deirdrearchleone:

soyeahso:

There are a couple of things about current shipping culture that confuse me.  

1. The focus on whether or not a pairing will become canon as a reason people should ship something or not.  Do you not understand what the “transformative” part of “transformative works” means?”

2. This idea that saying “I ship that” means “I think that, as presented in canon,this is a perfect, healthy relationship that everyone should model their relationship after.” 

Sometimes shipping something does mean that.  Sometimes shipping something means “Person A is a trash bag who doesn’t deserve person B but I would love to explore how Person A might grow to deserve Person B.” Sometimes it means “I want these characters to live together forever in a conflict free domestic AU.”  Sometimes it means “I want Person A to forever pine after Person B.  Nothing is beautiful and everything hurts.”  And sometimes it just means you like their faces and want to see Person A and Person B bone in various configurations and universes. 

okay so like, i like this post, but i think it puts waaaaaaaaay too much focus on the individual saying “i ship [xyz problematic ship of the month]”.

because like, i have a few ships that are either unhealthy or based around unhealthy shit in canon despite being healthy-ish in aus. one of my favorite books of all time is gone girl and like, there is nothing healthy about gone girl. and i’m aware of that, and i accept that, and i can take criticism for that because you know like… this is a Coping Mechanisms™ and i’ve reached a point where i can understand that what helps me get through a day isn’t what helps somebody else. i’d like to take a brief moment to point out the usefulness of keeping your shit private.

but like i said, my issue with this post isn’t based around individual behavior. it’s based around fandomwide trends.

since op is a star wars blog and this post is giving me a certain Vibe, let me talk about reylo. my god have i lived through the reylo discourse. people have a variety of issues with reylo:

• they might be related
  
• kylo is a space nazi who murdered his father
• kylo kidnapped rey
• kylo is absolute fucking shit and a waste of good oxygen
• etc etc etc

i would like to posit a theory: these are not the issues that people actually have with reylo. like, okay, asoiaf. jaime and cersei hit all the points on that list outside of the kidnapping bit, and people still write twincest shipfic. do i have any idea why? hell no i don’t. but it’s one of the more popular ships in the tag, trailing jaime/brienne but still holding about 700 fics. i was in the asoiaf fandom for a while and i did not see one (1) person bitching about how the lannicesters salted their fields.

this is probably because the lannicesters weren’t collectively acting like jaime and cersei did nothing wrong. of course, there could be a lannicourse waiting around the corner, ready to bludgeon me via 10,000 angry text posts on my dash, but whatever.

the thing is that the force awakens has a really fucking big fandom. it got people into star wars, it has some old star wars fans reawakening their interest, and like… star wars is one of the Big Series of nerd culture and tumblr is very nerdy so like of course it’s a big thing here. so any minor behavior in fandom is going to be magnified. 1% of a small fandom, like… oh, idk, leverage fandom… is like what, 5 people? 10? one moderately popular ficwriter and the people who like their stuff?

1% of star wars fandom is huge. 1% of star wars fandom is like, 5 fics with hundreds of kudos and about 50 comments each, plus like… an entire network.

a lot more than 1% of star wars fandom ships reylo. reylo is Up There in the ships. not as big as kylux, but arguably bigger than stormpilot and definitely bigger than any other rey ship.

source:

and in the reylo tag, on the first page and the first page only, you have these highlights:

please look at those comment/kudos/bookmark stats. those are not small numbers! those are big numbers! huge numbers. tremendous numbers.

the problem with reylo isn’t that kylo kidnaps rey, imprisons her, interrogates her, tries to invade her mind, and might be her brother or cousin. the problem is that a large amount of people have chosen to overlook this in favor of writing fluffy shipfic and are doing so to popular acclaim. and since the law of equivalent exchange is very much in affect in large fandoms, this comes at a cost.

and finn, the other protagonist of the force awakens, is the one who pays that cost. finn, whose relationship with rey is already based on the shit that fluffy shipfics are made of. finn, who already has a redemption arc begging to be delved into in ten thousand different ways. finn, the black guy.

fandom will bend over backwards for white people. captain america: the winter soldier featured the rise of hydra trash party, a mess of poorly contained rape-and-torture fic and shitty justifications. and in the not-fucking-evil side of fandom you had infinitysquillion different “bucky slowly recovers from his torture at the hands of hydra and steve is there to kiss it better!!!!”

like no lie that was the majority of ca:tws fanfic. and yet… fandom has apparently found something better than finn getting his shit kissed better–having a wank over the guys responsible for wrecking it in the first place. they’ve found something more appealing than writing fluffy shipfic–writing fluffy shipfic for a couple where the girl (because she is a girl, 19 to kylo ren’s 30) is disgusted by the guy because he kidnapped her and tried to invade her mind.

like if somebody says “i ship kylo ren and rey” i’m not gonna automatically judge them. but when you have large amounts of people doing shit like this…

yeah.

i’m judging. i’m judging all of y’all who contribute to this, whether it’s by writing fluffy shipfic or yelling about how great that fluffy shipfic is or even just making vague posts on tungle dot hell.

your ship does not exist in a vacuum. it exists in a world where little girls get told “he’s being mean to you because he likes you”, where women grow up to say “well, he said he’s sorry, so i’ll take him back”, and where black men are overlooked or demonized for doing little more than existing. your ship exists in the same world as fifty shades of grey and joker/harley. shipping isn’t activism, don’t get me wrong, but normalizing shit like this means perpetuating unhealthy ideas about what a relationship is.

if you want to write kylo ren jerking it while remembering how it felt inside rey’s head, there is not a damn thing i can do to stop you. but before you leave a comment on the latest coffeeshop au reylo, take a moment to think about what you’re doing, and why, and who it affects. do you want to be a part of that community?

stop pretending like your words don’t have consequences. they do, no matter how small, and you can’t take them back.