#ive noticed that people in this fandom get kinda defensive of their character hcs

[semisolidmind]

if the question bothers you then please ignore it ;; but I wanted to ask what you thought of “shadow peach” cuz it’s a pretty dominant ship in the lmk fandom. Again, if you don’t wanna answer questions like this then please ignore this ask😭

hooh boy, ok. figured id get this eventually.

alright. so. shadowpeach.

here's the thing. if you ship it, cool. i get why you would. it's sorta easy to see that dynamic between them in lego monkie kid. if you ship it , have at it! you should enjoy making or consuming content for whatever you like. personally, i see the mystic monkeys as having a familial or platonic type of bond between them (pre-betrayal). their relationship isn't much more than a short-lived rivalry and a murder in the book, so it's free to interpret as you will.

however.

there's a pervasive issue in the lmk fandom when it comes to tagging this ship. i think that because shadowpeach is such a dominant ship, some people think they dont need to tag it. because everybody likes shadowpeach, right? 🙄 now, ive done my fandom curation. i don't like the ship, i block the tags associated with it, and that's as far as my interactions with that tag and the folks in it goes.

the thing is, ill be scrolling through the general lmk tag, and ill see art for shadowpeach completely untagged. sometimes it's just suggesting the ship, other times it's full-on ship art. again, ship what you want, that freedom is what fandom is for.

but please, please don't assume that just because a ship is ultra popular that you don't have to tag it.

i know this is a problem a lot of fandoms have; one ship gets super popular, and then it's assumed that everyone ships it; any other points of view get steamrolled in favor of the big ship. and then the issue of people bashing anyone who doesn't ship it eventually comes up. in the course of my relatively short time in the lmk fandom, ive received more toxic anons than I have in any other fandom ive been in. ive gotten reblogs that just say "no" on my posts and then i go and see that the blog that reblogged it was full of shadowpeach.

it's just...tagging things correctly is the least you can do on tumblr. it's there for curation. please don't assume that everyone is going to agree with you just because you're on the biggest boat.

and shadowpeach is the only lmk ship ive had this issue with? every other thing that can be shipped is tagged fairly well, though i don't have anything else blocked.

anyways, long story short; please tag your ships.

[lucrezianoin]

ive never ppl who hc astarion as ace be weird about people who dont but ive sure as shit seen a lot of people get mad fucking weird about ace astarion. lmao it genuinely is so annoying, theyll try and find excuse after excuse for why its wrong and bad Actually to hc him as ace. it dont matter. theres nothing saying he is or isnt in canon so why do people get so weird and annoying about it???

i mean i know why...

Yeah, I think there is a lot of weird debate around "sexualization" of Astarion, and somehow ace people or ace headcanons are always dragged into it. There is a lot of defensiveness, I noticed.

Because there is a subsection of fans who are extremely quick to harrass, mainly. On twitter, in particular, there is a group of fans that usually goes around retweeting fanarts of artists to insult them, if the fanart is not "chaste" enough.

This is an example:

It is a type of fandom policing that goes against any kind of fandom etiquette. But also... I like to call it the Frollo from Notre Dame Effect. Because that particular piece of art does not sexualize anything, the character is naked, but the art focuses on how he is treated in game (treated as one of Cazador's treasures and objects to be stored away). It is almost haunting, as fanarts go. But somehow, this group of fans saw it and felt something (apparently they felt it was sexy), and instead of realizing it was their reaction, the uncomfortability of it made them lash out against the art itself.

I am just saying this to explain that sometimes I feel that the backlash against ace headcanons is set in this context. At least the one I got was set in this context, where this user decided that me trying to talk about canon events in the game = me trying to accuse them of being horrible people for sexualizing Astarion.

So in my case, the person immediately used my headcanon as "proof" that I was one of those people who did not want to sexualize Astarion.

The thing is that it kinda sucks (at least for me) that you cannot have an ace headcanon without somehow being labelled as someone who wants full on purity in fandoms.

This is what I think, in particular, regarding the sexualization of Astarion:

I am glad that in game he is not shown in full sex scenes. A part from ascended astarion (and for a reason), we never really see any sex scene with him. His spawn one is one of the least explicit in the whole game, and even his initial one is pretty much mainly focused on the seduction act (compare them with the Minthara one, or Halsin, or Gale or Karlach in act 3!).

Ascended Astarion having the more explicit sex scene is not by chance, given that choosing to let him ascend while in romance is directly connected with the vampire-fantasy the game wants to sell, and passionate sex is part of it.

On the other hand, I really don't care what people do in fandom with characters. That is outside the narrative, and does not change or influence the narrative of the game at all.