I am about to say something that will probably put a giant fucking target above my head, but against all good reason - I fucking hate this whole 'gaylor' trend.
let's get the facts out right now: 1. I am a non-binary dyke, in case anyone wants to play the queerphobia card 2. I've been a fan of taylor since fearless first came out when I was 11 (before some of you had probably even reached double digits) and 3. yes, this is inspired by the recent ny times article.
honestly I'm usually too much of an old man to be interested in a lot of celebrity news, even for artists I like, so I generally stay clear, but this came through my morning news feed via, bizarrely, ctv (fucking ctv thought this was NEWSWORTHY enough to put on their site which is bonkers, and if you're not canadian, ctv is a nationwide news broadcaster). and it made me livid - because this has now far beyond stretched the line of acceptable.
fucking ny times. this would be perfectly expected for rags like daily soap dish or enquirer or some other bullshit circus, where they spend all their damn days crafting celebrity stories of who's secretly pregnant and who's getting an underground divorce. ny times, in case they fucking forgot, do still have some sort of legitimacy to their name, but I guess they decided they'd run out of enough stories to now outsource to conspiracy theory level fans who's parasocial relationships with their favourite celebrity reaches deity levels. dear ny times, there is actual news still happening in the world in case you're out of ideas.
putting aside this bizarre so called attempt at 'journalism', onto the second point - which is that this. is. gross!!
I've had issues with the whole 'gaylor' thing since the start. we, as a fanbase, have seen taylor ripped apart and broken down by this intrusive and harmful celeb culture that analyzes her every move for who she might be seeing, who's she interested in, which male friend could be a potential partner, etc etc, over and over, and how it's been both damaging to her and her love life as she's said. fans have even criticized the media for it and said to leave taylor alone! but now, all of a sudden, just bc you're a fan or bc you're queer or both, it's okay??? it fucking boggles my mind when so-called 'gaylor' fans gush about her and her work, always at her defense and say they care about her, and then do this 180 where they partake in a super invasive thing at her expense and don't even blink an eye??? making your own guesses by yourself is one thing, but creating a whole plot around the fact of taylor secretly being gay and pushing her to come out is a whole other ballroom of nuts.
let's get this out onto the table - she hates this. she doesn't like that you guys do this. she's already stated so and you all keep doing it. just because you're replacing the male character with a female one doesn't mean shit when you're doing the same harmful activity, just switching pronouns. you're not subverting anything, in case any of you need to be told. as a queer fan, this is embarrassing.
it is such a gross over-stepping of someone's private life, and now that the goddamn ny times have posted it about it, makes the behavior even more legitimized!! while nothing excuses homophobia, if taylor eventually starts distancing herself from anything and all things queer and starts pushing back, I don't want to see any fucking one of you crying bc it'd be your own damn fault.
thirdly, even if, even if, taylor was gay - it's none of our fucking business!!!
it's like all you up and completely blanked out what it was like to be closeted. if you're staying closeted, it's because you're not ready to come out!!! you don't want to or it's not a good time for you or whatever there doesn't need to be any reason for why someone doesn't want to say they're gay!!! it's hard enough trying to make that choice, and then you have the rest of the whole world posting ''''articles'''' about your sexuality, putting a million pairs of eyes on you - fuck, that'd send me back ten more layers into the closet if it happened to me! it's super rude not only to discuss someone's sexuality like it's the weather over brunch, but even worse to demand they say something about it! this is queer etiquette 101 people - you don't run around gossiping about someone's sexuality bc whatever that person decides they doesn't need your fucking input!!
basically if I could spray you all with a spray bottle I fucking would right now - nobody needs your input on their sexuality, celebrity or non! all this does is perpetrate harmful celebrity gossip that just hurts the artist you claim to love so much. taylor is a real person with a real life, she's not a storybook character to speculate over! please, I am begging you, stop this! go outside! touch grass!!
and at the risking of being meme-ified, leave taylor alone!
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Honestly, imodna would be a good ship if the shippers/stans weren’t so damn insufferable. I also hate how they act like they are already canon and you can’t ship Imogen or Laudna with anyone else in the group. People got so mad when the conversation in the dust storm happened with Ashton and Laudna because people thought they were flirting. Or when on the first episode of 4 sided dive Marisha asked Robbie if Dorian’s crush was on Imogen, people got so mad at that! I also hate that they call them lesbians when THEY HAVE BOTH EXPRESSED HAVING FEELINGS FOR BOYS! Why can’t they be bi? Or Pan? I also hate how people read into Laura’s micro expressions/ movements, like last episode with the whole leaning shit “oh what was that lean Laura?!! Imogen wanted to kiss Laudna because look at Laura’s lean!” I dread the day that Imogen or Laudna fall in love with someone that’s not each other(especially if that person is a man.) because Marisha and Laura will harassed and hated because they didn’t give the people what they wanted.
oof. that's some frustration you really needed to vent, nonnie, and honestly i get it. full disclosure—my mutuals who are into imo/dna are all lovely, and none of them engage in this behavior. if imo/dna becomes canon, i'll be happy for (and potentially even happy with) fans like that. but enough shippers are doing things like this that it's becoming more and more of a source of frustration and friction as the campaign goes on.
i think a lot of fandom—in general, not just cr—still doesn't want to acknowledge that at the end of the day, they are looking at things like shippers, with a particular kind of confirmation bias. it doesn't make them necessarily wrong or right, but as easy as it can be to get swept up in it, i think it's important to take a step back every once in awhile and re-evaluate.
now admittedly, generally speaking, it takes a lot for me to get really invested in a ship; i usually only have one or two per fandom, even fandoms with tons of characters. i'm generally pretty passive about most ships if it's not the otp; like, vax/leth and pike/lan, for example, didn't need to be romantic endgame for me to enjoy CR1 (and honestly might have been more interesting to me if they hadn't), but perc/ahlia absolutely made the show for me and i honestly think them being together actively strengthens the narrative as a whole.
i say all that to say that for the most part, i very much consider myself to be along for the ride with respect to most relationships in most fandoms. if such-and-such pairing happens, great; if they don't, okay. and with CR in particular, it's such a long-form medium that i know going in that any romance is going to take a while, and most of them probably won't just reach out and grab me.
and as such, it absolutely baffles me to have seen shippers insisting, from the moment the characters first appeared in episode 1, that not only are imogen and laudna canon endgame, they're basically already together and just haven't admitted it yet. i feel this way about dor/ym and callow/moore as well—i saw a post making the rounds that claimed that all three of those ships are "not canon YET but let's be real" and like...why would you set yourself up for disappointment like that? because yeah! all three of those ships could be endgame! but they could also not be endgame. we're less than 40 episodes into a campaign that'll probably run well into the 100s.
i also fully agree with you re: the microexpressions and the cherrypicking, and i feel like a microcosm of this issue can be found in a conversation imogen has with orym early on—shippers latched onto the fact that imogen compares laudna's thoughts to music, something that finally brought her peace after the chaos of the world around her, and completely ignored the part immediately after where imogen says that the rest of the party also feels like that to her. i didn't even know that imogen said that about the whole party until i watched the episode, and to me it's an example of how shippers tend to warp canon interactions to suit a particular narrative in such a way that they become almost entirely divorced from their context.
and from the outside looking in, what confuses me about this sort of thing is like...didn't y'all already go through this? because if my understanding is correct, c2 ship discourse was full to the brim with beau/jes and wido/jest fans dissecting "laura's microexpressions" to prove that jester was for sure in love with our fave, really you guys we swear...and then not only was that not true, but jester also didn't even know about beau or caleb's feelings to acknowledge them at all, and from the actual words that came out of laura's mouth in various OOC moments like on TM, laura just...really really wanted to romance her husband's character in her dnd game and like, that's it. there was never going to be another romantic option for jester as long as fjord was on the table, and that was something that shippers always should have been taking into account.
laudna and imogen are canonically deeply important to each other. they love and appreciate each other very much. that love and appreciation could turn into a lovely romance with a great dynamic, and i certainly don't blame people for being invested in it. but it also could not be romantic endgame, and they remain friends or even get with other people. and as you said, fandom can and will turn nasty about their ships being sunk; we've already seen it happen. there's a certain smug, entitled undercurrent from that particular corner that i have very little patience with, and while i think there's something to be said for deciding to enjoy things in spite of the fandom and just be a cranky old curmudgeon shooing the wank out with a broom, i also understand the response of just "...aight, imma head out".
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