I feel not quite as cranky now, so I apologize if I came off too harsh. My intention was mainly this point here:
If you decide to run these people out, there will be no Artemis Fowl fandom left on tumblr
I believe the discourse surrounding A/H has occurred several times throughout the fandom’s 20+ year history. It happened on the forum boards, it’s happened here, and obviously it will continue to happen as new people join. But it needs to stay as actual discourse, and not pointing fingers while saying “this thing is problematic and if you like it, you MUST acknowledge that it is wrong”.
When I see the discourse start with “hey this ship/thing is messed up and NO ONE acknowledges it”, the implication is the people who like the ship are inherently messed up themselves and don’t understand that they’re “wrong”.
The moment you start the conversation with “this thing IS…” rather than “this makes ME feel…” then you (the collective you) have taken a stance. And that stance is “my opinion on this is the right one”. The next logical step is to vilify and demonize those who disagree with you if you can’t change their minds
Now obviously IRL relationships like Artemis/Holly can be very problematic. It can be counted as grooming (I did not address the fact that had Holly been human, she would have been closer to 20-21, still a 8-9 year age gap, but not 60-something years like OP stated), and there would need to be significant time away from each other in order to appropriately foster those feelings as adults.
But as I pointed out, this is fiction. This hurts no one to age up a character to make a ship appropriate. Or hell, age down a character to make a ship appropriate. No one in Hartemis actually ships child!Artemis and adult!Holly.
My main concern, because I have seen this occur elsewhere, is that this attitude, this “x/y ship is horrible/messed up” that implies similarly horrible things about those who engage with it, will lead to callouts, to bullying, and more. And once those start, they are very hard to stop.
Many of the people I saw active on fowldom and the Artemis Fowl tags over the years were Hartemis shippers. They were the biggest producers of art and fics for the past 10 years since I’ve been on tumblr. You know who I don’t see as often, despite their content not always being about the ship itself? Those same users.
The only thing I can assume based on posts like these that have popped up more regularly in the past year and a half? Those users felt unwelcome. Even if their content wasn’t A/H, they still worried that they would get harassed. So they quietly left or at least limited the content they posted. And now, we’re left with people going “hey, where’s all the AF fans?” because the content has dropped considerably.
Discourse is fine. But you cannot address someone’s opinion about a fictional ship by stating your opinion is fact. You cannot start discourse by saying that the thing is evil or horrible or messed up.
You’re not looking for discourse then. You’re looking for those who think like you do.
And that’s fine too, to an extent.
PROVIDED YOU DON’T TAG THE THING YOU’RE HATING ON BECAUSE YOU KNOW THAT THOSE IN SUPPORT OF IT WILL SEE IT.
There are OTHER WAYS to get people’s attention. Maybe start your own tag that the others can block if they don’t want to see hate. Because I’m sure they don’t, same as you don’t want to see the hartemis tag.
For that matter, it is never up to the person who is making things that you feel uncomfortable with to block you. It is YOUR responsibility to curate your feed. Either block the tags or block the people who use them. Those features are there for a reason. This is that reason.
Okay, I’m done for now. I still feel sick, I need sleep, and I’m just really fucking tired, so my thoughts might be a bit rambling at this point. The topic of anti-ship is a sore spot for me as someone who has seen people leave fandoms because they didn’t feel safe.
So forgive me for being protective of my first fandom.
This was my home as an awkward, lonely highschool student, and this was a safe space for hundreds and hundreds of others. I don’t want that to change.