"I hate how people make everything about shipping instead of doing serious literary analysis" says person who could have started an interesting literary analysis discussion of their own if only they'd stop bitching about shippers for 5 seconds.
When I was in The Untamed | 陈情令 fandom, I wrote several meta essays that had nothing to do with shipping, and somehow, despite the fact that The Untamed is literally a romance and virtually everyone in the fandom is a shipper of the central romantic pairing, my non-shipping meta posts got plenty of positive engagement!
It's amazing how willing shippers are to join you in a non-shipping related discussion as long as you don't start that discussion by shitting all over them!
Let me put that another way:
It's amazing how willing people are to learn about your interests and point of view if you don't open the conversation by shitting on other people's interests, and implying that they're mentally incapable of appreciating a subject from more than one perspective.


















