If weāre bringing back the citrus scale can we also bring back terms like notp and crack ship instead of sending people death threats for ships you donāt like
Dear Maude, let squick be a commonly used and accepted term in fandom again.
I hope you donāt mind me adding onto this post, but I actually firsthand witnessed somewhat the fading away ofĀ ācrack shipsā within my friend circle, and fandom as a whole, and I actually think we can somewhat trace that phenomena to this current fandom climate now.
Because see nowadays, ships are largely about validity. They need to have canon evidence, and often times saidĀ āevidenceā is used as proof the ship is good representation and also used as an argument against other ships, (i.e. Kirishima is gay coded so itās homophobic to ship him with women) and as suchĀ ācrack shipsā barely exist, or when they do exist people are confused. āWhy would you ship that? It has no endgame? Itāll never be canon? Isnāt the whole point of a ship for the healthy gay relationship to become canon so we can have representation? Isnāt that why Klance should be canon but Sheith canāt be, because clearly Sheith is homophobic pedo incest garbage, but Klance would be wholesome?ā is a bit of an attitude you tend to see lately. This idea that anything you ship represents what you desire to see in the canon, and what you desire irl, and says something about your moral values as a person.
And now I canāt help but thinking back to oh, about 2014 or so, when Free! was airing. It was RinHaru vs MakoHaru. Bullshit was happening everywhere. (It has been happening earlier, but 2014 was when I really remember the dumb,Ā āMakoto is abusiveā arguments popping up, among other things.) And then, you had this small faction of creators who werenāt on those ships, or if they were, they also multishipped one small, weirdĀ ācrack pairingā: SouMako. They had never talked. You could assume they had talked or interacted, but I think it wasnāt until like the watergun fight special that they actually talked? They were like, two satellites orbiting two characters who had interacted a lot, but they themselves had never actually shown any acknowledgement of each otherās existence.Ā
Either way, people made some hotass fanart of them, and some fic, and personally while I didnāt ship it hard, I certainly enjoyed it. I wasnāt opposed to it at all.
But I bit that down because my friends were likeĀ ālmao why do they even ship it? Theyāve never talked! Thereās like no canon for it! Theyāre so delusional!ā as though SouMako shippers somehow thought the two of them were gonna just magically propose to each other in the finale episode or something.
So I never really told those friends I liked it or found it hot, and even joined them in making fun of it, because it was 5 years ago and I was a lot more timid. Itās water under the bridge now. But now, seeing how fandom has continued, I canāt help but feel that was the hatching of a small egg that turned out to be housing a basilisk, in some ways. When we began to view shippers ofĀ ācrackā as stupid or delusional, we began in some ways to strip shipping of itās nonsense fun. Shipping became more and more some sort of desire and push to have your OTP canon, because it was better than the other OTP.
And nowĀ ācrackā barely exists at all in a lot of places, because why would you ship something with no chance? Thatās the attitude and feeling I get from a lot of people. And I think the moment we began to slowly lose that sense of wacky, stupid fun, that sense ofĀ ābecause I want to see two huge boys touch tiddies, thatās whyā we lost a little bit of the more lighthearted shipping sphere.
Now we have this mess.
God Iām not super into crackfic personally but I LOVE crackships. Itās so much fun to take characters that have never interacted and put them in a situation where theyād work, to see what kind of couple theyād make. Itās like rarepairs, but more carefree and silly!
Please letās bring light-hearted fun back to fandom.
