That viral post that's going around about how people who write "book quality" mlm fic are too "normal" to publish and have real jobs so only "weird" people publish their "shitty" fanfic is so completely out of touch with reality and I am giving a massive side eye to everyone reblogging it.
Not only is it completely, easily verifiably untrue (you cannot enter any professional writing space without tripping over a dozen grizzled scifi writers who got their start by filing off the serial numbers and publishing their Star Trek fanfic even going back decades ago??? it's a whole thing?? plus how can you look at the mlm category on Amazon right now and say with a straight face that people aren't publishing shitty Spirk and Stucky fanfic??? Oh, honey...) it's also the perfect example of this kind of sneering elitism that true artists would never sully themselves by seeking profit, they do it only for the purity of the thing that always somehow leads back to, "no one should be paid to make art, actually."
The only reason you're seeing more published fanfic right now has nothing to do with the idealistic purity of your hypothetical government employee written smut of the past vs the debased scribbles of those awful straights of today and everything to do with the fact that a) self-publishing has created a voracious readership that wants a ton of content so it's become a viable, flexible income stream for many, especially disabled people b) anyone can publish now with self-publishing tools so there are less gatekeepers and c) lockdown got a lot of people into fandom and therefore writing who never tried it before.
And if you really think there's no "shitty" published mlm and no "book-quality" m/f writing out there that started as fanfic, then you are clearly not a reader so why are you even talking about this?
Sure they can, infact it's rude to assume they're anything more than that if they're real-life people. Of course, just because it's rude doesn't mean your wrong but as my dad (and lots of other people I'm sure) likes to say, 'assuming makes an ass out of you and me'.
However if the 2 men in this situation are fictional then them just being friends is entirely up to interpretation.
A straight person might just see them as friends because it's content and we all like to see content that represents us -even if they already have abundances of it.
And a queer person might see them as potential lovers, both due to being more open-minded to something like that and because, as I previously said, people like to be represented.
Now I don't mean to say straight people aren't open minded because, fact is, your sexuality does not define how open you are to things. All I'm saying is a queer person is more likely to already be open-minded due to having to realise their sexuality is different from the perceived 'normal' and having to be accepting of it.
So in conclusion, yeah 2 guys can absolutely only be best pals but that might just be how only you see it, and maybe there's something you need to look deeper into if you're getting upset at people interpreting the relationship of 2 fictional guys as romantic.
Gay ships getting screwed over by homophobic producers/writers as soon as they get wind of it is nothing new, but what has been done to stucky really is uniquely cruel.
I’ve never heard of a gay ship having one member’s importance to the other simply... written out of the show/film? (Has this been done?)
Never heard of a gay ship having decades of important source material about them deliberately sabotaged just to spite a gay ship (that wasn’t even canonically gay or ever going to be so, anyway?)
Or having the (heterosexual-ising) female character literally put into the male character’s canon place, using his gay-inspiring scenes, with any other ship.
I’ve never heard of an actor’s brilliant performance, which made certain lines iconic; whose skill as an actor is the very reason they’re iconic... simply being taken away from him and credited to an untalented actress who never said them.
Just to damage an un-canon gay ship?!
Imagine they brought out new Trek shows with Kirk and Spock and said ‘anyway, Spock never meant anything to Kirk, every Spirk thing he said was actually said to/about his new wife Spacky (Woman who joined the Hating-Vulcans Society and hired guys to torture Spock) and here’s a flashback to Spacky as Kirk’s Chief Science Officer all those years. Also we will be buying up other media and editing all tie-ins to reflect that they are nOT GAY.’
You would expect it to turn out differently, wouldn't you? They wear the soulmate trope like a tailored garment. Their lives revolve around each other in a singular way that no other character can come close to matching. They have their inside jokes and their little rituals and the things only they would know about each other. It's each other's hearts they always seem to see and believe in, more than physical strength or years of brainwashing and control. Their smiles turn so much softer for each other. They were both believed to be dead, yet somehow both turned up alive the same number of years later, drawn inexorably together. They have shared life experience in two ways: they literally shared their early life, and they've gone through similar events since then separately. They're both beaten and bruised by the world in different ways, and yet their belief in each other of all things is never changed. One of their names was the other's last word.
You would expect it to turn out differently, wouldn't you?
first the pirate poll drama and now the stucky fans are frothing at the mouth lmao. literally i think everyone just hates the ofmd fandom bc they want what we have (queer queer romance written by a diverse writers room that actually cares about the characters and the story they're telling)
me when i do my daily checks of the stucky tag and see yet another post where someone is talking about how they used to ship stevebucky and then go on to proudly admit that they fell for marvel's ploy to kill a gay ship and whine about how steve is so awful
Whether it was disappointing, anger-inducing, tragic, or just generally fucked up - which ship had the worst ending for the ship itself, even if the characters or plot otherwise ended up ok?
Ideally, you should vote based not on which ship had the worst ending for you, but which ship ending you think would have been the worst to experience as a shipper (even if you, yourself, never shipped it).
Once again, please be polite about other people's choices. I picked these ships because I've seen people talk about how depressing or terrible all of their endings were. You can have your opinion about which was the worst, but please don't put down other ships.
If the usual posting trend keeps up the ineffables should surpass stucky for the first time in terms of public fics on ao3 anywhere from today to friday.