Yeah I've been idly complaining about the sheer amount of... just, like, blatant homophobia I see in the Arcane fandom over a ship that I don't even really care about and that is immensely more supported in the text than any average ship of mine that I think strongly enhances the text. And it's such unmotivated homophobia too because Jayce and Viktor basically have no other relationships on paper and their entire narrative arcs revolve around each other. It's probably the most blatant example of this, people literally just deciding that because canonical representation is a possibility, there's something wrong with just shipping a thing.
I broadly agree with the thought that F/F is just a lot less controversial and a lot more tolerated, even if I find most F/F representation tepid and uninteresting and lacking in the kind of strong chemistry I want my ships to have. The wild part really is that even though fandom is a lot more open to writing F/F now, a lot of the F/F that gets written is equally tepid as the boring canon lesbians, which just goes further to strip all relationships of eroticism. Men are incapable of love unless a woman is present, but women also don't seem capable of eroticism or attraction without a man present. We've pidgeonholed ourselves into all acceptable shipping being straight.
And it's just so wild to me because again I have to ask -- are people just worse at reading now? Does the idea that "well they can put in canonical gay rep so we don't have to read between the lines" really dominate so much that even without supposedly more queer-friendly progressive mores around polyamoury and queer sex don't allow us to read all of that into the texts we're engaging with? Why is it that newer fandoms just plain have less shipping in them when supposedly more kinds of ships are acceptable now?
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Date: 30/4/25 22:00 (UTC)Yeah I've been idly complaining about the sheer amount of... just, like, blatant homophobia I see in the Arcane fandom over a ship that I don't even really care about and that is immensely more supported in the text than any average ship of mine that I think strongly enhances the text. And it's such unmotivated homophobia too because Jayce and Viktor basically have no other relationships on paper and their entire narrative arcs revolve around each other. It's probably the most blatant example of this, people literally just deciding that because canonical representation is a possibility, there's something wrong with just shipping a thing.
I broadly agree with the thought that F/F is just a lot less controversial and a lot more tolerated, even if I find most F/F representation tepid and uninteresting and lacking in the kind of strong chemistry I want my ships to have. The wild part really is that even though fandom is a lot more open to writing F/F now, a lot of the F/F that gets written is equally tepid as the boring canon lesbians, which just goes further to strip all relationships of eroticism. Men are incapable of love unless a woman is present, but women also don't seem capable of eroticism or attraction without a man present. We've pidgeonholed ourselves into all acceptable shipping being straight.
And it's just so wild to me because again I have to ask -- are people just worse at reading now? Does the idea that "well they can put in canonical gay rep so we don't have to read between the lines" really dominate so much that even without supposedly more queer-friendly progressive mores around polyamoury and queer sex don't allow us to read all of that into the texts we're engaging with? Why is it that newer fandoms just plain have less shipping in them when supposedly more kinds of ships are acceptable now?
Who is having fun, living like this?