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"All Slash Ships are pretty much Inception"

God damn it people-- granted I am not the biggest slash/yaoi fan anymore, but are we seriously having this discussion still? What year is it? 2018? Yeah, I thought so.

Why does anyone really care what people like/don't like? Oh well, at times Fandom!Secrets can be a real cesspit-- but there are some secrets that are actually pretty brilliant.

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You mean this one? https://i.imgur.com/fw3rV1g.jpg

I suspect it's a reaction to the current spicy fandom discourse. Slash fandom changed a lot since you became less active in fandom. Due to some f/f and m/m in canon now, everyone thinks all characters will be canon, canon, canon and anyone who disagrees hates the gays.

Now the norm is "ship two characters who vaguely had eye contact in one scene and make up headcanons that they're actually gay (which fandom did used to have lol) and harass anyone who ships anything else and call them homophobes for not agreeing that these two characters who vaguely shared eye contact once are what will end all homophobia in the world, then threaten the cast and call them homophobes when these two characters who barely know each other aren't 1000% canon and the only thing canon ever focuses on."

The f/f variant is: "this married female character who literally never talks to another female in canon she isn't related to is a LESBIAN and if you don't agree you hate lesbians, and I will personally dogpile you." They're bizarrely hostile to "how about bisexual?" as an option because, you know, the happily married with 6 kids factor.

There's also aggressive headcanon pushing like "x is autistic coded and if you disagree you hate autistic people, x is trans and if you disagree you just hate trans people" and so on. Unfortunately, trying to avoid other people's headcanons has become an exhausting part of fandom.

It's gotten pretty bad. There's been fandoms where cast people getting their families threatened over ships, getting death threats, otherwise harassed... And it isn't rare, it's something you hear about every day now.

I could give examples for miles, but just read a bit of https://huntypastellance.tumblr.com/ and you should get a view of the worst of the recent wanks in the Voltron fandom, which this is probably referencing.

If anything I suspect the secret maker is a slash fan going "guys, I like them too, but it's never going to be canon, stop harassing the creators."

Damn it, why do people have to be completely horrible individuals--

At least back in my day if we put on the yaoi goggles, usually there was some blushing or a statement that fueled the fire.

*shakes head* Good thing I am over here in my corner now

To explain a little further because I poorly phrased myself at one point:
There's also aggressive headcanon pushing like "x is autistic coded and if you disagree you hate autistic people, x is trans and if you disagree you just hate trans people" even if you yourself are trans or autistic and see them as say, a different type of trans (a trans girl as opposed to a non-binary trans person) and so on. The true issue is there are parts of fandom have become points where they see the characters as nothing but sims or OCs to hollow out into something barely recognizable that they want but aren't getting. Which would be fine if people weren't so aggressive about demanding you see the character as well or you're ableist/racist/sexist/homophobic etc.
It's actually at times hard to find people to appreciate a character on their own merits anymore because what they're actually appreciating a character for is how much they can hollow out and put their own identities/mental illneses/etc into.

Which isn't to say these are bad, per se. I definitely have some headcanons, plenty supported by the origin itself. The issue is demanding everyone conform to your view of the character.

Well, from what I can tell, it's a mix of:

1) being extremely aggressive/assholeish gets attention now. Whereas back in the day it'd land you on fandom_wank and publicly humiliated for being a jackass, banned from communities and forums, and shut out of fannish places, now it gets followers and quotes and reblogs and lots of popularity. This is across many platforms, tumblr, twitter and so on. This drives people to be more and more aggressive, assholish and nasty to be heard. Until it's hard to have good faith conversations with people constantly flying off the handle.

2) many modern social media platforms have no moderators. This means the very aggro people as mentioned above often may step up to take on their own kind of very draconian moderation. Since communities have given way to tags, it means you often share spaces in ways you didn't before. In the past, shipper group A/B and shipper group A/C both have their own communities/spaces/boards/whatever. So even if A/C shipper XYZ hates A/B for whatever reason, they can sit in their own space.

Which meant that even in high wank fandoms, there were often spaces you could go to avoid.

Now, things are marked via tags. And due to character limits or whatnot, you may have to share tags, if there isn't a defined pairing tag.

So, the above "moderation" involves several steps. 1) harassing people out of shared tags, or even their own tags. From sending hate to spamming awful messages to flood a tag. 2) creating more strict communities 3) demonizing people outside these communities. ("you ship a/b? you support ____!" insert word here, be it homophobia, racism, etc.)

3) fandom wars are now infused with social justice/feminist buzzwords, most used incorrectly. Now a m/f pairing you don't like isn't just "not my cup of tea because I find het boring" it's heteronormative, abusive (because they fought once!) with a power imbalance, and lesbian erasure (because you ship her with another girl.) Everything you like has to be the most feminist, incredible thing (even if it isn't) and everything you don't like has to be the literal scum of the earth.

it's really the same old "I hate this whore, she gets in the way of my m/m ship!" of yore. It's just now people go "I headcanon her as lesbian" "she's too strong to have a relationship." or another series of buzzwords which make it seem like they care about xyz character when they really don't.

4) related to above, the main point of your morality is what you ship and what you like.

Too much m/m? You hate women!
Too much m/f? You hate the gays!
I don't like your kinks? You're a bad person!
You're a wlw who likes male characters/ m/f /m/m? You're just faking female attraction to be cool online!

5) bizarrely enough, fandom is also becoming incredibly conservative at the same time. I never used to run into TERFs in fandom, but now I continually have to check who I'm interacting with to make sure I'm not interacting with a horrible human being. There was even this artist in fandom drawing pictures of trans people being burned alive and other violent acts. It's also becoming bizarrely sex negative at the same time.

I wish I could say it's becoming better, but the discourse (which is the new term for fandom wank, which also encompasses social justice and feminist wanks) just keeps getting worse and worse.

Also since this topic covers a lot of wank, can I please ask that you lock it? My anxiety always makes me a little nervous discussing fandom wank in public. I was the same back in the Fandom_wank days, always convinced I would mess up and end up there despite never doing anything of that nature.

Edited 2018-05-06 15:12 (UTC)

I had no idea that fandom got that toxic-- I mean there were a few little pockets of toxicity (from how I saw it) and more then the annoying person, but oh my gosh, fandom being conservative-- it used to be so progressive aside from the people calling other people wrong for liking other ships (and usually that was all it ammounted to)-- I remember the level of how bad it got was someone on my friend's list impersonating a popular voice actor so this is really just saddening

And I've locked the post :) No worries

Yeah, some of the fandom discourse anymore just makes me so sad. :( I like being in my own personal little fandom bubble as opposed to really interacting with fandoms anymore. O_O;

It just wasn't so bad when I was in fandom, and I just wonder what the heck happened-- :(

This is why I pretty much just try to find blogs and comms that only post official art, screenshots/gifs, and information but they are so incredibly hard to come by.

I think bonnefois hit it dead on with people wanting characters that they can just hollow out completely. But for some reason, people can't accept that other people are projecting on to those characters in different ways and leave it at that. I don't really know how we reached the "I don't agree with it/like it so it shouldn't exist period" point.

But honestly it feels like there's a lot of performance involved. It's to the point where I'm not always sure if people actually care about what they're arguing about or if they just want to latch on to discourse buzzwords to look Woke(TM).

Edited 2018-05-08 08:15 (UTC)

I've projected myself upon a lot of characters, some of them I am definitely not proud of-- but I did see some of the 'I don't agree with it so it doesn't exist' to a smaller extent back in the early 2000's but nowhere near the amount that I am seeing now

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