#why do I feel so much guilt over how I feel abt & interact with media | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hazbincalifornia · 3 months

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(I’m pretty sure the way I type is recognizable but I need to like pretend at anonymity bc I feel. Remarkably silly about this)

I wanted to like idk rant to someone in the HB fandom who isn’t balls deep in the “anti proship” sphere bc like, I’ve been struggling w guilt over enjoying a certain ship that everyone hates and considers problematic (I think Loona and Octavia is rlly cute!) and I’d like to make content for it but I also rlly fear being seen as like a pedophile. Do u ever worry abt that kind of thing? And is there anyway ur able to get over it if u do? I don’t like getting into anti/anti anti discourse bc I feel like it’s a very reductive way to view and interpret media but I still have a crazy amount of worry/guilt

First off, it is still ridiculous to me that this is even a problem in this fandom. This is an adult show about characters in Hell, and the main characters are, respectively, assassins and the eclectic cast of the Hotel which includes a cannibal serial killer. (I am eternally both amused and completely baffled that like half the awful puritanical takes I see are from Val icons. Buddy. Pal. The fucked up fiction is coming from inside the house.) I saw waaaaay more fucked up shit on Zim nsfw twitter than I see on Hellaverse twitter and that show was Y7. Up your game, guys.

Personally, I don't really see Loona and Via as siblings/sisters as much as I think a lot of others do, more just friends (and honestly I think canon moved much too quickly to give them such a heartfelt scene together, they hadn't even met officially before that point?) so it's really only the age thing and even then, the plot of HB has seemed to imply that a fair amount of time has passed since the series started, probably around a year- so Via would be 18 or older by the time anything actually started anyway, especially if they became friends first. Setting aside the 'justification' though... they're not real. They're cute together, I agree, and I think you should be perfectly fine enjoying them just in the lens of 'they're similar, I like how they'd interact, and I think they're cute together'!

I was pretty much forged in my opinions about this from Invader Zim stuff, where people insisted that liking two characters that I'd liked together since I was thirteen made you a pedophile. Obviously, I could tell that wasn't true, because it had never been the case in all those years up to people starting to be bitchy about it in 2019. (Before that, it was that it was bad because it was enemies to lovers and, more importantly, gay. Great hater throne to inherit, guys!)

Unfortunately... as stupid as it is, this fandom is way more puritanical than it should be, so it wouldn't be wrong to engage through anonymity to protect yourself. Find the people in the tag who are using 'proship/proship interact' or something along those lines (I've seen a few, although some tend to lean more on hard/dead dove content), post on ao3 into the anonymous collection which removes your name, make a tumblr sideblog that doesn't connect to your main, find fellow shippers and interact with them specifically. Do whatever you need to do to keep yourself safe from people who can't understand that thinking something is cute or interesting to explore in fiction is automatically bad just because they don't like it. The more stuff that's put out there about the ship, the more likely you are to find kindred spirits, that's honestly part of how I gathered my mpreg weirdos to me in both this fandom and the last.

I'm pretty sure that the callout I got for Sunny was why several mutuals who were a friend group unfollowed (and likely muted) me on twitter. Unfortunately, it left me worrying that the other shoe was going to drop any day for about a week because it got just enough notes to make me worry but not enough to get to anyone with any real reach to spread and get it 'over with'.

At this point, I've sort of reached a state of 'fuck it', because if it happens, it happens. I know that I'm fine, and the people I genuinely care about know that too. I know that what I'm making is entirely separate from my morals as a person, if not from how dumb the IZ stuff was than from the fact that I was an English major. Literature is full of stuff that authors don't make as a 1:1 with their real-life morals! And the one you're thinking about isn't 'bad' comparatively at all.

I think the fandom is starting to see that being a dick about fictional content is bad through the backlash to Poison and 'hey, maybe telling somebody that they need to detail their trauma to the public to make fiction is bad?', but it seems to mostly be centered on dub/noncon, so I wouldn't necessarily hold my breath.

At the end of the day though, remember this: You, as a person, are completely fine, no matter what others might think. Octavia and Loona would probably be seen as a totally normal ship like ten years ago (except for people who'd be dicks about them being gay) and there is no judgement to be made on your character in any reasonable way for thinking they're a good ship. You're not a pedophile for thinking a fictional owl and hellhound look cute together, any more than I was for smacking together two Nicktoon characters, and frankly the IZ argument held slightly more water than 'the almost-18-year-old and the 22-year-old' because Zim's age was so ambigious. Try explaining this 'people think the young adult animals holding hands are bad' to any adult who isn't sucked into fandom discourse and they'd probably be baffled that it's a problem.

I know that the guilty feelings aren't always rational and it took a bit of time for me to unwind how I felt about creating certain stuff too, but try to remember that above all else- exploring things in fiction has been a thing people have done for a very, very long time. What matters is your actions towards other real people, not what you do with fictional dolls.

If nothing else, if you want you can always send me a dm and chat that way, I'd be happy to talk.

#discourse #asks #anonymous

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aro-aizawa · 3 years

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suprisingly not that many people ship them, but the thing is. the "&" is literally in the top 3 relationships!! i have not been in a fandom where a "&" is one of the most popular rships. (im not exactly.. against them? i prefer brotp in general but there are a lot of uh racist antis against that romantic ship so i like it on principle for the ~spite~)

i think theres a difference between a ship fic and a ..normal fic(?). like. usually in ship fics the plot and the focus would be their interactions/getting together. whereas for regular fics u can kinda balance plot and rship, but the main plot isnt actually getting together. do u kinda get what i mean haha

no no feel free to rant! its kinda funny that they taught u to swear in yr6 but rip for not being able to censor urself. and also. broke up. over facebook??? better or worse than text lmao.

the only rship ive had started off... not great. like it was an online friend from south america, and they asked me out literally the day i rejected my friend. so... i said yes out of guilt for rejecting my friend bc it didnt look like my friend was taking the rejection well ^^; not a wonderful start rip. went well for 6-8 months then we broke up bc the honeymoon period wore off and i havent talked to them since! ✌🏻✌🏻✌🏻✌🏻✌🏻✌🏻✌🏻 it was fun tho, but it felt honestly just more online friends tbh (....interesting decisions all around yknow? )

it be how it be. i was still id'ing as panromantic ace at the time. but still. im wondering if i could eventually "work" with someone? or is that just. allonormative asgsggshshd

i see enemies to lovers but what i Rlly want is enemies to friends to lovers. the friends is necessary!! at least in a long fic haha. ...and love at first sight sounds really fake to me? it sounds just like a hyperbole tbh. like maybe it was first wow u seem like a great person and then u like, get to know each other and then fall in love, etc etc

(👀 oop i type a lot. Rip)

oh yiiiikes i hate when fandom gets those racist fans. i’m kind of,,, dense?? about that kind of thing (abt a lot of similar things too), so whenever i see it, it’s like. mega bad. but nice! i don’t ever pay attention to what’s the most popular in terms of ao3 because when i get into a fandom i’ll blacklist every thing i’m not comfortable seeing in said fandom and then save that for when i’m gonna check out said fandom. for example [here is my atla filters], [here is my mha filters] and [here is my ml filters]. (i also use an extention called ao3rdr which has a blacklist function and my blacklist is SO LONG. but it’s an essential so that i don’t feel like my brain is going to rot by trying to find good fics.)

ye!!! i always think abt it in terms similar to genres. i hate watching films and regular books because genres are so....stilted? and ridgid in what it involves? so in fandom terms i think there’s two main kind of genre categories that have sub categories. there’s ship fic, then there’s genfic. no clue if these are wide spread terms i’ve just kind of understood it that way lol. but within those two categories, there’s sub genres like canon divergence that focus on said ship but with a focus on the plot as well so there’s two plots going on rather than just the main plot. usually there’s always equals in both sides. i think that’s what you’re thinking of. the difference is how the authors approach their fics, whether they think it’s a ship fic explorating the how do they get together of relationships or if it’s the genfic of exploring the relationship itself.

lmao yeah it was like. the only way we’d communicate in non-irl fashion because we were both like. 12/13 so we’d have like. pay as you go plans for our phones so i at least, hoarded my credit and primarily used alternate communication methods. so idk if this is wide spread but at the time we never got into the habit of communicating via text. it’s why still to this day i never ever contact my irl friends via texts, and always through social media (the only time i ever use facebook nowadays is to message my friends tho i’ve been,,,, rather lax abt that. i need to respond to one of my group chats but i’m,,, procrastinating). and we were both awkward people, so i wasn’t bothered by the online breakup, if he didn’t break up w me that way i’d have guessed we just,,, wouldn’t address the relationship ever again and still technically be together but not at the same time lol

oh man that sounds rough. never had any experiences w online relationships, but i can definitely see where it could feel like an online friendship. because,,, idk maybe it’s just me but there doesn’t??? seem like there’s much?? romantic-esque stuff you can do exclusively online?? it’s why long distance relationships are hard, and they only fit certain couples. and lol i deffo understand that feel of internet friends dropping out of your life suddenly. i still think of nearly all my internet friends fondly...except for the bad ones. yeah some of those ones ten years ago were p bad.

it is!! i think that people always shorten it to just enemies to lovers though because it’s easier to say lol. i’m MUCH more interested in the genfic varient of enemies to found family because it goes from “god i want to kill you so bad” to “god i need to kill for you like rn”. it’s just,,, *chef’s kiss*

(dw i type a LOT too lmaooo and sorry it took so long for me to reply, i didn’t feel like talking to anyone for a few days ahah i just get those kinds of moods sometimes. as evidenced by my also ignoring of my friend group chat of over seven years, that i’ve been meaning to reply to for over 24 hours and i haven’t yet. yay.)

#anonymous #lemme know if you want me to tag these posts/asks/whatever w a specific tag or smth so you can see them all in one place #like if there's a nickname i can call you #again sorry for the late reply i wasn't ignoring you i was just...stressed lmao #my neighbour had a really loud party for over 8 hours last night #we're in the middle of a pandemic THOMAS #i knew you as a cute toddler don't throw parties when you're dad's away #have fun explaining the fine you're going to be getting bc i reported you :)#next time don't let your friends scream the words to loud music until 11pm #Anonymous

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