For those who may or may not know, other than doing illustration as a hobby and playing the odd video game, I'm also interested in all things related to the maritime industry such as ocean liners and cruise ships, etc. (kind of an amateur enthusiast and cruiser when it's affordable and I'm pretty dedicated to it)
Believe me, I have mostly stayed silent about what I'm going to say in this post for a very long time mainly because I've never been a confrontational person, and it seems that most people nowadays act too sensitive and see it as a personal attack on them when they see opinions/rants about certain topics expressed by others, but the thing that I would like to address is that I have known for the past decade or so that there are people out in the World Wide Web (specifically a group of people, most likely a minority group, but who knows) that take certain vessels and envision them as humans/create gijinkas of them.
While I don't have a problem with that part personally (there are some designs that I like and that I think are pretty creative), it's the fact that there are some people that blatantly and rather shamelessly sexualize them and/or pair them together like they are actual human couples... I've even seen recently that people actually make up offspring for them too??
I can't even search up pictures of the Titanic or some of my other favorite vessels without running into such images like this, and some of it isβ¦wrong to say the least.
Let's be very real for a minute, this is not fictional characters from games and movies or whatever, these are very much real ocean liners and cruise ships that are man-made moving objects/machines; often referred to as floating hotels/palaces (or, rather laughably, floating apartment blocks, amusement parks or 'monsters' - but yeah, no argument there, some of them are as such - I'm looking right at you Royal Caribbean and Carnival), that are built by man to carry people like you and me around from point A to B or wherever they sail to in the world and that they also have a significant impact on the worlds' history in some way ... like hello??? They aren't/weren't alive to begin with; they don't have consciousnesses or are by any means sentient.
Answer this truthfully to yourselves; you wouldn't go up to a ship, say hello to it and expect a response from it. No?
No, I didn't think so..
So, I guess everything is Gucci until someone takes things too far, ... right? Like the mental gymnastics that I've gone through so far to try and understand it all. lmao
And no, don't read this and then spin the "just keep scrolling" or "click the back button" rhetoric, that's pretty hard to do when this stuff is literally everywhere when all I'm trying to do is look at pictures of these vessels as they actually are/used to be and not as something they're clearly not.
So, in conclusion, if you sexualize them, pair them like they're couples or whatever, you may want to seek help, there is plenty of it out there.
Welp, if you've read all that I have to sayβ¦congrats I guess, I unfortunately don't have anything to give to you as compensation for reading thoughts that have come from the deepest pits of my brain howeverβ¦lmao.
*Poofs*