Ship wars

[soc_puppet]

Jeez, ship wars sure have escalated since I stared in fandom. It used to be specific ship versus specific ship, but now it's like... entire categories of ships are at war with the concept of shipping itself. Or is it the other way around?

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

It's the WORST. I know toxic fandom has always been a thing, it just seems to have gotten both worse and broader in the last handful of years. The movement toward MORALIZING the ship wars has really been horrible to watch. It's not just "I don't like your ship and think you have bad taste" it's "your ship is immoral in some way and that makes you a bad person and that means I am righteously justified in hurting you in any way I can".
I could go on a REALLY long rant about it, haha.

[soc_puppet]

I myself keep going back to that time denise was talking about the technological side of social media interaction, and how the way a site is built will impact the sort of conversations you have there and the culture it develops. As a content aggregation site whose userbase is heavily invested in both fandom and social justice, Tumblr seems ripe for growing a particular culture that favors moral outrage in fandom settings. Slower format social media sites, such as LJ and Dreamwidth, still have problems with ship wars, and I even remember seeing some social justice oriented "Why you should ship what I ship and not what you ship" arguments referenced on Fandom Wank, but like. That was on Fandom Wank. We had a specific place to point out how outrageous and poorly founded those arguments were! With sources, even! Now we just have callout posts that get halfway 'round the site before anyone things to fact check, and links that rarely stay where you put them for more than a few weeks.

I need to stop typing here, or I'll be trying to sleep while angry, and that never goes well.

[mistressofmuses]

It's true. I'm not surprised that tumblr has the sort of priorities and attitudes that it does. Twitter is reportedly even worse, which is also unsurprising on a site that is built for extreme short-form. You *can't* allow for nuance, so instead you aim for the hottest, most extreme takes because that's what gets traction.

But yes, it's exhausting, and does genuinely damage the way I think people interact with fandom. I miss the days where garbage like that did get relegated to Fandom Wank, or at least could be fairly widely dismissed as the nonsense it is. Now there are way too many people falling into the "puritanism with a gay hat" groups, who think they are truly on a moral quest to get rid of all the icky weirdos who... idk, write about Unapproved Topics like sex or whatever. Or who dare to exist over the age of 25.

[vriddy]

It's pretty demoralising. You make a good point about the platforms/technology having an effect on this in the other comment. Back in the day if I didn't want to see Dumbledore/Harry because it squicked me I just never had to see it... but because tumblr and twitter push everyone together to play into the one big single courtyard and then try to do algorithmic recommendations, people end up seeing all sort of things they don't want to see (and might have happily continued living life not knowing it existed!) and there's no way to avoid it. Not that I don't think people also go looking for stuff specifically to hate on it, too, but it's a lot easier to become aware of it in the first place.

I was away from fandom for a decade or so and thought some of the ship wank posts I saw were jokes when I came back. Unfortunately not.

[soc_puppet]

Right? It's all well and good to say "Cultivate your online experience", but it's so much harder with content aggregation sites, because they're designed to move content everywhere. I wrote a long essay about the differences between audience on Tumblr and Dreamwidth, and one of the major points is that you are much less likely to have bad faith interactions on Dreamwidth because you are much less likely to be exposed to complete strangers. There's usually at least some greater context that your ideas can fit into, and when there isn't (say, on the Latest Things page), that's an exception rather than the norm.

Yeah, it's... bad. Things on LiveJournal back in the day were also bad, but not in the same way, and not with so much... IDK, splash damage? It was at least a bit more insular, in part because it was still possible to be insulated from it.

Anyway, I understand why Tumblr became as popular as it is, even if it frustrates me, but still: Long live Dreamwidth!

[vriddy]

Really interesting post about audience and context, thank you for sharing! Complete strangers tracking with higher likelihood of bad faith takes amplified by the lower context makes sense. Actually, that also clarifies why I start sweating whenever I see a post of mine linked on a linkspam from another platform, haha.

Long live Dreamwidth!