If we’re 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 don’t like
Dear Maude, let squick be a commonly used and accepted term in fandom again.
I hope you don’t mind me adding onto this post, but I actually firsthand witnessed somewhat the fading away of “crack ships” 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 said “evidence” 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 it’s homophobic to ship him with women) and as such “crack ships” barely exist, or when they do exist people are confused. “Why would you ship that? It has no endgame? It’ll never be canon? Isn’t the whole point of a ship for the healthy gay relationship to become canon so we can have representation? Isn’t that why Klance should be canon but Sheith can’t be, because clearly Sheith is homophobic pedo incest garbage, but Klance would be wholesome?” 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 can’t 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, “Makoto is abusive” arguments popping up, among other things.) And then, you had this small faction of creators who weren’t on those ships, or if they were, they also multishipped one small, weird “crack pairing”: SouMako. They had never talked. You could assume they had talked or interacted, but I think it wasn’t 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 other’s existence.
Either way, people made some hotass fanart of them, and some fic, and personally while I didn’t ship it hard, I certainly enjoyed it. I wasn’t opposed to it at all.
But I bit that down because my friends were like “lmao why do they even ship it? They’ve never talked! There’s like no canon for it! They’re so delusional!” 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. It’s water under the bridge now. But now, seeing how fandom has continued, I can’t 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 of “crack” as stupid or delusional, we began in some ways to strip shipping of it’s 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 now “crack” barely exists at all in a lot of places, because why would you ship something with no chance? That’s 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 of “because I want to see two huge boys touch tiddies, that’s why” we lost a little bit of the more lighthearted shipping sphere.
Now we have this mess.
God I’m not super into crackfic personally but I LOVE crackships. It’s so much fun to take characters that have never interacted and put them in a situation where they’d work, to see what kind of couple they’d make. It’s like rarepairs, but more carefree and silly!
Please let’s bring light-hearted fun back to fandom.
I think the dying out of crackships also has to do with being afraid of being accused of “fetishizing”. You can’t ship two hot guys together just because it’d be hot, or fun. You have to ship them for (100% wholesome, pure) reasons, it has to be “good rep” because Shipping is super serious politics now and not a fun hobby. Everything you make has to be unproblematic, otherwise you’re a dirty “fetishizer” (and also probably a pedophile) and you’re the reason the world is terrible.
