(back to shipping sphere shifts)

an overview of "any two guys" and the migratory slash fandom

written 28 june 2023.

this was originally written as a placeholder page with the expectation that i'd come back to this and write a proper essay on atg w/in genshin impact Someday Soon™; however, as time has gone on, there have been Other things i've found in my conversations w/friends that have warranted wanting a simple overview/explanation page for people to reference during future essays, as the concept of "any two guys" has been smth many people have been curious about when i mention it to them.

so, "any two guys" is a derogatory term i found when poking around anonymous fandom message board fail-fandomanon.

it took me a very long time to figure out what "atg" meant when poking around their archives, and it's tied in with this concept called "migratory slash fandom" (also a derogatory term from what i've gathered), wherein a slash pairing gets hugely popular in some fandom bc some Big Name Fan happened to get into that pairing, and then all the fans of the BNF come kinda whooshing in, and they all make a bunch of content for that pairing based off the BNF's interpretation of them, and then move on to the next pairing when the BNF moves on again.

basically, what atg means is that the people in migratory slash fandom would pick, quote, " basically any two (usually white) guys" to whose dynamic could be crammed into a few generic but popular shipping tropes, flood the fan content spaces with said supergeneric version of the characters, and then ~* vanish*~ to the next fandom, leaving the previous pairing's actual community, like, desolate and forevermore tainted in terms of characterization for fanon.

migratory slash shippers (as a nebulous blobby collective) will strip their atg ships of all nuance as people just get into it for the aesthetic and surface level trope. hence, an important aspect of atg fic specifically is that a lot of it reads the same no matter where you go, as if you can just replace a few visual details abt the characters or setting n call it good.