accio-shitpost:

shipping is a form of wish fulfilment. if you think it is sexy or cute for an adult to be with a child, or for brother and sister to be involved sexually/romantically, then you are a terrifying, disgusting human being.

Maybe I shouldn’t be jumping in on this, but I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff like this all over tumblr.  And the main theme seems to be that we should shame people for how they ship fictional characters, because it… says bad things about them in real life?  

Shipping is wish fulfillment the same way that writing fiction is wish fulfillment.  You don’t always write what you want to have happen.  Sometimes you write things because you’re curious, because you’re interested, because you want to know what would happen next.  Sometimes you write because it’s messed-up and awful but it’s cathartic.  Sometimes you write just because it feels… right.  Always you write with a boundary between fiction and reality.  

Occasionally the two overlap; you’d like to have a dashing gentleman or lady or nonbinary adventurer show you the world, and if you had the chance you’d sign up for it in a heartbeat.  But you’re always writing with the recognition that what you’re writing isn’t real, and it’s valid to want to think something would be cool in writing or if it happened to your characters, but not to want anything to do with it in real life.  You can write about characters who make friends with giant vampire bats even if you hate bats, and especially vampire bats.  You can write characters who go to nature camp and grow and mature because of it, even if you hate camping and would never in a million years do it yourself.  You can hate the military and still write, say, medieval fantasy or ancient Greek wars and describe how awesome fighting is and have detailed descriptions of battles that never condemn the organized violence in any way.  That doesn’t mean you support violence, or wars, or that you have an idealistic notion that any military is perfect.  It doesn’t mean that one of your wishes is for historical wars to have been so black-and-white, when there’s no way killing people could possibly have been that way.  It just happens to be the story that you want to tell at the moment.  You feel like writing it because why not.  

(Note:  If you’re writing problematic original content, though, like TERFs going around killing trans people, or nice Nazis, or glorification of KKK leaders, that’s something you should definitely reexamine and probably not publish, since it’s kind of a shitty thing to do.) 

Shipping is even more like that, because you have characters that already appear in media and you know perfectly well they’re fictional and you want to see them kiss.  That doesn’t mean you’d want to see characters like that kiss in real life.  If you ship kinda friendly fictional enemies together, that doesn’t mean you’d actually want Trump and Kim Jong Un to get together in reality.  If you think Sam and Dean should make out, that doesn’t mean you’d want actually existing brothers to bone.  If you constantly draw and write fanart and fanfic of Sonic and Spongebob… okay, you’re weird.  But it doesn’t mean that you’d… be… into… sentient hedgehogs and sponges?  The good thing about fiction is that if you’re interested in seeing how weird shit plays out, there’s an option that doesn’t involve real people (RPF is another story, and I’m not going to get into that because I don’t feel comfortable weighing in, since I think it’s kinda sketchy to be writing fic about real people boning, but also the entire point of AO3 is to let people write whatever fiction they want as long as it is a fictional story.  Honestly, I’m with Evelyn Beatrice Hall on this – I dislike incestuous and minor/adult ships, they totally squick me out, but if people want to write incest between adults, that’s not morally against all fanfiction website regulations.  Minor/adult or minor/minor incest is something I’m just not going to weigh in on).  

While we’re at it, calling people “terrifying” and “disgusting” just for how they interact with fiction isn’t going to persuade them of anything.  They’re just going to get defensive of their ships and ignore you.  This is highly unproductive.  

This isn’t to say that people who ship things in fiction shouldn’t be subject to critical self-examination in any way (it’s always good to think about why you like certain things and to recognize their flaws), or to conclude anything about whether or not shipping or fanfiction has an effect on real people’s real lives.  There isn’t enough evidence in either direction, and it’s not like it’s a thing you can measure or experimentally test.  But seeing incestuous ships in fanworks isn’t going to convince grown adults that hey, you know what, it’d be cool to bone my brother!  And ships with adults and minors should be a conversation left to kids and child abuse survivors, or people who as kids were affected by that kind of relationship; adults who’ve had relatively happy childhoods should probably stay out of it.  Some child abuse survivors say that they write and/or read awful fic like that as catharsis; others claim it normalizes that sort of relationship and puts children at risk for adults trying to act on these desires; still others say it helps them through their problems and they wouldn’t have come out of the dark place they were in without it.  As someone who’s never been sexually abused as a child, I can’t speak for these people and I don’t think I should, and neither should other people be trying to drown them out.  Let’s let the actually affected speak, and not drown them out with our own delicate sensibilities.