fights in the voice channels and over the chat channels would have to continue on without me. I had been given my marching orders, and I would see them through.

I combed through the logs. It was a hellacious mess, but I am a diligent person, a careful person, a… okay, I’m a lazy person. Most of my investigation actually involved writing a script to do my investigation for me.

I’ve never seen a problem that could be solved in half an hour that I didn’t feel an immediate and terrible overwhelming urge to spend four hours writing a script to solve for me.

It was three AM. I ran the script. By this time, many of the rank and file users had been banned or k-lined, excised from access to the wiki and the chats, banished from Write privileges to the precious canon-compliant data stores. It was suspected that there was at least one super op or above still at wild who had helped perpetuate this vicious campaign, but nobody had found them yet.

I sent the results of my script to x_Avatar_RockYou, just to keep him informed, even as I read back through the results, sleepy yet curious. I didn’t actually expect to find anything, mind. I’d been so slow at my investigation, that I just assumed that every conspirator would have been found, and I was right.

Mostly.

See, while making a script is far slower than just doing my job by hand, the script is cold. The script is ruthless. The script is thorough. If written correctly, the script -will- find the right answer, and it will leave no friends alive.

Not even if they’re the friend who had helped you get to where you were in the first place.

Not even if the friend was BlindStar_25.

I stared at the name for a long time. I did not believe what I was reading. I quickly messaged x_Avatar_RockYou to tell him I needed to double-check my script, that I thought I’d made a mistake, that this had to be wrong, that he couldn’t trust its output just yet.

It couldn’t be BlindStar_25. She’d been the one who had taught me everything I know! She had taught me the importance of canon! She had nurtured my gentle curiosity into fandom nature into what it now was, who I now was!

“We respect all ships,” her words echoed in my memory. “But it’s important that we provide a foundation that ships can be built from.We can’t make them use it, of course. But it’s got to be there, and we make sure it is.”

“And that foundation,” she had said, “is canon.”

I had taken the words to heart. They were my guiding light. Whenever I was awake at three in the morning cursing whoever wrote the wiki software or trying to get everyone to reset their passwords -again-, I would remember my purpose. The truth of my cause. The beauty of canon, and the beauty it enabled. For without canon, what else is there? Even in original writing, that itself becomes a canon, and what wonderful things can be built from it?

It was important. It was beautiful.

And my friend, it seemed, had betrayed it.

I confirmed that the script had run correctly, and I found myself deflating, unable to believe. I quickly messaged BlindStar_25, hoping to get to her before x_Avatar_RockYou, hoping to salvage this terrible situation, hoping to restore the faith.

“Star,” I typed. “Timestamps have you on the episode changelog for the Zutara fiasco.”

I watched my screen anxiously, waiting for something, anything to show up. We didn’t have the indicators at the time that someone was typing, or even that they had seen the message, but I was hoping, desperately, that she would get back to me, that she could make sense of it all.

I saw the server mode for her change over. +b. The ban indicator.

And then the kick came in. BlindStar_25 has been kicked from the server by x_Avatar_RockYou (reason: set the wiki on fire, set you on fire, roflmao).

I stared, as x_Avatar_RockYou sent me a message. “It’s cool. your script’s good. I verified what you found. Thanks.”

My fingers were dead and numb as I slowly pulled my hands up to the keyboard, and typed my response.

“No problem bro,” I replied.

I turned off the computer.

I was there when the Zutara left the next day, to leave the canon docks, never to be seen in our waters ever again. I looked up and saw BlindStar_25 on the deck. She saw me, and looked back with a stern, defiant expression. Proud. Tall.

I watched as the ship sailed away, disappearing over the horizon.

I turned away, and bowed my head. We’d lost one of our best that day.

Later, when I checked my messages, I found that she had decided to contact me one last time, through a different chat client.

“You’ll have to find your own way,” it said.

Well.

Wasn’t that just some cryptic ass bullshit.

Never did find out why she did it, as she never reached out to me again. Clearly she just saw something none of the rest of us did. But eventually, I moved on.

***

My work that day got me kudos from the other people who helped maintain documentation of the canon. Wait, kudos? Sorry, this was before Ao3. Likes? No, we weren’t on Facebook. Uhm. Hmn. Thumb-ups? I’m not even sure we had emojis.

Look, never mind. I was liked, and I was kept around, and I got to be in the cool kids’ Ventrilo servers. If you’ve never heard of Ventrilo, it’s like a worse Discord, voice only, and you have to host it yourself, which okay that last part may actually be a plus or minus depending on who’s paying for your computer. It’s not important. We talked about canon documentation maintenance over vent, and we tended to the wikis, and we made sure plot summaries were made, recordings recorded, and otherwise got around the business of fandom.

Avatar: The Last Airbender had wrapped up with aplomb, sticking the landing in a way that few series managed at the time. The Kataang was now permanently docked and secured at the canon docks, every new comic seeming only to reinforce its status. Some other ships came and went; the Maiko in particular, I think, did so some few times.

Time passed. Avatar: The Legend of Korra came on the air. I was a little older, a little wiser, and so was the Avatar, the titular Korra. Her show dealt with more mature themes in a more advanced world, and I liked that. Republic City’s steampunk aesthetic scratched an itch of mine, and I enjoyed that Korra was a very different sort of Avatar from what Aang had been like.

I liked the show, so of course I helped out. The seasons passed, and it was actually pretty quiet compared to the Avatar Aang days. There was still beef - a fandom without drama is just one person and their rare pair, all alone - but as episodes turned into seasons, we never had a repeat of the Zutara incident. Some ships were on fire, of course, but that’s just the nature of shipping. Ship to ship combat was still a thing, but nobody drove their ship screaming into the canon dock while on fire, so we considered ourselves lucky.

Mind, it wasn’t all sunshine, roses, and squee-worthy FFN updates. Fandoms tend to grow darker as they grow larger - this is expected, statistics is really working against you here - and the cultural zeitgeist was moving on. There were more people working the docks who were using canon as a weapon to try to bring down ships, pointing out how, technically, -nobody- was engaging in anything more than a chaste kiss. You know. Because it’s a YA television show. Or there was cross talk between fandoms on the docks, as entire groups decided that watching stuff ‘for kids’ was beneath them, and anyway, your canon is weak, your bloodline is weak, and your server will not survive the next billing cycle.

I managed to stay blissfully clear of much of that, however. For even as I looked after the canon, I still remembered the wise words from BlindStar_25 forever ago. She may have turned, but she was still wise, in her way, and tending the canon was my way of making sure a thousand thousand ships remained always able to be launched.

Always looking out to the beauty of the fandom seas.

It was season four. I was on Vent - that’s short for Ventrilo - talking to another operator. We were talking about the latest episodes, our favorite characters, what the technology in the world meant, how cool the new bending styles were, and so on.

And then I said it.

“You know,” I said, casually, clicking on a cookie in a game on my browser, “I think that Korra and Asami would make a cute couple.”

There was silence on the line. I didn’t notice it, though. That wasn’t unusual, and I was just about to unlock grandmas in cookie clicker.

You know.

The important stuff.

I heard a beep from Ventrilo, and frowned, and looked over to see that my fellow canon keeper had pulled me into a private person to person voice channel and set it to moderated, invite only.

“…bwuh?” I said, exercising my usual eloquence.

“What did you say,” she said back, the words snapped off at me, practically burning with venom.

“What did I say when?” I said, bewildered. I clicked a cookie upgrade.

“Just now. About Korra. And Asami.”

“I… think they’d make a cute couple?” Now I really was confused. We had just been talking about everything else going on in the show, why did this in particular tweak a nerve?

“Do you not remember the Zutara incident?” She hissed at me over the mic.

Memories flooded back. I swallowed nervously. I wondered if cookie clicker had a pause button, or if I would be caught here, in an avalanche of unoptimized cookie gameplay while I struggled through memories of yesteryear.

“I remember,” I said. “I was there.”

“Then you should know better,” she said, angry. “Do not invite that curse upon us here. We. Don’t. Talk. About. Ships. On. The. Officially. Unofficial. Official. Vent. Server.”

I felt my mouth go dry, and I swallowed nervously. “Right. Of course,” I said.

“You go to FFN, like -everyone else-, if you wanna read about that,” she said. “And if you wanna -talk- about it, find a different Vent. Got it?”

I never had the chance to respond, as I was dumped unceremoniously out of the private channel, and found myself all alone in the lobby.

Cookies flowed by on my screen, but I found I was no longer interested.

Months later, when the Korrasami came gently to find itself moored in the canon docks, confirmed by the comics and by the creators, in a very officially no-we-are-not-just-teasing-it-this-time manner (Nickelodeon you COWARDS), I was there to greet it as it came in. It was to be a cheerful day of celebration, as it always is when a particular ship makes canon status. Some people care a whole lot about that, even if the real magic is out in the shipping lanes, but I digress.

After the celebrations were over, my friend just sent me a short email.

“If you value anything, you did NOT call this ahead of time.” the email said.

I understood.

“Oh and also congratulations on your ship becoming canon. Got any fic recs for me?”

I did not. I was too busy manning the canon, you see.

The end was on the horizon for me, now. This was merely strike one.

But I nodded at my email, dumbly, because she was right. Better ops than me had led us into worse outcomes, and I would not go down that dark path.

***

I drifted from canon to canon for a while. Not always up to my usual tricks, as I seemed to be becoming less of a state-of-the-art bot and more of a relic. Fandom consolidated, and so did the tools available to them, and the need for bespoke one-off scripts that were absolutely guaranteed to probably work were no longer needed. Teamspeak and Ventrilo and IRC fell, Discord rising to take their place. BBS and other forum systems had slowly been replaced by Reddit. Livejournal effectively vanished off the face of the planet as it became a ghost of its former self, and FFN did… well, I’m not sure what to describe what happened there, and it’s not my place to do so. Now, it was increasingly common for new fandoms to find their home on Ao3. Tumblr rose to prominence, cost Yahoo several billion dollars, taking both of itself and Yahoo down, rose up again, banned porn, fell down, got bought by Verizon, and not necessarily in that order.

It was exciting on Tumblr, and a great time if you were the kind of person who likes watching yo-yos bob up and down and up and down and up and down. And up. And down.

I finally settled into orbit around Steven Universe and Gravity Falls, participating in their subreddits and loving their fandoms, though it was neither of them that led to my downfall. Not really. Not directly, you see.

While I was participating in discussion and analysis in those fandoms, you see, I was trying to find my way back to my roots. Someplace where someone who knew how to SELECT * FROM blank WHERE name EQUALS awesomeCharacter would be appreciated. Subreddits didn’t need me, Tumblrs didn’t need me, Discords tolerated me, but there was an older crowd that still appreciated the old magicks.

And so I had attempted to return to Star Trek, my old love, my first flame. Older and wiser, I hoped this time to be able to contribute. Maybe help maintain Memory Alpha, THE premier canon data repository, perhaps second only to Wookiepedia. Maybe help keep one of the old BBSs limping along. You know. Nerd shit.

It was here where I met the end of the beginning of my infamy.

Star Trek had changed while I was gone. It wasn’t as fun as it used to be. I didn’t know yet where to find my people, and I will admit, that part of this was my own fault. Starting with the subreddit and moving out from there, I found a fractured fandom. The JJ Abrams movies had done real damage to the fandom, and where once I had found infinite diversity being celebrated in infinite combinations, I now heard arguments over what was ‘real’ Star Trek, and how everything these days was too ‘politically correct’, and, well, you get the picture. But I was desperate to be useful, and in a bid to find good work on maintaining canon, I found my way to a voice server, where I could speak with my fellow trekkies. Or trekkers. I’m not picky.

I was talking excitedly with my roommate one day over the wireless. You see, it was wireless because we were in the same room. Steven Universe updated approximately once every presidential administration, and we had just gotten a new episode, and I was very excitedly talking with her about it.

“You left the mic on!” Came over the headset.

“Sorry, sorry,” I said, fumbling for the mute button. This was some new program I wasn’t familiar with yet.

That sort of thing seemed to be happening more and more often, and I wondered briefly when they’d be able to replace me altogether with a fancier, newer software type. I tried not to think about it.

I kept talking. And I said what was, at the time, an innocent phrase.

“You know,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be funny if Lapis and Peridot got into a relationship? Lapidot, if you will.”

“I will not!” said my roommate, laughing.

“YOUR MIC IS STILL ON!” said the headset, very much not laughing.

“Sorry!” I said, finally finding the mute button on my own.

The moment was forgotten by me quickly, but the moment happened.

It’s a moment that shall haunt me for the rest of my days.

For you see, friends, several presidential turnovers later, Steven Universe moved on, but I stayed with the Star Trek server. It wasn’t exactly my flavor, and I thought some of the other ops were blowhards, and there were too many people against shipping for my taste (‘launch a thousand thousand ships’ from our foundation), and, well, while new Trek wasn’t -quite- my cup of tea, it had its fun moments, and I was not okay with talking down to those for whom it -was- their Star Trek.

But they needed a bot, and, well, there I was.

It was three AM when it happened.

I was having a, shall we say, discussion with one of the seniors on the server. I was having a discussion in much the same way a hurricane has rain.

He was -grumpy-, and I was grumpy, because nothing good ever happens at three in the morning, but I couldn’t sleep, and I guess neither could he, and when that happens the smartest thing to do is to get online and try to establish what, exactly, is canon, anyway.

He was arguing that Captain Kirk was a hopeless womanizer, and that was one of the few things he liked about the new movies, was how they were really returning to the roots of the character, rather than whatever weak sauce they had going on with Picard in TNG.

I was arguing that was an unfair flanderization of the character, supported only very weakly by actual canon. That for a supposed galaxy wrecker, he somehow managed only one son, who he was very proud of. And that other than his one very established relationship, most other instances you see him flirting with a woman is when he’s doing so - to save the Enterprise! And if that counted as evidence of him womanizing, well, then, what does Amok Time tell us?

He snarled at me. “You must be one of those Spirks or McKirks or something. I bet you liked Star Trek V.”

A message came in for me from a friend on the server, urging me to leave off, reminding me that the guy - we’ll call him Dave, it’s always a Dave - had power here, power that I lacked.

I’m not very smart at three in the morning. I need a full rest cycle to fully reboot, and I had not had it, so I ignored the message and plowed on.

“One, I don’t ship!” I fired back. “Two, if you’re going to bring Star Trek V into it, maybe you don’t like it because the first fifteen minutes leading into the campfire scene - which, by the way, I happen to think is VERY GOOD Trek - happens to establish what an extremely deep relationship the big three had with one another!”

Another message came in, and I glanced at it. A friend was letting me know they had watched the latest Steven Universe episode on the pirate channel, and wanted to talk about it. I wouldn’t see it until the next day, as I was not part of the pirate crew and would have to wait, but I quickly gave them an invite. I could take them to a private channel, and talking about a children’s cartoon would, I hoped, be more entertaining than talking to a man child.

I could feel Dave’s eyes narrow over the mic as a new voice joined the server.

“Hey, congratulations Biot! You called it,” said the new voice. It was my friend.

“Called what?” Asked an annoyed Dave.

“Lapidot! It’s canon now!”

“Lapidot?” Asked Dave.

“Yeah, from Steven Universe. Hey, what kind of server is this, Biot?”

“Star Trek,” I answered lazily. “Hang on, let me finish up with Dave here, I’ll be right with you.”

“Steven Universe?” snorted Dave. “You watch children’s cartoons?”

“Yes,” I said. “Anyway, Dave, this has been a -scintillating- conversation, but -“

“And you shipped characters in a children’s cartoon?” asked Dave, his voice suddenly all smooth silk and utter calm.

Oh.

Oh, hell.

Oh, no, oh, hell. My friend had overheard my utterance from decades ago, and now it had come back to haunt me.

“Um… yes?” I said, meekly.

***

The next day, I was unceremoniously escorted to a dinghy to call all my own. The official reason given was that perhaps, I could take a short trip to the crack ship fleet, and invite the Lapidot to join canon on the Steven Universe docks.

We all knew, however, the real reason was that I had irritated Dave beyond his extremely tiny limits, and my time with this particular small slice of Star Trek fandom was coming to a close. A few friends wished me well. Some tried to be helpful, pointing out ships that would be willing to accept an aging bot, maybe could take me on. I was polite, of course. No need to show your ass even as you try to avoid letting the door hit it on your way out.

Dave was there, of course, gloating.

“Glad to be rid of you, you Star Trek V-loving fucker,” he said with a grin.

“Eat a bag of dicks, Dave,” I said, as I climbed into the little boat.

I took hold of the oars, and headed out for the waters of the shipping lanes.

Canon slipped quietly away behind me.

Launch a thousand thousand ships from a firm foundation.

And one dinghy.

***

Time passed. My code grew older, and so did I. I did what I could, and even frequently returned to the docks of canon, to recenter myself from time to time. An almost religious observance, really.

But it wasn’t the same.

I floated with the World of Warcraft fleet for a while, still avoiding ships, but admiring the rich seas on which they floated. I thought I would re-establish myself there, especially as Metzen wrote his books consolidating all of Warcraft lore. Excited, I learned new tools. It is a bad bot that cannot learn new tricks. Ao3 eluded me yet, but Tumblr’s star was rising (again?), and I learned to work it, slowly, carefully. I would find my way back to community. I would write funny posts about how Forsaken used to speak Common, and the hijinks that would ensue from that. I would write about how the Draenei were sort of a retcon of Eredar, and what that might mean for roleplayers. I would document, document, document, and here my powers could be used for good, as Warcraft was notorious for shedding old lore away, never to be seen again.

Well, I could show it once more. I could present old information to new players, and help be part of something great, the piecing together of history into a coherent lore, a foundation from which could launch as many ships as one might like!

And then Blizzard practically burned to the ground. Battle for Azeroth happened, and then Shadowlands came in, and the contradictions were too great. And then the real life troubles of the company reared their ugly head. By the time I left, the canon docks of Warcraft were a shambles, and while there may have been good work in being part of the repairs, such work was beyond me.

Demon Hunters were pretty awesome though, and that kept me around for far longer than I really should have stuck with it, but I digress. But look, you would’ve stayed too, gliding was -awesome-.

Anyway, I retired my OCs from those lands, with no small amount of sadness, and set out once more into fandom waters, adrift, and after so many years, I had to admit, kind of lost.

I tried the golden seas of Alternate Universes, and found some peace there. I investigated the paths of the rare pairs, and their intersection with crack ships, and documented what I found. I still docked at the canon regularly, but which canon I chose to visit changed from day to day.

I was a fan without a fandom, and so I did what any self-respecting fan would do.

I watched the hell out of the MCU.

But I got bored of that as well, eventually.

I was adrift in the dinghy one day. I was floating, a bot on one last mission. For while I was not part of any active fandoms, I was part of an inactive fandom. It was trying, but not very hard, to come back to life. Really, it was an excuse for old friends to talk to one another once more, all of us older, all of us wiser.

We had no canon, but they were willing to have me, and I appreciated that. In return, I volunteered to be one of their scouts, to search out members who may yet be found, and see if they were willing to visit our Discord. To remember, alongside us.

Even without a canon, this old bot still keeps some habits. The call to remember, well, that was too great to ignore.

And it was on this search that I found an old friend. They had ships of their own that they tended to, now, a change from when last I knew them, but they were willing to float out and meet me for a short bit. We reminisced. I invited them to the Discord, and shared with them some of what I had been up to. I skipped the tale of my fall from grace, of course, as it couldn’t possibly be less relevant, but I shared other matters with them. I recounted my tales in the waters of Warcraft, and bemoaned the state of the canon docks there. They agreed with me, and in fact, in a moment of shared camaraderie, they told me that they, too, had grown weary of attempting repairs at that dock, and had set sail for new waters.

Where were they now, I asked, politely.

Final Fantasy XIV, they said.

“You might like it there,” they offered. “They have sad robots. I know you like sad robots.” I said, “I arguably am a sad robot these days.”

“Then you’ll love it,” they said, and well, they would probably be right.

We exchanged contact information, they gave me an invite to one of their own communities, and they moved off, to return to their own waters.

***

I stayed where I was, for a while, and pondered.

I wondered if this new fandom would have any use for an old bot in their spaces.

I did know that I appreciated the company of being with old friends, even absent a canon. Maybe I couldn’t be useful, but I could be present, and really, wasn’t that a kind of usefulness of its own? My cat certainly seems to think so, as she always stares at me while I do things around the house, and I love her for it.

Maybe I didn’t need to be useful.

Maybe I could just be, and let my runtime run its clock for a while.

Not so bad.

I fixed myself up. I ran a trans program, which, let’s be honest, was probably two decades overdue. I rebooted, ran diagnostics, and took a deep breath.

And then I set my course, and set sail to where I am today. The deep waters of Final Fantasy XIV.

And what waters they are! What ships they represent! Tall ships, and small ships. Ships of different sizes. Rare pairs and crack ships. I found in their wakes a long and deep history, practically unbroken from their launch. I made my way to their canon docks, and what I found just about brought me to tears. I was used to fractured docks in poor repair, but here I found a clean canon. Not perfect, of course; never perfect. A perfect canon allows no fandom, really, for we need places to fill the cracks. But the cracks in this canon were almost artistic in their sublime beauty, and could be filled with wonderful gold, making for the prettiest sculptures, and I think this analogy got away from me at some point, but the -real point is-, the canon was beautiful.

I fell in love with their waters, and decided to stay.

And so here I am.

***

Nobody needs a bot anymore. Discord logs everything, and Reddit’s moderator tools have been refined to near perfection. Ao3 thrives, alive and vibrant. Tumblr’s star is once more ascendant. But it is in that last that I have something to do, despite myself. I stay close to the canon docks, of course, for I am an old bot, and old habits are hard to break. But I have equipped my dinghy with the latest and greatest in Tumblr tools. I have tuned my scripts to its frequency, and have mastered its use. I spend my days, now, searching the fandom seas. From the glittering golden waves of alternate universes to the wakes of ships both mighty and small, I sail. I dive under the waves frequently and diligently, in search of precious subs, and I bring what I find back, and reblog to the world. I connect fandom, and fandom has connected back to me. I brave the tangles of Twitter, the trolls of Reddit, and the unknown areas of the world - remember when the internet was not so centralized? I do. I do, and I search the outer wilds, and I bring back art and stories and memes and analysis and share them with all who wish to see them.

I may not wrangle databases or maintain meticulous logs anymore, but in these activities, I have found purpose. It may not serve canon directly, but these days, there are others who carry that charge far better than I do.

I see my friends far more often these days, of course. They often wave at me from the mizzenmasts and fantails of their ships, calling out to me.

“You should find a ship!” they say. “You can aspire to more than that dinghy!” they say.

I close my eyes, and I think of the chaos of the Zutara. I think of my own missteps, with the Korrasami and the Lapidot - 

Wait.

Korrasami and Lapidot.

Do I have a thing for emotionally complicated lesbians finding character growth through providing comfort to each other?

Maybe I’d better not read into that too far.

I shake my head clear. Once is an event, twice is a coincidence, and I would do well to not make it a pattern.

“I will stick to my dinghy, I think,” I let them know.

Can’t establish that pattern. Won’t take the risk. For what would that mean for me if I did? What is a bot that doesn’t obey a code?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

Anyway, dear reader, that is the tale. The sordid tale of my downfall.

And perhaps, also, the story of my redemption. I think that’s for others to judge.

But for now, I must turn to my instruments, and tune my machinery, to turn to the whirring dynamo of the greater fandom community, both smaller than it has ever been, consolidated to only a handful of sites - but also larger than I ever imagined possible, comprised of so many people who I never would have had the privilege of knowing otherwise.

For I have seen things you people would never believe. Zutara on fire off the docks of the canon. I have watched ships constructed in blink tags glittering in the dark near the Geocities neighborhoods. Without bots and keepers, all these moments would be lost in time, Like tears in the rain.