You might be right. I never considered how the heterosexual reality distortion field may be playing into this, but I've definitely seen a lot of people just relying on adhering to convention to point out chemistry -- Cait/Vi is actually a good example of this because Vi is ultimately just a female bad boy archetype and them both being women has almost nothing to do with their relationship being interesting (and their relationship isn't interesting because Cait just. Isn't interesting, lmao) -- and even kind of using the logic of "stories go like this!" to declare something as canon or as problematic when the story emphathetically did not even go like that. It's the kind of poor media literacy I expect from people who are new into fandom, but I never considered that it could also be the kind of bare minimum media literacy most straight normies need to interface with media, and that I'm just seeing opinions from people who don't actually want to be doing fandom.
A lot of the discussion seems.... very "mainstream from 2007", which would also check out with the idea that there are just a lot of brazenly uncritical people in the conversation not really trying to have a conversation as much as they're trying to have coffee break talk. It would also go a long way to explain why shipping noncanon ships gets called "terminally online" by even people who ostensibly like queer relationships.
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Date: 3/5/25 20:35 (UTC)You might be right. I never considered how the heterosexual reality distortion field may be playing into this, but I've definitely seen a lot of people just relying on adhering to convention to point out chemistry -- Cait/Vi is actually a good example of this because Vi is ultimately just a female bad boy archetype and them both being women has almost nothing to do with their relationship being interesting (and their relationship isn't interesting because Cait just. Isn't interesting, lmao) -- and even kind of using the logic of "stories go like this!" to declare something as canon or as problematic when the story emphathetically did not even go like that. It's the kind of poor media literacy I expect from people who are new into fandom, but I never considered that it could also be the kind of bare minimum media literacy most straight normies need to interface with media, and that I'm just seeing opinions from people who don't actually want to be doing fandom.
A lot of the discussion seems.... very "mainstream from 2007", which would also check out with the idea that there are just a lot of brazenly uncritical people in the conversation not really trying to have a conversation as much as they're trying to have coffee break talk. It would also go a long way to explain why shipping noncanon ships gets called "terminally online" by even people who ostensibly like queer relationships.