The first time I saw ‘sin’ used to describe a ship in a 'funny’ way was Kylux. It made me uncomfortable and it still kind of does. But I think it’s good to understand the evolution of the use of this term.
To start with, it was often compared to ships like Finnrey, Finnpoe, and Finnpoerey. There was even a chart of “sinful ships”. Finnpoerey was especially high on the pure part. All three of them were. Hanleia was a lot further down. The “pure” part described ships that involved sweet, loving supportive relationships.
Reylo was down near Kykux, but Kylux was the absolute bottom.
At that time Kylux was described as sinful because a lot of the ship was “let’s make them kill 50 billion people and have sex in their space ashes” or “let’s make Kylo a monster and Hux want to haclve sex with him on the dead bodies of Kylo’s victims”.
In other words, stuff that was just wicked, evil, wrong and sinful. Kylo and Hux were people who either had no moral compass of joyfully ran into doing horrible things. “Sin” described not the sex acts, but the horrible things Kylo and Hux did.
Now, as we got further and further away from The Force Awakens being in theaters, things began to change. Finnpoe took a painful noes dive (I’m going to say for reasons for racism, both in and without of the ship. Also the feeling of superiority certain shippers put off for liking a “good” and “pure” ship was frustrating, since enough acted like it got them out of a get out of being racist free card. But that’s a discussion for another day).
Kylux suddenly took off. What was a small ship that focused mainly on violent, evil characters with little to no redeeming personal values suddenly became huge. I want to note that when the ship was small there was little talk about racism around it like there is now. Kylux fans stayed in their lane. They wrote stories about true horror shows of human beings, but didn’t mischaracterize the heroes. Finn never got thrown under the bus to make Hux look like a woobie. Rey was never seduced by Kylo’s sexy curls to the dark side. Finn wasn’t treated like just a janitor and Poe wasn’t turned into a hyper sexualized valentino.
Things have changed. I still love kylux. I still write for it. I write mainly fluff. I like reading about evil people cuddling.
Kylux, a ship of two monsterous human beings, already had the label of being 'sin’ because of the things the characters did. But as the ship got bigger and bigger how we portrayed the characters changed. They stopped being just monsters. Suddenly we wrote coffeeshop aus, high school aus (I’ve done this). We gave them kids (done this too).
Suddenly calling this ship a “sin” ship changed in connotation. The concept of “sinning” began to apply simply to reading about two gay men having sex. People who were new didn’t realize the original context and began to use it to mean what it means now.
I’ve never been comfortable with calling ships “sinning”. But when the term first began to be used to made sense. No one could call stories about Kylo eviserating people with his bare hands just because it was fun anything but a terrible thing for a person to do. There wasn’t anything wrong with liking horror. But as fandom does, we applied “sinners” to ourselves because our ship dealt in “sin”.
And as I have said, while it was never comfortable for me to hear, it made sense why they picked this term. Now we have moved so far from why the term was used.
As has already been said: there are fans who are religious. There are people for whom sin is not a laughing matter. A lot of us grew up hearing (and still hearing) that being queer is a sin. It takes a lot of work to move past that. Being refered to as a sinner for us is distressing. I understand it doesn’t mean anything to people who aren’t of faith. But to queer people of faith it’s very uncomfortable.
As I said, it was uncomfortable when we were talking about monster!kylux and cannibal!kylux and murderers!kylux and war criminals!kylux. Now that it refers to fluff!kylux, totally normal relationship!kylux, it suddenly takes on the connotation of “if you’re queer meaning you’re going to hell”. And while that doesn’t mean something to all of you, it means something to us.
And it doesn’t help that there are now new people in the fandom who never knew why the term was used, but use it because others use it.
So yes, this is another plea to stop. I understand why you still use it. It’s fun and irreverant. It’s a middle finger to establishment. Also, a lot of other people use it. Just please be aware that it’s painful to some of us.
yousharknotpass
origamiaround
ellievsbear
vaporwave
germansingergirl
kaledo-art
