#i'm not going to get into the age old 'is rpf actually morally wrong' discourse everyone has their own opinions

[valyrfia]

I really like some of the takes and overall people sharing their opinions in a safe sort of way/space.

I also love how I can trace your point of view not only on lestappen topic but on shipping in general and rpf specifically.

I think sometimes people forget (maybe due to their age or inexperience) that Max and Charles are real life human beings with high stress level jobs and who are public personas as well. If people think about themselves as nuanced individuals they should think the same way about these two too.

Like don’t get me wrong I enjoy analyzing their interactions, I do read fanfiction and always reblog a good gifset or post but I also realize that what I spent my time on is not a true reflection of reality.

Thus I don’t expect them to be publicly smooching every race weekend on camera.

They are just guys doing their job, they seem to have some type of feelings towards each other and they might as well be aware of it but even if it is so we are not gonna know about it probably. Not while they are active F1 drivers at least. And honestly? We are not supposed to know about it. It’s called private life for a reason.

So yeah I’m kinda glad to know that there are other tumblr users with similar opinions on sexuality, personal stuff and shipping and I hope the majority of the fanbase is sharing them.

First of all let me just say this is one of the kindest asks I've gotten, thank you so much <3 I love that you feel I'm curating a safe space for everyone involved

But yeah, I'm an old hat at rpf so I'm pretty good at the cognitive dissonance required to distinguish between the Max and Charles the super famous F1 drivers and the Max and Charles that we cackle about here, which is why I'm pretty straightforward about the fact that I don't like talking about their irl partners or speculating on their sexualities. It does take practice, but I think it's a really vital skill to have if we're going to talk about them. I've been involved with 3 or 4 rpf ships in my time and they get sour quickly unless we explicitly set some boundaries for ourselves.

Also let me play devil's advocate for a moment, let's say either of them are anything not straight. Imagine how absolutely terrifying that is, in an extremely high-stress sport that's had no high-profile non-straight people that competes in countries where being gay can get you killed by law. A grand majority of the fans would change the way they see you, probably some of the higher ups would too. Tabloids would hound you relentlessly and it's likely some people or their families in your circle would shun you. There is no way you would even think about the possibility of being openly queer in an environment like that. Whatever their sexualities are is their own private business, which is why I explicitly refuse to speculate. It's important to distinguish feelings from sexuality here. You can speculate on someone's feelings without speculating on their sexuality or how they identify.

That being said, fic plays by different rules (apart from the partners bit). I think fic can use these characters of Max and Charles to explore some really interesting theses on sexuality and how it would fit into the sport. It's still important to keep in mind that these aren't the Max and Charles that exist here in the real world though, they're characters based off of them.

[yarns-and-d20s]

I'm a fandom old.

I just left this comment on a Reddit post. Thought I'd drop it here. Just to have extra access to it.

I've been around the block in fandom. There's always been holier-than-thou types, but they were... tamer.

I started on the peripheries of fandom in the late 90s, and then I was in a fandom that didn't have fanworks. I got involved, fully, properly, at 18 years old, in 2000, in the Due South fandom. I have the very distinct honour of being the reason a separate mailing list, "Due South After Dark", had to be created. I wrote a fic that involved either handcuffs or a blindfold. Some people were SO OFFENDED by this tiny bit of mild kink that it caused an uproar.

But it was kind of just pearl clutching. I wasn't called a monster or suicide baited or anything like that. In fact, a lot of the offended parties didn't even talk directly to me, just around me and about the fic itself.

And that's the flavour that sort of stuck with a lot of fandom drama for years. The shipping wars of the early 2000s were shockingly tame, and there was also a lot of--to use an antiquated term--wank about slash shippers; the first time I saw the "fetishisation" accusations dating back all the way to the early/mid 2000s.

I do remember that there was a small contingent of Harry/Hermione shippers who accused Hermione/Ron shippers of liking "abuse" because Hermione and Ron bickered (not unlike Han and Leia or Elizabeth and Darcy). One of the big things is that a lot of this was not actually targeted. It was people pontificating on their LiveJournals without calling out anyone by name. Not that there wasn't a lot of arguments In the Comments(tm) and whatnot.

The first time I ever saw the term "SJW" was actually in fandom, some years before I started seeing it in "mainstream" online discourse. It was in the late 2000s, and it was used by left-leaning fanpeople against other left-leaning fanpeople. Right or wrong, it was a term levied against a certain type of, and I'm not going to beat around the bush, middle-class white woman in her late 20s and older. To be clear: fandom, especially when involving middle-class white women, has long had problems with racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc. But this specific type of fan, the "SJW" type, held to their convictions so hard they would drive people out of fandom. This is when things started to get targeted. When individual fans would get called out not for behaviour (eg, MsScribe, Victoria Bitter) but for what they made. For their fic. One young person who wrote a thoroughly misguided SPN AU (I don't remember if it was RPF or FPF--she wrote the characters as aid workers in maybe Haiti?) was driven out of fandom over that one fic; there was no atoning for it. There was no ability to learn why she shouldn't have written it. She was just a monster.

I can see these threads all converging and leading to, for instance, the Voltron: Legendary Defender shipping nonsense and the demonisation of one pairing over the other on moral grounds. I can see it coming from the Due South ladies who were offended by handcuffs and/or a blindfold, from the Harry/Hermione shippers saying that Hermione/Ron shippers were okay with abuse, from the specific callouts by white women towards people who wrote things unthinkingly and out of ignorance without having the opportunity to make amends for their grievous misdeeds in fic.

I can see how it leads to this thing, where we have people telling folks to kill themselves because they like a pairing with a 5-year age gap. Saying it's immoral to ship two characters because one of them is "autistic-coded" and therefore a child even though the character is in their 20s, it doesn't matter, that's pedophilia somehow (hey, Critical Role fans). Painting people as monsters because of a video game where the main characters commit murder and cannibalism and incest and it's not the first two things that are a problem.

The antis make everyone out to just be monsters, even the people who don't even like the taboo and dark fics, they just don't believe in censorship, harassment, suicide baiting, etc, over fucking fanfic. It's become "with us or against us". It's... terrifying. Especially because it's targeted against oftentimes vulnerable people who don't have, say, studios and publishers and tons of money to keep them safe. They go after, y'know, AstarionsGirl292 and not George R R fucking Martin. Well, I think they went after Tamsyn Muir? But she ain't GRRM, is she?

It's a helpless feeling, seeing fandom get to this point. But I can untangle it. And it sucks.