#i might come back later and link sources but i’m tipsy rn

[themarkofoxin]

every time i think about dan and phil becoming the internet’s go-to example of the Dangers of Shipping Real People it makes me so exhausted. for their entire fourteen year career together they have encouraged people to write fic about them and draw fanart and generally “be creative” as they always phrase it. dan specifically, outside of 2012/2013 when he was aggressive towards fans pestering him about it, at one point said he likes reading fic and that he’s often surprised about how good they can be. hell, they wrote fanfic of themselves in their own published book and hired a popular fanartist to illustrate a manga of them.

and then dan came out. and in his video he mentioned how stressful it was to suddenly blow up and have a bunch of people speculating about his relationship, and how it triggered him due to his trauma from being heavily bullied in school. and then followed up the segment talking about how past that point the fans’ support was actually very healing for him, and hearing people tell him that he had helped them be comfortable with who they were without him even being out was one of the things that made him confident in coming out in the first place.

but the people who write angry posts about the evils of rpf or whatever don’t care about dan and phil’s actual opinions. they saw or heard about how annoying the fans were, heard along a thousand-step telephone game that dan and phil hate their fans, and have now christened them the platonic ideal of creators whose lives were ruined because of shippers. it’s ridiculous. it’s unfounded. and it’s disrespectful to the actual existence of the people they’re propping up to support their argument