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I get that Widobrave is not as popular as some canon ships but is it really that unpopular? Didn't it just win a non-canon ship poll?

I've gotten a question like this before, and I feel like I really need to emphasize that any popularity you've seen around widobrave has been a fairly recent phenomenon. I wasn't there all the way at the beginning, but I've been in these ship trenches since, eh, about 2020. Back then, I remember the ship being unpopular enough that i felt uncomfortable main tagging widobrave posts. I have been blocked by otherwise nice people I got along with for shipping this. "widobrave" used to be in my bio so I didn't jump-scare anyone with Caleb and Veth ship content when it popped up on my blog, like--YES, historically this ship has been very unpopular. Numerically, certainly, in that there aren't many shippers, the tag is very slow, and the AO3 hasn't yet hit 300 in the FIVE years I've been in the community, but more than that it has been unpopular conceptually. There has always been a strong feeling within the fandom that these two are a familial unit, that Veth's interest in Caleb is strictly maternal (despite the.....*gestures vaguely* everything happening during the Aeor arc, not to mention Sam canonizing her romantic feelings for Caleb on both her second playlist and one very insane episode of Talks Machina) and that it was not right to interpret them romantically because of this. This was, and frankly still is, the prevailing, popular notion of their dynamic.

On the topic of the ship poll--it was SIGNIFICANT that widobrave won that. That is not only the first ship poll we have ever won, it is the first ship poll I think we've ever been included on. This was the second time that non-canon ship poll was run, widobrave was omitted from the first one like a year prior because it was m/f. When we first got polls, there was a time when there was a cr romantic ship poll, a cr platonic relationship poll, AND a queerplatonic poll including some cr dynamics running simultaneously and widobrave was omitted from ALL of them for being either too platonic to be romantic, or too romantic to be platonic, and honestly idk why it was not included on the queerplatonic poll, the creator chose to highlight Yasha and Molly instead. I'll never really understand that one. Like, the fact that people know the ship name today, acknowledge it's existence, and are willing to include it in things instead of just being kind of weirded out by it is new. Genuinely.

I'm excited that people aren't automatically looking at this ship as something weird or fringe or uncomfortable today. I am over the moon about that, I've wanted this ship to be more popularized for a long time and have, you know, been putting in the work trying to make that happen for like. five years. So seeing that progress is great, but also, yeah. It WAS that unpopular. I hope we can keep up this momentum, but yeah to keep the history of the ship alive: it's been both unpopular and somewhat controversial for a long time, hence why widobrave mainstays were so ecstatic over winning a silly ship poll and maybe get a little protective over keeping the wb tag (a slow-moving desert on a good day) a place for strictly ship content