A post about ship gatekeeping and a very, VERY personal rant about why I left the TSAMS fandom and will not be returning aside, maybe posting on A03 (a platform basically created for unrestricted ship content, heck yeah)
I see a lot of gatekeeping with, like, ships and specific characters in fandoms. In this case, I'm obviously referring to the TSAMS fandom since it is part of the reason why I left the fandom, but it happens in other fandoms as well.
News flash: Fandoms are allowed to have ships, and fanon is not canon. It's not like people are rewriting canon by making their own ships. Only the creators can do that. You can give the characters headcanons and disregard canon. You are allowed to make your own fan headcanons and headcanon a character as bi, pan, etc. You can ship Sun with Eclipse. I can ship Ruin with Ballora.
You can do what you want. I can understand not liking a ship. I hate some canon and fanon ships. But people have been rewriting aspects of characters in fan works since the beginning of fandoms. If someone has a preference for ships, there's no reason not to let them just ship what they want. They're doing their own thing and engaging in the fandom in the way that makes them comfortable/brings them joy.
Once a fandom starts gatekeeping what people are allowed/not allowed to do in their fan works, it dies. People leave. I left. Nobody wants to be in a fandom like that. I didn't want to be in a fandom like that.
Funny story: One reason I left the fandom was that I shipped Ruin with Ballora, STARTING BEFORE Ruin was supposedly confirmed to be gay, right? And then immediately, when it was confirmed, I got bombarded by people being like "erm, actually he's gay and you're (insert some bogus claim about me being a bad person here) if you ship it" and then I got slandered. Then I was told to stop shipping them. Y'know, a ship I'd been shipping for months before that. Which I had genuine reasons for shipping, and points as to why I shipped them. (I could have mentioned people do this with Sun and Eclipse, Moon and anyone he's shipped with, etc, but I don't gatekeep.) (Also, the TheatreGolf shippers who came out of nowhere the moment the ship was mentioned canonically were funny because he could still have dated Monty in the past AND her in that AU?? Which is something I keep canon in it.)
It made me want to stay away from any fandom like this. It seriously affected my mental health. I left quietly. Somewhat. I mean, I left in a huff, and people wondered why, but I didn't want to cause drama since I felt like an outlier and didn't want to be dogpiled on. I made my own DCA OC.
But yeah. No. I felt like people needed to touch grass. Genuinely. It felt like a cult when I was getting dogpiled on for doing something that comforted me (newsflash, I lost my irl bf to cancer, and I was coping, but people cared more about "preserving the identity" of a fictional character IN FAN CONTENT, and policing it, than me taking comfort in my own fan content). It was literally just a comfort ship. I was using it as a healthy coping mechanism, and it was quite literally working. Nobody was doing anything productive there. That accomplished nothing good. It didn't help anyone. All it did was make a grieving woman leave a fandom and feel like shit, which is NOT the inclusive OR diverse win people thought it was, btw.
SO NO. I AM NOT MAKING A COMEBACK TO THE OVERALL TSAMS FANDOM. EVER. I may write those stories on A03. But the Tumblr and Discord and whatever the other popular places for TSAMS is, and actually interacting elsewhere? No.
It's genuinely why my mental health goes to shit whenever I interact with the TSAMS fandom. Or any fandom that acts like this with ships, really.
It's funny. You can disregard canon in designs. In other things. But when it comes to that, people get so damn defensive in these types of fandoms. And not in EVERY fandom either. Just some. And those are the ones where only those people can be in, 'cause everyone else will just leave.
And that's just the thing: These fandoms will die out. Because, at the end of the day, they don't let people do what they want creatively. "You can disregard canon in some cases, but not in others" is absolutely bonkers and is policing at its finest. A fandom that does that will dwindle. It will push innocent people away, but it also fails to understand that diverse fan interpretations are what carry the fan part of fandoms. I feel like if you're that insecure that you see some stranger having a (very non-problematic as well btw) comfort ship as a threat to your identity, and you'd be really mean over them to it, maybe you need to reflect on yourself.
Anyway, someone wanted to know why I left the fandom, but I didn't feel comfortable telling them all this yet. Thinking about what happened puts me in a bad place mentally, so having to write this was hard. It made me despise fandoms like this. And all for what, truly? A sense of moral superiority that, at the end of the day, was for literally nothing?
Sorry for such a personal, dark rant. Some people knew of that at the time, and they were still being pretty mean to me, though. At this point, fandoms are cooked.
