Happy one year Sinnersversery! Some wonderful anon has started a Sinners Kink Meme, open to all (18+). Add your prompts, write your fills, and thank your fellow contributors!!
1970s AU. Remmick is on the run from his past. He meets a young man named Sammie who is desperate to escape his future.
excerpt:
“Yeah, well.” Sammie shrugs, finishing off his beer. “Maybe I was called here for a reason, same as you.”
Remmick sucks his teeth in response. He’s always been annoyed by church folk who believe everything is predetermined by God or such nonsense. Remmick has always made his own choices. They haven’t been good choices, but they’re his and Remmick sticks by them.
“I wasn’t called here.” Remmick informs Sammie, rolling his eyes. “I found my way here on accident. There’s a difference.”
“Oh, really?” And now Sammie is looking over at him, and despite the tragic story he just told there’s amusement sparkling in his gaze. “A thief and a murderer, living as a priest on accident? You really believe that?”
@crypticcowboys made a post saying Sammick fic/shipping dynamics ties back to buck breaking then disabled reblogs, so I'm making my own post. This really isn't just about that one post, though. The buck breaking comparison has come up in anti-Sammick discourse a few times before and it should be addressed because it’s a serious accusation and comparison to make.
First: buck breaking as a specific, systematic practice is historically disputed. There is no substantial evidence from historians (including Black historians), slave narratives, plantation records, or court records that it existed as a ritualized public sexual punishment. Sexual violence against enslaved people is well documented but the specific concept of buck breaking that people bring up gained most of its traction from a 2021 Tariq Nasheed documentary (that was ahistorical, homophobic, and anti-feminist btw), not from historical scholarship. If you're going to use something as a weapon in an argument, you should know whether the history you're citing is solid. In this case, it's not.
But even taking it at face value: buck breaking as described wasn't just "a powerful figure sexually dominating a Black man." It was defined by chattel slavery, legal ownership of human beings, and its function as public terror. Strip those away and you're not describing buck breaking, you're describing a general power imbalance with sexual violence, which exists across centuries of fiction involving characters of every race. Saying dark Sammick fic and dynamics "ties back" to that collapses everything historically specific about the concept into something broad enough to apply to any fictional power imbalance. That parallel requires you to ignore what defined the practice in the first place.
Invoking a historically unverified atrocity to describe how other Black fans engage with fiction is using Black trauma as leverage in a shipping argument. It’s disgusting, pathetic, and needs to stop.
say it with me now: shipping remmick and sammie is RACIST and weird as HELL because a lot of you guys center the ship around sammie being sexually assaulted ANYWAYS which ties back to buck breaking! if you don’t know what buck breaking is, go look it up! leave black people ALONE! THANK YOU!
Yall get mad when we make them fluffy and vanilla yall get mad when we go the realistic route and make it dark and horrific. You can just not like a ship without tying a moral justification to it. And instead of posting in the tag, just block us????
say it with me now: shipping remmick and sammie is RACIST and weird as HELL because a lot of you guys center the ship around sammie being sexually assaulted ANYWAYS which ties back to buck breaking! if you don’t know what buck breaking is, go look it up! leave black people ALONE! THANK YOU!
I've been thinking about the Sammick discourse for a while now. Not in a "let me defend my ship" way, but out of genuine curiosity about why this particular pairing draws the level and type of hostility it does.
I spent a day going through Tumblr, Twitter, and TikTok reading anti-Sammick posts and collecting the most common criticisms. Below is my attempt to lay each one out fairly and respond to them.
Before I get started, for context: I'm a Black woman living in the US. Sinners has had me in a chokehold since I saw it last year. I've written multiple fics for the fandom, including a few with Sammick. They’re not my OTP, but I enjoy the dynamic and I understand why it resonates with people. Obviously, I'm not coming at this as a neutral observer, but instead as someone with genuine interest in understanding other povs and attempting to respond in good faith.
Heads up: long post ahead
PART I: THE CRITICISMS
1. “Remmick is a racist character, so the ship romanticizes racism.”
Remmick is a white man in 1932 Mississippi who fixates on a young Black man, tries to possess his talent, and wants to turn him into a vampire for his own purposes. In a Jim Crow setting where white men historically exploited and commodified Black artistry, that visual reads as racialized exploitation.
The film doesn't support the claim that Remmick is a racist. To quote Coogler himself: “Remmick's survived for a long time and I like that he sees the bullshit that is American racism. Rather than the KKK, he identifies with what's going on in the juke joint, that he wants to be a part of it, and he wants all of them to be a part of him.” He's an ancient Irish vampire whose own community was destroyed by colonialism, and his villainy is rooted in grief and loneliness, not white supremacy. His pitch to Sammie frames vampirism as an escape from racism, not an extension of it. Coogler positions Remmick as a separate threat from Jim Crow. The setting is racist but the character's motivations are not.
2. “The racial power dynamic makes it an oppressor/oppressed ship.”
Even if Remmick isn't a white supremacist, the power dynamic between a white immortal and a young Black man in the Jim Crow South can't be separated from historical context. One person holds structural power over the other in every way: racially, physically, supernaturally. Some dynamics carry too much real-world weight to be treated as ship material.
Remmick isn't operating within or benefiting from Jim Crow power structures. He's a supernatural outsider who exists apart from them. But even setting race aside, the power imbalance is still real. Remmick is older, stronger, supernatural, and manipulative. Sammie is human, young, and vulnerable. Nobody is arguing that this is an equal dynamic.
The question is whether an unequal dynamic disqualifies a ship from being explored in fiction, and the answer has always been no. Power imbalances are one of the most explored dynamics in fiction and fandom, across every genre. Vampire/human, captor/captive, villain/hero... These pairings are popular precisely because of the tension the imbalance creates, not in spite of it. Engaging with that tension in fic doesn't mean endorsing it as a model for real relationships.
3. “The age gap is predatory.”
(I believe) Sammie is around 19-20. Remmick’s age is debatable but he’s really old. The imbalance in life experience, power, and knowledge makes any romantic dynamic between them inherently predatory.
This criticism should be applied to virtually every vampire romance ever written. Edward and Bella, Lestat and Louis, Spike/Angel and Buffy, Bill/Eric and Sookie. The genre is built on age-gap dynamics. Singling Sammick out for an issue baked into vampire fiction as a whole suggests the age gap isn't the real issue here.
4. “Sammie is too innocent to be shipped like this.”
Sammie is the youngest main character, the heart of the film, and the one who makes it out. His actor, Miles Caton, is a newcomer, which reinforces the sense that he's fresh and vulnerable. Placing him in dark ship dynamics feels like corrupting someone who was written to be protected.
The protectiveness is understandable, but this is infantilization. Sammie is a young adult wrestling with faith, identity, heritage, and autonomy. He's not a child. He performed cunnilingus on a sweaty married woman in a packed juke joint. Had her singin’ and crawlin’ all over the stage after. When fans insist Sammie is too pure for dark dynamics, they're preserving a version of him and the film that exists only in their heads.
And speaking of Pearline…
5. “The ship overshadows Pearline and sidelines a Black Woman.”
Sammie's canon love interest is Pearline, a Black woman. Sammick has a lot of content while Sammie/Pearline has significantly less. This follows a well-documented fandom pattern of gravitating toward slash ships and erasing women, especially Black women from the narrative.
This is the most structurally sound criticism. Fandom absolutely has a pattern of sidelining Black women and the fic disparity is real. The solution to this, however, is creating more Pearline content, not tearing down Sammick and the people who enjoy it. One ship existing doesn't prevent the other from thriving. You can advocate for and produce more Pearline and Pearline/Sammie stuff without demanding less Sammick.
6. “The dark fic content proves Sammick shippers are harmful.”
Sammick fic sometimes features manipulation, obsession, coercion, dub and noncon, and racialized power dynamics. Dark fic involving a white character exerting power over a Black character in the Jim Crow South echoes real historical trauma. This crosses the line from exploration into eroticized violence.
The discomfort is real, and the racial context adds weight. But Sammick is a dark ship because the source material is dark. The themes of manipulation and obsession come directly from the film. Fic writers didn't invent them. Also, the assumption that writing about a dynamic equals endorsing it, the idea that fiction should only depict what is morally acceptable, and the belief that exploring darkness is a confession of real-world values are all symptoms of purity culture.
7. “Sammick shippers only care about Remmick and ignore the Black characters.”
Sammick shippers are Remmick-centric, using Sammie as a vehicle for their interest in the one white character while the Black characters get overlooked. In a movie overwhelmingly about Black characters, Black community, and Black art, the most popular ship features… the white guy.
This accusation gets aimed at the wrong people. Sammick shippers love Sammie. Sammick fic and art engages deeply with him and his identity. The fans who center Remmick at the expense of Black characters are more often the Remmick self-shippers and/or Jack O'Connell fans, not Sammick shippers. Conflating them lets the actual problem go unaddressed.
You also can't control who someone walks away from a movie loving. The answer is always gonna be uplifting more content for the characters you want to see, not punishing people who latched onto a particular dynamic or character.
8. “We are just trying to protect Black characters and Black art.”
Some Black fans who oppose Sammick are coming from genuine protectiveness. Black characters historically get terrible treatment in fandom. When a ship like Sammick blows up with a white villain in a power dynamic with a Black protagonist, the instinct to push back comes from years of watching fandom do Black characters dirty. That protectiveness is real and comes from a real wound.
This is probably the most sympathetic root of the anti-Sammick position, and it deserves to be treated with care. The protectiveness comes from somewhere legitimate. But when it starts dictating how other Black fans are allowed to engage with Black characters, it turns into its own kind of gatekeeping. You can't advocate for Black fans having more space in fandom while simultaneously telling Black fans they're engaging with fiction incorrectly. The creators producing Sammick content are mostly Black. Protecting Black art shouldn't mean policing the Black artists making it.
Non-Black fans who ship Sammick aren't automatically disrespecting Black characters or Black art by engaging with the dynamic either. What matters is how someone engages. Are they thoughtful about the dynamics? Are they treating Sammie as a full character and not a prop? Are they engaging with the racial context rather than ignoring it? Those are fair standards to hold anyone to, regardless of race. But "don't ship this at all" isn't a standard.
—
PART II: WHAT I’VE NOTICED & FINAL THOUGHTS
The OC Hypocrisy
A striking number of people who are anti-Sammick also ship Remmick with OCs. These OCs are often young women, and more often than not, they're white or non-black. The age gap is still there, the power imbalance is still there, and Remmick is still Remmick. The only thing that changed is the M/M pairing became het, and the Black character got replaced.
Huh.
Then there are Black fans who ship Remmick with their Black OCs while still hating Sammick. In that case, the racial dynamic hasn't changed either. It's still a white ancient vampire in a power dynamic with a young Black person. The only difference is the gender and the fact that it's their self-insert.
Interesting.
For some people, it’s painfully obvious that the real issue was never the racial dynamics, the age gap, or the power imbalance. It’s the fact that Sammie is black and/or male and some of you may genuinely be racist or homophobic.
The Telephone Game
Anti-Sammick sentiment spreads through Twitter, Tumblr, and Tiktok through repetition, not investigation. A few people posted "Sammick is racist”, it circulated, and within a few cycles it was the accepted consensus. People who have never read a single fic will confidently repeat that the ship and its fans are white racists because enough people have said it that it feels true.
If they checked, they'd find the ship’s spaces are LARGELY popularized by people of color, most of them Black. Checking requires effort and the risk of contradicting the popular take and most people would rather fall in line than be labeled problematic.
Final Thoughts
People don't have to like Sammick. They don't have to read the fic or engage with the ship at all, and that's completely valid. But I do think it's worth examining whether the reasons some people give for hating it actually hold up, and whether the energy directed at Sammick shippers is consistent with how people treat other “problematic” ships in the fandom.
A lot of the criticism comes from real places. There are real frustrations with how fandom treats Black characters, real discomfort with dark content, and real concerns about representation. I'm not dismissing any of that. But somewhere along the way, those real concerns started being used to justify going after a group of people because they ship something that makes others uncomfortable.
I started this wanting to understand the other side, and after sitting with every argument I could find, I think a lot of people on that side owe themselves the same honesty. Both about Sammick and about why it actually bothers them.
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