30 Days of De-Objectification: Fictional Free-For-All

Ship it good!

30 Days of De-Objectification:

Fictional Free-For-All

When it comes to fictional ships, I give not one single fuck what you ship.

Regardless of how much I may personally hate the ship, I will only crack wise if you are obnoxious with your ship, i.e. injecting it into every single Chuckdamn tag that ever existed.

That includes not putting your ship material (fics, manips, meta) into the general tag for the characters involved in the ship or the actors who play them or the show/movie the characters come from.

I mean it. The author of something I consider to be the grossest fictional ship in the world will not hear even the teeniest peep from me (unless they happen to have even better super hearing than the Super Family and can hear me groaning in agony) on their blog, so long as they haven’t splattered their gods-awful ship throughout every tag. If I happen to say something negative about the ship, it will be in a post of my own (or in agreement with someone else who hates the ship) and I will tag it as anti-whatever.

So, yes, even if the fic (or manip) involves the most graphic family orgy ever, I am not going to get into a twist about it if it involves only fictional characters. I may barf buckets over it on my own, but I’m not going to get into a flame war with the creator. It isn’t worth it.

Trust me, I have seen some things involving The Simpsons that you don’t ever want to see.

In my younger days, friends’ older brothers often had underground comics. Disney characters get up to some unbelievable things in those comics, believe me.

Sometimes the actual animators from kids’ cartoons create naughty stuff of their own behind the scenes.

Most of these people are not child molesters. They’re just blowing off steam with dirty jokes. Adult humor is a thing.

There are a few things that get under my skin.

1)      People acting like shipping fictional characters, including canonically biologically related characters and characters with a marked age gap, is equally as bad as real-world child molesting.

2)      People acting like shipping biologically related consenting adult characters in a similar age range is the same as shipping a child character (here I mean a pre-pubescent child, not a seventeen-year-old) with an adult character. Yes, both are fictional ships, and no actual child is being harmed, but there is not a direct comparison between these ships. They are apples and oranges.

3)      People screaming “PEDOPHILIA!!!11!!!1” whenever they don’t like what someone’s shipping.

4)      People shipping real people as if they were shipping fictional characters.

Again, when it comes to fictional ships, I shouldn’t have to explain for the 666 gazillionth time that fictional characters aren’t real. The authors of fictional ships see a dynamic between two characters and want to explore that dynamic. That doesn’t mean that the authors of ships like Anna/Elsa, Thorki, or Wincest want to have sex with their siblings. It means that they see a romantic and/or sexual dynamic between Anna and Elsa, Thor and Loki, or Sam and Dean Winchester.

It’s bloody rude to accuse people of wanting to have sex with their relatives or molest children just because they ship something you think is icky.

Also, for the 666 gazillionth time, a squick is not a trigger.

There are a lot of ships that squick me.

There have been many times when I’ve been reading a fic, thinking to myself, “hey, this is pretty good, well written, so creative,” and then suddenly…

DAFUQ DID I JUST READ???? 

OMG, NOPE IT FROM ORBIT! IT’S THE ONLY WAY TO BE SURE!

Here’s what I don’t do.

If the fic is properly tagged, then it’s on me. And, as I said, 9.999999 times out of ten, my reaction is a squick, not an actual trigger. So, off I go to read something else, or write my own, because that’s what adults do. We don’t go whinging to the author of the squicky fic about what an icky, awful, baddy-bad baddie they are. We go on our way and find something more to our liking.

Sometimes people who write extremely bizarre sex stuff are working through something that happened to them. Think of how much worse it will make them feel to curse them out or accuse them of all sorts of awful things.

I, personally, have a lot of weird trust issues with most of the members of my family, and I do have a history of sexual assault, both in childhood and as an adult. For me, Sam and Dean represent a love against all odds in a life that has been very odd. They found with each other something that they couldn’t find with anyone else.

I would not want a romantic or sexual relationship with my real-life brother and fuck you if you think it’s funny or appropriate to imply that I would.

My brother and I are not Sam and Dean Winchester.

We are real people.

Sam and Dean Winchester are fictional characters.

My Sam and Dean don’t have to be your Sam and Dean.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~