#this isn't aimed at a specific group of fans or even a specific fandom in general

[thesherrinfordfacility]

I'm going to preface this by saying this is not meant entirely an admonishment but more a reminder. It's also not aimed entirely at you specifically but rather people I've seen in notes on your posts, as well as Neil's. Neil is not lying about Crowley not being Lucifer and isn't going to surprise us with that suddenly being canon in the series. He quite literally can't do that now. He knows people are or will be making fanfic of it now. He now cannot ever use it. Same with the Raphael theory. Same with any other popular fan theory someone has taken to his inbox for confirmation, only to be denied. All that accomplishes is confirming he in no way will ever use any element of it in any of his writing going forward. So keep speculating! Keep having fun making theories! But stop taking them to Neil. All you do is ensure they will never be canon. As Neil always says, just wait and see.

hi anon✨

im going to take you at your word re: it not being entirely an admonishment or aimed at me. and choose to simply see this ask as a way of getting a general PSA out into the tumblr ether. that, i will gladly help with.

i respect your view and agree with it... i would however argue that personally i think the people that have been in my post notes in particular have been pretty respectful from what i recall, or at least have been very clearly joking.

there is, as far as im aware, a relatively small group of blogs that went generally full-ham on the theory (and perhaps im in that number, idk) but from what ive seen, following neil's ask, the majority have actually found the whole situation very funny...

maybe gone a bit ironic/sarcastic with "lmao imagine if he's lying" out of disappointment (me too!), but obviously joking and otherwise pretty respectful. honestly, i found the whole thing hysterical, i hammed up the Lucifer Theory Grief for an evening, and have since largely gotten over it. i think a lot of others have been the same.

however. i managed to read about 20 replies through That Neil Ask before i was starting to get pretty pissed off, by people on both sides of the lucifer argument:

i get why people were getting irritated by the pro-theoriers; the theory was debunked - move on, or take it off of the ask. i agree with that sentiment - other than rb'ing the ask twice and adding my tags, i left it alone and kept the dialogue on my own blog, and imo others should have done the same - just simply left the neil ask, and taken the discourse to their own blogs.

that being said, some of the anti-theoriers were coming across as outright rude, to the point for me of even being quite upsetting (and it wasn't even directed at me lmao). i get they were probably getting annoyed on behalf of neil, and that's admirable - but neil is a whole ass grown man. if he wanted people to stop commenting on his ask, i imagine he would have locked the post, posted a PSA, or just simply turned off his askbox. people do not need to police for him.

one thing i will point out, however, is that the lucifer theory came up on an rb, not directly in his inbox.

neil chose to respond to that rb (and the one after) entirely by his choice; it wasn't sprung on him in his inbox. noone should have to police their rbs or rb tags just in case he sees? direct inbox submission is a huge no-no (i agree with you, especially as he has actually asked for people to not do that), but this particular situation, ill be honest, does not fit that.

i also think the way both sides have reacted over the lucifer debunk has now unfortunately set a rather unsettling precedent for any other theory that might come out and people disagree with; ive been bracing myself for a potential shitstorm all day about my theory on the second coming for this very reason... and tbh i shouldn't have to feel like that.

everyone deserves to have fun in fandom-space, that's what makes it enjoyable and collaborative. if you (royal 'you') do not like a theory, or think it's a load of rubbish, either argue it back eloquently and with an open mind, instead of just being outright dismissive and making people feel stupid (as i felt after reading those replies, tbh), or leave that person/collective alone. it doesn't hurt you, it doesn't hurt anyone, and it's just people speculating and having fun with it.

now about the actual debunk of the theory itself - yes, i agree, it could be an IP nightmare potentially. i have further thoughts on this but i think im going to leave it there for now, my reply is already long enough✨

#good omens #not a shitpost but its good omens babyyyy #ask #if i start getting any hate on this #anon function will simply be switched off #i am not in the mood

[olderthannetfic]

Thank you for your explanation for the skin-color-as-food-description thing! (also I apologize to all olives for assuming them mostly green ;) ) Are there any good resources/tips on writing a diverse cast without falling into the old stereotypes/food-descriptors/more-yikes-words-that-are-yikes? I guess there are probably a lot more pitfalls to this I really want to avoid in the future.

--

I accept your groveling, olive besmircher! ;P

There are guides...

As a white American, I have found it useful to at least peruse them to familiarize myself with things I might not have realized are cliches and red flags. And the reason I have found them useful is that I am a white American, the typical target audience of such guides.

Writingwithcolor, on tumblr, is a classic example of guides produced by fandom.

The thing is, a lot of fans who are from outside of a US context find these guides really... err... misguided. They feel they center the experiences of diaspora in a few countries (like the US, UK, and Canada) over the experiences of people in the home country. They feel they're too One Right Way or too obviously aimed at white people. Many people find them too enmeshed in a US-centric POC framework for dividing identities into categories as opposed to how identity would be seen in even Europe or Australia or New Zealand, never mind various parts of Asia or Africa.

So I'm not saying don't read them. Absolutely. If you want a guide, go read all of the many posts on writingwithcolor. Go find other guides.

But you're not going to find a magic bullet that fixes this.

I would personally focus more on not being an asshat in your own context than on pleasing the nitpicking Americans who might find your fanfic and find it problematique for stupid reasons. What ethnic minorities exist where you are? What do they think about writing cliches? And not just the loudest bloggers: what do people you run into in your actual life think? What do writers from your location think?

There's really no substitute for having a varied friend group and talking to them, but life experience and reading widely are helpful too.

There's no substitute for specificity either. Are you writing Sam Wilson or are you writing BTS? Are you writing something completely original? Is it set in the real world or is it fantasy?

If you want to write African Americans or some specific group not near you, go explore the rich history of literature from this group. Maybe for some groups, there isn't much to find, but black people in the US have produced a fuckton of art about their own experiences, and so have many other groups. Go consume it if you're interested.

Recognize that a very specific niche of highly online people who share the same politics isn't going to give you a robust view of an entire group. Sam Wilson is probably considerably more conservative and traditional than a lot of black bloggers in fandom and considerably less concerned with minutia of word choice given that he's a military guy who has made it through a whole career of other military guys. That doesn't mean he agrees with white US conservatives though or even that he's what we might call conservative overall. Ditto Nile Freeman from The Old Guard. Meanwhile, Peter Grant from Rivers of London is likely going to have far more leftist economic views, less of a connection to Christianity, and certainly a far stronger connection to an immigrant experience.

It's more important to learn enough to write something you know isn't offensive drivel than it is to listen to each and every hater you encounter. Those queer teenagers wailing about "the q slur" have equivalents in any demographic. Beware giving too much weight to this sort of person's views.

But that said, I don't think you need to wallow in research until the end of time. It is far more important to try in good faith than to fear getting something wrong.

Someone might yell at you, and that sucks, but if you're more afraid of that than of making boring art about only one kind of character, you're focused on the wrong thing. If you have basic confidence in your own intentions and general knowledge, you can shrug off the most mean-spirited or petty critiques and are better able to listen to the more relevant ones.

If you just want a list of words that are slurs, that's relatively easy. Writing something that sensitively and properly represents any group is harder, even if you're a group member yourself, and a lot of it comes down to writing skill.

There is no magic bullet.

[freedom-of-fanfic]

hey um just a request, but you seem to use dfab and dmab often in weird contexts when you could just say women and men. e.g.: "any mlm that is shipped by more dfab people than dmab people." as a nonbinary trans person, a sex assigned at birth is not relevant most of the time, so could you maybe use it less when it isn't necessary?

thanks for letting me know your thoughts, anon. I’m pretty sure that particular example comes from the ‘my objections to anti-shipping’ post, which is pretty old now (though I reblogged it from myself today). I remember re-reading that recently and thinking ‘ah, I don’t think this is the best use of these phrases’ but I forgot to edit the original post anyway (classic adhd move, tbh). But still, it’s not the only example of me using descriptors that are kinda ‘eh’. 

I’m sorry that my word choice here was inappropriate and may have made you feel uncomfortable.

my use of descriptors like afab, amab, intersex*, genderqueer, cis, nb, trans, male, female, woman, man, etc is constantly evolving as I try to be precise but also inclusive when I talk about experiences that are affected by gender (which, let’s be real, is a huge number of experiences).

under the cut I’ll go into more detail about why I think picking the right combination of gender descriptors is both really important to me and also difficult to get right without causing anyone harm.

(built in tw: descriptions of transphobia/transmisogyny and mentions of the harm it causes.)

because my blog deals almost entirely in fandom experiences and how they are influenced by negative outside factors, I believe it’s very important to address both personal gender identity and how gender identity is perceived/treated by others (especially bigots/ignorant people) both currently and over the course of their lives. but that gets very complicated, very fast.

For example, every gender experience will be different from one another even if they share aspects of their gender identity:

- even though all cis and trans women are women, cis women and trans women will have very different experiences of womanhood. 

- to dissect this down even further, a trans person who realizes they are trans very early in life and is able to live as their true gender will have a different gender experience from a trans person who doesn’t realize they are trans until later in life, or who realizes they are trans early in life but is forcibly misgendered by people around them, or a person who changes from a non-transgender identity to a transgender identity as an adult, etc etc.

Relatedly, a person’s life experiences are also deeply affected by what gender other people assign them regardless of their consent:

 - If someone of any gender is raised under the assumption they are a particular gender because of their agab, they will share certain experiences with other people who are assigned the same gender at birth. otoh, how it affects them will depend in part on what their actual gender is, or if their gender identity changes down the line.

- obviously, non-cis people have to contend with a variety of nastiness that cis people don’t have to deal with. I won’t go into detail b/c nobody needs that grossness, but suffice to say: TERFs, right-wing activist groups like FRC, and transphobes in general make non-cis lives particularly difficult, up to and including getting non-cis people killed. in particular transgender people (but this also affects other non-cis identities).

- other forms of misgendering also cause harm, whether deliberate or not. from outright bigotry to people who think there are only two genders out of ignorance to people who use misgendering as a weapon to accidental assumptions of the wrong gender, it’s shit, and everyone will have a different experience with these issues based on a shitton of variables.

- and if all of the above wasn’t enough, gender experiences are heavily influenced by cultural background, the political climate, racism, sexual orientation, and on and on and on.

(and regarding my * on intersex above the cut: i am not intersex, and while I have read/heard a variety of experiences from personal anecdotal accounts by intersex people I generally try to avoid commenting on it from lack of knowledge (particularly because some intersex people have expressed they do not view ‘intersex’ as a gender descriptor but rather as a medical state.))

These are all things I try to bear in mind when making a post on tumblr that references gender. here’s an example of the kind of internal debates that come up:

the Japanese word ‘fujoshi’ is gendered, referring specifically to women who enjoy/create BL & queer-eye fictional m/m relationships. It carries this gendered connotation both when referring to a particular fan experience* and when it’s used as an insult in English-speaking fandom. What gender descriptors do I use to refer to people who are affected by this?

(*in this case I’m referring to using ‘fujoshi’ to describe a specific fan experience in English-speaking fandom/primarily US experience. By virtue of being a different culture than Japan, the experience described by ‘fujoshi’ will necessarily be different.)

as a fan experience, I’d say ‘fujoshi’ can encompass the experiences of women and/or afab people (particularly afab people who were raised under the assumption they were a woman whether or not this was true) who choose to describe themselves as fujoshi.

women: encompassing trans and cis women. (trans women may or may not share the experience of being recognized as a woman/identifying as a woman while being raised, but they are still just as affected all their lives by messages aimed at women.)

and/or afab people, particularly if they were raised under the assumption of being a female whether they were or not: afab people who are raised as women are also affected all their lives by messages aimed at women, though that experience is likely quite different from gender identity to gender identity.

who choose to describe themselves as fujoshi: a person who was raised under the assumption they are a woman may share certain experiences with other afab people, but even if they experienced the same messages/similar experiences as other afab people who chose to identify as ‘fujoshi’, that doesn’t mean they fall under the descriptor of ‘fujoshi’. I’m particularly thinking of trans men and nb people here - unless any one individual says differently about themselves, I think calling a trans man or person off the gender binary a ‘fujoshi’ would be misgendering them - but there may be many examples of people who don’t relate to the gendered aspect of ‘fujoshi’ for many reasons.

as an insult, I’d say ‘fujoshi’ is almost always a mess of gender essentialism and misgendering. It refers to those that are perceived as women by the person slinging the insult. ‘Perceived women’ often include cis women and/or afab people of any gender, frequently including trans men, and occasionally encompasses trans women who the insulter sees as ‘passing’ as a cis woman.

perceived women: people that the insulter and/or ignorant portions of society would categorize as a woman without the person’s consent and regardless of accuracy.

cis women and/or afab people of any gender: a gender essentialist views gender as being synonymous with genitals (intersex people frequently either being categorized by the insulter separately or by whatever HRT/surgery was chosen for them). (in practice radfem ideology has the same effect, but they argue that gender doesn’t exist at all (only biological sex does).)

frequently including trans men: depending on how far the insulter is willing to go with their misgendering & often influenced by whether or not the insulter perceives a trans man as ‘passing’ as a cis man. (this may be affected by whether or not a trans man has undergone HRT/surgery depending on the opinion of the insulter.)

occasionally encompasses trans women who the insulter sees as ‘passing’ as a cis woman: because if they ‘pass’ they may be perceived as a ‘real woman’ (ugh ugh ugh). (this may also be affected by HRT/surgery depending on the opinion of the insulter.)

and now that I’ve settled on these descriptions, how do I condense them to something easy to read without distracting from the points I’m trying to make?

as an experience: “women and/or afab people”, maybe? perhaps “women and/or some afab people”?as an insult: “perceived women”, maybe?

(and I’m happy to take constructive criticism on this. I’d prefer it be sent not on anon so we can privately discuss it rather than doing it in posts on this blog (and if you don’t want to discuss your thoughts, just want to share and go, feel free to let me know - I won’t demand your time.))

in short: I think about a lot of stuff every time I pick gender descriptors on this blog. This doesn’t mean I always make the right choices - far from it - and there may not even be a truly ‘right’ choice. But I’m always seeking to be as inclusive and honest as I can be.

(PS: I don’t talk about my gender status here much other than to say ‘i’m afab’ because while I don’t presently identify as cis, I’m murky on it myself still & I don’t want my gender identity to affect whether or not ppl speak up about their opinions about my use of gender descriptors.)

#gender stuff #long post #gender descriptors #transphobia mention #transmisogyny mention #misgendering is a big problem #i really need a faq #Anonymous

[olderthannetfic]

Sorry (and feel free to ignore) if this isn't your purview, but do you have any thoughts on the racism angle of the Anti debate? Not gonna lie, the most convincing (*and* the angriest) anti-AO3 arguments I've seen on this site were from PoC disgusted with how it wouldn't take down stories fictionalizing and sensationalizing stuff like George Floyd's murder, or Atlantic Slave Trade/Holocaust AUs. I haven't yet seen anyone muster a decent counterargument to that.

--

Beware of censorship because you may not be the one deciding what the bad content is.

That is the argument. People just don't understand it or don't agree with it.

Here's the thing: AO3 was explicitly set up to protect art, regardless of horrificness. That is the point. There is no such thing as beyond the pale for AO3, just legal or illegal. This is right there in the ToS. There are specific historical reasons why this is AO3's stance and mission.

It's not a stance and mission everyone is down with, and I can respect that... but if they want a different kind of archive, they need to make or move to a different archive.

Most fic archives have some level of taste or morality-based content rules. FFN does. Wattpad does. Skyehawke did. All the single-fandom or single-topic ones do, if only in the sense that they ban off-topic fic. The big non-English archives like Ficbook and EFP do. Dear god, especially, EFP where you can't write derogatory things about religious figures, among many other rules. Archives that ban tons of shit have always been the norm. Having multiple archives has also always been the norm and continues to be.

If people see AO3 as all of fandom, that's on them.

What AO3 is is one of the few archives that won't delete m/m or f/f dark fic and kink. This fact is directly tied to its extremely hardline anti-censorship stance. A lot of the anti-AO3 crowd fundamentally does not get why this is the case or dislikes how popular m/m is and doesn't care.

AO3 protects reprehensible art for the same reason the ACLU defends Nazis.

If that's not the kind of free speech above all organization you're into, that's fine, but then AO3 is not for you.

On a more specific note, I don't trust people demanding deletion because the vast majority of wanks aren't about things I personally agree are disgusting (hot takes on George Floyd or whatever) and are instead about My NOTP Is Inherently Bad shipwars or top/bottom fights. Or even worse, they descend into "This fan of color is a traitor for liking the wrong kinks". (If you think people don't call each other inflammatory language like "race traitor" over shipping all the time, you're naive.)

People always think they know when an author is white or straight because they write things Wrong or their mind is too fucked up or whatever, but it's bullshit. There is no reliable way to tell why someone wrote something or how much is their intent and how much is poor writing skill. AO3 is a safe space for writers to post without threat of deletion. It is not and never was a safe recs list for readers. That's not its aim.

Anti-AO3 people try to portray this as brave POC striking back against white oppressors, but that isn't how it ends up. Deletion tools are going to be leveraged hardest against other POC who fail to live up to some impossible double standard.

--

Now, as for whether OTW/AO3 should try to be better and help marginalized groups of fans of all types use AO3 more easily, of course they should. The non-bullshit version of that looks like better blocking tools to hide whatever you personally find triggering or gross. Blocking tools, not deletion.

Many anti-AO3 types dislike this approach because their abusive rants about how your kink is bad or you should ship het instead of m/m would get blocked.

But as lierdumoa said in a cogent explanation of how AO3 actually needs to improve, are people looking for solutions that protect POC... or do they just want a chance to punish?

[freedom-of-fanfic]

I need your help friend, the fandom is at stake: can you do a quick recap of why shipping isn't activism? And I don't mean just in terms of antis, but also the anti-backlash where people defend their ships by trying to prove they're actually progressive (which would still imply you need to prove your ship is not harmful before shipping it). Fans may have good intentions and mean no harm, but social justice is not achieved through fantasy.

what a good question. let me see if I can do this justice with a good answer.

Why Shipping is Not Activism

(edited on August 6th, 2018, 1 year after initial writing)

First off: let’s define ‘shipping’ as ‘desiring two characters to have romantic and/or sexual interactions and using social media or fanworks to share this desire with others.’  So: specifically looking at shipping as a social activity here, because I hope we can all agree that ‘shipping it’ - simply wishing for two characters to have some kind of interaction in your head - is not activism because it’s thoughts, which on their own nobody else knows about and thus can’t have an impact.

Shipping as activism is mainly talked about in the context of being ‘queer/LGBT representation’, and everything else is treated as secondary.*  So I’ll be talking about this primarily from that POV.

Okay.

shipping is not activism because shipping doesn’t do two important things that activism does: 

shipping does not generate or act as mainstream representation

shipping does not increase awareness or change social values

and that’s okay. Shipping doesn’t need to do these things because shipping takes place in a microcosm. Fandom is but a tiny, tiny fraction of internet and social activity as a whole. No matter how ‘progressive’ we collectively are, only in the rarest cases will we make a meaningful impact on society as a whole.

Shipping serves a different, but no less important purpose, which I’ll get into below.

That’s the short version. the long version is below.

Shipping is not activism because: 

Shipping is a fandom-specific activity and fandom doesn’t make much of a social impact. We get talked about a lot by the creators because we’re the people most likely to have contact with them and provide feedback on their content; we have an impact on creators in that sense.  But apart from coming to cons and talking on social media, when we get mainstream attention it’s almost always to talk about how weird we are. Also, we don’t cause social change. We can fan over something that already exists, but we can’t cause a show with better representation to be created.

Because of this: 

Meaningful, mainstream representation of LGBT/queer relationships come from mainstream media, and fandom is not the main force acting on mainstream media productions.  Remember when korrasami became canon in the last few minutes of the last episode of Korra because the creators knew about the shippers? Congratulations: you’re looking at an outlier that took a lot of very specific circumstances and luck to have happen. And most importantly: it wasn’t done to please the shippers.  Shippers may have given them the idea, but it was done because canon korrasami would create visible bisexual/LGBT representation. It was possible because the show was only airing online, to a smaller audience, and because of the herculean efforts of LGBT/queer activists over the last century to get our collective visibility and acceptability as high as it is (and yes, we have a long way to go, but we’re miles past where we were even 10 years ago.)

Current fandom seems to carry the belief that if we just ship hard enough and loud enough, the creators of an ongoing mainstream media will reward us by making our favorite ship canon.** The reality is we rarely, if ever, make a meaningful impact on the direction that canon takes. We’re a small, small part of the consumer base - a loud one, but small!  We’re often not the aimed-at demographic, either, so pleasing us is the last thing the execs trying to make a buck are thinking about. The material we’re fanning over is already old news to producers; short canons are usually already finished by the time we receive it, and longer ones are at least a season ahead in production time. (If we do make an impact, we won’t see it for at least a year or more.)  Shows must meet decency standards, and LGBT/queer relationships are still seen as higher-rated than their cishet counterparts.  Executives care about what will sell ad space or toys more than what fandom wants.

The fact of the matter is we have the cause and effect backwards.

Ships being ‘good representation’ is a function of increased mainstream media representation of marginalized identities, not the other way around.  When media was entirely full of characters who were white cis men, we shipped white cis men. And as media slowly stops having nothing but white cis men, we’re … still shipping white cis men a lot, because there’s still a lot of them and there’s still a societal bias that tells us that white cis men are the most important/interesting people (and simultaneously, because they are unmarked, we can’t accidentally fall into stereotype pits while fanning them), but we’re shipping more and more non-white, non-cis, non-male characters too. 

Real social activism leads to increased media representation - like the reclaiming of the word ‘queer’ in the late 80′s/early 90′s leading to a TV show called ‘Queer as Folk’ and featuring gay characters. And increased media representation leads to more marginalized characters for fandom to ship.

While transformative fandom does, to an extent, change things from canon to represent ourselves more - or just to suit our fancy! - canon always reigns supreme and is the most widespread version of the characters.  Canon becoming more diverse will always have more of an effect on fandom than fandom being diverse/having diverse content will ever have on canon.

Besides:

The desire to see ships become canon is not primarily motivated by generating healthy representation of marginalized identities.  Fans have been wanting their favorite ships to become canon since the Stone Ages.  The Harry Potter fandom wars were all about what was most canon: Harry/Hermione, Hermione/Ron, or Harry/Ginny.  Notably: Draco/Harry is not one of the pairings I list, because nobody thought there was the remotest chance that Draco/Harry would ever become canon.  It’s only recently that LGBT/queer rep in particular has been making a meaningful appearance in mainstream media, and suddenly slash ships have entered the ‘will it be canon!?’ fray. And some mlm fans feel they have more ‘right’ to canon because mlm ships are LGBT/queer rep.

Here’s the thing: if this was really about representation, then we’d all be celebrating if any mlm pairing became canon. No matter which pairing is ‘more progressive’, any LGBT/queer canon representation is better than none. But (surprise!) it’s not; the ‘queer rep!’ battle cry is just an additional cannonball in the arsenal of ongoing ship wars.*** And I venture to say that most mlm shippers engaged in a ship war would rather see an unrelated het pairing become canon than their rival mlm ship.

And this is because: 

Shipping is not, and never has been, primarily about creating healthy marginalized representation.  

Don’t get me wrong: transformative fandom is heavily LGBT/queer/mentally ill/disabled/otherwise underrepresented, and we often create transformative fanworks that bring our identities into the story. That’s awesome self-fulfillment, and it can really bless and excite fellow fans who see fandom content that makes them feel more welcomed and recognized.  However.

Generating marginalized representation isn’t the primary motive for shipping. We ship out of love. We see the dynamics between two characters and think ‘oh, that’s hot’ or ‘I’d like to see more of that’. We ship for fun. We ship because we think two characters would look good together. We ship because we imagine ourselves as one character and have a crush on the other. We ship things for many, many reasons, many I haven’t mentioned here, maybe as many reasons as there are people in fandom doing shippy things.  And to that end, I’m sure that some people do decide what to ship purely because they believe it represents minority groups that need representation - but it would be too much to say that’s the main reason people ship things.

Shipping doesn’t need to be about creating healthy marginalized representation because:

Fiction is not reality; a person can ship the ‘right’ ships and still be a bigot IRL. and visa versa. Because we interact with fiction and reality in different ways, there are people who really love mlm ships but still think gay marriage is icky. On the other hand, a person can be the loudest activist for LGBT/queer causes in real life and only ship het ships in fandom, just because the dynamics of het ships pings their fancy more.

Shipping as activism preaches to the choir. Shipping being a fandom-specific activity, and many of us being oppressed ourselves, shipping the ‘right’ ship to increase awareness in the microcosm of fandom isn’t really accomplishing anything. Most of us are ourselves LGBT/queer, or friends with people who are LGBT/queer. Most of us are aware of how much pain the lack of representation in mainstream media brings on.  And most of us are sensitive to the fact that we’re not the only oppressed person in fandom space and are willing to learn more about how we can help other oppressed people.

If I could sum up the problems of current fandom, it’s that we assume that nobody else is #woke (even though most of us are sufferers). 

In that sense, shipping the ‘right’ ship doesn’t bring more awareness; it acts as a signal to others that you have awareness, and hopefully protects you from being erased or harassed as an ignorant asshole (’cishet’).

Most importantly:

Shipping isn’t activism, but it does something else great: it lets marginalized fans express and indulge themselves in any way that pleases them.  

- fandom is hugely made of underrepresented minorities, so shipping is a way that we express ourselves and relate to one another - whether those ships are ‘progressive’ or not. So, so many of us deal with social stigma or harassment or hate in our real lives; we consume media to get away from that, and we indulge in fandom to get away from that.  

Most of us are, just by existing and demanding space in the world, activists for the rights of the marginalized and oppressed. 

I’ve had some people disagree with me on this, but I stand by it. many people in fandom have orientations/identities/nd/etc that politicize our existence. When we are ‘out’ - when we are visible - and vocally demanding recognition for our lives by being visible and refusing to compromise, we are activists by existence. And many of us are allies, taking political action on behalf of others. and many of us are both - marginalized this way, allies to people marginalized that way. 

the actions we take as activists in the real world are the ones that matter - not fandom.

Fandom is a space for us to play with each other and connect over something fun and pleasant, and those fun and pleasant things don’t have to be activist things. We’re allowed to take a break.

The importance of activism and representation is to benefit the marginalized and oppressed, letting us be recognized and less stigmatized, and deconstructing the social and political structures that work against us leading fulfilling lives.  When we use shipping the ‘right’ ship as a bludgeon to attack one another, we are literally defeating the purpose of our own causes. We’re stigmatizing each other for our fandom interests. And we’re certainly not deconstructing any social structures that harm us!

In conclusion: The way we can be most activist in transformative fandom is, no joke, to care more about the fact that almost everyone else here is marginalized too than that one another’s ships aren’t marginalized enough.

fandom is different from the way it used to be: it’s more visible, more mixed with non-fandom, and easier to access. certainly, it’s important to make clear where we’re addressing relationship stuff for fandom versus relationship stuff for real life. there’s value in taking steps to counteract the harm done by lack of education about sex, consent, and healthy relationships, particularly as LGBT+/queer people, or people who need access to & information about reproductive health care taking care of one another in a world that doesn’t care enough about us. 

but educating each other doesn’t happen through a ship: it happens through open, friendly communication. shipping can open the door to communication, but it can’t substitute for straightforward honesty. 

Let’s foster healthy interaction and honest communication wherever we can: by celebrating each other and our creative endeavors - instead of creatively locking us down with terror of getting erased or driven out of fandom by demanding everything be treated as a teaching opportunity.

be kind to one another. 

(the rest of the world is not going to do it for us.)

–

*In talking about ships as representation we generally start with ‘this ship is queer/LGBT’ and then use all other axes of oppression to prove which ship is ‘more progressive’, i.e. - F1nnPoe and Ky1ux are both mlm, but F1nnPoe is more pure because it’s a black man and a Latino man as opposed to two white men. (Occasionally race will also be talked of as the primary point of value, depending on the fandom.)

**On a side note, this whole paragraph is also why it’s unlikely that fandom being ugly will ever cause a show to be cancelled or a pairing will get changed in canon because some fans were nastier than others. We’re like bugs with stingers: scary and painful but ultimately not that impactful (unless you’re allergic, I guess, but forget that part of the metaphor). 

***This is part of where the ‘I have to prove my ship is wholesome/their ship is evil’ stuff comes from: ‘proving’ to creators that your ship is the ‘better’ queer representation because it either covers more marginalized bases or is ‘more pure’, making it less objectionable for mainstream representation. (the joke is that bigots don’t care how pure an LGBT/queer ship is: they’re gonna still think it’s awful because it’s LGBT/queer.)

PS - I don’t think this answer really addresses why arguing about purity of ships is a bad plan, but this is already so long that I’ll address that somewhere else I think.

#shipping is not activism #in defense of shipping #queer representation #this is an americentric post #in defense of freedom to fandom #*chanting* SHIP WAR SHIP WAR SHIP WAR