#though if this gains any traction I don't want to see any wars in the notes

[messiambrandybuck]

okay I don't know if any of my followers have watched avatar the way of water, but I'm gonna go on a rant about a common take on one of the characters and why I disagree with it: so, spoilers up ahead!

Alrighty. Spider is commonly hated and criticized within the fandom, mostly for the fact that he spent so much time with Quaritch, and saved his life at the end of the movie. But I personally do not understand why people are so angry at his character- it's not a simple situation that can be put in black/white, and let me explain why.

Spider grew up among the Na'vi and the scientists that stayed on Pandora. He had always known Quaritch was his father, and what he did, which I think heavily influenced how closely he clung onto the Sully children instead of the scientists he lived with. However, despite being around the family for what I assume to be the majority of his life, you never see him have an actual relationship with Neytiri and Jake- despite them quite possibly being the only people he would've considered as his parental figures. And I wonder why? /s

It's said right at the beginning that Neytiri always considered him one of the Sky People, and that she wants him with his own kind. It would be no surprise to me that him being Quaritch's son made her see him in bad light, therefore making her biased against him. He genuinely feared being seen by her when during her frenzy, meaning he knew deep down she'd hurt him. And that's proven later, with no hesitation in her eyes as she promises she'll kill Spider if Quaritch didn't let go of Kiri. And once he's served his purpose, she tosses him aside without a second thought. And who were the ones who cared for him in that situation? Quaritch and the children. Even if Spider wanted Neytiri to be a mother figure, she would've never let him.

Now, Jake may be fond of him, and never actively treats him badly, but he admits that he sees Spider as a stray. Like that cat that always pops up and plays with the kids. There are almost no interactions between them and none of them are personal- it's always an external situation that makes them interact with each other, though they do so without complaint. The only time you see Jake being affectionate with Spider is when he takes him as a trade-off for Neteyam. "A son for a son". He doesn't see him as a son, he sees him as a replacement. Which to me, personally, sits in all the wrong ways.

Now, Spider could've found a parental figure among the other humans he lived with, but with his desire to be Na'vi, I don't think he would've. He's always shown with the Sullys, the only time he's shown with the scientists is when the Sully children are with him. He sees the scientists as family, there's no doubt of that, but not parents. So.. who's his parental figure? I'd say no one. He separates himself from the humans and tries so hard to be Na'vi, but it never changes how Jake and Neytiri view him. So he's stuck in a cultural and social purgatory of his own making, but not his fault, without parental guidance or bonds.

Until Avatar Quaritch shows up.

During their time together, not only does Quaritch value Spider's knowledge about the Na'vi and their language (which I'm sure no one has ever done), but he never treats him entirely as a prisoner. Sure, there's a tracker in his mask, but he saves Spider from a literal torture device and seems to want to impress him. You can see they clearly start to form their own type of bond during the trip; even when he's unhappy, Spider will listen to Quaritch as long as he's not telling him to do something that goes against his morals. Unlike Jake and Neytiri, Spider finally has someone willing and emotionally capable of being a parental role in his life. Unfortunately, said someone is the main antagonist.

Put simply: he is not afraid of Quaritch. He's never given any reason to. Sure, Quaritch does horrible things, but never to Spider. In fact, he cared about Spider more than his need to have leverage over Jake, which is extremely significant imo. Y'know. Since he was literally resurrected for the sole purpose of taking Jake down.

So yeah, he saved Quaritch- but what would you do if you saw that the closest thing to a parental figure you've ever had (which just so happens to be your father, but more aware of how he should do better, and is y'know. an avatar), was drowning? I would hope you'd save them, even if your relationship was complicated and confusing.

In my personal opinion, Spider's priorities lie primarily with the Sully children, and the Na'vi people as a whole. They gave him companionship and support and love; and the people were his everything- his home, who he wanted to be. But Quaritch definitely ties with Jake, at the very least. He doesn't agree with Quaritch's morals, and Jake was nothing more than another adult in his life, but it's shown he clearly doesn't want either of them to be hurt. Neytiri is most likely on the literal bottom of that list because she's been nothing but horrible to him. He saves Quaritch, but he doesn't side with him fully. Instead, he goes back to the Sullys, who have been his whole life; though he does seem distant, most likely due to internal conflict.

Getting angry at a complicated character in a complicated situation for making a complicated decision is a common troupe among fandoms, but it does genuinely irk me. He's not Jake in Avatar 1 with a savior complex: he's a kid finally meeting and bonding with his father after feeling alien and isolated from the people he cares about most. His character development, and what he decides to do in the future, aren't going to be as straightforward as it seems. There's a lot going on with his storyline, and it's going to be a bumpy ride. He's not going to make the decisions the audience wants him to every time, and I honestly enjoy that about his character. He is, indeed, human. A human in a very conflicting situation.

In conclusion: yes. his decision to save Quaritch will mean he will come back in future movies and will continue to bother the Sullys. but, it wasn't an unjust decision, and it certainly wasn't betrayal.

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk

#this is my very passionate opinion #though if this gains any traction I don't want to see any wars in the notes #nor any disrespect #I genuinely only meant for this to be like one paragraph max- I'm so sorry lmfao #aidan talks #avatar 2 spoilers #avatar the way of water #atwow #spider socorro #spider avatar #spider atwow #I

[fruitydemogorgon]

Vecna VS Voldemort- Stranger Things Meta

aka: Voldy and Veccy Bae Slay the Day Away as the Same Person

PART 1:

Excuse that.

Actually, don't, let's look at the similarities.

The Duffer Brothers are known for paralleling other films and series', and this season has drawn inspiration from some huge 80s tv culture [see Nightmare on Elm Street, Carrie, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker]. Harry Potter, the popular story by J.K Rowling, has gained worldwide traction over the past 20 years. The new villain of Stranger Things 4, Vecna, holds many similarities to Harry Potter's ultimate enemy Lord Voldemort. Analysing and reviewing these similarities may provide insight on the future of Stranger Things (V. 2, Season 5), and even a further delve into the past.

Lord Voldemort was born on the 31st of December, 1926 at Wool's Orphanage in London. But, he did not always have this title. He was named Tom Marvelo Riddle by his mother, Merope, who died shortly after giving birth to him. His father, an abusive and ignorant husband, had left Merope a year or so prior to Tom's birth. Tom, alone and without any knowledge of his heritage, grew up in the orphanage, averse to the other children and staff. Isolated, lonely, quiet. But not weak. Not useless. For Riddle knew there was something special about himself.

Victor Creel moved his family to Hawkins, Indiana, for a fresh start in March of 1959. Their beautiful house was dreamlike, and the young girl, Alice, grew immediately attached to its princess-like wonder. His wife was happy, he was happy. Though, his son Henry was not as pleased as his sister. The house, the children, the town, none of it felt right to him. Though, he'd never really fit in anywhere. Eventually, Henry started to realise he had abilities.

Both boys, solitary souls, troubled home lives, and powers quite unusual.

A doctor will be able to help...right?

A new parental figure is brought in, someone to teach them, care for them.

Both started at a place where they didn't fit in. People didn't understand their powers. Then moved to somewhere where there were other people with powers like them, who could

We'll fix you.

Brought to a new place, a place for them to grow their strengths.

Both being subtly referred to as someone known closely from the past. Both feeling more at home in their new place (Henry fitting in at the rainbow room, Tom fitting in at in Hogwarts).

Follow the spiders...

[see above: Tom Riddle finding Hagrid's spider- Aragog]

Their abilities...

Both being destroyed by a young child who has similar powers to their own, the full extent of the child's abilities still undermined by most people.

Both despising humans/muggles because of how they were treated by their parents when they were younger. Not seeing the way the world is run as 'fit' or 'just'. Wanting to manipulate the world to their own accord.

Souls changing after murdering someone...

I understand this probably requires some knowledge of the Harry Potter universe, but I'll elaborate in part 2. I'll also consider how these parallels could link to the future events of stranger things, tell us about the past, etc, etc, u know the deal.

I will do a proper analysis on this soon, but for now, this is everything I'll write about compiled into a visual representation.

Thanks for your time!!

#stranger things #harry potter #stranger things 4 #voldemort #vecna #tom riddle #henry creel #stranger things theory #stranger things analysis #stranger things meta #eleven #jane hopper

[stepfordgoth]

i really dont disagree with you, i just dont think theres any harm in being annoyed by how seemingly every piece of media that gains any traction these days is “50 year old franchise being resurrected because people cant let go of it and it makes the companies money: installment #400” or whatever, especially when its all you ever hear about from your friends and coworkers and family. cant exactly unplug from that lol. youre right though, people on here definitely get too absorbed in being angry about things they cant control. i dont think youre interested in arguing about it and neither am i so i wont prolong this, just wanted to try to explain where people on that post were coming from.

The thing is though, being annoyed about it online is still interacting with it.

It certainly is annoying but algorithms exist that will pick up any mention of specific phrases and count them towards hits, and I don't believe that those algorithms know the difference between a shit review, an "I'm never going to watch this" tweet, and a positive review. Bad attention is still attention, no such thing as bad publicity, etc. The only way you win here, online, is to block mentions of [specific franchise] so you aren't tempted to interact with it, and overall pretend none of it exists. I know there's new Pokemon, Scooby Doo, GoT, star wars, etc games movies and shows out but I have a lot of phrases related to those franchises blacklisted on Tumblr (and I don't use other social media) so when someone on the dash starts posting about any of it, most of the time all I see is a blocked post lol

As far as IRL family friends and coworkers, I was able to get people to stop trying to talk about these things with me by telling them, the first time they try to initiate this conversation, that I have no interest in any of this kind of stuff. "I haven't seen the movies and I probably wont." And if they insist on talking to me about it anyway I just kinda.... Stop listening lol. You know that thing you can do where you just kinda avoid eye contact and say "mhm..... Mhm...... Mhm...." Through a whole conversation? It works, they'll take the hint eventually. The secret is just not engaging.

#i have a close family member who can will and does turn any conversation into one about superheroes #when we were learning french this dude piped up and said ''the only french i know is from that one scene in spoodleman where he and...'' #in the MIDDLE OF OUR CONVERSATION like dude the adults are talking please save your sooberhewo shit for another time but he just went on #and i completely tuned out #and making it clear that im not listening is really the only thing I can do in that situation lol

[firelxdykatara]

not gonna lie I would love to hear more about the drama and infighting that went on in The Vampire Diaries fandom if you have the time (and also want to use that time to give your experience with the fandom, which from the snippets you've told sounds Not Fun so I get it if you don't want to lol)

oh god, there was like, SO MUCH, i just

i really feel like tvd is one of those fandoms that is so hard to describe without a lot of ‘you’d have to have been there’, but it really felt like this huge and all-consuming beast for about five years until the show finally imploded and the fandom basically turned on it en masse. (you ever see that post going around that’s like ‘if you ever want to know what true regret feels like, ask someone who once called tvd their favorite show’? still a mood, all these years later. basically the entire fandom thought the show should have just bowed out with whatever shreds of dignity it had left at the end of season 6, and became more of a hatedom than a fandom for the last two seasons. when you have an entire fandom cheering news of your show’s cancellation, i think that’s a sign you done fucked up, julie.)

first and most infamous, of course, are the ship wars. which are pretty much inevitable in any teen-centered drama, and i really think the CW fucking thrives on them, but it was particularly egregious in TVD’s case because not only was the base premise of the show a love triangle, but the two main romantic leads were brothers that the show constantly pit against one another--in pursuit of elena’s affections, but also because it kept up this insistence on the ‘good brother/bad brother’ dichotomy which stopped making sense after about season 2 (by which time we have found out that the good brother was never as good as he appeared, and the bad brother has been growing and isn’t nearly as bad as he pretends to be)--and the question of which brother ‘deserved’ elena (and no, what elena wanted very rarely factored into these discussions, especially in the team stefan camp because they turned on her when what she wanted was no longer The Good Brother, but i’ll get to that in a bit) was hotly contested.

i’m not kidding when i say the shipping wars were vicious. i started watching tvd shortly after it began to air, which was late 2009, and kept up with it fairly sporadically over the years. i didn’t come onto tumblr until 2011/2012, and by then, the fandom was already pretty much a garbagefire. there were anti ship and anti character blogs, any time something bad happened for one ship the rival ship would invade the tags to gloat about it (seasons 3 and 4 were especially rough, and i’m not gonna pretend delena fans weren’t just as bad about tag invasion and shit, but as that was my side of the road i saw a lot more of the stelena shippers being assholes, which soured my opinion on the ship a long time before i started rewatching and realized the red flags were there from the start), confessions blogs were popular also toxic as fuck (so much fighting happened in the notes of those posts, good gods), and this was right around when twitter’s popularity was on the rise and the line between Celebrity and Fan was thinning, so the fandom was absolutely atrocious to much of the tvd cast and crew.

(some of them deserved a lot of the later backlash, but in the early years a lot of it was ‘how dare you write the story in a way i dont like, you terrible fucking person’, and gods don’t get me started on the dobsley vs nian Thing)

i think what really encapsulates my feelings on the tvd fandom as a whole, though, is the way they (to this DAY) treated elena gilbert, which can be summed up in one meme that gained a lot of traction around season 3 if i remember right: that gif of pam from true blood, with the text altered to read “i’m so OVER elena and her precious doppelganger vagina!”

i swear at one time i had over half the active tvd fan accounts on tumblr blocked, because i got to a point where i would no longer tolerate elena hate, and she was (and still is, in what remains of the fandom; you’ll see a lot of ‘elena was one of the worst things about the show’ takes from ex-fans, too) one of the most widely despised characters in the entire fandom. because she -checks smudged writing on hand- was a traumatized teenage girl who -reads off a crumpled notecard- couldn’t always perfectly sort out her own feelings and -squints at the ceiling- sometimes made mistakes or bad decisions. (except a lot of the fandom also insisted that she was a mary sue who had no character traits or flaws or faults and it was like....make up your fucking minds???? is she a calculating conniving bitch whose somehow manipulating these centuries old vampires to tie them around her little finger or is she a boring flat character with no depth and no flaws??? jfc)

there was this massive double standard, too--like, stefan and damon could fuck whoever they wanted and that was fine, but elena was constantly raked over the coals for the crime of developing romantic feelings for the two men who had become constants in her life and whom she cared for deeply, and oh my GOD the slut shaming that happened when elena slept with damon was fucking wild. (and also happened in canon lmfao. like the show had one of elena’s best friends basically call her diseased on screen for falling in love with someone other than stefan. it was gross and ridiculous and the friend in question was also being a giant hypocrite at the time since she was happily flirting with someone who was directly responsible for the deaths of like four of elena’s loved ones and her own boyfriend’s mother but that’s beside the point) but like elena was called a slut and a bitch and a whore for ‘cheating’ on stefan (she hadn’t, and she had in fact broken up with him on screen the episode earlier) and ‘immediately’ jumping into bed with damon, even though none of them said fucking boo when stefan had one night stands or damon had fuckbuddies or whatever.

shit, caroline didn’t get any of this treatment when she started falling for tyler while dating matt! which isn’t to say i think she should have, just that i think it’s fucking ridiculous that elena was absolutely demonized by the fandom for daring to have feelings for two guys at once and eventually acting on them--despite the fact that the entire premise of the show was a love triangle. it’s not a love triangle if both sides don’t eventually get explored, and the crew had been pretty explicit about the fact that delena was going to happen at some point--but when it did, a huge chunk of the fandom absolutely threw a fit.

and a lot of these elena haters were alleged stelena stans, and i say alleged because they hated her so much for not wanting stefan’s dick anymore that it was clear they were really stefan stans and only wanted stelena to be endgame because they wanted stefan to ‘win’ at the end of the day, because ‘he’s the good brother’ so he deserved elena more.

it was all very gross and very misogynistic and very sex shaming (apparently delena was a ‘shallow’ and ‘superficial’ relationship because they had sex after two years of unrequited feelings slowly becoming requited and then pining for ages on both sides, and because they had a lot of on screen chemistry that the show capitalized on for years so of course they did a lot of making out and shit but it’s not like stelena didn’t have its fair share of making out and sex scenes, stefan was just too much of a coward to let elena top i’d apologize for that joke but i’m really not sorry because it’s true), and when i say it was egged on by the crew, that’s because they refused to let the love triangle die back in season 4 when it should have.

they insisted on stringing stelena fans along, dropping little bread crumbs to keep them invested, like dreams of a future where they were married and revealing that stefan was also a doppelganger and he and elena were descended from a pair of star-crossed lovers (a plot that ultimately went nowhere, to no one’s great surprise), and then fucking like. julie plec turned around and threw nina under the bus after she chose not to extend her contract and pretended that stelena might have happened again if she hadn’t left the show, which....i mean frankly i wouldn’t put it past her, but it would have been shitty writing. then again, she thought having a vampire pregnancy where a uterus was magically transplanted from a witch into a vampire that could somehow......carry the babies to term.... made sense and was a good way to accomodate candice’s RL pregnancy rather than like literally ANYTHING else, soooooo. but anyway julie saying that around like, end of s6 sparked off a new wave of nina hate and elena hate and ship wars bc they SEers took it as ‘confirmation’ that stelena was REALLY meant to be endgame and it was all just a hot fucking mess

another thing is that, while tvd was in its prime before the anti/purity culture shit started picking up any real steam, there was still this pervasive attitude throughout the fandom that if you liked Damon, you were A Bad Person. liking damon was apparently grounds for insults and harassment, and apparently he was The Worst Person on the Show even though literally nothing he does on screen is any worse than shit we know stefan has done (and frankly every other vampire too, but i mention stefan specifically because he was always held up--in the show but especially in the fandom--as the Good Brother while damon was the Bad One, and if you liked damon more then that had to mean your morals were dodgy and you clearly couldn’t appreciate what a heroic and saintly figure dear stefan was and....oops, i’m sorry, my salt keeps leaking -cough-).

meanwhile klaus quickly became a fandom darling despite not even really having much of a redemption arc (on tvd anyway, he just became more ‘affably evil’ as the show went on and more inclined to work with the main characters rather than try to kill them; i have no idea what went on over on his show, though), and like i can 100% appreciate liking villains and not caring that they do dodgy villainous shit, even just liking them bc they’re hot and wanting them to kiss a main character bc they have insanely good chemistry (yes i ship klaroline, no i won’t apologize for it, they could have been Really Great), it’s just really the double standard that gets me.

and all of this, incidentally, required ignoring some truly gross shit stefan was responsible for wrt his relationship with elena, that frankly it has always bothered me never really got addressed in the show. i get why elena herself would never be able to actually call him on it, but the fact is that he stalked her for months after he first saw her and thought she was katherine (meanwhile it only took damon .5 seconds to realize she was someone else entirely, but that’s another topic entirely), and then he deliberately inserted himself into her life because, in his words, ‘i have to know her’. he never gave a thought to how his presence in her life might affect her (or rather, he did, and tormented himself about it in his internal monologue, but never let this actually dissuade him from disrupting her life), and elena would wind up blaming herself for every tragedy that befell her friends and loved ones as a result of getting mixed up in vampire bullshit even though none of it was her fault--she literally blamed herself for existing but most of the fandom didn’t give a fuck about that lmfao--and stefan did shit like find out that she was adopted and then withhold this information from her until she got pissed about another secret he was keeping (her resemblence to katherine) and drop it on her to try and distract her from her very reasonable anger, and like... i should stop before this becomes a whole rant about how much i hate stefan fucking salvatore, but the point is, he did a lot of really sketchy shit he never answered for and elena never really took him to task for, and the fandom just kept eating up his insistence that he was the Good Brother and therefore he deserved to have elena, and if she didn’t want him anymore it was because she was a heinous bitch who didn’t deserve him.

uh.....i think i got off track there. and there’s probably a lot of shit i missed, like i think i was incandescent with rage for most of seasons 5 and 6 so i missed a lot of the interfandom shit cause i was too busy being increasingly pissed off at the show itself, but if nothing else this should give you an idea of how much of a goddamn cesspit the fandom was while the show as in its prime. there’s a reason both the show and the fandom have such a lousy reputation lmfao.

#the vampire diaries #tvd #tvd fandom salt #anti stefan #anti stelena #salt for ts #asked #Anonymous

[thefeministherald]

There have been a whole litany of complains about Brie Larson: she doesn't smile enough in the trailers, she doesn't have the exaggerated superhero physique, she doesn't know enough about the character. Many of these issues are bizarre, and frankly a little sexist, hinting that Captain Marvel should exist primarily as eye-candy. As Larson herself pointed out through an amusing Photoshopped image, male superheroes are traditionally portrayed as stoic, so why should female heroes have to grin at the camera all the time? The more recent TV spots have revealed that the film is as rich in humor as any other Marvel movie, and first reactions have praised the "buddy cop" banter between Larson's Captain Marvel and Jackson's Nick Fury. So it seems this particular reaction was very much premature.

Compounding this is the fact that Brie Larson herself is a feminist. Some fans claim to object to the idea that Marvel has hired a politically vocal actor, but that argument is flawed; Josh Brolin has recorded Donald Trump tweets in a Thanos voice, Chris Evans has been so outspoken that he told Esquire he'd been advised it could damage his career, and Mark Ruffalo is a noted political campaigner on environmental issues. These actors all seem to get a free pass, which suggests that the real issue is either the complainants either don't like a woman being political, or that they object specifically to feminism. Of course, there's a real irony in objecting to a feminist actress playing Carol Danvers; in the comics Danvers is a prominent feminist herself, and her original superhero identity - "Ms. Marvel" - was intended as a deliberate political statement. Captain Marvel is largely inspired by Kelly Sue DeConnick's popular comic book run, which was notably feminist. So Marvel has essentially cast according to type.

Some fans have gone to ridiculous lengths to accuse Brie Larson of misandry, twisting words completely out of context. For example, in an interview with Marie Claire she made a point about wanting her press days to be more inclusive. Here's what Larson said:

"About a year ago, I started paying attention to what my press days looked like and the critics reviewing movies, and noticed it appeared to be overwhelmingly white male. So, I spoke to Dr Stacy Smith at the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, who put together a study to confirm that. Moving forward, I decided to make sure my press days were more inclusive. After speaking with you, the film critic Valerie Complex and a few other women of colour, it sounded like across the board they weren’t getting the same opportunities as others. When I talked to the facilities that weren’t providing it, they all had different excuses."

This is hardly misandry; Larson's problem isn't that she doesn't want to see white men in the audience, it's that she wants to see women as well as men, and people of every racial background. "What I’m looking for is to bring more seats up to the table," she was forced to clarify. "No one is getting their chair taken away. There’s not less seats at the table, there’s just more seats at the table." And this is far from the only example of Larson's words being taken out of context in order to attack her; when she recorded a jokey video pretending not to know who Captain Marvel was, countless YouTubers pretended she was serious.

HOW FANS ARE TRYING TO HURT CAPTAIN MARVEL

Some fans are going beyond critical comments though, and are actively trying to hurt Captain Marvel's box office performance. So far, there are really two lines of attack. The first was deliberately misreading box office projections, suggesting the film is expected to underperform and even bomb at the box office. It's a flawed argument, since early estimates show Captain Marvel tracking to gross over $100 million in its opening weekend, meaning it will outperform the likes of Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Iron Man. Some are arguing that the movie should be viewed as a failure simply because it isn't set to beat Black Panther - the MCU's highest-grossing solo superhero film to date - but by that measure, even Captain America: Civil War is a failure.

Then there's Rotten Tomatoes. Trolls are already review bombing the film, even though none of them have actually seen it yet, all in a misguided attempt to make it look as though the film is in trouble. A close look at the comments reveals that most of them are related to Larson's politics, or to the ostensible "agenda" surrounding Captain Marvel, and many of them are from people who clearly weren't interested in watching the film in the first place.

WHY CAPTAIN MARVEL'S CONTROVERSY WON'T MATTER

For all the heat Captain Marvel appears to be generating, the truth is it's probably safe to relax. These trolls aren't doing anything new; they attacked Star Wars: The Last Jedi in pretty much the same way, and that film went on to become the highest-grossing blockbuster of 2017. This isn't even anything Marvel Studios hasn't had to deal with before, as it's a rinse-and-repeat of what happened with last year's Black Panther. Far-right trolls announced a campaign to sabotage Black Panther's Rotten Tomatoes score, claiming to be angry that Disney was spotlighting non-white and/or female characters in their films. Director Ryan Coogler even wound up responding to the news after it gained traction, insisting he wasn't worried about it. He was right not to be concerned; Black Panther grossed over $700 million in the domestic box office, and made over $1.3 billion worldwide. It was a cultural event, and is the first superhero film to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. The trolls really didn't succeed in their goal.

#feminism #feminist #misogyny #sexism #representation #women #brie larson #captain marvel #marvel

[adventure-hearts]

I really want to make a guide to shipping in fandom and how to do it right. I don't have enough followers for it to gain any traction, but just to vent maybe. People are SO dumb. Having a ship be canon doesn't make it better than someone else's ship. Canon is awesome, but not everyone has to agree with it 100%. Not everyone can relate to canon pairs and that is FINE. It literally takes zero (0) effort to let people be and to treat someone's ship with respect, even if you don't like it. (cont.)

(cont.) And I’m totally talking about non-canon shippers too, it’s OK to think you don’t see the chemistry but don’t go shouting it at people who do? Abusive ships and gay fetisizing aside, who someone ships and how is no one else’s business but their own. The digifandom has been around for ages so wouldn’t it be nice if everyone just finally grew up and learned some respect?

To be fair, I think the Digimon fandom HAS grown and learnt. 

Admittedly, I don’t spend a lot of time in fanfiction circles where this may still be a problem, but from my experience shipping wank is virtually a non-issue and I see everyone enjoying their preferred ships in peace, both canon and non-canon ones. Discussions tend to be fun and respectful, and almost everyone is a multishipper to begin with. We’re all (mostly) adults now, and compared to other fandoms (and the Dark Days of the shipping wars) this is a remarkably non-toxic fandom when it comes to shipping.

Sure, occasionally you have fans stirring up shit, but it tends to be either trolls or people who come out of the woods and aren’t necessarily familiar with the arguments that have been already done to death, who bring up the same old boring stuff like discussing the Epilogue endgame decisions and all that.

But you’re right: when it happens, shipping wank tends to come from both sides - canon shippers who think they know best (though nearly all of them also happen to ship non-canon pairings so??) and non-canon shippers who spend time attacking/downplaying canon/canon hints and people who like it (even those who like crack ships??) - and what it has in common is a petulant, narcissistic mentality of ‘MY ship is superior and I NEED everyone to feel the same way and I DO NOT accept any criticism of it (just of other ships) and EVERYONE who disagrees is wrong’ which if you ask me is a sign of raging insecurity.

Which of course, doesn’t mean we can’t discuss all ships critically or even negatively - but there’s a time and place for everything, and it seriously depends on your attitude and what you intend. There’s a huge difference between a civilised discussion based on ‘If you ask me, Ship A doesn’t work for me for these reasons’ and (e.g.) dropping negative comments about Ship A at every opportunity OR starting wank who people who do like it OR insulting the fans or goddamn artists who created the series, and then getting angry when people fight back.

I suppose, for me, ‘doing shipping right’ it’s as easy as:

a) Minding your own business and letting people do what they want in peace

b) Having a basic degree of empathy and trying to understand why people ship X, Y and Z even if you don’t agree 

c) Stop caring so damn much about what other people do or think

d) Learning to deal with opposing views

e) Never forgetting that shipping is not that freaking serious

A shipping guide to fandom seems a great idea - don’t worry about traction, it’ll come! Just be prepared for some negative feedback from people who will inevitably feel attacked by common sense.

#asks #digimon #shipping #fandom