#'oh yeah in this us v. them argument the 'us' is ofc us gay people [m/m and f/f shippers together]'

[hua-fei-hua]

as soon as it's summer and i'm medicated again i NEED to write a series of essays covering my experiences switching from the broader social sphere of fandom which predominantly ships m/f ships to the social sphere of fandom which predominantly ships m/m, because i feel like a lot of what we say about the other social sphere is simultaneously true and false at the same time, and i've literally never seen anyone talk about it ever

#the m/m shipping sphere is different from the f/f shipping sphere but both are honestly like lowkey disdained by the m/f sphere #well okay the f/f sphere is lowkey disdained while the m/m sphere is like highkey disdained #but at the same time It Is True that the m/f shippers can get pretty bullied by people pushing their m/m ships!!!! #so it's like a historical beef; esp when considering the fact that a lot of the times our tastes in ships can be pretty informed #by the ships our friends/fan community members are getting into in regards to new canons #i wouldn't be surprised if it was common for some nebulous hypothetical concept of an m/m shipper to be like #'oh yeah in this us v. them argument the 'us' is ofc us gay people [m/m and f/f shippers together]' #but i do think it is worth drawing a distinction btwn the m/m shipping spheres n the f/f shipping spheres #many m/m shippers like f/f ships passively; i don't see a lot of f/f shippers get super actively engaged in m/m pairs even on the side #as a result their results on ao3 feel more likely to have a significant % of genuine slush #like in my experience looking through m/m ship tags it's full of slush (referring to fic that's just not to my tastes or poorly written) #but for the most part if a ship is tagged it at least plays a role or shows up in a fic #but if i'm looking for a f/f ship on ao3 god fucking heaven help me; i have to filter so hard it cuts out >50% of the results #and when looking for m/f ships back in the day it was usually shit like 'one-sided' or 'past' or just incredibly minor passing mentions #like complain all you want abt having to go through a massive slush pile of an ao3 tag listing for an m/m ship #but at least we don't have to literally just come together as a community to make an ao3 collection #just to have a repository of fics that are just ABOUT the pairing tagged w/o being forced to grovel through slush like that #like not even 'these are the best fics for this pairing' just 'these are the fics for this pairing' #also. my hot take. is that a lot of the times people who ship *exclusively* m/f ships Are being kinda homophobic to the m/m shippers #like at the very least the way they talk abt the ships or argue with the shippers sounds like it draws on homophobic rhetoric #like the m/f shippers themselves are not necessarily homophobic people. but. like. it's nuanced. there are trends. i have many thoughts #(meanwhile the gen social sphere exists beyond most of my own experiences but god do i feel bad for them when searching through ao3) #also like. this should go w/o saying. but i'm not trying to categorize individual people into 'belonging' to any one specific sphere #but we as people just generally have our fave spots to hang out n those spots have distinctive traits n flavors #n while we're in there commonalities in the people chilling there start to emerge #if we go to a different spot bc we like being there then different things will be had in common #we're looking at strength of overlap here; not individuals #花話 #anyway obviously i have many many thoughts on this subject. this is bc it fascinates me greatly bc i don't see it talked abt #bc for the most part you don't really see people into m/m who used to really like m/f ships the way i did