#to “overlook” a wlw ship for a mlm one

[clfixationstation]

do u understand how embarrassing it is for me, as a lesbian, to be more obsessed with eremin than yumihisu? like aot presented me with a compelling, devastating, canon lesbian ship between two complex characters I both enjoy and relate to, and my brain went nope! non-canon losers! so cringe bro

[fallingstarsburn]

don’t get my wrong, so glad about all the wesper we got in season 2 SaB … BUT… tamadia 🥺🥺. why do lesbians always get overlooked?? we didn’t even get an on-screen kiss between them

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

since it's pride month, i want to highlight my favorite underrated/underappreciated queer characters and ships! (part 1/???)

(feel free to add more!)

Lake - Infinity Train (non-canon)

it's not canon but you cannot tell me that Lake isn't an allegory for trans/nb people. her arc is so beautiful and her character resonates with me so much!

i have to admit, i actually kinda hated her in the beginning because of how aggressive and rude she was, but she actually gets good character development and you can also understand why she was the way she was, being a good representation of a minority who is constantly suffering because of the social norms she’s forced into. also i don’t ship her with jesse but i do like the idea of them in a qpr or just being platonic besties.

(i use she/her pronouns for Lake because that's what they use in the series, but also because not all non-binary people use they/them, and it's kinda weird to see people insist on using they/them for Lake just because she's nb-coded. she has never shown an aversion to bring referred to with she/her pronouns.)

Le Chevre x El Topo - Carmen Sandiego (canon)

they are side characters who don't play a huge role in the narrative but they are a really cute couple and have been confirmed to be canon! even without the confirmation, it’s clear that they were written to be a romantic couple.

mild spoiler: after the series ends, they stop being antagonists and instead put up a food truck together! it’s the cutest thing, i swear

Ryan x Min-gi - Infinity Train (non-canon)

my OTP through and through! i say non-canon but the romance is so heavily implied, you cannot ignore it.

they're a good example of childhood friends who had a complicated relationship where both individuals did something wrong, but in the end, they grow as people and manage to mend their relationship together.

Moomin x Snufkin - Moominvalley (canon)

i have only read one of the books and watched a few clips of these two characters but from that alone, it's clear that they were written as lovers (and the author is queer too!)

they are a beautiful portrayal of long-distance relationship where both individuals have different needs in life, but still want to be with each other regardless.

Terrestrius / Terry - The Dragon Prince (canon)

Terry is canonically transmasc and they actually manage to explain this in the series, without making it sound too forced or expository. he's such a sweetheart too, and his relationship with Claudia is actually really sweet, despite the fact that she's one of the villains.

Carmen x Julia - Carmen Sandiego (non-canon)

again, i say non-canon but it is heavily implied that they have feelings for each other, especially in the extra interactive episode, where Carmen leaves a bouquet of red roses for Julia, and Julia is shown to blush when receiving them.

Amaya x Janai - The Dragon Prince (canon)

what’s that? it’s actually possible to write an enemies to lovers romance that is healthy and not extremely abusive?

Amaya and Janai have such a good relationship in S5 (and Amaya is also a great disabled representation!) Janai actually learns sign language to communicate with Amaya, and there are no unnecessary miscommunication plots or drama, they’re just a really loving wlw couple.

Benson x Troy - Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (canon)

when i say we need more mlm ships in animated media!! i’m so glad us sapphics are getting a lot of representation but it’s time cartoons started including more queer men.

benson and troy are just a really sweet couple with a good relationship that doesn’t have a ton of pining or unnecessary angst. while i love complex and tragic queer relationships, i also think that it’s good to show teenagers just being teenagers sometimes.

this opinion seems to be scarce in the queer community, which really annoys me tbh.

Raine x Eda - The Owl House (canon)

i cannot believe that given the popularity of TOH, Raeda is still such an overlooked ship. this might be an unpopular opinion but Raeda is better written and has more chemistry than Lumity and Huntlow.

just within the span of Raine's introductory episode, they managed to establish a clearly romantic past between these two characters, and also an interesting dynamic. and even though they didn't have much screentime, they still turned out to be the best ship in the series. (again, just my opinion, don't come at me)

i think it's so important to show older queer people in media, just as it is important to show younger queer characters. it helps establish the fact that queerness has always existed and isn't some newfound trend that social media invented. not to mention, raeda is one of the very few canon ships that include a non-binary character.

[tommykinard6]

I don't mean to pile onto your bad day but I've been seeing a lot of creators on tiktok complain/compare the bucktommy and henren tags/fic count on ao3 because there's almost more bucktommy fics then there are henren fics. The number one claim is always that bucktommy writers are racist because we don't write for henren. But like, that's not correct at all? People can write fanfiction for whatever they want to. If they want to see more henren stuff then they can write it on their own.

We can coexist without fighting each other. I'm just tired of people screaming about how bucktommy is anti this or anti that, when we're just vibing by ourselves and don't want the drama but the drama finds us anyway because Sucky People are loud and get heard the most.

You’re good, anon. It actually gave me something to think about during work.

As a quick disclaimer, before we begin, I’m not a POC. I am not speaking for anyone in the Black community and am not attempting to speak over them. My following thoughts are as a queer woman-ish who is also a writer.

I think it must be noted that Hen and Karen have been overlooked since day one. The fact that Buck coming out made it the “gay firefighter show” when we’ve had a beautiful canonical lesbian couple since the very beginning? Is only proof. Is this proof of racism in the fandom? Maybe. Quite possibly. I would argue that it comes from a misogynistic point as well.

If you look in any fandom, regardless of the color of their skin, any wlw ship is horribly overlooked. I’ve done some tag searching on ao3. Straight and mlm ships battle for dominance while there are canonical and fanonical wlw ships that have a drastic difference in numbers. This isn’t a good thing. But it’s an experience that spans fandoms.

I find it sad that BuckTommy has almost more fics, with only two episodes under their belt, than Henren with 7 seasons. However, this isn’t a reason to hate on BuckTommy. The ship didn’t do anything wrong. Comparison is the thief of joy and it’s also rage bait. I think that some creators simply are using anything they can to hate on BuckTommy. Which that makes it sadder, that they aren’t concerned about Henren other than pushing their own agenda.

This isn’t to say all creators who are speaking about this are doing this, but I guarantee some are.

Now, let me speak as a writer.

As someone with 62 published fics on ao3, I write almost exclusively mlm ships. This isn’t because I hate women. And as a queer woman-ish, don’t even start about homophobia. But for some reason, I find it so much easier to write men than I do to write women. This is true for straight and wlw ships and also just in general. I love Henren, but I don’t have the faintest idea about how to write them.

It’s hard enough to write as it is and I’m already writing on ships that are easy for me. I try to write women and it just hasn’t come out right. I want to challenge myself, branch out, and maybe I’ll write for Henren to do that. But I say all this to point out that for some people like me, writing some ships and demographics of ships are just a little more difficult.

That leads me into something else.

I, as a white person, worry about accidentally writing non-white characters wrong. And this was reinforced not too long ago when we had that whole thing on ao3 with deliberate racism in 9-1-1 fics. If anyone has resources or advice for writing non-white characters, I would love to hear that! The last thing I want to do is cause any harm.

I feel like I’ve spoken a lot about me, but that’s because I can’t really speak for anyone else. I can only speak from my experience.

We already have a ship war between BuckTommy and Buddie. We don’t need to pit more people against each other. I think we can love BuckTommy while agreeing that Henren needs to be seen and appreciated and treated equally.

End note to say: I tried to speak as delicately and as sensitively as I could, but if anything came out wrong, please feel free to point it out (kindly). Again, I speak for no one but my very little section of the world. I’m interested to hear what people of other backgrounds have to add!

[butwhatifidothis]

Things that the Completely Innocent Edelstan Server have done that warrants absolutely no self-reflection:

Calling a woman "nominally bi" for liking mlm ships over wlw ones in one specific fandom:

Calling someone a pedo and alt-right:

Calling an open asexual woman a homophobic Christian who hates lesbians:

Saying literally anyone who "shows disrespect" towards Dorothea, a fictional woman who isn't real, must hate women:

Imagining "AU's" of horrific real-life events for a gotcha for fandom arguments, while accusing "Mooners" of being Holocaust deniers:

Calling a (hypothetical) black woman wrong for preferring Dimitri over Edelgard, because Dimitri is "representative of deities worshipped by white supremacists" - I say hypothetical black woman because the woman in question isn't black. Also blatantly admitting to trying to stalk someone to find out their race and gender:

Insisting that a female user is actually some other male redditor pretending to be a woman:

Accusing a user of being an incestual necrophiliac:

Saying that Rhea fans overlook her being a groomer:

Casually joking about killing a real, breathing woman:

And remember, if anyone tries to say that maybe the server should back off and stop doing stuff like this?

The server has done nothing wrong. Everyone else started everything. So there is no reason for them to be civil towards the people they have spread such rancid accusations about, for months, if not years. Revealing what they've been saying in their discord about people is wrong, because everything they've said in the discord was fair to say - they shouldn't know what's said about them. And what was said about them wasn't why they responded to the discord; it's all because they hate Edelgard, and no other reason.

Like I said before: completely hinged behavior, nothing to see here i promise

[aloeverified]

Speaking of Terfs, a lot of them seem to be exclusively anti trans women. I've noticed that many of them like the idea of a woman not fitting in with all the girly girls(a lot of the pick mes I used to know are now trans men and gay). But when it's the other way around, when a boy has trouble fitting in with all the dudes and is transfeminine–oh boy. I have almost lost the count of how many heavily transmisogynistic blogs I thought were okay at first bc they had transmasc hc's and stuff. To them gender dysphoria is valid and empowering for trans men but not valid for trans women. Bigots are bigots.

The majority of terfs target trans women. That's not to say they aren't violent to trans men — a lot of people think terfs are more sympathetic to trans men, but I've seen a lot of trans men get called groomers amongst other awful names and get extremely detailed threats of physical and sexual violence against them, as well as overall harrassed and doxed — but sometimes, terfs will see trans men (more specifically, trans boys who are pre-transition on everything) as innocent victims who are being brainwashed by evil trans people. They see these boys as girls who simply are confused, whereas they see trans girls & women as well as transitioned trans men as the abusers to this imaginary victim.

There's also just a lot of transphobic people who won't admit they're transphobic. These people don't mind trans men, but they don't really see them as men but rather tomboys and butches. This doesn't make them uncomfortable because there's tons of women in the world who have short hair and wear pants, but then when they see a trans woman they lose their mind because in their eyes it's a man crossdressing which is completely unacceptable and sexual.

There's also just a lot of modern day fujoshis who fetishize gay men and trans men a lot in fandom spaces. It's easy to spot these people because they only ever care about mlm ships and trans masc headcanons. They typically see lesbians and wlw relationships as accessories to the gay ones and would absolutely never let a character they like be trans fem.

Transmisogyny is so overlooked in fandom spaces particularly. Even queer people get weird about trans women sometimes and simply want to make everything about trans masc & nonbinary people instead. Gross.

[koolkat9]

EngBel or Itapan for the ship ask please? 🙂❤️

Love them. I used to love them a lot more before I discovered engukr. But they're still really cute. I wrote a fic about them once and it is one of my favourite fics. Though I put wlw/mlm solidarity because although I see them as bi, I love the scenario where they're in a lavender marriage and Arthur has a secret bf and Emma has a secret gf and they cover for each other.

But overall, really cute. I enjoy it. Not one of my favourite pairings but I still enjoy when content of them comes across my dash.

I really wish I had more to mark for them, because I do love them a lot. They aren't my main ship but I think they're so cute and a dynamic that's been overlooked for a long time. Kiku and Feli have almost as much cute interaction as Ludwig and Feli so it's a shame I didn't really see this ship until years and years later after first getting into it. But I really have no thoughts on these two other than they kiss and hold hands and Feli always has to sit on Kiku's lap.

[masterthespianduchovny]

As much as I understand the need for queer representation, queer shipping around mlm ships tend to be misogynistic as fuck. Doubly so if one of the male characters has a canon female love interest. They have to shit on her and "punish" her for interfering with a ship that isn't canon and was never going to be canon.

And that's important to note because, within the last few years, fans of these ships frame these relationships as barriers to their preferred ship or they get mad that there isn't an open ended to pretend these two characters ended up together.

As if this is somehow the fault of the female characters and not the writers. Most importantly, it overlooks the fact that, more times than not, these character sexualities were considered and there is a vague outline of where they might end up. It's unfortunate that queerness isn't often considered, actually very little, but it's not okay to engage in misogynistic rhetoric all because your mlm ship didn't happen.

From my own personal experience, a prime example is Steggy.

Steve is framed as straight. Maybe there's a chance that his bi--idk. But the MCU has always positioned him as being into women with the subtext that he'll end up with a woman. Yet, because he ended up with Peggy, she's constantly attacked and doesn't "deserve" him because she didn't know him as long as Bucky. She's been called all sorts of derogatory things, slandered, criticized for random bullshit, etc. Reduced to just her reproductive parts, having ageist remarks leveled at her, and so forth.

Most of this didn't exist before Endgame, but after Endgame, the attacks are non stop. People are triggered whenever she comes her. All because Cap chose her over someone he wasn't even interested in. All because fans shipped him and Bucky together and the MCU didn't bend to their will.

Another example: Darvey. Harvey and Donna from Suits.

No one has to like a character, but usually, the way certain fans rip into Donna usually ends up with it being a Marvey shipper. They'll contort truth, ignore details, and color her in the worst possible light to prove how she's bad for Harvey, yet ignore all of Harvey's bullshit to prove how he and Mike are MFEO.

Let's be clear: I don't fucking care if people ship non canon ships or think two other characters, whether or not they're the same gender, are better together. However, When you're being misogynistic and sexist to upload your OTP, you can rightly fuck off. It's so easy to ship what you like without bringing that bullshit into it.

Tragically, many of these critics are women who have massive internalized misogyny, but believe they are being progressive, inclusive, and ship without prejudice. If you're tearing women down to uplift any ship, even if it's queer, that's not progressive and feeds into the patriarchy.

It's okay to prefer something else, it's not okay to feed into a pre-existing, harmful, and sexist narrative.

And it's really bothersome because these same people call themselves trying to validate the LBGTQ community, many of these shippers are straight (which this opinion is based on various discourses and criticisms of how gay characters are written in these stories and dialogue surrounding them) and ironically end up invalidating Bi, Pan, and NB people.

Some of these ships are due to these characters being hot, which is fine.

Other times it's due to chemistry, which is also fine.

But as another person argued years ago, one of the reasons why mlm shipping is so popular and prevalent is because male dynamics are actually fleshed out and explored meaningfully. This leads to wanting to ship characters who have real relationships, conflicts, and history with each other no matter how small or large.

However, the issue comes in for some because it's not canon. These meaningful relationships aren't romantic and many women tend to want some romance included, which isn't a bad thing. But when you know the romance will never happen, it's easy to get upset about that. And they know people who ship canon pairings have that over them, which is infuriating.

Which is understandable.

Regardless, diminishing, trivializing, and insulting women is not okay, esp when some of these women have the relationships with men that are usually reserved for male dynamics.

Donna and Harvey have a long, complicated relationship that is based on a professional dynamic, friendship, and romantic yearning. This was established in the first season and didn't come out of nowhere, yet people either ignore that, play it as one sided, go on and on about why they couldn't be just friends (they never were), and hilariously, refer to it as fan service.

Peggy and Steve develop a friendship of sorts, are supportive of one another, genuinely are in love with each other, and have worked alongside each other is criticized because Peggy didn't know Steve as long as Bucky. Appalling things are said about her.

Thing is: these aren't the only fandoms that do this. Trust and believe, whenever there is a major male pairing, if any woman is canonically paired with ether one of them, she's being attacked and called gross things. That's not okay even in the name of representation. If you genuinely hate this female character because of who she is and not because of her gender, I get that. However, a lot of it is gender based and it's quite obvious when reading these criticisms.

Wanting better and more representation doesn't excuse or justify shitty behavior.

Lastly, people factor in compulsive heterosexuality regarding their criticisms of various straight pairings. That's a validate take, however, we need to be honest about our issues with certain pairings rather than piling on undeserved hate towards female characters, and then have nuanced conversations about what this means in context to that specific series.

No. You're not going to have these conversations with show runners, writers, and actors. I get this. But some of you need to stop harassing others and acting like assholes because they don't support your pairing (which they don't have to). If you believe Steve is bisexual, then stop fucking harassing people who ship him with Peggy. If deep, meaningful relationships are important, then stop undermining them to push a ship. And stop turning women into fucking mascots in your fanfic and fan art to prop up your ship--that shit is so dehumanizing. Often times, when these shippers don't hate the women, they only exist to say, "when will these two silly kids get together?" OR "I'mg lad you two silly kids finally got together."

Turning a woman into a mascot isn't any better than harming her or killing her to fuel a man's story--even if the man is gay.

Ironically, I'm less likely to see this from wlw ships or ships that has more queer support and than het support.

Quite interesting.

[hematomes]

Do you have any ships you like in genshin? Or like a top tier list or smth?

xiao x me <3 /j

ok so!!! i have a few. first, wlw

1st would probably be either kokomi and Sara or ei and yae. there's too much potential

xinyan and yunjin has grasped my attention and i am carefully looking, they look very cute

lisa and jean is a given, but im not too invested

lumine and ayaka always makes me a lil bit happy <3

and naturally ningguang and beidou!!!

oh and keqing and ganyu, too, they're adorable

and hu tao and yanfei AAAA

+ a bit overlooked, ive seen some fantastic headcanons about the tsaritsa and la signora.... especially after what happened to our dear signora

then, mlm

1st in line would be xiao, venti and aether

then we have gorou and his two boyfriends, kazuha and itto

also thoma and diluc, otherwise i tend to headcanon diluc as aroace

childe and zhongli are fine, i don't care much abt it

kazuha and scara is a pretty cool rarepair too! although im sad the drifting bottles theory was debunked

xingqiu and chongyun soothe my soul, just like benny and razor. but im not too invested in it either, i prefer to focus on the adults

and i do have a few straight ones!!

sucrose and albedo <3 i am aware some people think sucrose is a minor, but personally i don't think so! also until the new dragonspine event i was going by albedo's line (= they are around the same age) but now i assume he meant physical appearance? anyway. very cute ship <3

and thoma and ayaka, but that's slowly dying. i loved the idea of thoma being ayaka's fiancé or even just them being cutely in love, but the whole rework of their relationship kinda bummed me

basically as soon as i see cute fanart/headcanons i start to ship, but im not that invested in any of them, it's all vv light-hearted (but i hate itto x sara and diluc x jean. the 1st one because of the overwhelmingly homophobic fans and the 2nd one because it's as spicy as a glass of cold milk)

[carryon-countdown]

MLM/Trans Rep Issues: a conversation

Hello everyone!

As was announced to the public in this post, we’ve noticed some voices of discontent from mlm/trans people in this fandom. We’ve spent the past week talking to many mlm/trans people in this fandom, to listen to what has likely been hurting them/making them uncomfortable. Our goal here was to educate ourselves on views that we’d been overlooking and to have a conversation about how to move forward.

We’re glad to say that every person who reached out to us was very patient and informative, so now we’re able to share what we’ve learned with our followers and the rest of the fandom. What makes everything a bit more complicated, however, is that it became clear quite quickly that not every mlm/trans person experiences these issues the same way. Most people we talked to had their very own way of viewing things, and we, as admins, think that each individual view had something valuable to say. There’s not a very clear right or wrong here, so we’re going to ask everyone not to approach these issues like there’s a definitive right or wrong.

What we’re going to do instead is explain the different views, in hope that it will educate many of you who’d had a blindspot to these issues. And then it’ll be up to each individual person to self-reflect and decide what you think is important. Once again, there doesn’t seem to be a definitive right or wrong, so we think the best we can do is make sure everyone has as much information to make their own choices with.

Fetishizing

One of the main issues that was brought to our attention is the fetishisation of mlm ships (in this fandom’s case mainly snowbaz). Some people we talked to said they came across this quite a lot, others felt like it happened here and there, and others said it happened so little that they had never been able to come up with an example of this within the fandom. So that already gives everyone an idea of what we mean by people seeming to have very different experiences.

What it means to use a ship for fetishisation is that you interact with the ship in a way that is purely focussed on the “hotness”/aesthetic of the ship, instead of focussing on the actual dynamic of this ship. This turns the ship into something more like an object of your fantasies, instead of seeing it as a representation of something real.

Everyone we talked to agreed that fetisising is wrong/hurtful. There were, however, more divided opinions on where the lines lie between content that is and isn’t rooted in fetishisation. Some views are more quickly to label a piece of smut that’s just straight up porn, with a strong focus on the “sexiness” of it all, as a piece rooted in fetishisation, while others think it’s more okay to have smut like this because wanting to celebrate a ship that you love having a bit of sexy-time can definitely come from a place of loving the ship for who they are rather than a objectifying sexual fantasy standpoint.

This shows that the whole concept of judging whether a piece of fan content is fetishising the ship isn’t something that’s just black and white. Something that is easier to judge, though, is yourself and where your love for the ship/certain pieces of content comes from.

We do thus strongly encourage you to take a look at yourself and the way you interact with the ships and content in this fandom. It’s good to ask yourself what your intentions are when creating/sharing any content relating to these ships, and to question whether you might be fetishising. We hope everyone will refrain from engaging with this ship from a fetisising standpoint. It’s often not something that happens to intent harm, but it is something that makes people who are actually represented within the ship highly uncomfortable and upset. It’s not a form of support to any sexuality/type of relationship that might be represented in the ship.

(Note: please don’t instantly write off the idea that you might be fetishising because you, for example, aren’t even attracted to men, because that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t look at a mlm ship in an objectifying way. Please, just, absolutely everyone, take an honest look at your view towards the ships in this fandom, and try to see if there’s instances where you are fetishising these ships.)

Genderbending

Genderbending/genderswap was the other main topic of the conversations we’ve had with mlm/trans people. Genderbending is simply put: changing the genders from one or more of the characters present in your work, to a gender that’s not their canon gender. In our fandom we mostly see this trope used on snowbaz, thus having them become fem!snowbaz.

A big critique for genderbending is that, very often, with genderbending the appearance/physical features of the character is what changes, and thus “that changes the gender”, which is a way of viewing gender that completely excludes the experience of trans/nb people. In the case of snowbaz, this means that Simon and Baz remain the same, but suddenly they have boobs and more feminine features, so that must mean they’re now women. While really, if you want to represent snowbaz with more feminine features, it doesn’t instantly have to mean that they’re now women, and being a woman doesn’t mean you need any kind of feminine features. It basically treats sex and gender the same, when they’re not. Genderbending also often treats gender like it’s binary, which it isn’t. For a bunch of the trans people we talked to, this is something that they consider quite harmful, not only to themselves but also to the way it inspires you to look at the concept of gender.

Besides that, there are times where genderbending gets used to explore a certain concept, such as: having one of the characters able to become pregnant, when really you can also avoid using genderbending here by using a trans headcanon/au for such a thing. The idea that the only way for you to explore these concepts with a mlm ship is having them turn into cis women comes across as both excluding the mlm and trans experience. So there are trans people who prefer if you use a trans au or trans headcanon instead of genderbending in these cases (here it is also preferred that you then have a trans person look at your work before you post it!). With this we do also want to note that not necessarily everyone trans person we spoke to experience trans au/hcs as something positive, and actually actively avoid them.

Now that we’ve spoken about the views against genderbending, there are still other trans people we talked to who don’t have an issue with genderbending. Their views on it with snowbaz are that when you have a ship that canonically consists of two cis men, it makes sense that people would have them be cis women when applying genderbending. (Also, not always everyone makes them cis women when doing a genderbend). The people that didn’t see an issue with genderbending generally came from the standpoint that people’s intentions behind genderbending are completely innocent and not done with the thought in mind that sex=gender, and that is enough for them to not feel hurt by it.

A thing that was also brought up here is that genderbending in this fandom is often used by wlw people to find a way to represent/express themselves in a fandom they love. The people who are in favor of genderbending see this as a very valid reason to keep genderbending around. If it has a positive influence on someone, and isn’t done with the idea in mind that sex and gender are the same, they don’t see why genderbending should be seen as a bad thing.

With this we also want to note that not all wlw are the biggest fan of genderbending. There’s definitely plenty that use fem!snowbaz as a way to see themselves represented, and for them it’s a very positive thing. There are, however, also wlw around who’ve spoken up against it. They see turning a mlm into a wlw ship by genderbending as a very objectifying way to look at a wlw couple. They don’t consider a mlm that now looks like wlw actual wlw representation. They often feel like it comes across very feishising and it makes them uncomfortable. So saying that it’s something positive for all wlw in this fandom is definitely an incorrect way of looking at it, but it is still also a positive thing for quite a number of them.

This shows how polarising the concept of genderbending is, and it’s really not in our interest to tell you what side to pick. We hope that you take in these views and use them to educate yourself on the topic. We hope you put in the effort to understand the different takes on it and then decide where you land. We want to at least make sure that your decisions around genderbending don’t come from a place of ignorance.

We also want to ask everyone to always tag genderbending if you do decide to post anything with genderbending. This way the people who are really hurt by it can at least avoid having to see it by blacklisting it.

This about sums up what we’ve been talking about with the people who reached out to us. We really hope everyone will use this to open their minds to different views on these topics. Since everyone's opinions on these topics seem influenced by personal views and experiences, we really cannot ask you to decide for others what’s right and wrong, and so we ask you to reflect on yourself and your own views instead.

We really want to thank @nonbaznary, @krisrix and others who will remain anonymous for taking part in this conversation! You were all super helpful and patient!

Both @nonbaznary and @krisrix told us that they were open to talk to people who still have questions surrounding these topics. Both of them represent different views, and thus will be able to give you different answers. (Please, if you decide to contact them, be kind to them and actually make an effort to listen to them. They’ve been nothing but helpful in all of this. Treat them well, this is something that can take a lot of energy out of a person)

@nonbaznary also mentioned that if anyone is ever looking for a trans person to look at your work before you post it, they’d be open to doing that for you, so you can contact them for that as well.  

We hope that the actions that were taken here will help everyone feel a little more at home in this fandom, even though the solution is such a vague one.

Much love, The admins of the Carry On Countdown of 2020

[mysticalmusicwhispers]

Idk if this counts as a ship ask, but what are your thoughts on South Korea X Vietnam?

Thanks for the ask anon!

Ship asks!

Gotta be honest, I’m not sure what my thoughts are about them? I haven’t seen much content for them and I don’t have a sense of their vibe ig, so I can’t really say anything for certain. The historical parallels and irl relations are certainly intriguing though and I feel like there’s a lot of material for shipping as a) vassal states/tributary states of China, b) the Korean War and Vietnam War both in terms of parallels and SK’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and c) the modern day relations, which are quite good. I can’t really expand on anything of their possible history, but I feel like Vietnam would’ve met Korea somewhere while they were both under China; from reading Wikipedia a survivor of the Ly family massacre fled to Korea and then helped stall the Mongol invasion of Korea, so I feel like perhaps South Korea would have felt grateful (?) towards Vietnam, and sort of in awe of her. He’s not sure whether her resistance of China was a good idea, although she seems to think so, but he can certainly admire her bravery for doing so, especially as he was unable to keep him out in the end. The whole thing with the Mongols would probably only strengthen his image of her as someone fierce, intelligent, with strength that’s often overlooked, and maybe make him feel like he’s in debt to her a little? Not sure, but as I headcanon Yong Soo as a young kid/preteen (subject to more research and evaluation) during the Mongol invasions, he doesn’t have any other feeling for Vietnam besides a hint of awe and vague curiosity.

I think there’s probably a long gap of minimal contact after that (again subject to more research) and that they meet again during the Vietnam War when South Korea sent a lot of people to help the US. I’m not sure how either of them feel; I think Yong Soo would have felt at least a little guilty, even if he’s in denial. After all, he’s just been separated from his brother, whether he willingly chose to or not, and now he’s helping Alfred try to meddle in someone else’s affairs when he’s still unpacking his own feelings about aligning with capitalism for the cost of a sibling. From Linh/Vietnam’s POV, she’s probably thinking about Yong Soo’s hypocrisy too, but she can see how he doesn’t have many other choices besides coming here and sacrificing his men in a war that should have no relation to him. She’s also thinking about how much he’s grown from that kid she met long ago who looked curiously at her as he stood next to Yao, eyes wide with a hint of trepidation (no doubt because Yao had told him lies about her, or half-truths, they were pretty much the same anyways), overpowering inquisitiveness, and maybe a shadow of admiration. He’s grown, as all of them do, into someone who has killed and bled, and she can’t help but feel a little bit sorry for him that he kills and bleeds for someone else; he should not be here, because there should be nothing in it for him. But he’s here.

Ok small drabble over, skip to modern day relations are pretty cordial between them. I think Linh and Yong Soo have k-drama watching sessions, and often Taiwan joins in. They’re probably good business buddies (South Korea is one of Vietnam’s top trading partners) and have moved on from some/most* of their antagonistic encounters. *However, there’s inevitably some sore spots, and I don’t think South Korea holds it against Vietnam that she might still have a grudge, because it’s always this way with nations. After all, he still has a grudge against Japan even as they have regular meetups with America and watch K-pop MVs together.

So, after I’ve finished giving them some thought, I think there’s a lot of interesting possibilities in shipping, but I think I see them as more of a brotp or (mayhaps) wlw/mlm solidarity friends. For me, they’re more platonic than romantic, but again it would be interesting to see them interacting from a romantic lens as well! All around the amount they’re featured together in something is a little bit criminal considering the history :\ the woes of being 2 minor Asian characters in a fandom where everyone is going crazy for Europe :|

[valentinesparda]

hello, i don't follow you but i saw your post about being nb and pan and feeling out of place in the self ship community and I just wanna say you're not alone. i'm unaligned nb and mspec too and i feel like that too sometimes. i'm happy that mlm and wlw get the support and appreciation they deserve and i'm certainly not complaining about that. i just feel like there's still a lot of emphasis in the self ship community about fitting into the binary or being aligned one way or another, even when it comes to posts about nb self shippers. and that kind of bums me out because even in lgbt+ spaces, being nb, esp if you're not fem or masc aligned, kind of makes people overlook you. it's a bit disheartening, tbh.

hello anon, thank you for sending this!! i love how far the community has come in accepting and raising up mlm and wlw but you hit the nail on the head in saying that!! i mean, it's okay to want to identify on the binary or with a binary, but some of us don't....feel that way.

there isn't still any proper language to discuss nonbinary attraction and it kinda hurts. actually, no it does hurt. i don't want to land in one boat or the other and even if i DO land in one boat, I'm still seen as like....i dunno, boy/girl lite?? and that doesn't sit well with me at all

and again, identifying as loving women / loving men specifically completely ignores the majority of my own attraction labels and that's my other issue. nblw feels like it erases me being attracted to masc aligned people / men, but nblm erases being attracted to women / fem aligned people - not to mention the fact that even then, people are already assuming most nb people are falling on one presentation or the other by including nb people in their label but only when they fit one binary box or the other

i dunno. I'm really really tired lmao i want to make inclusion and positivity posts but that's hard to do when it feels like I'll get talked over regardless.... thanks for sharing anon, i love you 💙💙

[catradoraism]

i'm not anon but if you feel comfortable dropping the zu/kka salt i'd love to hear it

(edit: this isn’t a catradora vs zukka or even klance thing. it’s more just about the disservice to both mlm and wlw ships. mlm ships are heavily fetishised and wlw are overlooked.)

i’m not gonna write a whole “zukka sucks!1!1!” essay bc i don’t want to contribute to unnecessary hate and i’d rather keep this blog positive. and i’m also not a zutara/kataang/maiko shipper so i actually have no personal gripes about the ship itself, in fact, there’s nothing inherently wrong or bad about zukka. they have little, almost nonexistent romantic chemistry and barely any screen time sure but the ship itself is not a bad one. it’s just disheartening (but not surprising) when mlm ships with very little basis for canon romance are more popular than canon wlw ships. but the overwhelming popularity of mlm ships in itself is also problematic, bc a really really large amount of mlm shippers are usually. fujoshis. (not everyone ofc but a Lot) who tend to heavily fetishise mlm ships, u can see it in how much top/bottom dynamics are emphasised in these fandoms or how bastardised the actual characterisations of the characters are to fit their seme/uke fanon characterisations. if you’ve spent five minutes in the vld fandom u know what i’m talking about. i’m not gonna draw the obvious comparisons between zukka and klance bc they’re pretty discernible. it’s not surprising a lot of klance shippers project a lot onto zukka. i don’t even have a problem with klance itself it was moreso just the fandom. so i guess. history repeats itself

[literaphobe]

I’m not about to say that Zukka Isn’t massively overrated and that a lot of the fans are cishets fetishizing mlm, or that Catradora is often unfairly overcriticized, hated, and overlooked (bc let’s be real, it is), but I haven’t seen much of zukka shippers trashing catradora. I’ve scrolled through both the notes of the original fandometrics post as well as the Zukka and Catradora tag for posts talking abt it so I could block the people that made them. (1/4)

But in the Zukka tag, all I could find were fans celebrating that Zukka got first with no mention of Catradora or laughing abt how Zukka placed over Zutara. And in the Catradora tag all I could find was one post and op claimed that they were joking (even though it’s really poor taste). And I’m trying to make excuses for Zukka fans, it’s just that I don’t really see this loud victorious sentiment (2/4)

that the mlm ship lauded by cishets has finally defeated the “evil” wlw. But it could also be that I’m not looking in the right places, or that I just so desperately want to not see fans of two ships that I love hating on each other. And it just feels like the main reason that Zukka placed over Catradora is that atla has a comparably larger fanbase than spop, because it’s had 15 years to gain fans, while spop has only had two. (3/4)

I understand and feel the disappointment of a far from canon mlm ship beating out an explicitly canon wlw ship, but I feel like there’s a more productive way of going about that critique than creating an us vs them narrative, and instead directly criticize the fandom culture that let Zukka thrive. (4/4)

let me. get some things straight because it clearly seems you have misconstrued parts of my post out of your guilt that you? ship zukka? or something? anyway:

i never said zukka shippers were trashing catradora. i said SOME of them were celebrating their victory, and whether they like it or not, celebrating that is not good

why is it bad to celebrate zukka being #1 ship and catradora getting pushed to #2 after roughly two months of being first? it’s because as far as i can remember, this is the first time a canon wlw ship has been number one. or any wlw ship being #1 for so long for that matter

how many times have we seen mlm ships pushed to the moon on this website? why can’t wlw ships have that same treatment? the reason why catradora being #1 felt important and special to me is because it is essentially. a celebration of love between two women. that it can be that valued. that it can be that incredible. that the dynamic between women can be so good! so powerful! that it doesn’t have to involve men, and that IS special, and that IS important, and to be knocked down by a mlm ship again... its just not a great feeling!

but like i said. that in and of itself is. whatever. who cares y’know? we still had a good run. but it is insensitive to see Any zukka fans celebrating the win!! because your win came at our expense! at the expense of all wlw who were so happy and excited to see a lesbian ship be the number one ship on tumblr! and honestly, what is so important about zukka being #1? i’m not saying anyone is bad or problematic for shipping them. i myself think they are cute and that their resurgence is a great foil to all those old het ship vs het ship wars. but did you need this win? did you need zukka to be the number one ship? 

if you are a wlw, either you see the importance of a canon wlw ship being popular and widely celebrated, or you do not care enough about other wlw who feel this way. if you are not a wlw, you shouldn’t even be involved in this conversation and should just. listen. to how painful it has been. and to acknowledge that ur mlm ships don’t need to be number one for you to be valid or whatever. if you’ve been on the internet, you KNOW how dominant mlm ships are

yes. i know how popular atla is. i love the show. i know how long it has existed. i watched it as a kid. i’m not throwing a fit because people dared to enjoy atla and find happiness and comfort in its characters and the fun and potential they see in zukka. i am not asking people to stop shipping zukka or to stop making zukka content, nor am i asking them to switch over and make catradora content instead. i’m not trying to start an “””us vs them””” mentality! and i have criticized the fandom culture that let mlm ships thrive while wlw ships got the short end of the stick! 

keep this in mind: i am not against zukka. i do not hate all of their shippers, or even in general. i am not calling any of them out for trashing catradora, because i don’t think many of them are trashing catradora, and frankly, i do not care. but is it really necessary for any of them to celebrate this like it’s a victory? like it’s at all monumental and not in fact a disservice and loss for wlw? who just want ships that reflect our identities to be treated with the same love and reverence and given the same hype?

[sunshinycc]

I think I've cracked the code of why popular fandoms rarely have popular wlw ships! It's just so difficult to find popular media with more than one or two woman main characters in them, and even if there are more than one or two, those characters rarely have a personality outside of their friendships/relationships/connections with men. Even if the media technically passes the Bechdel test, a woman in popular media rarely gets the same development and attention as a man.

Therefore, if a fandom wants a wlw ship, more often than not they need to construct or reconstruct the entire personality of the women in question, or genderswap/genderbend a popular ship. Sometimes a minor character or an original character needs to be used in order to satisfy the desire for a wlw ship, and because the fandom hasn't made attachments to those characters, the ship never catches on.

Of course, we can't overlook straight girls' fetishization of gay men, or their fear/disgust towards wlw (a large part of mainstream fandom is dominated by women, esp cis/straight women). A big part of the shortage of wlw ships can be attributed to the idea of mlm being "cute" and "pure", and wlw being "scary" and "predatory". But we can't blame it all on fetishization and homophobia without also acknowledging the continuing dominance of male main characters in popular media without an equal amount of women to balance it out.

[johannas-motivational-insults]

Catradora are both tops and Catra is a dom, change my mind

(Actually, don’t change my mind. I’m not writing this to cause drama, I’m writing this because Catradora sexual discourse is frustrating me and I want basically a masterpost to link back to whenever I need to explain my apparently controversial views on this shit. Hopefully some other people will also find that it speaks to/for them and be able to use it for the same purpose. Please don’t troll me, I’m but a simple girl who needs to be understood. I am, however, totally open to respectful debate. :)

Okay, I’d like to take some time here to follow up on my previous posts about how Catra and Adora are both vers-tops and Catra is so not a sub. I feel a little silly writing a long meta about the sexual dynamics of a femslash ship in a cartoon aimed at kids and teens, but there’s reason for it. For some reason, lots of fics write one or both of them in ways that feel extremely out of character, perhaps to make them fit the mold for a particular kink or sexual trope. And people will write what “works” for them ugh, and I’m not kinkshaming on principle, but some of it feels extremely disrespectful to the characters. Particularly Catra, given her backstory and struggles so far in the series, and I find this rather troubling.

And unfortunately, some of these things that are written to fit some sexual trope have ended up entering the more general discourse and morphing the fanon interpretation of the characters into something urecognizable, something that would make the canon characters mad if they read it. That’s another big reason why I’m bothering to write all this.

Let’s start with a clarification: when I said Catradora are both tops, I meant they would fight each other for control of an encounter and that’s totally fine and we don’t need to make hard statements about who is the top because it comes naturally to both of them. But I didn’t mean they would necessarily want control for the same reasons or that they are interchangeable in the sack. IMO, Catra is a dominant vers-top and Adora is the definition of a service top (but also versatile if that’s what works for her partner). These may be unpopular opinions (honestly why?), but I am fully prepared to back them up. *cracks knuckles*

I’m going to explain my biggest point first and then put a bunch of additional thoughts under the cut. That point being we need to consider Catra and Adora’s relationships with power.

Here’s the thing. For Catra, power is safety, power is an accomplishment she is proud of. She has fought/longed her whole life to be taken seriously. She has always felt disrespected and like she lacked agency (both of which are true, actually), so feeling respected and in control is very important to her.

This is especially true of her relationship with Adora, as she feels like Adora has been controlling her for most of their lives and doesn’t respect her. She resents that Adora has been in the “power position” for ages and is actively trying to change that.

Didn’t anybody else see how she got off on those guards standing at attention as she walked by in 2x01, and how tickled she was standing on top of Dryl in 2x02, overlooking her troops taking it over? Catra gets off on power, why would she not also literally get off on it?

To Catra, giving up power would feel like a failure.

For Adora, power is a burden. Yes she is an absolute control freak, but that’s because she feels like she needs to control everything because if anything goes wrong it’s all her fault. Shadow Weaver instilled this idea in her when she was very young, the way she was groomed to be a leader in the Horde reinforced it, and now being She-Ra has made that feeling inescapable for her.

I’ve seen people use the “person who has a lot of power irl wants to give it up in the sack” concept to explain why they see Catra as a sub, but imo it works way better for Adora because she has always been saddled with power, even when she didn’t want it. I will get into this more under the cut, but we have seen Adora resenting and struggling with all her responsibilities on multiple occasions.

To Adora, giving up power would feel like a relief (once she got past the mental block of needing to control everything).

(This isn’t all to say that Catra would be running shit 100% of this time, I do actually think both are somewhat versatile in terms of top/bottom and dom/sub classification. I’m just making a hard case in this direction because I think they lean this way and because so many people seem weirdly convinced that Adora would 100% dominate Catra all the time and it’s weird and a little offensive.)

Now, let’s move on to my additional thoughts! The tl;dr of it all is: brattiness =/= submissiveness (quite the opposite, in fact), why the hell would an abuse survivor want to relive her trauma, this master/pet nonsense is racist af, Adora is not a starfish wtf, and Adora is a good little soldier who likes following orders.

(Plus new bonus content: Catra’s love and protection of Adora signals she’s a top, not just a dom.)

(A quick sidebar on semantics: I find the definition of “top” to be a little weird with wlw couples because we stole top/bottom from mlms but it doesn’t work the same way. We don’t always use strap-ons and when we do it’s not uncommon for both partners to use it on each other. So when I say top I might be referring to use of a strap-on or penetration in general, but more often I use it the way straight people do, literally referring to who is on top/who wants to be on top. [And for Catradora I really do think that’s both of them, though perhaps for somewhat different reasons.] Meanwhile, when I say dominant/submissive I mean who is running shit/in charge vs. who is pliable to their partner’s whims/willing to give up control. I don’t necessarily mean anything to do with BDSM, and I will say so if that is what I am referring to. So, hopefully the way I am using those two terms makes sense.)

Let’s start by clearing something up in regards to Catra: Brattiness does not equal submissiveness. This is a common misconception because yes, some submissive types will use brattiness to goad their partners into aggression. However, brattiness is first and foremost a defense mechanism. Brats are usually people who lack power and make up for it by acting out. It’s a way to feel like you have some power by resisting the unfavorable dynamic and/or causing the other person to lose control while you keep it together (causing a feeling of superiority/satisfaction that you caused that reaction). Why do you think so many youngest children are bratty? It’s the only way we can feel like anything but the omega of our family. Despite being about the same age, Catra basically feels like the younger sibling to the favored and overachieving Adora. Don’t you think she’d love to take her down a peg?

Yes, bratty behavior is meant to provoke a reaction, but it’s often an attempt to gain power, not lose it. Unfortunately, kinky stereotypes have caused this misconception that bratty characters must be subs looking to be dominated (and/or punished if into the BDSM stuff) or bottoms looking to be aggressively topped. Even if that is sometimes the case in the bedroom, we haven’t and will never see how Catradora interact in the bedroom, and people don’t always act the same in those situations as they do out in the world.

Sticking with Catra for now, I gotta say, anything that makes her a BDSM-type sub feels really problematic to me. Catra is an abuse survivor, and putting her in situations where she would be basically reliving her trauma (especially if they don’t take the care to establish the reasons for this behavior in a way that feels organic to the character) is extremely disrespectful. We’ve seen Shadow Weaver restrain Catra with magic and take control of her body, and it’s heavily implied by Catra’s behavior that Shadow Weaver has beaten her in the past. She is constantly struggling to get out from under Shadow Weaver’s thumb, why would she then want to go submit to someone else, especially in a way that would reenact this trauma? (Again, this is especially true of her relationship with Adora, considering that she feels like Adora has been dominating and controlling her for most of their lives and she heavily resents this dynamic.)

Then there’s all the racist implications of Catra in restraints, especially collars. First of all, cats usually hate collars and Catra in particular would hate it. She doesn’t want anyone to take control of her, Shadow Weaver’s done that enough for a lifetime. Then there’s the really gross implication that people want to domesticate Catra. Master/pet scenarios are a little fucked up when the “pet” character is a hybrid of a common house pet. Like, yikes. If you can do enough character work to make me believe she’d be into that, maybe we can talk. But, can’t anyone else see why this is kinda fucked up?

All this sub/bottom Catra stuff really makes no sense to me, and I can’t help but agree with the posts about how Catra is a top but the fandom likes to write her as a bottom because they ID with her and want She-Ra to top them. Like, Catra is her own character, not an empty vessel you get to mess with to self-insert into a sex scene with a buff goddess.

That being said, I do respect the power bottom Catra headcanon even if I don’t agree with it, if for no other reason than Adora is a total service top so her slotting into that role makes some amount of sense. My issue is more with the idea that Catra is inherently a total bottom (as opposed to her fitting in where she does with Adora) and with the dom/sub stuff in general. Because yeah, no.

Look, cats are like the least submissive creature on this planet, and Catra is one of the least submissive characters on the show. Adora, meanwhile, is basically a big puppy dog. If you have a dog and a cat together, which one ends up being submissive? Like, honestly.

On that note, let’s move on to Adora.

As I said above, Adora is the very definition of a service top. Adora is, as Catra said in 1x01, a people pleaser. She wants to please the people around her, both by making them happy and by making them proud/living up to their expectations. She’s also the type of person who tends to go for what she wants, tackle her problems head on. I honestly can’t imagine a situation where Adora would not be focused first and foremost on giving her partner pleasure, whether that means taking charge and fucking them with a strap-on or letting them ride her face until she suffocates. Or even if it means letting them have their way with her, as long as she can reciprocate and make them feel as good as they made her feel (hopefully better, because she’s super competitive).

Here, we run into another problem. I’ve seen Adora written multiple times as a melty starfish who lets Catra top her and doesn’t try very hard (if at all) to return the favor when Catra blows her mind. Maybe she whines a little about wanting to do stuff to Catra if she initially turns it down, but she doesn’t try to take control. Like, please. Do you seriously think Adora would stand for that shit? Canon Adora would get so huffy if Catra tried to turn it down, because Adora needs to prove her prowess and please the people closest to her. I’m not advocating for dubcon here or saying we should write that, just that based on Adora’s personality she would at least try. Adora is not a pillow princess, and certainly not a starfish. Like, that should be obvious.

However, I do see Adora as someone who could easily end up being more submissive in the bedroom. She wouldn’t necessarily be at first because she is so used to being in charge, but once she experienced that loss of control I think she would enjoy it. Here is where that “person who has a lot of power irl wants to give it up in the sack” idea comes back. I already went into this earlier, how power is a burden for her and letting someone else take charge would be a relief for her.

Fact is, this is already canon. Adora likes following orders. Madame Razz literally called her out in 1x03 for how she wants other people to tell her what to think and do. She was constantly striving to please Shadow Weaver, to carry out her orders and be a good soldier, and she never gave much thought to whether these were the right things to do until the truth smacked her in the face. She was happy to be promoted to Force Captain, but to me that read as her being pleased at the validation/recognition for her good work more than the power the promotion gave her (whereas for Catra, it was obviously both). When she moved to Bright Moon, she suddenly had this burning need to prove herself to Queen Angella. She craves approval from authority figures, and while Catra does too, Adora seems to have this very deep intrinsic need to be valued and appreciated for her service.

Like I said, a total service top. But she is a top. So is Catra. As I said in my first post about this, that is part of what’s fun about this ship. Let them playfully fight for control. We don’t have to assign these roles so rigidly, the only reason I’m making a hard case for dominant Catra is to counteract the common discourse/fanfic tropes for these two. Tbh I don’t even think they’d be very kinky, their lives are crazy enough and I think they’d just enjoy the comfort and intimacy and fun of vanilla-ish sex, once they got past all their hangups and reconciled. Catra likes her power, but once she got comfortable enough with Adora again she would be able to let go of that at times and I think it would be freeing for her.

Okay that’s about it for this ridiculous rant, but I hope I’ve given you all something to think about. Please try to consider the characters’ histories and personalities when writing sexy fanfic or remarking on the sexual power dynamics between these two. That stuff is so much better anyway when it actually feels true to the characters and shows respect for them.

ETA: I foolishly did not think to include this in the post initially, but Catra’s history of protecting and caring for Adora in the small ways that she can suggests she’s a top, not just a dom. It’s worth noting that she feels like a top-type personality forced into a role not suited for her, i.e. a role where she feels weak and dependent on her partner. I’m not gonna go into all the details here because this is a whole other meta I’ve written since, but you can find all that in this post. (I have since edited it into a PG version to address the non-nsfw aspects of what I was trying to say, but the original is still there.)