#literally it's not even about spirk it's just that spock has been always gay coded and any reboot made ever since tos always tries to erase

[iliadette]

I think that it's possible to believe that being the love interest is good for a black female character, that spuhura is a popular ship that has the fandom in a chokehold, that fans made it even more beautiful, and still recognize that 2009 spuhura wasn't greenlighted out of love for black feminism but rather to try to extinguish any gay readings of spock

[weaver-of-fantasies-and-fables]

So there’s a specific post that’s making the rounds again and I don’t want to stir up any drama so I am making my own here. This is gonna be a little meta about male friendship, slash shipping and homophobia. I want to address the complaint that the fear of being perceived as gay prevents men from having healthy friendships, and that slash shipping plays a major role in this.

Of course, this are my thoughts! But I think there’s a bit of confusion regarding correlation and cause, here. So, if you want, read more, if not, scroll, whatever.

Slash shipping is as follows: a person  consumes a certain media and headcanons two or more characters as queer and involved in a relationship; this person might produce content (fanart, fanfiction, meta) based on this, and speak of their headcanon. It doesn’t mean harassing the writers/creators because the ship is not canon, nor does it refer to ship wars - I am not condoning that. 

The media are full of healthy male friendships: Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter (the books, at least), Percy Jackson, Joey and Chandler in Friends are the first to come to mind, but there are a lot. One could say male friendship is a recurring theme, and has been since the dawn of time. I would like to point out that the importance and weight given to platonic relationships as opposed to romantic ones is a different issue that is rooted in the way our society is built, as is the absence of female friendships (interactions...) in mainstream media.

But let’s move into shipping territory; often, there are certain relationships that are open to interpretation. So let’s talk about the grandmother of shipping: Spirk.

Kirk and Spock’s relationship in Star Trek is, at the very least, a deep friendship based on the fact that Captain and Commander complete each other, and that their bond transcends time and universes. Roddenberry himself coined a word to describe it: t’hy’la - in Vulcan, ‘friend, brother and/or lover’. The actors played them as co-dependent, deeply in love. So people have been shipping these two since before the Internet (when slash fiction was illegal) and the term slash comes from Kirk/Spock. 

So how has this shipping influenced the media? It hasn’t. The 40-year-old (at the time), established shipping fanbase did not prevent JJ Abrams in any way from completely removing that relationship from the picture when he rebooted the series, and from putting Spock - a strongly queer-coded character - into a poorly written, somewhat questionable heterosexual relationship (one that, incidentally, reduces Uhura’s characterisation grievously). The deep bond between Kirk and Spock was sacrificed, and even their friendship was erased.

What about CANON queer relationships? Like, say, Achilles and Patroclus. How many times throughout history have they been re-written as ‘friends’ when Greek philosophers literally had discussions about the workings of their sex life? See, the point is, there’s an unfortunate lack of queer representation. How many queer stories have been straightwashed, whitewashed, downplayed? How many have been entirely erased?

Fanfiction is a realm of possibilities. It has very little power over how the stories go (if that weren’t true, I rather think we would have seen Kirk and Spock kiss on screen a long time ago); slash shipping is a way to find representation where it isn’t explicitly given, or to simply enjoy a story.

Now are writers really that scared of writing straight friends who are affectionate with each other because of shipping? Are men scared to be affectionate with their friends because of shipping? The answer is a hard no. And the problem is homophobia, toxic masculinity and the heteropatriarchy. What’s so tragic about being perceived as gay? Do you think that’s demeaning? Do you think that’s dirty? You might want to ask yourself why. Why do you associate gays with softness, affection, weakness? Is it because (straight) men have built an image of themselves that does not allow them to feel emotions and show vulnerability? Is it because vulnerability, caring and soft emotions are a traditionally womanly thing, and thus, beneath men?

I will give an example. One of my best friends is a sweet, gentle guy. We spent a good 8 years of our friendship navigating people who believed we were a couple/should definitely hook up/were pining for each other. They even jokingly planned our wedding (I wasn’t out yet). It was a bother, sure, downright annoying. So did that stop us being friends? Did that stop us behaving like we always did? No. So what if they ask if you’re gay for your bff? Say you aren’t and move on. Affection should be normalised, not demonised, and that includes male affection, both queer AND platonic.

 As for writers - you must understand that once your work is out, it becomes public domain. If it’s good, if it resonates, if people like it, it gets rewritten and reinterpreted and analised for meaning - that’s what the study of literary works is all about. Haven’t we all, as a civilisation, been obsessing over fiction written 3000 years ago? How many retellings of the Iliad exist? Should Virgil come back from the dead to complain about the fact that Eurialo and Niso were supposed to be a couple?

So what if people want to interpret a relationship as romantic, or queerplatonic? Just say you haven’t written it that way, but that everyone is free to see it the way they want. That doesn’t make you homophobic unless you throw a fit about it, like some do, Because All My Characters Are Perfectly Straight, Thank You Very Much and How Dare You Suggest Otherwise. But it’s fiction. Fiction is based on a pact between the writer and the reader, in which the writer leaves certain points empty for the reader’s imagination to fill.

Bottom line is this is not a competition between slash and friendship. Friendships are wonderful, but if you’re not affectionate because you’re afraid it might be read as gay? That’s homophobia, I promise you. Slash fiction has nothing to do with it.