hot take? but the Twilight fandom needs to stop citing Mormonism for everything that happens in this hell series.

the characters aren't Mormon. the plot isn't Mormon. the wardrobe isn't Mormon. this series was WRITTEN BY a Mormon woman whose religious indoctrination influenced her work. there are themes, plot points, characterizations, etc, that are related to or in line with LDS teachings. saying the book/characters are Mormon is not the same.

the more you label everything in text as Mormon, the less likely you'll be able to identify the actual religious influences

and if you think you are somehow immune to the influence of something you cannot correctly identify, think again

About Ship wars

Ok, well don't say I didn't warn you. A couple terms first: * Shipping - Derived from "relationship." Imagining two characters being romantic. This is usually accompanied by producing fanworks that depict those characters in a romantic situation. The relationship can be canonical or not, and the fan works can be everything from PG handholding to XXX vore. (If someone ships Kylo Ren/Rey it means they like to think of them in a romantic/sexual relationship.) The pairing itself is called a ship. * Shipwar - When shippers of two different ships attack each other over their ships. * Wank - common fandom term for drama * Antis - People who invest energy in attacking shippers of a particular ship, and employ arguments of morality of social justice to do so. * Fandom in this case refers to a particular subset of fandom that is traditionally female oriented, focuses a lot of male/male pairings, and often chooses fanfiction as its primary output. There are 2 big things to remember as you read this. 1) Some people are SUPER SERIOUS about fictional characters getting it on together, and 2) they will use any means at their disposal to stop people from doing it wrong. Imagine the ridiculousness of PS vs. Nintendo fanboys ratcheted up to 11 and you get an idea of how some fans approach shipping. Generic ship wars have been happening for a very long time. If you thought Harry Potter deserved to fall in love with Draco Malfoy and Ginny was the devil you were in good company and would gather together to get those dirty Ginny fans run out of the internet. Bad actors have always been around to exploit this, either to troll, or to worm their way into popular or rarefied circles. [The Ms. Scribe Story](http://web.archive.org/web/20140401225619/http://www.peeep.us/0418dc98) is a good example of what the old school shipwars could produce as far as wank was concerned. And in it you see the seed of what would become the modern "Anti" mentality, which is framing yourself as a victim of bigots to win sympathy points, all for the purpose of forwarding your preference of who bangs who. This portion of fandom has always been closely linked with genre fiction, since many people in the latter are engaged in the former. Genre fiction had and still has some issues concerning race, sexism, and homophobia, which is par for the course in almost all media everywhere. In 2009 those issues came into contact with some MASSIVE WANKERS, leading to what continues to be known as [Race Fail '09](https://fanlore.org/wiki/RaceFail_%2709). A lot of people don't know this, but the term Social Justice Warrior started to pick up usage around this time, to define some very particular, very caustic people who were destroying communities by claiming the moral high ground and attacking anyone who had an opinion even slightly different from them. A few of them are listed at that link. It quickly became apparent that pointing the finger and claiming -ism! was an efficient method of silencing certain people. Fandom, however, remained relatively insulated from this fail, which was spreading mostly in certain websites and in professional circles at the time. In '09 the internet was still relatively decentralized, and fandom was dispersed among various livejournals, archives, webforums, and so on. This limited the damage one movement could do, because just because Winterfox was shitting up one site didn't mean there was another that hadn't escaped unscathed. Enter web 2.0, and specifically, Tumblr. As the internet began to coalesce into platforms that aimed to monopolize user engagement, the separation between communities grew more and more difficult. Before, if you wanted to see Kylo Ren and General Hux having kinky tentacle sex you went to a community specifically for that and didn't have to worry about those people who had their own community for Rey and Finn. But now, all the shippers were converging into a single pot, a pot that had no filters, no privacy functions, and actively wanted everything to be shared as widely as possible. Another massive change that happened about this time is that the attitude towards kids in fandom had shifted. Back in the good old days a 13 year old understood that lying about their age was the price you paid to get your porn. The kids these days no longer have that mentality. They don't think twice about declaring themselves children on the internet. This will come into play later. Ok, as we near the present here's a quick review. * Ship wars are serious business to some people. * Screaming about social justice is a proven method of getting people to shut up. * There are some crazy people out there who will do anything to manipulate themselves into a position of infamy. * Everyone has slowly been squeezed into the same fandom spaces, adding pressure. * Children are fucking everywhere. When you combine all those elements what you get is this, some really loud ass motherfuckers who think that whoever can claim oppression and bigotry the loudest is the one who deserves to ship things the way they want, and there can be only one. There have been some reaaaaaallly bad fandoms for this, but since the OP is specifically about the age issue, I'm going to stick to that and not get into some of the ridiculous racism angles this has also taken. A lot of shows that fans like to ship for are cartoons, or shows that are ostensibly aimed towards younger audiences, but adults often are a big portion of the fandom. Ponybros are the more infamous version of this, but they are a bit of an outlier as they don't run in the same fandom circles as the old lj>tumblr fandom that is the source of this particular wank. Big targets of these conflicts include Welcome to Nightvale, Homestuck, Steven Universe, and the new Voltron series. When Voltron came out it got super popular among fandom. A lot of fic was written, and a lot of art was drawn. Since it's a show with a team cast, people were shipping a lot of pairings that shared a member, which is often where the worst of the ship wars happen. For example, two of the biggest ships were Shiro/Keith, and Keith/Lance. Now if you're a kid who ships Keith/Lance and haaaates Shiro/Keith, and you need to stop people from producing things involving Shiro/Keith, and you know accusing people of moral crimes is an effective tactic for this, it turns out your best option is to use pedophilia as a weapon. So people started insisting that Shiro had to be at least 20, and Keith had to be a minor, and shipping these two meant that you were a pedophile. No, it doesn't make any sense, but the people who do this are dead serious about this. They called themselves anti-Sheith (the pairing's "smushname") and went so far as harassing the showrunners for the exact ages of all the characters and tattling on professional artists for indicating a fondness for the ship to their employers. And if people push back and say you're being an idiot, you can throw that back in their face by saying that they are adults abusing minors while simultaneously endorsing abuse and pedophilia! 20 year olds started calling themselves children so they could position themselves in a place to abuse 22 year olds. Teens started declaring 30 the age in which all women should get off the internet and stop having hobbies. And all this was done because they didn't like a fictional pairing. This is by far not the only instance in which pedophilia was brought up as a massive reach to support attacking shippers of the wrong ship. One of the most absurd instances was spearheaded by a 30-something woman named graceebooks, a member of The Johnlock Conspiracy (another very deep rabbit hole) who actually harassed a rape survivor to tears, in public, because she preferred to have Sherlock topping John rather than John topping Sherlock, and even though these people share the same ship, and the SAME FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ARE INVOLVED, the TJLCers actually had the balls to make the claim that Sherlock topping John = pedophilia because John was being infantalized or something, IDEK. Both Voltron fandom and TJLC share this absurd notion that their "gay babies" will become a canon couple too. That's a whoooole other ball of crazy, but it explains why some people go insane over this. They genuinely believe that if they fight off the rival ships in fandom space the showrunners will reward them by making their faves kiss on the show. So that's the context. What then happened is that these idiotic arguments that were being used for ship wars were then adopted by young, stupid children who did not understand or care about the context, and saw only the arguments themselves, and took them as reasonable and good arguments, and believe in them completely. While most of the initial wankers were just cynically throwing shit at the wall and hoping something stuck to drive out rival ships, there are now a large number of people who believe in a moral code that came out of that. It's like watching a religion form sometimes. The end result is OP, who has bought into a convoluted logic process developed to legitimize the harassment of shippers, and is now trying to apply it to the actual real world, with predictable results. Soucrce: Redditor shares a detailed explanation of how Tumblr's fandom culture formed into the mess it is today, complete with examples. https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/6b5ke3/redditor_shares_a_detailed_explanation_of_how/