Snowflake Challenge Day #3

[kingstoken]

Challenge #3

In your own space, Scream Into the Void. Get it all out.

I'm actually kind of blanking on this one, I don't have much to rant about at the moment. So, I thought I might tell you about how I stumbled into my first ship war. First, I'm going to preface this by saying I grew up in rural area and we had either no internet connection or a really spotty one at best, so I missed all the fun stuff like geocities, mailing lists, and all the other things people my age are nostalgic about. I was well into adulthood when I got into online fandom, some of my early online fandom forays where in Facebook groups and later fandom specific sub-reddits, both of which are pretty heavily moderated, and then I got into Tumblr. My first big Tumblr fandom was Game of Thrones (which was surprisingly good, at least in the early days, there was some Catelyn and Sansa hate, but that was more on reddit than tumblr), and my second Tumblr fandom was The Walking Dead.

I think I really got into TWD the summer between seasons 4 and 5, I had binge watched it over a couple of months. I really shipped Caryl, which is the pairing of Daryl Dixon and Carol Peletier. I went looking for Caryl on Tumblr, not realizing that TWD fandom was in the middle of an epic ship war between Caryl shippers and Bethyl shippers, Bethyl being the pairing of Daryl Dixon and Beth Greene. I didn't really know about ship wars, so I saw all these posts debating and discussing these pairings, and I commented on some of these posts thinking that if I could just explain why I felt Carol was a better fit for Daryl then people would understand how wonderful the Caryl ship was, oh I was so naive. Thankfully I did not receive blow back for that, but the ship war did effect my experience. I had followed dozens of TWD/Caryl blogs and my dashboard was soon inundated with these posts, some of which were very, very negative. Fortunately, fairly quickly (within a few weeks) I was able to realize that I really didn't like this environment and didn't want to engage with it, so started to unfollow blogs, and only continued to follow a select few artists and writers who were positive and didn't interact with ship war posts at all (or if they did it they kept it behind cuts so I could easily avoid them).

I look back on that and realize I experienced a very quick learning curve, it taught me to better curate my fandom experience. When I join new fandoms now I'm very selective about who I chose to follow, and I mute tags if I need to. It has made for a better fandom experience for me, and I have been able to enjoy and find connection in some fandoms that are were notoriously fraught this way, I can't avoid all wank obviously, but I can choose not to engage with it.

Comments

[senmut]

Shipping wars are so aggravating.

[kingstoken]

Mostly it's fun, but it can be aggravating at times.

[corvidology]

I've come to the conclusion that the fandom wank is the *actual* fandom of a lot of its participants.

[kingstoken]

Very true!

[svgurl]

I think a lot of go through that learning curve, but it does teach you stuff for the long run. I'm with you on being selective who I follow and interact with. Fandom is nicer when you have a smaller, drama free circle, or at least it is for me.

I can't avoid all wank obviously, but I can choose not to engage with it.
Exactly this.

[kingstoken]

Fandom is nicer when you have a smaller, drama free circle, or at least it is for me.
Same here!

[shipperslist]

This is something I just can't wrap my head around. We're talking about fictional characters. In a fictional world. Doing fictional things. Why are people fighting? IT'S FICTION?

[kingstoken]

I know, but you'd be surprised at how heated it can get.

[barbaratp]

Ship wars have always been such a ridiculous thing in my opinion, I love that everyone has their own interests, but fighting over it? So unnecessary. I'm sorry you had this experience of being a layman caught in the crossfire on Tumblr. Sometimes fandoms freak out a lot over something so silly. I remember the Twilight days where people would argue with each other over the #teamedward and #teamjacob hashtags across sites and groups. Some of the fights were hilarious, others not so much.

[kingstoken]

Yep, ship wars are confusing for newbies, and never necessary.

Off topic, I had a younger cousin that was into Twilight, and she was Team Jacob, her other cousins even bought her a t-shirt that said that. In fact all her friends were team Jacob until the last book came out and the whole imprinting on a baby thing happened that kind of killed it.

[barbaratp]

This train of him bonding with a baby (as well as another character before him in the same plot) killed me inside. Gods Meyer screwed the readers over on this part. A baby of mine, a newborn baby. Worrisome. But imagine your cousin's disappointment, we were all disappointed with even who TeamEdward was.