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.