#is this a ship manifesto [butterfly meme] | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

t-eyla · 2 years

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Sometimes I wonder if I’m too exclusionary about my ship preferences in DMBJ: whenever I’m reading something that’s not Iron Triangle OT3, I’d rather it were, and I don’t ever write anything else (or, well, the polycule can get bigger, and the members of the polycule can have outside relationships, but the OT3 is always there in the background).

The fandom’s quite small, and exclusionary focus on Iron Triangle OT3 limits my choices in stuff to read/ to enjoy. Writing it means there’s a number of people who won’t read my fic. And I don’t dislike the other ships. They’re good, I’m happy when people enjoy them. They’re just not for me.

Anyway, I just rewatched Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Star Trek: TOS was my first fandom, but I never managed to really pin down a ship for myself. K/S was fine, I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t quite it. I always ended up missing Bones. The other ships that existed were also all fine, but none of them quite hit the spot. Now, you gotta realize, this was over 20 years ago, and I was in my teens. “Polyamory” was not really a thing I’d heard of outside of awful men marrying 50 women under religious pretenses and exploiting them. And while there were a handful of people writing Kirk/Spock/Bones, the AO3 didn’t exist and I was using Yahoo search to find things. Figuring out that Kirk/Spock/Bones was the thing I wanted didn’t just happen.

Time passed, I moved on to other fandoms, I found other ships, I figured out my own sexuality and preferences, the AO3 came to be. And now I’m here in DMBJ fandom shipping the Iron Triangle--and, you know, that ship is not so different from the TOS OT3. Xiaoge and Spock have some character archetype overlap, so do Pangzi and Bones, and Kirk and Wu Xie are both heavily plot armored protagonists driven by curiosity and solving problems with unlikely maneuvers that would never work in a story that cares about realism, never mind reality. It’s the first ship dynamic I fell for, even though I didn’t realize it at the time, just because I didn’t even have a name for it.

So, you know, thinking about it like that, maybe I get to just soak in the pleasure of having discovered a ship that does what I want at a point in my life when I can finally put a name to what it is that I want. Maybe I don’t need to give Pingxie a chance, or keep an open mind for leaving Xiaoge or Wu Xie out of the mix. I’m never going to have as much content to enjoy as someone who ships the main ship, but that’s okay, as long as I can go on the AO3 and read the handful of fics for my ship and post my little poly stories for other people looking for poly content to enjoy.

(... and this is why we don’t want censorship on the AO3, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.)

#dmbj #pingpangxie #kirk x spock x bones #star trek: tos #poly feels #is this a ship manifesto [butterfly meme]#kinda tripped and fell into ao3 discourse there #oops #can't be said enough though #anyway POLY SHIPS FTW

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