Can we talk about how some people use “species” to justify shipping the boys with their female counterparts?
(For context, these are all comments someone left for me on YouTube before I started gaining a following.)
Yeah, yeah, I’m back at it again with my usual rants about the PPG fandom. I swear I’m not a negative person, but I REALLY want to get this off my chest….
I’m talking about how gross the “they are the same species” argument is when people talk about PPG x RRB.
There are a lot of reasons why some people consider these ships their OTP. If you said it was cute, you grew up with it, or you just like the aesthetic, I would 100% not have a problem with that line of thinking. I’d simply end my opinion with “it’s not for me.”
But when you start saying that the PPGs need to get together with their male counterparts because they are the same species… yeah, then we need to talk.
I’m not accusing this person of being malicious or anything, but I am deeply uncomfortable with everything they said. Feel free to read the giant wall of text if you want, but it genuinely comes across like the ramblings of someone who thinks people should only be with others who look like them.
This person goes on and on about species and “being with their own kind,” and even goes as far as comparing the girls not ending up with their male counterparts to a human dating a monkey… which is a whole other level of yikes that I really don’t appreciate.
Seriously, they kept bringing up species, “their own kind,” and even tribalism, which is a concept heavily associated with exclusionary and harmful rhetoric (a.k.a. eugenics). Again, I’m not saying this person is prejudiced, but the way they phrased everything felt really insensitive and honestly just very uncomfortable. There’s this weird emphasis on characters having an obligation to be with the “right species,” and that anything else would somehow be wrong or gross.
And when I tried to explain why that wording made me uncomfortable, they basically just told me to shut up and called me stupid, which is… definitely not helping their case.
They also tried to bring up examples like Tweek and Craig, Mickey and Minnie, etc., but those comparisons really don’t work in this context.
Tweek and Craig became canon in South Park simply because the creators liked the ship and thought the fan response was funny and the two would make an interesting couple. Nobody was arguing they had to be together because they were the same “species” or because they looked alike.
And Mickey and Minnie looking similar is mostly just a byproduct of old cartoon design conventions and animation limitations. Back then, studios often reused body types because it was cheaper and easier to animate. That’s why so many classic cartoon couples are basically “same character but with eyelashes and a bow.” It wasn’t some deep statement about only dating your own kind. Plus, this argument completely falls apart when you remember that Oswald the Lucky Rabbit — Mickey’s predecessor — had a cat girlfriend.
This whole thing started because I said I personally don’t ship the PPGs with the RRBs because they look too similar to me — almost like twins — and it makes me personally uncomfortable. That’s it. And apparently someone got so offended by that take that they went on this entire rant about how the characters are basically obligated to be together because they are the same species and therefore “belong” with each other.
Like… are you starting to see why this made me uncomfortable? 😭
It also doesn’t help that some PPG x RRB shippers unironically call themselves “purists,” which is just… not great wording in combination with all of this. 😬
Maybe I’m overly sensitive, but if you replaced the word “species” with “race,” suddenly this entire argument would sound REALLY bad. And that’s exactly why the wording bothers me so much.
Especially because superhero stories have always had relationships between completely different species or beings. Lois Lane is with Superman even though he’s Kryptonian. Robin dates Starfire even though she’s Tamaranean. Wanda fell in love with Vision, who is literally an android.
So no, I don’t think fictional characters need to date their counterpart just because they’re the same species, and I definitely don’t think “they should stay with their own kind” is a good argument for a ship….any ship…
