I do have to say, as someone on the camp of "you could probably ship someone else who isn't non-partnering but honestly I don't care as long as you don't harass people over this", I think it's lost on some people that the reason why so many non-partnering aroaces may become defensive over these characters even if "it's just fandom" is the fact that a lot of aroaces who do fit these stereotypes and who may fall into this camp genuinely had horrible experiences about their social circles and yes, especially this fandom site, harassing them and saying they don't exist or that they're mentally ill and should "get fixed" among other things.

As common it is to see aspecs here on Tumblr, the queer social media site, you need to understand that there's still a lot of contempt for aroaces outside and inside this place. Hell, I received an ask calling aros and aces delusional just last Christmas Day 2023 that came with a wave of increased arophobia around that time. As much as that time period was definitely discourse against aroallo men, aphobes did not cherry pick on who they're sending hate to.

Besides this, a lot of non-partnering aroaces often receive this kind of dismissal in real life too and as much as some people may think it's not a big deal, it definitely fucks up your brain when people say you and your experiences not only don't matter but you are doomed to live a lonely and miserable life if you don't find someone. Even my otherwise very supportive relatives expressed this concern and it's absolutely out of care but it's fucking damaging to constantly hear that I will die alone if I don't find a partner (romantic, platonic, or otherwise).

This is besides dismissals like this or even non-acceptance had literally barred me from mental health care when I was a teenager because my specialist said I had a "distressed sexuality" and had specialists focused on that aspect rather than all my other issues.

The shipping of a non-partnering (typically romance repulsed or uninterested) character feels like another form of dismissal for someone like me, like my sexuality is not good enough or serious enough to be respected. The shipping of these characters sometimes reinforce the narrative that non-partnering aroace people can't find happiness on their own and do need someone (romantic, platonic, or otherwise) to be happy or they will become happier if they do find this someone. People are having fun with their ships but there are still many people who don't want to spend the time actually extending grace and understanding towards me and my experiences. I'm just another discourse topic and someone who's inconvenient to some of them.

This doesn't even account for how these fan communities aren't just filled with aspec people and do extend to allos who may take some of the discourse and actively apply it in real life to other real life aspec people. People who go and interact with real human beings and may hurt them or harass them. It isn't even accounting for the fact that even online things affect real people too.

Of course, I do understand that a lot more complex aspec identities often don't get the spotlight so they may express themselves through shipping fandom characters but non-partnering people should deserve more than these people isn't really the point of this post.

The point here is that there's a reason why a lot of non-partnering (typically repulsed or uninterested) aroace people get defensive about these things even in fan communities and it's very likely that it's because aphobia and especially against the stereotypical aroace™ still very much exist outside of our little community and they can be informed by media and the fans that consume it and this shit could genuinely have negative consequences. This of course extends to those who do have complex aspec identities as society does not treat those who don't live up to what is expected as "normal" in terms of romantic relationships and sexual attraction kindly.

Distancing yourself from these aroaces who do have frustrations with how media and fandom treat their sexuality because they're being "prudes" or are just affected by "purity culture" is unhelpful to say the least and honestly veers eerily close to shit I hear aphobes say about us.

Absolutely do stop people and block them if they're instigating and participating in harassment over shipping of all things, even these aroaces, but trying to say that every person who do have issues with shipping aroace characters are the same way with this is extremely lacking nuance and absolutely dismissive of other members of the community and why they may have the opinion they hold.

I don't know why rabies discourse is a) a thing or b) coming up again, but if any Americans are participating on the side of rabies I am going to assume that this is another consequence of banning To Kill A Mockingbird and Their Eyes Were Watching God in schools.

You can't simultaneously reclaim a slur and then insist it's not a slur. A word has to be a slur to begin with for you to "reclaim" it. I'm all for reclaiming "queer" if you want to, I call myself queer, but you can't then also spread misinformation that it's not a slur and never was. If it's not a slur, then you're not reclaiming anything.

I'm a Jew. I call myself a kike. Proudly. But I would never insist that because I and other Jews are comfortable using it to describe ourselves, that it's no longer a slur.

I think some of you are so caught up in the euphoria of your own reclamation that you recoil when others don't have the same euphoria. But it's perfectly normal to not have the same experiences. Someone saying "hey, please don't call me this word, I'm uncomfortable with it" isn't oppressing you just as much as you aren't oppressing someone for saying "hey, I like this word, please call me this word".

You will encounter people who call themselves "queer" but not "gay", "gay" but not "queer", "faggot" but not "queer", etc etc. And this diversity of experience is beautiful and important.

And this doesn't even touch on the fact that the social context and gravity of certain words are different in different regions and countries, and insisting that everyone abide by one region (read: Northern USA)'s definition and context of a word is extremely American-centric and paternalistic.

Not everyone should have the same relationship to different words. Diversity is important, otherwise it just becomes an echo chamber.

I appreciate you a lot, frank! Can you give me a list of your favorite horses, both from movies/shows and from real life?

From real life, my favorite horse of all time is probably Echo who I heard about back in 2015, and then mentioned in passing in this post about Bayes' Theorem on SSC. I linked to the article on Facebook and my mother then started sending me all sorts of articles about Echo and I loved reading them because they made me smile, which is the core of the question: "if you're sad, you can always find happiness in horses."

Sadly, Echo did not live very long (I think he was 26 or something?), but he had one final, very moving, happy chapter as a therapeutic riding horse.

He's in this video, too, doing something that made him happy in the last weeks of his life, which involved holding a trampoline in his mouth. The researcher is then talking about how "we don't want to harm any of the horses in this study, and Echo is no different from a patient with a broken leg or a depression that we are trying to help" -- which makes me really happy and is a very good reason to use horses to get at a phenomenon that would otherwise be hard to study.

----

Other horses I like:

1. The appaloosa from The Black Stallion (1979).

2. My Little Pony.

3. The horses from War Horse

4. The "Hooves of Fire" parody band, from The Simpsons episode Bart's Chocolate Homer. Listen at your own peril.

5. Pegasus, from Yes.

6. Pegasus (various), from Game of Thrones.

7. And finally, The Pregnant Horse

I don't care how you want to write the obikin dynamic.

I don't care if you like top anakin or bottom anakin or top obi-wan or bottom obi-wan. I don't care if you like submissive anakin or dominant anakin or submissive obi-wan or dominant obi-wan.

Preferences are preferences and I have my own just like you have yours.

But I've heard through the grape vine of authors that some people are harassing writers for how they choose to write The Team, trying to persuade or peer pressure them into a different way of doing things.

Stop it.

Leave people who write for your FREE enjoyment alone. Make this fandom a more welcoming place.

I'm not saying you can't have a preference or discuss why you love that take on the dynamic, celebrate the things you love! But don't shit on people who have a different take and definitely do not go into an author's ask box or dms and harass them.

the social contract of visible queerness to say "hey you're not alone" and not fucking outing people or being weird about them in public

i too don't get the cam/pal weirdness whenn the twins are RIGHt tHEre

I got a couple of asks about this, only posting this one to keep the Disc Horse content to a minimum BUT:

In my experience, it isn't that unusual for fandoms to have much stricter standards for shipping characters that are perceived as "good" (and Camilla and Pal definitely are) vs. Designed Freak Ianthe being Weird about her sister or John "genocide" Gaius calling his occasional fuckbuddy "my son, my brother." Like, I have negative patience for ship policing BUT I understand why people are more bothered by ~bad ships~ for characters they like.

However. Camilla and Palamedes aren't... family. They are second cousins (something that's not actually in any of the main books, just in Dr Sex) which means that they share ONE great-grandparent. This says more about Sixth House obsession with their gene pool and keeping track of their genealogy than it does about them regarding the other as cousins. I don't even think most readers know they're supposed to be related.

Anyway. This is the first and last time I'm going to weigh in on Shipping Discourse bc life is too short and love is too long, but both sides of my family are products of second-cousin marriages bc that's just what happens when you live in a town with 5000 people! so this is funny to me

I honestly feel entirely unwelcome in all online queer spaces. Every single aspect of my identity has been picked apart and I've been told over and over again that I don't belong, and the oppression I've faced isn't real, or "only" misdirected, and that I shouldn't talk about it because other people have it worse. Insisting that the ONLY reason people like me are ever allowed here is to be glorified allies. Talking about similarities in our experiences is "derailing the REAL discussion to insert themselves", talking about differences is "inventing ways to feel special".

And every time "the discourse" slows down and you all move on to the next target, you all pretend like it never happened. No discussion is ever had about the long term harm. We're just expected to act like a huge segment of OUR OWN COMMUNITY didn't just go on a months or years long campaign against us and the best the rest of you had to offer was some wishy-washy platitudes about being "valid, BUT".

And when, in the end, we say we feel unwelcome, we are told we're traitors so. You know.

I was going through your gifs and damn the comment section of that Darklina gif because wtf. Fuck purity culture.

oh lmao yeah that sure was a time! people get real intense about fictional content and how other people respond to it, and it makes them act like rude goddamn nutjobs on the internet, i guess!

my policy has always been to ship and let ship—because at the end of the day, it's fictional content—and stay in my own little corner, but if people crash in and start randomly calling me an abuse apologist for enjoying a fictional ship, you can bet i'm not going to let that stand

also it is fascinating to me how you get to be a misogynist so long as you say "white" or "straight" before "women." and then you can say whatever shit you want. it's not the first time I've noticed this. but it really did hit this time.

when talking about equity in the workplace, my boss, a black woman, often says how uncomfortable she is when white people put themselves down for being "basic" or "white" for liking, say, pumpkin spice. or whatever. in an attempt to assuage their own awkwardness, they are othering her. putting her in the position to make them feel better about their whiteness and privilege.

as long as you're shitting on white people, it's okay to shit on women. as long as you're making you feel better about yourself, it doesn't matter if the other person in the room now feels like they have to police themselves for your comfort.

maybe intersectionality means people get to be themselves and like whatever they like without being told they're doing it wrong. maybe butt the fuck out of what women can and can't do. maybe I'm taking the phrase "straight white cis women" away from you until you can use it to actually examine their privilege and not just use it as a cudgel against anything women do that you don't like.

Continuing on for whatever the fuck happened with that poll™ yesterday, OP claiming that it was made as a "joke poll" doesn't matter because they were still being arophobic and not at all curbing any aphobia in their replies. It's also apparent that the joke here is the absurdity of the existence of aro men who are also cishet which shows how little OP and other aphobes really know about the aro and ace spectrums and the nuance within them.

Besides, the fact that so many people aren't really taking to it as a "joke" as OP claims, and is just spewing out such rancid hatred for ace and aro people, even wishing for our deaths, is still something to be called out. It still shows how uncaring OP and those other people are.

They really don't give a shit about us.

If you don't like movie with sex scenes in them or think they're awkward to watch with family members my suggestion to you is to not watch movies with sex scenes in them, or at least not watch them with family members.

rmr when that one guy who worked on the shows or w/e said legend of the boneknapper wasn't canon?? like, ok lets get you to bed, grandpa, stop using twitter <3

Every popular mlm fandom ship goes through a top and bottom discourse. The characters could be about two half shark demi gods with pizza cutters for arms and yet fandom would still be divided about who does who lol

Oh, I know. It's been like this since the internet was conceived. Doesn't negate the fact that entitled readers should shut their traps :)

Am I being overly naive in saying people should hold hands and be nice about who takes the penis? Yeah, probably. Definitely. Bitches will be bitches and the people trying to peer pressure writers into writing the dynamic they want will always do that because they have done it of their own volition rather than creating the content they want to see. They see this as a commercial transaction and that they, the customer, are right and need to exert their will on the writer. News flash, it's free, you are not a customer, and the customer is not always right. Stop internalizing capitalism.

It just seems so silly to me because it's fanfiction/fanart. We create stories where Anakin Skywalker, known baby killer and sith lord, did not fall to the dark side and did not kill children and fandom is fine with that. We love those stories! But those actions and choices are more important to his character arc and personality than whether or not he's the one taking dick up his ass. But that's the thing fandom thinks is a huge and gross misunderstanding of who he is and a huge betrayal of his personality 🤡 The same thing goes for Obi-Wan. We change aspects of his story and we're all cool with it but heaven forbid someone write him as a submissive 🙄 you'll just get yelled at that you do not understand him as a person and you really should check out this other fanwork someone wrote where they got it right and maybe you'll finally get a clue.

Like, we're all clowns at a circus committing clown violence on each other except writers, artists and other content creators are getting hurt by it. We react and flail and accidentally hit other content creators and it hurts.

the crowd SHRIEKS! it goes WILD with oot-raj. your inflammatory viewpoint gets MAXIMUM ENGAGEMENT! +15 points

- Do it again! (recommended)

- Maybe sit this one out.

- Write a thoughtful deconstruction instead, at the cost of NEGATIVE ENGAGEMENT

I love Cam and Pal and am a CamPal romance truther and it's for that exact specific reason that I hate the sixth with my entire chest. Honestly I think if you're going to make an imperialism or patriarchy argument like people do with Jod (I agree with you on that front, by the way) the sixth is actually the one it'd be easiest to do that with. Like their entire military is dedicated to having children with residents of the shepherd planets and then taking them to be raised in the house. Once saw someone say it wasn't eugenics because they're trying to diversify their gene pool not limit it and I feel like people just don't get that, in canon, they are using their military as a positive eugenics campaign. Also telling someone they can only have kids with two other people because there can't be a drop of relation between them is eugenics. Any attempt to obtain favorable reproductive outcomes through systemic control of who is reproducing and how within an adult population is eugenics! Idk I know this is a stupid hill to die on; it's just something I'm very sensitive to because I'm from the appalachian mountain region in the US, and negative eugenics campaigns from the early 20th century that promoted the stupid cousin-fucking hillbilly narrative about the region people still use today. Also, people don't seem to realize that the enormous social taboo on cousin marriage that exists in western society now is the result of early 20th century eugenics campaigns. This got very off track but I hate the institution of the sixth with an insane and disproportionate passion and honestly would have said "good for her" if BOE killed the oversight body. Also I don't care what authorial intent was to your average non-fandom reader (and I would posit to most fandom readers on first read!) their relationship reads as romantic and at that point intent becomes irrelevant. I needed to make this opinion public but I also need to stay alive so I've dumped it in your ask box. Sorry.

Ship Disk Horse disclaimer: I'm not Appalachian but I do have second cousin marriage very close in my family tree (small town Italy!) and I agree that the incest argument around Cam and Pal is weird. BUT you can't control what people find squicky, and I'm not very fond of the argument "X is actually perfectly okay IRL" to support shipping discourse. I get why you'd take it personally, but that's a super slippery slope IME.

On to the Sixth! I actually think they all employ vat wombs (unless it's for science) and their strategy is to fuck members of other Houses, not the occupied planets. There doesn't seem to be many (or at all) relationships between Houses and non-Houses people.

I don't think we know Enough about the Sixth to say they're unequivocally bad and I'm hesitant to bring up eugenics OR reproductive autonomy, because I don't feel comfortable comparing sff worldbuilding to RL systems of oppression.

That said, the Sixth's commitment to the gene pool thing leaves leaves me very ???? because it seems to be a strategy they have employed for thousands of years with no visible results. The consanguinity tables get narrower. It doesn't seem to give them a "boost" over the other Houses. So why do they stick with it? Gives me a very similar vibe to the Seventh's commitment to their ideal that cancer strengthens a necromancer despite no actual proofs. I think it's just the Sixth's manifestation of the underlying theme that the Houses are basically a zombie civilization, constantly stagnant.

I'm also wondering WTF happened to all those Cohort people when the Sixth seceded. Do they think their friends and families died in the solar flare?

Anyway! I appreciate you sending this ask but I'm going to make it non rebloggable for my sanity :D