Me sittin’ here, seriously concerned for all the young kids who are gonna’ grow up in this fandom environment thinking they’re secretly evil monsters because their sex fantasies aren’t strictly pure or vanilla or because they ship something with an unhealthy dynamic. Soooooo many people must hate/be terrified of themselves.
Hey…….hey kids…….
You’re fuckin’ fine.
The human brain is weird. Sex fantasies ≠ actual desires. If you ask yourself, “would I want to act out this thing in real life” and the answer is “fuck no,” then you’re fine. Shipping is also not an indicator of what you would condone in real life. You are not secretly a monster. You are a human being. Human beings are complicated. Please calm down and treat yourself to a smoothie or something.
“What you want to read about” is not the same as “what you want to happen in your real life.”
The murder mystery industry has no problem understanding this.
The entire “horror” genre is built on this. Ditto “thrillers”, and indeed most other genres. In fact, possibly the only genre which isn’t inherently built on this assumption is “romance”, and even there… well, there’s a lot of romance stories which are basically about “I want to experience catharsis” rather than “I want this to happen to me” (consider Wuthering Heights, for example - Heathcliff and Catherine are great to read about, but they would each be hell to live with).
This also means if you’re asexual but you still like reading stories where people fuck? You’re still asexual. If you’re aromantic and enjoy reading romances, you’re still aromantic. If you’re non-heterosexual and enjoy reading heterosexual porn (because hey, there’s more of it and it’s easier to find than anything else, right?) then you’re still not heterosexual.
The only thing your taste in reading says anything about is your taste in reading.
