#i'm so used to typing out ship names as character names with slashes between

[schnuffel-danny]

*stares into the void* .....WHY DID I NEVER GIVE MORGAN AND CROCKER AN OFFICIAL SHIP NAME???

[secretsofthewilde]

There's something particularly frustrating about how academic fandom studies tend to talk about fandom spaces as being a place for inclusiveness and queer representation when there's still a very prominent misogyny problem throughout them. Even when these studies address issues of racism within fandom shipping dynamics, they still tend to perpetuate the idea that fandom is the rare place where queer ships tend to be more popular than straight ones, without really addressing the fact that this tends to only true when it comes to cis, white, m/m ships. If you want some kind of numerical evidence of this, you just need to look at the statistics on ao3 to see that f/f ships are the least popular kind of pairing on that site. And when you think of the stereotypical big name fandoms, most of them are well known for their m/m ships, with the f/f ships often being dismissed or treated as a joke.

I'm not of the opinion, nor trying to make an argument in support of the idea, that this is due to the stereotype of fangirls fetishising queer men. Instead, I think it's largely due to misogyny* - shocker, I know. I really do think that the stereotypical fangirl gravitates towards slash pairings due to both internalised misogyny and the general prominence of male oriented media over female oriented media (which will therefore have more male characters that are fleshed out with more engaging writing as opposed to their female supporting cast).

However, it's one thing for the abundance of male driven stories to generate more fan works exploring said characters, and another entirely for those same fans to then ignore when we do have media that gives us well written and enjoyable female characters. I think it's in part due to our internalised misogyny that fangirls have a tendency to gravitate towards their familiar male orientated shows and then fixate on the same familiar character types, rather than exploring and celebrating the breadth of female-centric media we have finally been getting produced in recent years. And this inability to allow ourselves to enjoy female characters the same way we do with male ones is what leads to an abundance of slash pairings being celebrated in fandom spaces, while femslash ones struggle to get recognition**. The fact that there's a common joke in fandom spaces about popular pairings developing between two characters who never interacted (or for only a brief scene) is all very well and good fun, but this is almost always referring to a m/m pairing.

As fans we should really reflect on why we might celebrate a male character for doing morally grey things, but then hate a female character for exhibiting those exact same traits. It's fine to genuinely not enjoy the writing of a female character (especially when sexist writing is often to blame), but we should consider how much more willing we seem to be to forgive poor writing when it comes to male characters than we are with female characters. If we can make a million headcanons and claim to love a poorly written male character, who is now viewed as something so far removed from the canon of the media he appears in its practically a different character entirely, why do so many of us seem unwilling to do the same for female characters?

We should be doing the same with our female characters - we should be putting more female characters into our favourite dynamics and tropes. I want to see more enemies to lovers headcanons with femslash pairings; I want nbc hannibal levels of art and meta posts about toxic femslash couples; I want johnlock levels of delusion posts about a femslash couple the story writers are claiming they didn't write the subtext for. I would just really love to log into tumblr and see a femslash pairings tag is trending more than once in a blue moon.

*note: obviously misogny is not the only contributing factor, and this initial argument I'm raising doesn't address the issues surrounding racial, gender-queer identities, and other inequalities within fandom. Please do not think I'm ignoring or downplaying them.

**Theres also an argument to be made here about fangirls projecting themselves onto male characters in order to explore queer relationships, without having to challenge their own internalised misogyny/homophobia, but I'll come back to that later (and this in general) and expand on it some other time I think.

[once-was-muses]

anonymous | Misc. Asks

do you have any ships youre more inclined to?

[ I will admit that I do have some favorites for certain muses, that doesn't mean I subscribe any less to the "shipping with chemistry" philosophy. Even if one of my mutuals is a character I really like with one of mine, I'm more inclined to sit and think on it and run a few interactions before approaching the subject- or accepting if I was approached first. ]

[ Now, with my wee disclaimer out of the way, here's my list of an answer (minus OCs because. Everyone except Jackdaw is original fiction, and even then Irene doesn't have any ships at the moment.) ]

Abe: I am very attached to both the idea of Abe Has Two Hands (for Hellboy and Liz), and B.P.R.D. Agent Found Family Siblings- but the former has been growing on me lately. I don't particularly like Abe with Kate, I see them more as explicitly close friends, but I could be persuaded otherwise.

Bro'Dee: my first big ship for him was an itty bitty rarepair with Martian Manhunter. That's still near and dear to me, but Arkillo, Hal, and Kilowog have entered my multi-shipper heart. The idea of Bro'Dee and Sinestro or Iroque/Indigo-1 has crossed my mind a few times now, but those are harder to explain, lmao. Bro'Dee's Mentor-Slash-Adopted-Dad relationships with Kyle and Razer are So Important to me, thus unsurprisingly no-gos as far as romantic ships.

Dedan: I don't really ship him with anyone. He absolutely has feelings for Queen Vader, not just protective/loyalty but romantic- however he knows better than to ever admit so allowed. He and Enoch are a big no for me, same with Japhet. Dedan and Hugo Found Family is all I really care about dhhsks-

Edwin: besides (obviously) Jon, I really like the idea of. Not necessarily a romance (not at first) but he and Eddie. I like ships with Nygma that go from "I hate you so much you're so stupid" to "okay maybe you're not THAT stupid but I STILL HATE YOU" so on and so forth. Also love the idea of Winnie and Selina being little shit kleptomaniac friends.

Harriet: hello yes I think Harrie and Steph Brown would be so good. Not for anyone else in a five mile radius, but they would be the perfect Chaos Lesbians. (There's a joke about Steph liking people with caffeine addictions to be made here.)

Harvey and Harv: Bruce Wayne or Oswald Cobblepot are who I almost always think of for romantic ships for the Dents. I think them and Selina and/or Eddie could be interesting as well. A really inexplicable pairing I like is them and Jon of all people, I have no clue why, lol. (I also think it'd be interesting to see what a Two-Face/Batman/Riddler relationship would look like òvó)

Jon: again excluding the obvious answer (Edwin), I'm not opposed to he and Riddler but it's not my favorite. I'm more partial to Batman, Catwoman, Bane, or even Two-Face or Croc as a partner(s) for Jon. Harley, Ivy, and Hatter are hard nos for different reasons (found family, usually found family's girlfiend and/or lesbian, and Very Bad History respectively.)

Linda: another I don't really ship with anyone. She's not aromantic, but. In terms of like practice, Yes She Is. Linda isn't that concerned about a partner (and refuses to tell me what her type is beyond "people I can use.")

Salaak: Guy. Or Kilowog. It's inevitable that Salaak is the "long suffering" in the "jackass and long suffering partner" dynamic, and name two bigger jackasses in the Corps (that aren't Hal or Kyle.)

Sameer: also zero ships. The only Squad member he has even close to a positive opinion of is Harley, and even then it's more "you didn't plot to kill me, leave me to die, or try and force me into shit so. You're cool I guess" than anything.

Thoth (really straddling the line between "canon" and "OC"): I've mentioned this on my sideblog for EoK but. I didn't intend to pair either god with anyone (and still don't, not in the main story at least), but Set and Thoth have become my number 1 pairing for that project (tied with a pair of goddesses that do actually get together in main story.) I also like the idea of Thoth hanging out with other wisdom gods and psychopomps, not necessarily as a romantic thing but a fun dynamic.

[olderthannetfic]

Since you seem to be litigating rpf right now and since you’ve been around awhile, I wanted to ask you about how it’s evolved, if you haven’t already talked about that? I’ve been in fandom for maybe 15ish years, and I remember reading a lot of rpf back then (when rps seemed like more common terminology), and I feel like there were more defined lines between fans and the real people they wrote about. A lot of “if you got here by googling yourself, go back” disclaimers vs the current culture where some fans seem to show the people or ask them about fic and art and other fan works. It’s like there was a culture of secrecy before where there was less of a desire for the fanworks to ever reach their subjects, rpf or otherwise. I think most rpf writers/creators still feel that way, but I see so many awkward interview panels where actors/etc are being asked about fanfic. Is this in my head, or is the shift real?

--

Heh. Well, I was never a fan of any boy bands or the like until bitten by the BTS bug. I didn't even know who BSB and NSYNC were at the height of their popularity. So I did not always have a front-row seat to RPF evolution, but as far as I know, it went something like this in English-speaking spaces:

Prehistory: 1960s magazines were full of "Your night on a date with [member of the Monkees]" type stories. Music RPF was floating around in various forms for a long, long time, though the m/m band member/band member stuff tended to be extremely locked down, often with the names replaced.

From Eroica with Love shows how horny everybody was for Led Zeppelin back then. I can only presume there were doujinshi of the members in Japanese, but I'm not really familiar with what was going on over there.

Idols & Visual Kei: English-speaking fandom of Asian groups was into RPF by the early 00s and perhaps before. I was tangentially aware of this stuff from being in anime fandom but wasn't interested because I wasn't into most of the music itself. (Also, this was the era of limewire computer viruses or paying like $60 to get a Japanese album legally in the US.)

Johnny's Entertainment fandom is what I associate with this, circa 2001. On the visual kei side, people were shipping Malice Mizer around then.

Godawful 2003 vampire movie Moon Child, starring Gackt (of Malice Mizer and solo fame) and Hyde of L'Arc~en~Ciel (yes, with a fucking tilde) did make people ship their characters but certainly did not dissuade people from shipping the guys themselves.

Popslash - Ye olde slash fandom converts: On the very, very Western side of things, all of the oldschool slashers started catching the RPF bug for "popslash" in the late 90s/early 00s. Prior to this, RPF was a HARD NO for much of this crowd and continued to be seen as a dirty secret. This umbrella term was intended for specifically BSB, NSYNC, and a few other pop stars, not just fic of any pop act. I don't know if people were calling it "RPS". I think they were just calling it "popslash", but I wasn't on the mailing lists and things. This was a pre-LJ era with that older infrastructure.

LOTR - Ye olde slash fandom converts again: Those that didn't get sucked in by popslash fell to LotRiPS when the Lord of the Rings movies came out in the early 00s. RPS was still seen as a shocking dirty secret before the advent of this fandom. Afterwards... people still hated it, but they'd realized there was no way to fully keep it out of their spaces. This also coincided with the move from the bajillions of LOTR (non RPF) archives with picky rules and mailing lists ruled with an iron fist to LJ with people's personal blogs full of their ungovernable wrong opinions and terrible taste in fandoms on display for all the world to see.

There was so much structured behind the scenes material for the LOTR movies that it formed a kind of canon of its own along with the press tours, and the actors were cuddly with each other. I don't think this is easy to understand now. Even the Hobbit movies didn't have this vibe, and there's so much more behind the scenes info and so many more youtube clips for everything now that the effect is much diminished. At the time, LOTR felt like a new era in sff franchise media.

There was tons of any two gu... um... somewhat generic hot porn, so even if you didn't care much for RPF, it became an attractive fandom. At this point, people were calling it "RPS", not "RPF", despite there being some femslash and het in the same spaces as all the Viggo/Orlando. The domlijah tinhats were notorious and did go bother the actors, I think?

The height of this fandom coincided with the height of cringey photomanips and "Why are their necks broken?" art with actors' faces on it. Fanartist The Theban Band was well known, though more for FPF than RPF. It's just that when you use the actual actors' faces, things tend to get conflated. Now, whether people started bothering most of the actors at the time in the early 00s, I don't know. Fanlore suggests that misuse of The Theban Band's art was already well underway in 2004. It's also often this stuff that Graham Norton bothers actors with years later.

It's not so much that fandom or RPF fandom changed at this point as that new people were into RPF who hadn't been before and much more importantly, the internet was changing. The level of access to actors and the level of awareness of online fandoms was changing radically around here. It changed again with Twitter and so forth, but this was still a major point in internet history.

Rockfic: "Rockfic" as seen on the Rockfic archive got started at some point. They meant Metallica, Bon Jovi, etc. I mostly know about them because there was beef between them and some of the popslash and bandom people around the time OTW was starting. (Popslash and bandom but not rockfic communities being well represented among OTW founders.)

Bandom: "Bandom" is another umbrella term with a general sound but a specific meaning. It was used for Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Panic! at the Disco, and associated bands. This RPF fandom got big on LJ at the height of LJ fandom. It sucked in plenty of Western fandoms types who hadn't been into RPF before.

At the time, some of these bands and their associates weren't that famous, and they had personal Livejournals. It was not unusual for people peripherally involved with the actual people to be in the same spaces as the RPF. This was very much not appreciated by a lot of the fic authors. Band reactions seem to have varied between "yuck" and "Why doesn't anyone ship MEEEE? Don't you think I'M hot???" and other jokey lack of boundaries stuff.

A lot of the "Go away, X" disclaimers that sound like jokes are from this era and are due to some of these people actively going looking for the lulz.

Hockey - The final nail in the coffin for ye olde slash fandom: If the Popslash and LotRiPS waves didn't get people, Hockey did. After SGA, all the big slash writers that people follow from fandom to fandom seemed to be going to Hockey RPF.

Asianfanfics.com: Meanwhile, on the Asian media side of things, sites like Asianfanfics have been going strong for ages and are full of kpop rpf and the like.

Wattpad: Wattpad was the home of not only the Larries but of soooo much more Mary Sue/1D guy, and now Mary Sue/Jungkook.

--

How the boundaries are really depends on the era and the fandom.

The Rockfic archive used to make you pay a buck to sign up or something. It was extremely locked down, from what I remember, as you'd expect from a very old community writing m/m about macho bands.

The hockey people don't tend to be all up in players' faces because the players were mega, mega, mega famous long before the RPF fandom got big and because half the fandom doesn't even like sports: they're just there for the m/m AUs.

The Wattpad fandoms are a toxic hive of no boundaries and 13-year-olds posting their porn and too much personal info, but with fandoms as big as 1D or BTS, you can figure that plenty of individual people behave themselves.

Asking actors about fic in panels has become more common over the years, I think, though people have also learned to head it off better. I wouldn't say this is a RPF-specific phenomenon though.