#but then some fandom things get so ingrained as canon that people don't bother to question it and treat it as fact

[gamebunny-advance]

I Feel Like Explaining This A Bit (Scrapped)

No one was asking, but I’ve had it on my mind for a bit.

So, when I say I reject the 10/10 fanon names out of spite, that’s only half true. The spite part comes from my assertion that I refuse to let any fandom change how I choose to interpret the text. I don’t want to get caught up in that kind of nonsense. If you use 'em, and you like ‘em, that’s fine. I don’t have anything against you. This isn’t a “me vs. sheeple” kinda thing. I recognize the usefulness and utility of giving them names: it makes it easier to refer to them individually, and it’s a little more humanizing to call them by the fanon names rather than their hair colors, but that’s the other half of why I reject them: giving them individual names humanizes them.

Although I like some interpretations where 1010 are individuals (one of my own AUs revolves around that idea), part of their appeal to me is that they’re lifeless mass-produced robots. I just think that’s a more interesting theme to explore than just letting them be pretty boys at face value. Again, there’s nothing “wrong” with that, but it’s not what I like, so it’s not what I do.

#gbunny scraps #1010 desynchronized #nsr #kinda? it's tangentially related #of course whether it's irony or just how the fandom is #generally my most popular nsr posts are the 1010s standing pretty #like the malt shop series that i still want to finish #i don't mind stuff being cute for the sake of itself #but i like doing other things too #one time i saw someone post something along the lines of: #OMG the fanon names are real?! #when they discovered the nameplates in-game #and i'm just like #no the fandom names came from an interpretation of the name plates #it's stuff like that happening that i want to avoid #anything that a fandom does to keep the fans from thinking on their own i consider a negative #it's fine if you agree with the fandom consensus after you've given it some thought of your own #but then some fandom things get so ingrained as canon that people don't bother to question it and treat it as fact #this is a very small and insignificant example but this kinda stuff happens at the larger scale too

[ricanvvas]

Hello. I have noticed your very impassioned posts about shipping male friends in anime fandoms and am attempting to write a response in what I hope comes across as an understanding manner.

I am not here to attack you. I am not trying to call you homophobic. I will not be trying to convince you to ship anything you don't want to ship.

I do agree with you that fandom as a whole could benefit from more discussions about platonic relationships. Sometimes just seeing a lot of romantic shipping posts can get a bit annoying. Society as a whole could benefit from focusing less on romantic and sexual relationships. Platonic relationships are just as valid and can be just as important and deep as romantic relationships, if not more so.

However, I don't agree with how you seem to talk down to shippers. I've seen you say that people who ship characters who are best friends must not understand friendship. That is not a fair assumption to make. You don't know those people. You shouldn't make generalizations about their experiences. For example: I have 3 best friends I've known since high school who I would do anything for and be devastated to lose, and I ship Gojo and Geto. And I know full well that they will probably never be confirmed to be canonically in love, and I'm fine with that. You shouldn't be making assumptions about people based on their shipping preferences.

And again, I am NOT calling you homophobic, and that's not the point people tried to make when pointing out that the ships you are critiquing in those posts are almost entirely, if not all, mlm ships. I haven't seen you mention non-canonical wlw ships, like Nobara/Maki, or non-canonical m/f ships, like Gojo/Utahime or Yuji/Nobara. None of those are confirmed canon. I know there are only so many ships you can list or know about, but when you only ever mention mlm ships, it appears as though you are making a targeted attack. I am saying this because I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and believe that this is unintentional.

I've also seen you mention that you want to be a writer and how you would feel if people headcanoned your characters contrary to your intention. All I can say to that is that you cannot control how people will react to your writing and attempting to do so is futile. It may sound harsh, but it's true.

I can see that you have very strong opinions about this, but if you do care more about discussions about platonic male friendships than shipping discourse, then your time would be better spent making those discussions yourself and blocking the shipping tags. You aren't going to change anyone's minds with those posts. Sure, you'll attract people with similar opinions, but, as you've seen, you'll also attract the annoyance of people in related tags who didn't want to see posts like yours. For better or for worse, shipping is ingrained in the foundations of modern fandom going all the way back to the 60s with Trekkies writing fan fiction and making fan magazines to ship Spock and Kirk. It's something you'll have to either make peace with or ignore.

I'm not expecting you to reply to this. Honestly, I'll be surprised if you even bother to read the whole thing (I doubt I'd be happy getting a whole essay from some rando in my ask box lol). But if you do read the whole thing, just know that I say these things in the hopes that it will help you have a better relationship with fandom. You don't have to like all of it, and you don't even need a reason to dislike something. Fandom is about having fun, but I just can't imagine that this whole discourse is much fun for you.

Skimmed through your input, the respect is much appreciated.

But I would’ve really liked it if you didn’t bring up the being a writer part—I hope you realize that writers are writers for themselves and not for the satisfaction of others. Their imagination and their work. If somebody is twisting an author’s story and their characters, they have the right speak up and be upset because it belongs to them. Yes, it’s shared publicly, but nonetheless, they should be respected. I think it’s very ridiculous to try and create excuses for this.

A reminder of my main point; friendships should be left alone as friendships instead of being twisted.

I don’t care for headcanons or what ships one likes or whatnot. Trust me, I don’t have that much free time. You have your opinion. My problem is enforcing it onto others and this is an undeniable topic.

Saying these people probably don’t have strong friendships is an an unfair assumption from me, I’ll agree, but I’m not completely wrong for thinking so when they go berserk when I don’t agree with romantically or sexually shipping platonic friendships.

I was targeting specifics here, too. There are rarely any cases to the otherwise of this, but “MLM” has been fetishized immensely across anime fandoms, to the point that male friends are not allowed to stay male friends without being seen as a romantic or sexual partner which is where the toxicity starts. I hadn’t targeted “WLW” or regular male/female ships because they aren’t extremists in HUGE amount of numbers who will bash and shun you for not giving into their ideas. There is no dodging this fact—sure some of them are normal who accept their idea is not accepted fandom-wide and move on, but others will go as far as giving you death threats.

For example, I know an artist who ships Gojo and Utahime, and they got plenty of doxing death threats. It’s very common. When it’s a female and a male, suddenly nobody is entitled to their own opinion. This happens more often than you know.

In the same way, if you comment “they’re best friends” on a post where Gojo/Geto are shipped, they will come for you with ridiculous attacks and ridiculous claims of homophobia and I can test this any second to prove it. They have no sense of respect. They’re triggered by canon, so they should be the ones to find something to their liking. They don’t even watch for story, seriously. And I would like to kindly remind the obvious that people like me are preaching the givens from the author while people like them are preaching things they twisted in their head, so why are we the ones being attacked? We aren’t even the ones with opinions, we are the ones with factual givens.

It’s been barely two years since I became an anime fan and I thought the definition of fandom was to enjoy and speak about the show and author’s work all together—not twist it into something it isn’t and attack one another. If not, then I’m ashamed. I have never personally went up to somebody in the comments and said “fuck you” for shipping two male best friends but I’ve been told that several times for calling two male best friends, best friends.

And the thing about these animes is that they’re beautiful stories, they’re writings from an author portraying strong and emotional friendship between men, encouraging men to be more open and expressive and appreciate those they admire, because in reality they find it difficult to do so. It’s okay to feel angry if your friend left, it’s okay to cry if your friend hurt you in a way, it’s okay to grieve for years when your friend dies—but what does the “fandom” insensitively say? “They’re definitely gay and in love.” What’s the message people are sending when you only address males to romantic and sexual relationships?

Close friendships are damn strong. Stronger than one wants to believe.

What’s the point of watching something just to toss aside the story and contort characters that aren’t yours? That debunks almost any right to yell at those who don’t do what you do.

I’m not trying to change minds. It’s the other way around. They need to stop trying to change minds, and when one doesn’t buy it, they need to stop attacking childishly.

[offtorivendell]

I am a bit divided with this situation, on the one hand i understand and agree that things on the other side of the fandom should be respected and not hated, but shameless theft is exhausting, from the front aesthetics to canon stuff, now that wouldn't matter if the other side won't act like crap and always blame us they changed all the narratives, they always accuse us and I know that other blogs don't understand it, but when you are a little elriel who is just enjoying social networks you feel trapped and humiliated by all those people, I don't think the Elriels could do something as bad as what they have done to us.

I know you never get into these arguments but they happen a lot I think we can't always be good really one of the reasons Elriels always get trampled is because they prefer not to get into discussions.

Hi anon,

I've been in this particular fandom for almost two years now, and I've seen some shit I never thought people would or could do to each other be done in the name of defending fictional characters, so I understand the ingrained hurt. I really do. I've been targeted myself.

That being said, and not to sound trite, but two wrongs don't make a right, and bullying is NEVER the answer. I strongly encourage anyone who comes across anything that bothers them to take a deep breath, and simply ignore it.

#rant #fandom fuckery #otr anon #otr ask #we can all do better

[lampfaced]

I've seen a lot of stuff talking about cringe culture lately, but I don't really know what it is? Does it have to do with all the anti- stuff?

Ehhh… I’m sure someone could possibly tie it into anti- things but in my personal experience it doesn’t so much?

Cringe culture is basically the attitude of older fans in fandoms* taking content made by younger and/or newer fans and parading it around as laughable because of how awful it is and generally acting like they’re idiots and should be mocked for it. In my formative years on the internet it was extremely prevalent, and I’d see people reposting other fans’ personal purely-for-fun art and characters and act like the mere existence of it was the Worst Thing to happen and rip into why (short answer is they were fuckin’ cynical assholes with nothing better to do), and as a result so many people have these ingrained notions about carefully tailoring content to not be too out-of-character, too over-the-top, too unrealistic for the fandom universe, and all around making what should be a fun experience a stressful one to avoid the scorn of peers. It’s especially bad when it comes to OCs and canon/OC ships, since that would warrant cries of Mary-Sue and the creator of said OC being so pathetic that they had to invent a fake relationship with a not-real character because there’s no way anyone would like them IRL. OCs also frequently got called out as self-inserts even if they weren’t. 

*and even outside of fandoms, if you had certain qualities to your work (bright neon colors, goth outfits, wolf OCs, use of overly-dark-and-emotional-song-lyrics, less than perfect anatomy or color theory, etc.) you’d also get pulled up and publicly scorned because it was “soooo cringy and hilariously bad”.

To this day I still have those thoughts and feel like I need to keep most of my fan content to myself because of all I saw. When you’re that new to fandom and some of your first experiences is people treating your content (or content close to yours) like it’s not good enough and deserves to be laughed at? When there are entire pages and blogs dedicated to laughing at it? It hurts, and you start to feel like you really shouldn’t bother at all with anything. It’s stifling people in their formative creative stages. You need to be encouraged to explore and figure out which things do and don’t work and grow, and cringe culture does the exact opposite and instills this message of “if you don’t start out perfect, you’ll never be any good, so you should just quit now.”

But we’ve come so far since then. I have never seen so much reader-insert content before, let alone see it encouraged by such huge amounts of the fandoms I’m involved in. I’ve never seen such encouragement for people to make whatever characters they want, self-inserts included, and let them have whatever kinds of relationships with whoever they damn well please. It all should be about having fun. 

Cringe culture is still present, but it’s taken a back seat and become so much easier to block out. It’s a breath of fresh air and I wish it had been this way from the start. 

(Note - you may come across things by artists online that do make you stop and laugh or shake your head. As long as you aren’t posting that to a public page and encouraging others online to join in, you’re fine. My friend group has a habit of mentioning or “sharing with the class” things we’ve found in our private Discord chat [which is pretty rare in itself], but we will never go out of our way to harass said people or post it publicly in a ridiculing manner. That’s where cringe culture begins.)

#feel free to ignore #can you tell I am passionate about this kinda thing #I'm very bitter about this mindset I had forced upon me thanks to cringe culture #Anonymous