#consumed it in media/fandom which how I even got into it(thru shipping)

[bitchapalooza]

I was thinking I wanted a queer platonic partner, but thinking about it more I don’t? I don’t want any intimacy whatsoever. I don’t wanna be touched unless it’s simple arm holding/arms linked together or a quick hug or lean on when in troubled times. I don’t want to be called a partner or anything either. I guess I just want a best friend to maybe live with? Just be close to someone with mutual trust and comfort and understanding and respect? I don’t wanna rope someone into a relationship that’s other than friendship because that’s all I want; I wouldn’t ever want to hold someone back if they want to be an intimate or romantic relationship! Having a close friendship sounds so heavenly to me, while having any other kind of relationship makes me feel anxious and uncomfortable to think about. God this book did so much for me ngl..

[brydeswhale]

The thing about sterek is that even tho, as I said, the show ITSELF didn’t lean on the ship, enough ppl inside and outside of fandom did use it for attention that the perception of teen wolf often was sterek.

From the idea of sterek as an actual ship on the show(more than one person in my circle expressed surprise when they started watching at how LITTLE Stiles and Derek actually interacted) to the idea that sterek would be canon if only Davis and co would stop being so cowardly.

(Denial runs deep in these ppl bc even in the godless tens and on cable, no one was going to actually make a pairing between an obnoxious teen and the man who, I will repeat this, assaulted him on more than one occasion, canon. It was never going to happen.)

It took Tyler Hoechlin leaving the show IIRC for the sterek fervour to die down.

And even then, the sterek contingency just shoved the supposed chemistry onto other white characters in Stiles’ vicinity, eg Peter(yikes), the villain of the month, or Lydia(I mean, at least they’re the same age, even if Stiles repeatedly fuckzoned her.).

Which honestly just proved what a lot of non/anti-sterek ppl had already been saying, which was that it wasn’t really about sterek. In fact it wasn’t even about Derek.

(Which had already BEEN evidenced by how sterek and stiles fans had taken Derek’s character development(he became less of an asshole) and canon love interests. They were particularly vitriolic towards Braeden, his second love interest, who happened to also be Black. Predictably.)

It was about what Stiles represented. The white lead they never got.

You might hear that TW was an ensemble show, or that it had an “unreliable narrator”(this was from one of the most racist anti-Scott ppl in fandom), but the reality was that the titular Teen Wolf of the show, Scott McCall, was the lead.

And the majority of the Stiles’ fandom couldn’t and can’t STAND this.

They absolutely writhed in agonies of racism over it, and spread their misery everywhere they could.

From harassment over anon, to fic after fic bashing Scott, to poorly researched, bad faith meta, gifs, and fan art, a highly vocal section of fandom(still active to this day) set out to do battle against the very show it claimed to be a fan of.

And this harassment didn’t stop at other fans. The actors were also targeted, to the point where Crystal Reed cited her treatment by fans as part of her incentive to exit the show.

Tyler Posey, who played Scott, was done much worse, as continues to this day. This has included ppl accusing him, a queer dude, of queer baiting, and someone who basically urged him to commit suicide when he opened up about his mental health issues post his mom’s death.

Of course, you’ll see many sterek/stiles’ fans talking about how these egregious occurrences are the work of a few “bad apples”, and “real” fans don’t do that.

Which would be easier to believe if they actually spoke out against these actions, against the racist tropes so often used in their fic and art, if they pointed out how the supposed “meta” produced by their number contains both bad takes and outright falsehoods, but, well.

They don’t.

In fact, they usually go out of their way to DENY that these ppl even exist. They say that Scott and Tyler Posey fans are the ones committing the harassment, that the call is coming from inside the house, and then they actually straight up lie about the rest of fandom.

So honestly, if any of them did speak up, we all know that the rest of them would turn on that person like the pack of starving hamsters they are.

Basically, sterek and stiles fans were not fans of the show. They were Ppl who put their fetishistic adoration of white male centred slash above the actual media they were supposedly consuming. I’m not saying that Teen Wolf was perfect. It sure as hell wasn’t. I’ve commented before on the bigoted tropes the show used and the cultural appropriation that basically made NO SENSE.

But at its heart, as explored thru Scott, it was a show about essentially rejecting the toxic masculinity pervasive in the urban fantasy/horror genre it took its inspiration from. Scott grows over the course of the show from a frightened teenager to a courageous leader, from someone willing to kill if that’s what it takes, to someone who kills as a last resort only, who relies on intelligence and diplomacy to get the job done.

He becomes someone who rejects the violence in the world he’s brutally forced to enter in favour of kindness and hope, even when things seem at their worst. A strong Latino(and yes, despite sterek denials, Scott is Latino) lead embodying the best his world had to offer, a new way forward that even the old guard and his worst enemies admired.

But when there are two white guys who exist within the same square mile on a tv show, who cares about that, amiright?

Bonus

https://twitter.com/cetotherium/status/1418570345007755267?s=21

And that was a big draw for a lot of ppl. When most urban fantasy was about EMBRACING toxic masculinity, Teen Wolf asked the Uber macho, might makes right, violently abusive Hunter/supernatural communities, “What the heck, man, are you alright?”

And Sterek fans HATED that, 😂. Their idea of a good urban fantasy horror show is one where the vicious but oh so cute white protagonist is over powered by the commanding, controlling, abusive alpha werewolf.

It would not surprise me at all if most of them were Anita Blake fans. Between the racism and the outright rejection of the core message of the show, they seem to have been saturated in LKH’s weird, bigoted nonsense.

[theplaguebeast]

A Long Ramble On My Experience Reading Nothing But Fanfic For Over A Year

So, my entire Adult Journey Through Fandom (as opposed to my Teen Journey Through Fandom, which started around 13 and petered off when I was 19) began because summer 2019, after I moved back in with my grandparents and left the state I’d spent the last ten years in behind (along with almost all my possessions excepting my cats, my wolf pelt, some clothes, and some misc stuff including the entire Lord of The Rings series in paperback) I went to Archive of Our Own (AO3) on my shitty phone that didn’t actually function as a phone because that costs money, and went to the Fallout 4 section (because I have played that game to DEATH AND BACK, modded it to death and back too) and started reading. Because it was literally the first fandom I could think of.

And then, one day, as I was reading Piper/f!SS I thought ‘What’s another Media I Have Consumed’ and for whatever reason, Legend of Korra came to mind which is wild because I watched it when it came out and then NEVER touched it again. I did wind up rewatching it after reading probably around 100 Korrasami fics, but I watched it BECAUSE of the fics.

Then, and I think I hopped onto this because a bunch of writers who wrote Korrasami also wrote them, I fell into Clexa. And I’d watched.... like five seasons of The 100? IDK, whatever it was that season-dumped on Netflix in like 2017. And WHOO BOI did I stick around there for a LONG TIME. We’re talking 90 pages of my AO3 history (20 fics per page yo) of JUST CLEXA.

Thru a similar mechanism I started reading Supercorp, and here is where I come back into my ‘I don’t even GO HERE’ tendency, because you see I still have not seen a single episode of Supergirl but you bet your ass I have read literally about a hundred fics for it.

Then, again, via authors-who-I-liked-writing-for-other-fandoms-than-how-I-found-them I read a hefty pile of SwanQueen (which, RIP y’all OUAT fucked y’all huh?) and that’s a show that I had really honestly TRIED to watch but guys... The only thing going for it really is that it’s the better Live Action Beauty And The Beast and that’s sad on a number of levels.

Then Pitch Perfect caught me up and I HAVE seen the first movie (and jesus if that het romance wasn’t shoehorned in) but also ONLY the first movie but that didn’t stop my consumption of those fics.

At some point I strafed thru the Glee fandom and rediscovered Faberry which I don’t recall ever actively shipping Back In The Day but you BET YOUR ASS I thought they were both SUPER GAY when the first couple seasons were airing, which is also the last time I watch it at ALL.

And from there, AGAIN this has ALL happened because I kept checking out other stuff written by authors I like, I started reading Sansa-shipping Game of Thrones fics. Now here is a Very Important Thing to Know: I started with Sansa/Margaery, and you might have seen earlier my discovery that I fell into reading other Sansa ships via Sansa/Ellaria/Oberyn.

Before that point, even as a teenager, I shipped ZERO heterosexual couples. NONE. NADA.

Also, I had not watched Game of Thrones past season 4. (Some of you may be aware I watched and liveblogged watching the whole series recently. Do not do this thing.) I still spent seven months reading almost exclusively GoT fanfic. I’ve bought the books. I’m in MULTIPLE discord servers for GoT fan shiz. 

And I also fell into checking Other Works By This Author I Like, except now, because I will read a fic featuring Sansa with literally anyone because it’s interesting to me, I started also reading het ships.

And so I wound up reading A Bunch of Zutara, and I had seen Airbender back when it aired and also... at some other point. But I did not rewatch it when it came out on netflix because holy shit Korra retroactively makes me so mad about both series now that I really think about Katara okay guys? Because I’m not okay. I’m mad. Whatever.

Somehow I wound up BACK in the Once Upon A Time fandom, by the way, but this time with Rumbelle (remember when I mentioned Beauty and the Beast earlier? HI) and man it’s interesting to see two sides of a fandom like that lemme tell ya.

And now, to the present, where I’m reading Bethyl fics for The Walking Dead, which I saw like three seasons of and mostly remember as ‘that show with the zombies where I got mad that no one could ever actually catch a fucking break for more than five minutes’ which is, for the record, WHY I stopped watching. And the extra funny thing is that I didn’t really author-hop for that one I just went ‘hey i know vague things about this IP let’s read stuff’ and Bethyl was just... the first ship I clicked on? And now I’m fucking Team Delusional and I DON’T EVEN GO HERE.

I need to REALLY DEEPLY HIGHLIGHT the fact that out of EVERY fandom I have listed, BEFORE I got into them I only finished/kept up with TWO of the shows and the one video game, ONE fandom has made me make myself watch the series it’s based on (and I’ll read the books as soon as they get here I’m not paying for fast shipping y’all), and EVERY OTHER ONE I know of from watching like three seasons on average. 

(This is not including the fandoms where I checked out like five fics, went ‘I’m bored now’ and left. There’s like five of those I think???)

So what I’m saying is that I get a basic understanding of a piece of media and then throw it away and go check out the fan shit because it’s more entertaining to see what everyone’s doing with the toys the media provides. Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice And Fire is a fucking anomaly on every single front, literally every other fandom I have, there is The Ship That Happens (well, OUAT gets two, but they’re not mutually exclusive so WHATEVER) and then pretty much every other ship ranges from ‘whatever’ to ‘fuck off’.

But fucking Sansa Stark, man. 

Anyways I’ve got 350+ pages (that’s over 7,000 fics yo) of AO3 history since June 19 2019 because quarantine changed zero percent of my lifestyle. If I can do math (debatable) that’s 15 fics a day every day, on average for nine-ish fandoms but the vast majority is GoT/ASoIAF.

Tune in fking WHENEVER when I finish the project my brain has decided will happen (THANKS HYPERFIXATIONS) where I’ve got the full data for all of this bullshit so I know how many words of whatever fucking ship I’ve read.