Aww, thank you, anon! 💖🥰🤩 You’re too kind!
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For the Claurenz Week 2023 prompt: “I crave the touch and the connection, but I’m not always brave enough to open my hand and reach out. This is the great challenge: to be seen, accepted, and loved, I must first reveal, offer, and surrender.” – Anna White
Give me ships that are star-crossed!
Doesn’t a ship being illegal make it more enticing?
Doesn’t a ship being ‘immoral’ make the yearning sweeter?
Isn’t a ship where the characters think they have to hide their love more romantic?
Don’t the problematic elements of a ship make it so much more satisfying when the characters finally manage to surpass the barriers between them and connect?
The heart always wants what you say it can’t have. And the heart will not be denied.
Back before Rowling outed herself as a great big TERF and HP became a taboo subject I literally had a [former] friend berate me for several days and then deliberately pick fights about it weeks and months later because I’d let slip that my favorite HP character was Snape. Not because I thought he was innocent or because I wouldn’t acknowledge the bad things he’s done, but because I like tortured souls and morally gray characters and bad victims and angsty sad boys with tragic pasts. And also Alan Rickman’s a snack.
At some point they told me that they just couldn’t see themselves being friends with someone who saw any value in the character whatsoever, and I probably should have known our friendship would take the wild downward spiral it did in the years following.
This repeated itself several times with various other media we had in common. Tony Stark. Joker. Every chance they got, they would demand I justify why I favored those characters and not the ones they preferred. Even when we agreed on characters from a specific series, they’d still pick a fight if I said literally anything remotely positive about a different character. Saying I understood where Anders was coming from, even though my choice like theirs was Fenris and I disagreed overall with Anders’ methods and extreme behavior, resulted in them not speaking to me for several days and then picking fights every time I turned on my console to play.
Even mentioning my love for Tolkien turned into a fight because they felt the books were unsaveable and unsalvageable because of their lack of POC and LGBT characters (which is a critique I AGREE with) and became a “read better books” discussion.
At some point I had to be like “hey it actually kinda sucks to try to talk to you about anything I like because you’re constantly negging on it, can you stop?” and even that turned into an argument because the takeaway was that I was supposed to change the things I like to be morally in line with *their values* rather than be annoyed that they were constantly needling me about how the things I enjoy make me somehow a bad person.
And that I think is why I am entirely done with this stupid fandom bullshit of people trying to assign moral value and purity politics to people enjoying characters or various pieces of media. I know the phrase “let people enjoy things” has been poisoned but also, fucking seriously, let people have their favorites without being forced to justify at every turn why they like something.
Once upon a time, finding a Fandom meant finding your people. Folks you could be weird and excited with over stories and characters!
But now, all around us, you have to like the media “the right way”. You have to like “good characters”, you have to prefer the right ships and theories for the right reasons…
My goodness…where did the good days go…
I’ve wondered this too, as a “fandom elder”, so to speak (I’m in my 30s, I’ve been in fandom since I was in fourth grade) and…
What happened to the fandom culture I grew up in?
What happened to YKINMKATOK, SALS, DL;DR…all the things we understood were law of the land?
When did fandom become so obsessed with purity culture and everything being non-problematic?
~ Mod Niecest
