LogFAQs > #960636798

It depends on the fandom, their demeanor and the way they're doing it.

Real-person shipping is an instant "no", like what happens in stan culture. Two of the One Direction guys apparently had their friendship fall apart because any time they showed any sort of affection for each other, One Direction stans would explode with this rumour about them dating and shit. Imagine any time you hang out with your best friend and someone goes "holy shit they're so fucking cute I want them to have s*x and falling love oh my god my little heart canrr take it" - that shit would probably impact how much you want to spend around your friends.

You also have white K-pop stans whose strong affection for their preferred artist often manifests with them infantilizing them, which has this really uncomfortable racist undertone. Everything they do is phrased like "these two soft baby purebois", right down to their perceived queer love where they're characterised by fans as like young teenagers having their very first crush despite essentially being 20+ year old show business veterans who are on the clock 24 hours a day.

It doesn't ring to me of a genuine appreciation of queerness, but the fetishization of queerness. And it always has this edge to it that's like "it's okay if these two men are in love or having sex because it's pure and wonderful and makes my heart swell up with joy, but if I ever met a queer person I'd be afraid of them hitting on me and/or I'd call them a slur". As far as real person shipping goes, especially in regards to stan culture, I think this behaviour is rotten. I can sympathize with queer folks who see the spark of what they are in these performers, and I would hope that this space is good for them on some level, but I feel like a bulk of the shipping in stan culture comes from a really rotten place.

There's a term for this that comes from anime and manga culture - fujoshi. It translates to "rotten girl", and it essentially describes a boy's love fan whose fan input basically consists of fetishizing gay men. Stuff like the intense "die for our ship" behavior and general shitty fan entitlement with ships like Sora/Riku from Kingdom Hearts comes to mind. You also have people whose intense fixation on the most recent Voltron show had them comparing the showrunners to Nazi war criminals, pressuring them into canonising these intensely debated ships at the risk of the fans calling the creators queerbaiters and performative homophobes and shit. Voltron literally got to the point where people were saying "make these characters get together or we'll collectively brand you all as bigots".

HOWEVER


And this is a big "however", because I've talked a LOT of shit about shippers

A majority of queer shipping, regardless of the canon sexuality of the characters, is perfectly fine and harmless. Even when it becomes popular enough for the creators to comment on it, even when people want it to become canon.

Voltron and stan culture are notable examples of what you're talking about, but they're significant outliers. Fujoshis and other people who fetishize queerness do exist, but they make up a minority of fans and as people find the language to better articulate what they want to say, the conversation evolves. And what's more, as LGBTQIA+ stuff becomes more mainstream and more integrated in the broader cultural conversation, fujoshis and stuff are decreasing because people are able to say "this way you're expressing your attraction for these gay characters is really unhealthy and makes people uncomfortable, let's unpack what your deal is and we can go from there".

For example, Thasmin - the pairing of the Thirteenth Doctor and Yasmin Khan from the most recent run of Doctor Who. It has a couple scenes that could hint at an attraction between them, but you could just see it as a strong devotion to uphold the Doctor's code of conduct from a character who's bought into her mythos. Whether you ship it or not, the ship is completely benign, as is a majority of ships that isn't signalled by an army of stans ready to jump to heinous extremes as an expression of their fandom.

And stuff like Korra dating Asami or the recent Owl House pairing have genuinely been great steps forward for wlw representation. And while there are some people whose appreciation of queerness is skin-deep and shaped exclusively through shipping goggles rather than an earnest appreciation or expression of allyship for the queer community, it mostly manifests in the loudest and most toxic minorities of gigantic mega-fandoms. The majority of fans - the majority of shippers of those ships, for that matter - are not that bad.

Like we're not all as riled up as a rika_furude or a Scotty_Rogers. They definitely exist, and when they go out of their way to be callous and rude it might make you feel shitty. But how many of them are there compared to the people who actually want to have a conversation? The issue isn't so much the format itself, but the bad faith actors who take shit too far and ruin the format for everyone else. The same goes for shippers - hate the bad shit, but understand that not all of it is bad shit and the people you probably dislike the most don't represent the broader community.

So to summarise:

There's a lot of significant baggage in regards to fandoms who virulently and aggressively lobby for queer pairings, a lot of it rooted in fetishization and infantilization, and that goes back a long time and is worth mentioning - but as the conversation surrounding the queer community and representation has grown over time and gotten more mature, we're seeing more reasonable discourse emerge.

While there's still immensely vitriolic fans making asses of themselves and fucking up the conversation for everyone else, it doesn't represent the majority of people who ship characters as queer. For the most part, outside of the extreme stuff I was talking about, fandom picking up a headcanon about a character's sexuality is fine and doesn't hurt anyone - if you disagree, all you have to do is stay in your own fan corner and do your own thing, and it's none of anyone else's business what you choose to believe.

To further summarise:

Shit's fucked up sometimes, but by and large it's a perfectly benign practice that isn't inherently negative.

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Thought I saw a mouse kicking in your beak, it was only a skeleton
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