I've been thinking about changes in fandom behavior lately, especially in relation to shipping, so I gotta dump my thoughts out here.
So, it's not that shipping wars don't happen now, but they seem to happen less in the traditional way (and I'll get to why in a second). It used to be, back in the day, that shippers would fight with each other allll the time about which was BEST. Real wild stuff. I joined fandom in the early 2000s, I've been through the wars (Pirates of the Caribbean, Phantom of the Opera, I've seen things! Even early Les Mis movie fandom had some Times).
And I think two things have changed.
One, people rarely seem to fight about the actual ship now so much as You've Done Something Morally Wrong By Shipping This And I Will Call You Out behavior. Purity culture. All that. But that's not so much what I've been thinking about lately. What I've been thinking about is the kind of, Sheen of Being Fake Nice, where people say ship and let ship, but many of them ... don't actually mean it. Fic or art of less popular pairings will have passive aggressive commentary from time to time, things like "oh I really don't ship this but this art is cool" or "I liked this fic but I wish it was this ship" or just generally being weird about ship content that ISN'T their ship ON that content. And yet, if you make your own personal post saying you don't like a ship (not for a moral reason, you just don't dig it!) that's considered being mean. And I find, overall, that it's that certain shippers of big pairings that are the biggest offenders here? Which is ?? Strange to me??? You're popular what are you afraid of? The smaller ship overtaking your ship?? Be serious. Anyway, I just have found in recent years, especially shipping a smaller ship in a bigggg fandom where people can be REALLY aggressive about non-canon ships "actually being canon and everyone thinks so" and about fanon generally, that I have to be nice, but the bigger ship people can behave badly. This is not nearly everyone of course! But it does happen. I'll never forget the commenter on one of my SW fics who called the main romantic pairing "the only vice of the fic." I'm a big girl, I can take weird comments, but it wasn't a one-off, and it doesn't only happen to me. It happens to other fic writers and especially, I think artists! Not cool behavior.
(Plus god, people are really unkind to multi-shippers these days which! Is also super rude. You can ship more than one thing, man, there aren't laws).
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