#sometimes being the only non shipper can get lonely
I am literally begging people to learn how to participate in fandom through a lens other than shipping
People have been asking me questions about the aromantic fandom experience at the same time this post, which I have come to have a serious love-hate relationship with, started picking up a bunch of notes again, so let’s talk about the intention behind it, because people have interpreted my meaning a myriad of ways and most of them are wrong! (Even some of the “positive” ones!)
First off, I should mention that while the post is short and flippant, I wrote a lot more context in the original tags. This was, ironically, because I wanted to vent without having my words circulated and thus risking the ire of the people who do the sort of thing I was venting about. Which. I’ve been on tumblr since 2013 and should have thought more about the fact that hiding my commentary in the tags was no guarantee of that, but it’s whatever. I’ve lived with things like this before, and inevitably will live with them again. So anyways. Here’s the tags:
#it doesn’t have to be exclusive! it doesn’t even have to stop being your main thing!,#but by god please learn how to reblog a post analyzing a piece of media with no mention of ships and not tag it to be about ships,#amongst other things,#i get that shipping is important to some folks and that’s something i am completely fine with and can even respect,#but the culture around it can be awful and it shouldn’t be treated as a prerequisite to engaging in fandom spaces,#it should be possible to exist and talk about media without other people forcing your words to be about something you don’t want,#and i desperately wish more people would engage with the other parts of fandom more often
You will note, what I was saying basically boils down to “Shipping fictional characters together is totally fine and cool, and I understand that it’s meaningful to many people! But oh boy is it hard to exist in fandom as someone who doesn’t want to participate in it for my own reasons, because people like to interpret my content as shippy even when it’s not, and that makes me pretty uncomfortable because it really feels like something I shouldn’t have to accept as an inevitability”
Which. You know. There’s a lot of Death of the Author that happens on tumblr posts, and sometimes that’s a great thing for fandom – I’ve seen threads that go ridiculous, wonderful places due to other people’s commentary, and even had people add some to my own posts that I have LOVED (as well as derailed more than a few myself, if I’m being honest). I for sure know I can’t control everything that happens with my content, and I know that there are a lot of people who really like shipping. However. Let’s talk about the reason this particular “inevitability” in fandom makes me so uncomfortable. Because in the months since I’ve made this post, here’s some of the responses I’ve had to it:
- People telling me I’m homophobic
- People telling me I hate women and their interests
- People telling me that if I have such a problem with the content that’s out there, I should stop being lazy and make my own
- People assuming that I hate “transformative” fandom
- People telling me I’m a gatekeeper
- People making harsh assumptions about my sexuality, my gender identity, my involvement in fandom, my interests, etc
- (Most uncomfortably: adult cis women writing entire essays on my post about the “fact” that I am a gatekeeping cishet man with no reason to be interested in queer or other transformative fic – I am not, and a very quick look at my bio would reveal that I am actually a queer trans guy, to whom queer/transformative fic is very, very important)
- People using particularly abusive language to say all of the above
Now, for people who don’t know me all that well – I am not cishet, I am not particularly inclined to gatekeep anything, I love transformative fandom, I regularly engage in making content uniquely catered the parts of fandom I love, I regularly help others do the same by offering my services as a beta/idea sounding-board, and on and on. If you want tangible stats, have 28 published works on Ao3, for many, many different fandoms, and more in progress – a large number of which deal with adding queer headcanons to less-queer source material, including one story that’s 25k words and counting!
Obviously none of my “credentials” prove anything on their own, but what I’m trying to point out is that I’ve had a lot of harsh assumptions thrown at me just because I expressed that shipping is basically treated as a prerequisite to being involved in fandom, and that makes me pretty uncomfortable – I don’t want to participate in it myself, but I do want to be a part of the community that fandom offers. Frankly, I used to be a lot more involved in it, but I have drifted away from fandom a fair bit in recent years entirelybecause it’s so hard to be involved in it as someone who really doesn’t really want to see much shipping content, and definitelydoesn’t want my posts and meta to always get turned into other people’s shipping manifestos.
(Also, if you want real nightmares: I am also a cosplayer, and I have had people make uncomfortable shipping comments directly to me while in costume at cons – it’s not just a tumblr problem, nowhere is safe!)
I don’t have a perfect answer for how to make people like me comfortable without, as so many people have accused me of since making this post, “ruining others’ fun.” I get that people aren’t always going to check an OP’s or author’s blog or tags before adding their own commentary to a post. And that’s genuinely okay! I want people for whom shipping is a comfort and a fun thing to engage in to enjoy fandom, too. But I also want us to have more conversations about the fact that the assumption everyone wants to be involved in the shipping side of fandom isn’t just wrong, it’s actively draining for people like me with personal reasons for not wanting to be engaged with it. I want to be able to participate in fandom too, and so do other people like me, and we’re really, genuinely trying to be involved in all the ways you’re telling us to, and under the current model? It’s not working. I feel excluded, and get abusive comments fielded at me, and have people who won’t put in the minimum amount of effort to get to know me speculate that I’m the kind of person they actively want to exclude from their communities – even though I’m not! – proving that voicing discomfort with the current way fandom operates is enough to have people assume you don’t belong in it.
TL;DR – I made a vent post to talk about how people’s putting shipping on a pedestal makes me feel excluded from fandom. And hundreds of people, at the most conservative estimate, took that as a sign that I deserve to be excluded from their vision of fandom. Something is really wrong there, and I hope we can all have some productive conversations about how to fix it.
