#fandom culture

[niyarest]

tumblr could learn something from Elmo

[localsapphicidiot]

when just giving them a happy expression seems ooc

[sekamehu]

Man can't say i entirely hate the contemporary fandom convention of combining character names or coming up with a wholly unique term to get a name for a ship. It can be fun. It can feel like a secret club handshake. But. ☝️It IS obtuse and annoyoing and confusing, ESPECIALLY if you arrive to a fandom "late", aka after the initial hype dies down and you're not wired to the mainframe to witness the widely used shipping terms be born.

It's especially infuriating if a ship has SEVERAL popularly used terms attached to it, but there's also like, a whole culture of nuance to those terms that are just not intuitive or apparent if you haven't been lurking since the beginnig. Like no you see, THIS term is for the platonic interpretation ONLY and THAT term is for the nsfw and THAT ONE is only used in the context of a specific au. And you'll get yelled at if you use the terms "wrong" even tho obviously there's no central authority to regulate shipping terms LMAO. You understand why this can cause a headache and make getting into a new thing more difficult if you weren't there from the start.

So i often find myself wishing fandom as a whole just went back to using a generic name/name or name x name format. Actually we don't even have to drop the combo name format! We could, god forbid, use both as a failsafe maybe?

"But it's easy enough to find the popular ship name if you just scroll long enough, it's actually not difficult at all and you are just stupid"

Yeah but what if there was a universal and intuitive naming system from the start. Yknow. Like we used to have. It would also make it easier for blacklisting purposes, so that you don't have to figure out what to mute if you really can't stand seeing Those Two Characters together! You could just slap name x name in your muted tags and call it a day.

[easterneuropeangirliedotcom]

This is such a midnight thought, but good ships really are like soft serve ice cream: there are 2 flavors + mixed:

flavor 1: this relationship is the worst thing that happened to at least one of them (abuse, abuse, abuse, toxic enough to be power-plant waste)

flavor 2: literally everything about their lives is the worst except this relationship, they suffer together and additionally suffer from suffering together because either doesn't want the other to suffer♡

mixed: they go through some tough shit together, but are waveringly awful to each other

[vflamrrrph]

I just realized Fandom is fan plus kingdom! Holy smokes! :P

[evenknight1984]

The question today is:

How many torment nexuses (nexi?) can I shove The Characters into at the *same time*?

[ineffablehaemogoblin]

passing by fanart of your first ship when you don't actively ship it anymore feels like sending a birthday message to an old friend you lost touch with