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Where did this “Wincestie” shit even come from?
It feels so infatilizing and stupid.
We ship brothers who fuck, we don’t need to be cute about it.
It’s been a surprising development that in the wake of the show’s end, theres this attempt to squash wincest shippers and even rewrite the fandom’s history, as if they haven’t always been an integral part of the fandom— as if a wincest shippers didn’t establish AO3!
The infantilization is new too, because what I used to hear was that wincest shippers were all “creepy old women” etc etc. There’s a lot of sock accts being used and apparently a lot of people who feel entitled to be bullies because they didn’t get their way about the finale.
I’m pissed bc I’ve had more than one mutual say they feel overwhelmed by the hate and it’s making them feel like leaving fandom, and it sucks. And I’m pissed that there’s so much extreme jared hate and misinformation about jensen going around. nearly all of the destiel/cas blogs I used to follow turned sour and a few of the samgirl blogs too. I’m pretty sure a lot of the newer sam bloggers are sock accts. it’s so bizarre.
Well, I am a proud creepy old woman who will happily remain a Wincest shipper then, yelling at the kids to get off my lawn with that wincestie crap.
Brotherfucking is for grown-ups anyway.
As for how toxic the fandom is, I have to be real for a second: It is absolutely possible to not even be aware of it. First, don’t go on twitter. Second, don’t follow people whose fandom experience is all about being knee-deep in the discourse.
I follow exactly two blogs who do nothing but scream about Destiehellers did this and said that on twitter all damn day. I pull out the popcorn and shake my head at these damn fool kids and occasionally go looking for trouble but if I unfollowed them? Nothing but happy brotherfucking and pretty men on my dash.
So whenever I hear people complaining about how bad fandom has gotten I want to ask people to clean up their follow list and look to themselves.
Atta girl!
Also, I think younger people in fandom don’t realize how insular the online experience used to be. They’re so used to social media filtered by algorithms into broad tags, sorted by engagement, by trending, everything slushed into one open space. People who had the LJ experience or a more personal tumblr experience or were part of forums and email lists back in the day tend to curate their experience and filtering out bullshit. Tumblr can be reasonably insular but I think as fandom develops its presence in Discord, younger fans might realize how much better the closed community of a server can be vs an unfiltered forever feed of bad opinions and strangers.
Anyway, I feel fine curating my own experience, but the thing that I can’t change that still gets to me is that so much of this aggressive cringe behavior is directed at actors online via twitter, and certain actors are making the mistake of engaging with it and encouraging it even more to survive the pandemic joblessness. I don’t like that that’s the norm, and I miss when shipping wasn’t turned into a mission to prove something to the world or expose something to celebrities.
TLDR: younger/anti people expect a whole platform’s userbase to change on their behalf or get lost. older/individualized people know they are carving out their own space in the internet and create their own boundaries.
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