#on shipcourse

[shadowfae]

Not trying to be rude, I am just a little confused. “People were already afraid of sharks when Jaws came out. It amplified that fear and fed back into reality.” So why would fiction romanticizing pedophilia not amplify and feed back into reality? Also, have you read Lolita? Again, I just need clarification because I’m trying to genuinely learn the arguments so I can find where I stand

I have. And it was a horror story with an unreliable narrator. That was also how it was intended, and I’m a little surprised not everyone got that. You know what it did? Take pedophilia from something never talked about and taboo and brought it into the international limelight to be studied and talked about, because suddenly pedophiles could be well-liked priests and good people everyone likes, not just always some scummy guy in an alleyway. It was monumental to help victims, because suddenly they could be believed. No big “oh okay pedophiles and giving children horrific trauma is okay now this book I read said so :)” happened whatsoever.

As for why Jaws did what fanfiction doesn’t: people already were afraid of sharks, and my fics that don’t top two hundred views and ten kudos aren’t being seen in theatres worldwide, and seriously dude how many people do you think are secretly okay with pedophilia in real life???

If fanfiction was going to normalize anything, Game of Thrones would have normalized it. And if you won’t go after GRRM, don’t go after some queer writer who doesn’t get paid to deal with your shit. GoT has incest and rape and pedophilia up the wazoo, and none of it’s tagged, and yet somehow people aren’t falling over themselves thinking dragons are real and it’s okay to fuck your sister.

Almost like fiction isn’t likely to change your mind unless you were already open to it, and it’s far more likely to validate what you already know, and if you’re reading fanfiction looking for a moral to the story... there is something wrong with you, dude, and I the writer am not obligated nor going to help you work through that. Maybe try an English class for third graders that makes you do basic literary analysis. And that probably sounds harsh, but it has to be. I do more work than fucking Game of Thrones to ensure people don’t get hurt if they want to read my fic, and I get called one of the worst things to ever fucking accuse someone of in return. You know if you call someone a pedophile in real life, they usually lose their job? You know that sort of accusation ruins people’s lives? You remember that? You haven’t forgotten it and reduced the meaning of a horrific child predator and abuser to someone you don’t like on the internet?

I do nothing the average YA author doesn’t do. I am going nowhere that hasn’t been gone before by people far more mainstream. And nobody has a problem with them, so if you’re gonna have an issue just with me and not them because I write fanfiction... Your misogyny and queerphobia is showing. Misogyny, because what is fanfiction if not women’s writing (and I acknowledge that as a man); and queerphobia, because this argument LITERALLY ONLY HAPPENS against queer writers. You’d forgive whatever show by and involving white men of all their sins, of course they can’t be better, but shred every queer thing to bits if it isn’t perfect. Dream Daddy, Thomas Sanders, Steven Universe, you fucking name it - it’s all Problematic and Secretly Pedophilia and Secretly Fascist Propoganda because it’s queer and not picture perfect with a moral for babies.

I’m not mad at you personally, anon, but there’s no other way to demonstrate how fucking asinine this entire thing is. If someone’s looking through my fic for a moral of the story that can be applied to real life: get lost and go read a book for five year olds. I’m not writing for you.

[shadowfae]

I think what really gets me with antishippers is that you can write the most fucked up violent stuff and people don't tend to give a damn (I mean there's a few people sure but not as many) but you draw a couple with a height difference you can get sent death threats.

I also don't really understand how there can be antishippers in kin spaces given how, uh, problematic, people's timelines can get but apparently here we are.

I mean, the last antishipper I saw in the tags was all "how can all the popular fictionkin be proshippers it literally affects them :(((" like bro. Bro. I can deal with doubles (lmao if they EXISTED--), I can deal with someone going 'hee hee funny trauma on fictional character'. It's not about me. (They did say they didn't want folks arguing with them, so I blocked and moved on, but maaaan I wish I'd made an example of them to explain this shit.)

Honestly, I wish we had a good space for fictionkin and just shootin' the shit about being godawful problematic, South has some fun stories folks would appreciate. The man is simply unapologetic. But alas, I don't know of any.

But you do have to remember: most antishippers also happen to be KFF, because they genuinely don't believe it's real, and they'll also shit on you for having exotrauma or, because you're serious 'kin, are somehow faking DID or psychosis somehow.

It's sure something.

[shadowfae]

I kinda had a small revelation. Antis are people who base their community on changing the definition of words to suit their needs (from fujoshi to all the time p*edophilia gets used wrong). Kff are also people who base their community on changing the definition of words (kin). No wonder there is such an overlap

It's similar logic, but I don't think they're based in the same stuff: KFF do not know nor care what words mean, they just go for what's trendy. Antis do it as part of their godawful agenda to hurt people. KFF are ignorant and malicious only when you try to get them to stop being ignorant, antis are actively malicious all the time.

But one would be attractive to the other, when they do intersect.

[shadowfae]

Have a bit of an odd question that I'm curious if you have insight into. The other reason I don't want to get involved in the plural community further is that pretty much every endogenic system I& have met have been quite vocal antis. Do you have any idea why that is? I can see why traumagenic systems would be more susceptible to falling into the that mindset, but why the endos? Has soulbonding damaged their objectivity? I can see how that could happen, one of my headmates and all of my sister's

are versions of characters that entered our minds after getting fucked over royally and permanently by their sources, but you don't see either of us our our headmates baying for censorship :/

Mmmmm, I can kind of see it? I mean, I don't pretend to fully understand antishippers, there's a lot of reasons why someone would become one, and they're all flawed logic if only slightly understandable.

It reminds me of that post of someone asking why all the big fictionkin are proship considering all the stories are real to us (tl;dr because the big fictionkin are adults, and had it drilled into us that we do not belong anywhere near fandom, and also the stories are vague legends and mean very little about what actually happened to us), and that's probably true for systems of all kinds as well?

I don't go into system spaces often, which is to say I go in them not at all. I know other systems through 'kin spaces or finding them in the wild. So I really don't know the big narratives on how fandom and system spaces intersect and interact.

Now, Al's awake and he does want to point out that his source has a very rose-tinted (he ignored the accidental pun entirely) view on what happened. He's the third youngest Gold Saint in his garrison, and yet he had the longest tenure out of any of them preceding the Holy War. He was a child soldier, in every way, and Saint Seiya absolutely downplays that. So his view on the matter is very much that Saint Seiya as a work of fiction downplayed literally everything that happened, and if someone wants to write a version of it that's darker than canon, they're only going to be depicting history and the Saints' experiences more accurately - or more respectfully - than canon ever did or tried to do, so he's fine with it so long as he doesn't have to deal with it. Which is entirely understandable, he dislikes having to focus on the trauma when it isn't his idea.

And it probably goes both ways? I feel new soulbonders - and this is hugely a damn guess based on my own experiences - could be very protective of the sources of their headmates specifically because it happened, so they're mistakenly thinking that the source belongs to them, and only what they say can go. I know when I was young it used to drive me into a visceral, incandescent rage when someone knew my headcanons and then did something different. I can assume when it's real to you, someone else deliberately (or accidentally) getting it wrong can be a bit irksome.

But that doesn't give them the right to be antishippers and harass people over it. It's fine to not like it. We don't like a whole lot of things. But it's not fair to give others grief over what they're doing on the other side of the sandbox. It ain't your damn issue, go move to your own part of the sandbox and get out of their splash radius.

Kinda wish that was a more common sentiment, but with new fandom poisoning literally all metaphysical spaces that have any chance of brushing up against it, I'm not very surprised by it.

[shadowfae]

Oh god you were there for the just-antithings shit? I know it's ancient history now but it still makes my blood pressure spike a little to think about. Some people have never had to deal with the horrors of actual hate groups and it shows

I'm faintly baffled because I think you and I are not talking about the same thing. I dislike the blog just-anti-things because the mods are very KFF and think otherkin are just overly serious gatekeepers. (The fact that what they did to our terms is literally what antis do to the word 'fujoshi' is a fact I have unfortunately not had the chance to throw in their face.)

As for hate groups, I haven't a clue what you're talking about, and probably don't want to know. Fandom is better when it has jack to do with actual politics.

[shadowfae]

Okiii so I need help and I’m shy and so I’m using anon XD but basically I’m trying to explain to someone that judging someone as a person for what they ship is wrong bc there’s a difference between fic and real and I’m really not good at wording it but I know you’ve spoken on this before and maybe you could help? If not just ignore!!

The person whose blog you should be marathoning is @/fiction-is-not-reality2, every argument in shipcourse that you could possibly have is down in there somewhere. I get being on anon for this one, I fully expect after answering this at least one person to suicide bait me on anon because they're a coward. It's a good thing I don't let South bat at the discourse, he'd show colours as the terrible person he is. :p

But basically, "ship" does not mean "relationship I ideally want to have". It literally is just shorthand for "a relationship dynamic I find interesting". You get crackships, the pairings you explore because it's funny as hell (from two characters who probably don't go well together to Benedict Cumberbatch/Sonic), you get your OTP (one true pairing) that you only wanna see in domestic fluff, you get your angsty as hell star-crossed lovers, you get your hatefucks, you get whatever the hell Homestuck is on, sometimes you get a man and his age-dropped father committing kinky incest, literally it's just whatever you find interesting.

Fiction is good. Fiction is great, and messing around with it is pretty fun. Because it's safe, for the most part, because nobody's getting hurt and you're holding things at arm's length a little more. Because sometimes fiction is how you deal, and sometimes fiction is the creative world to the survival world of reality.

It's not that fiction isn't reality and exists in the vacuum. It's not that fiction is reality and matches 1:1. It's that fiction amplifies reality. It can create a bit of a loop, where an undercurrent of unspoken ideas exists in reality, gets put into the spotlight in fiction, and then is talked about in reality a lot more.

People were already afraid of sharks when Jaws came out. It amplified that fear and fed back into reality. But when Fifty Shades came out, there was a suddenly mainstream dialogue about kink and BDSM and how to do it safely. Hell, when Lolita came out, pedophilia went from "that thing we don't talk about that you send your pedophilic son to the church to be cured for and then he becomes one of those priests and nobody believes his victims because you sent him to church to be cured" to "shit, let's talk about this on an international level, because if that's what they're like for real then we need to deal with this."

Lolita's a horror story with an incredibly-well-written unreliable narrator. You're supposed to be taken in by his words, pause, and realize how horrific the whole thing is. That was the point, and tbh, I'm reasonably sure it did miles of good for bringing that into the spotlight so victims could be believed and then helped to recover, and to stop their aggressors from getting away with it.

Fiction amplifies reality, good and bad. And really, I'm gonna trust a fic that has 'racism' labeled as a tag (because that shows flat-out that the author knew it has racist elements, and was nice enough to warn you about it) over the one that isn't, because the author doesn't know, doesn't care, or wants you to not realize it's racist.

If someone says they ship something, it just means they find it interesting as a dynamic. Doesn't mean they think it's the one perfect relationship everyone should aspire to, and if they do say that outright, I'm gonna ask what they're selling. People have morbid curiosity and all sorts of reasons why they like things. It's not any of your business to ask, although some will tell you why outright if they want to.

So it doesn't matter. It really, really doesn't. If you wouldn't judge someone for liking gory horror films, why the fuck would you judge them for their taste in fictional relationship tropes? Because it's the same thing. It really is.

[shadowfae]

Some clarification of where I was coming from with that- Beyond the grossness of "scary foreign word I don't understand for scary foreign people" in fujoshi discourse, I've seen TERFs use the "fujoshi" bogeyman to paint transmasc people and AFAB nonbinaries that enjoy queer content as evil straight fetishisers and porn addicts. With that and the fearmongering about sex and the despoiling of the purity of womanhood inherent in purity wank, anti + "fujoshis" panic smacks either of a radfem or much

more likely, a total idiot that hates the big scary words the radfems on Tumblr told them to without an ounce of critical thinking applied. I block both.

You’re making me do this thing where I answer things on mobile at work, so if you were hoping for a nice long essay, No. :p

But more or less. It’s racist in the first damn place, and then it’s also incredibly misogynistic and transandrophobic. Fujoshi means rotten woman, as it “ew the girls like that gay shit they’re ruined for marriage, they’re rotten trash” and they reclaimed it by going “Rotten trash girls, lets all sit together and talk about queerness and celebrate the kinds of love we’re not allowed to talk about!” (This is simplifying it quite a bit, but that’s the gist of it.)

Fujoshi are overwhelmingly queer. And really, how many people you know went through that cringey “xDDD such a seme” phase ended up being queer themselves? You usually only need to tell them once not to treat real people that way and they learn, but it’s a genuine and common step of the queer discovery process. We don’t get born knowing we’re queer, and to say it’s a perfectly respectable to straight people journey is a flat out queerphobic lie.

Terfs love dividing and conquering, and getting everyone to think it was about ~*~protecting mlm~*~ (while being ragingly homophobic) was a move I’d envy if I wasn’t a bisexual fucking trans man. There’s a reason I have fudanshi in my carrd and fandom bios, and it’s because I respect the women who taught me about politics and chronic disability and queer theory and respecting those around me. I found the fujoshi community and it sure got me here and I will honour my roots.

And I will support even the straight fujoshi! Because they’re in a very queer space, and they know it, and we fucking need allies! We need people listening and helping and not drinking the fucking terf koolaid! It’s not about what they like to see in fiction or get their rocks off to, I don’t care. It’s about respecting the people around you, and if they’re willing to put that in, I will meet them halfway. I’m not going to be an exclusionary ass that way, it does nobody any favours.

Anti-fujoshi folks are at the very least racist, because they always think fujoshi means something it doesn’t; always misogynistic, because women don’t get to have sexual autonomy apparently; and almost always transandrophobic, because we’re just evil secret straight women pretending to be men. I block them on sight. You respect where I came from and the women who taught me, or you don’t respect me.

Simple as that.

[shadowfae]

Why do you think murder more of a normalized thing as a crime depicted in media than sexual crimes?

Because Puritans began America and they say “sex icky” and radfems on tumblr ensured half the teenagers nowadays still agree with that. I remember when people thought video games meant folks were gonna go into evil Satanic sex cults. I did talks in fourth grade for assignments about the studies that proved that wrong.

It was easy to see that “sex icky fanfic bad” was absolute nonsense after that, but some of us didn’t get the memo I guess.