eremika.

as you might be able to tell from its weight of 10, eren/mikasa was my otp while in the snk fandom, and believe me, my experiences there are foundational to how i engage with fandom today.

credit where it's due, i joined tumblr at around the same time i got into reading mlp fanfiction (mostly because i liked those the "best of tumblr" facebook reposts got me curious about it), which got me marinating in, like, The Gay Sauce which got me to start breaking down the homophobia i grew up internalizing.

as a result, when i got into snk, completely obsessed w/eremika (what can i say. the heartbeat moment in episode 8 got me!!), i was more open to the idea of queer pairings, adopting a number for myself when i saw the big-name eremika writers in the Tag on tumblr.

i was never, like, into jeanmarco or even yumikuri the way i was into eremika, aruani, and springles, but i'd include them in my own works as like side pairings, and i'd be pleased when i saw them in the bg of fics bc yeah duh those chars go together.

being in eremika from 2016 – 2017 gave me the impression that it was normal for gay people to, like, exist, and for shippers to like ships of all categories. this was so wildly important to me, and i really cannot credit them enough for gently marinating me in "being gay is normal actually" sauce. sure, homophobia remained in my staunch preference for m/f pairings, but it was a subtler type.

The Discourse™

the main reason i didn't include mlp on this chart (or reflection) is mostly because i was like. a lurker only. i wasn't writing fic, only reading it (and watching videos on youtube lol). as a result, i was blissfully unaware of any fandom infighting or discourse.

this was. SO not the case during my time in snk.

it's important to note that snk was my primary fandom while tumblr was still the dominant fannish social media platform: the legendary Porn Ban would not hit until december 2018. it was also a Pre-Voltron Era (for the most part), and this is important because it tells us two things:

1. i was witnessing what were essentially the front lines of fandom wars firsthand
• it was also pretty fresh off the legalization of gay marriage in the united states, and so "Tumblr SJWs" were still around and widely considered to be nuisances.
2. the "proship vs. anti" discourse as we know it today, comprised of its two major factions focused on The Morality Of Shipping, did not yet exist, and "anti" was not yet a term used all on its own. rather, people were anti-specific things, such as a character, ship, or fandom.

so. the primary anti-eremika sentiment present in the snk fandom back then was the claim that "Eremika is incest." if this sounds familiar to you, i've been meaning to write a page w/my thoughts on the parallels btwn fandom's responses to eremika in the mid-2010s and kaeluc in the early 2020s for some time now. this is, in my opinion, kind of absurd, but i'll reiterate some of the most common arguments (or really claims) here anyway because doing so feels relevant:

eremika is incest because…

• mikasa was adopted by the jaegers; therefore, shippers are invalidating the validity of adopted children's claim to family.
• eren sees mikasa as sister, while mikasa sees eren as her child to take care of.
• eren and mikasa are step siblings

(do you guys feel that? that's the soft and gentle breeze generated by my soul departing my body.)

and like. i don't know; make of that what you will (THEY WERE ALL WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!). i am going to restrain myself here because if i were to go digging up old discourse posts to prove myself, we'd be here for the next three years as i dump post after post here, and considering that a lot of this discourse was taking place like almost ten years ago now, i am going to give the eremika haters from that era my grace and assume they know better now.

speaking of the haters…

our primary rivals at that time were the Ereri/Riren (eren/levi) shippers (and, to a lesser extent, Eremin (eren/armin) shippers).

the ereri shippers were worse to us, probably because they were way more numerous than the eremin shippers, but i mean. at least the eremin shippers weren't usually being violently misogynistic about mikasa in people's inboxes. plus, eremin shippers generally didn't discard all of eren's friendships with the rest of the 104th (his friends from his graduating class), and so my impression of the eremika-eremin relationship was like. "i don't like you, but i see where you're coming from and respect the idea of it."

ereri shippers, on the other hand, we generally did not respect on principle, and we generally viewed them as like. delusional, misogynistic fujoshi who were just "straight girls fetishizing gay men for teh hawt yaoiz." our arguments against ereri itself were that it was abusive (for the courtroom scene mentioned earlier) and pedophilic (for the age gap btwn fifteen year-old eren and levi being in his, like, thirties, as according to mangaka hajime isayama).

(speaking of isayama, that reminds me of the other major discourse i remember being frequently exposed to even for years after i left the fandom, which was that "isayama is a nazi and snk is nazi propaganda." which we will NOT be touching. probably fucking ever. but know that i saw it. i understand it. and that both of these things have an impact on how i view politics & fandom. )

and like, this eremika vs. ereri discourse was very formative to me in my early fandom days, most critically because it gave me that distinct anti-fujoshi impression. the fujoshi were not like us normal shippers, because when we shipped men together, we were normal about it, unlike those nasty, fetishizing straight girls calling themselves fujoshi! they were probably off appropriating maleness in their misogyny against female characters even!!

(*head in hands* im sorry fujoshi)

and that image…

well, it stuck with me.

more on that later. or some other day.

crosstagging :/

so, for those of who who don't know, "crosstagging" on tumblr is the practice of putting a post into pretty much opposing tags. the Tags on tumblr (capitalized to specify the fact that i'm referring to the global /tagged/[tag name] pages of original posts w/said tag on the website itself, rather than the private, local tags on an individual's blog, which could include reblogs) were basically the community centers for fandom back in the day. think of it as like a livejournal community, except that you didn't have to join the comm to post in it.

basically, because tumblr Tags are generally followed and looked through by people who wanted to see things related to that subject, it's considered extremely rude to put negativity into a ship tag (or positivity into an anti-ship tag). the idea was basically that we'll all stay in our own lanes so as not to start unnecessary discourse. ~manners~! :D

unfortunately, the people who hated eremika because they thought it was incest didn't think we deserved that kind of courtesy. people crosstagging eremika hate was so common after a while that the actual #eremika tag was deemed unusable by the community at large, and it was proposed that shippers wanting to post their eremika creations should make a new tag instead: #eremika art.

and to this day, eremika remains the only ship i've been active in that had received so much vitriol that we couldn't even use our own fucking Tag on tumblr.

the allied ships

another concept that i'd say i noticed in the mlp fandom that got rather reinforced or codified in my time in snk was a concept i'm going to call "a shipping convoy," which is basically just a group of ships that are so commonly seen together, they're like a little unit. like in mlp, if you shipped one of the mane six with a guy, you're probably shipping all of them with guys sort of thing.

and when i was into snk and eremika, the most common side ships were aruani, springles, yumikuri, jeanmarco, and levihan (i wanna say in approximately that order?), but by far the most common side ship was aruani. the eremika and aruani shippers on tumblr were like brothers-in-arms—i think some of the big name fans had a group chat together actually, but i wouldn't know for sure— which is why i typically refer to them as sister ships.

i feel like this kind of shipping allyship is not that uncommon in fandom, hence why i felt the need to give some of its concepts their own names. but really, the most important takeaway from this part of my Reflections On My Time In SnK is that it encouraged me to invest in ships outside of my otp, and to understand those ships and characters through the eyes of people who loved them most.

voltron (summer 2016)

considering where the voltron fandom ended up going as the show progressed, this is arguably a dark mark on my fandom history, but i have a defense:

i only watched the first two seasons.

i actually got into it bc one of my middle school underclassmen wanted someone to beta read her sheith fanfiction, and so i watched the season that was out at the time, and then season two when it came out not long after. and then when season three started airing, i think i saw like an episode or two, but tbh i was frying different fish by that time.

i don't know what i would have shipped if i'd gotten into voltron organically, tbh. maybe allurance? who's to say.

however, bc i got (loosely) into the fandom from a friend's shipfic, i ofc felt a sort of protective attachment and pride over sheith, even as i continued to distantly monitor the fandom by virtue of People On My Dashboard Getting Into Voltron Too.

as such, ofc i could feel the distant waves of The Discourse™ rocking the boat and hating on sheith (and shaladin ships as a concept) and eventually changing the fandom world forever when being "anti-shaladin" eventually just turned into our modern understanding of "antis".

i was aware of voltron's reputation going down the shitter, though, which is why i eventually did go through my blog and purge all 560 posts i reblogged and tagged with voltron.

the ghosts of those posts still haunt my archive, though.

you could argue that this was my first time on the side of the m/m shippers in the yaoi wars, but tbh since our main rival was the fellow m/m ship klance, the discourse never mentioned homophobia or misogyny, and thus it never registered to me as this being a ship war based in anything other than personal preference. i honestly don't remember if i ever saw any anti-fujoshi sentiments happening even.

but, since i was obviously already experienced (and very much still living) in the eremika trenches, distant voltron discourse was, like, nothing to me. yes, even when the "shiro is like a brother to me" line from keith came out and everyone started calling sheith incest. i was like, "well, that's stupid!" and moved on.

fullmetal alchemist (july 2016 – 2017)

there's actually not much i can think to say here. while i kind of fandomy abt fma and read a chunk of fanfiction, i didn't really chat with people or make fandom friends from it.

my fma tastes being all m/f ships i think can also be justified partly by arakawa being very good at writing women and partly by that concept of a shipping convoy i mentioned in the snk section:

following the canon edwin, i saw royai around as a common side pairing, got more into them than edwin, and like anyway ofc lingfan and almei (and occasionally havolina) would be paired up too in those ensemble cast fics with multiple focal pairings that were more common in those days.

you could also argue my dislike of edling at the time was still internalized homophobia, yes. but tbh, i only remember having beef with the idea of royed back in those days LOL. and i say "the idea of royed" specifically bc fma was several years done by the time i watched it, and so obviously there wasn't any active fandom ship war discourse happening where i could see it. the fandom had Chilled Out.

flip flappers (oct. 2016 – 2017)

you can actually read my reflections on my time in the flip flappers fandom in the yurizine! i might archive that essay here later, since it is also very pivotal to my growth as a person— it's probably not an exaggeration to call it the most pivotal out of all the fandoms not on my shipping composition chart, even— but there's a lot to cover on this page anyway.

however, something i didn't talk about in the yurizine that's still extremely important to know was…

my beef with yuri on ice.

GOOD LORD. where to start.

the fall 2016 anime season was one where i had decided to try watching almost every single anime that aired, with a few exceptions. one of those exceptions, even right from the start, had been yuri on ice.

at first, i ignored yoi because it was a sports anime. this might be news to people who weren't there at the time and now know yoi as basically the gay ice skating anime, but that's how it was promoted at the time, and since, like,

1. i was not interested in sports no matter how effusively my friends would recommend haikyuu!! to me, and
2. sports anime would inevitably be a fujoshi magnet, just as kuroko no basuke and free! before it had been

i decided to skip it.

however, as the show progressed and began to show its yaoiful hand, i very vividly remember developing a deep sense of resentment and distaste towards its burgeoning popularity, especially in comparison to flip flappers, that i attributed to the fact that it was essentially yaoi (derogatory) in my mind. this came to a head when it beat flip flappers for best animation at the First Ever crunchyroll anime awards (also known as "the yuri on ice awards" >_>)

at that point, i swore off sports anime for the rest of my life, a vow i continue to (admittedly very pettily) uphold to this day.

bc, like, despite not really seeing it myself until soon after the anime ended, i knew that flip flappers was a show abt a queer relationship, too. and a huge part of the hype around yoi was how cleanly it blew everyone's tits off with how gay it was and how far it was going with said gayness.

so why was flip flappers so fantastically snubbed in comparison to yuri on ice?

remember what i said abt fujoshi in the eremika section? about how i understood them to be basically just misogynistic fetishizers of gay men? and about how ~Tumblr SJWs~ were still a thing on the site, both fighting the good fight and making mountains out of moral molehills?

back when flip flappers aired in fall of 2016, fujoshi would, in my mind, pretty much by definition or necessity, snub female chars at best and bash them at worst in order to fawn over their ~hawt yaoi men~

and, well. the best way i can put this is that those experiences as a m/f shipper at the hands of The Yaoi Majority resulted in yaoi and yuri, as concepts, being both deeply gendered and deeply moralized at the same time. yes, in the terf-y gender essentialist "men inherently oppressive and evil and thus can only ever cause harm; women inherently oppressed and good and can never hurt anyone else ever" kind of way.

there was a significant period of time in my life when i thought of myself as a cishet(ace) girl. and i don't resent that! part of thinking that i was a girl for so long means that identifying with female characters is pretty easy. despite being nonbinary, a strong part of my identity is still tied to femininity (separate from womanhood).

all this just to say that i realized yoi's popularity over flip flappers was due in no small part to misogyny & the prioritization of men in fandom.

feeling like a girl myself at that time, i never wanted to contribute to that. and because my definition of "fujoshi" necessarily included misogyny back then, i essentially swore to never become one of those fetishizing freaks.

that's right!! looking back, being into flip flappers and mentally going to war against yoi basically turned me into the fandom equivalent of a political lesbian. a political himejoshi, if you will. but i still considered myself het back then and i still liked m/f ships a lot so like. i guess technically political woman enjoyer LOL.

the slush pile

as a great many m/f and f/f shippers can attest to, the ao3 tags in m/m-dominated fandoms can be absolutely full of slush. "slush" here refers to fics which add tags that are true and arguably relevant, but not really the focus. they're not the characters/relationships/tropes that get development that is meaningful enough such that someone looking Specifically For that tag will come away satisfied with what they read.

in relatively popular ships, esp m/m ones, the slush is negligible, bc there are enough fics actually focused on the ship tagged to make up for it. unfortunately bc most people don't have a very deep understanding of how ao3 filters work (and/or don't check ao3 tags themselves, instead relying solely on recs from others to be fed), this often means that m/m ships are the perpetrators of slush in m/f and f/f tags.

now, remember how in eremika, the tag hate spam on tumblr got so bad, we started a new Tag to share our art in peace? well, in todomomo, we had an incredible amount of slush polluting our ao3 tag after bnha's popularity spiked post-voltron.

most slush came from tododekus tagging "one-sided todomomo" or bakudekus with background todomomo. because this casual tagging happened incredibly often thanks to the relative size and popularity of tddk and bkdk, the raw tdmm tag was eventually overrun by irrelevant fics, esp. when sorting by kudos (ew but unfortunately a popular practice :/)

in response, one very prolific reader (and writer!) started the todomomo collection on ao3 in mid-2020, went through the entire tdmm tag on ao3, adding every single fic focused on endgame todomomo. they and the other curators who later joined them did not care about the genre, rating, subject matter, or even writing quality, only that it focused on tdmm.

and for that, i respect the maintainers a lot, though community knowledge of the collection seems to have been lost now that many of the original maintainers have wandered off to other fandoms.

but anyway!

todomomo.

tdmm was still very small when i first got into it, having less than 40 fics on ffn and somewhere in the ballpark of 200 on ao3 when i started reading for them in january 2018. according to my old discord chats w/nat, i finished reading all the tdmm fic on both ffn and ao3 in about three weeks.

and unlike snk and soul eater, there didn't seem to yet be an established community in the Tag on tumblr. like yeah, there were a couple Cool People there, but none of the Cool People seemed to really be friends with each other in that tumblr banter kind of way. which is kind of to say, i got into bnha and tdmm relatively early, long before its peak. this might(?) be important for reasons i want to pretend are Complicated™.

basically, what it meant is that i ended up with a bit of a Name in the community that eventually formed around the ship. more on that later, if i feel like it. but something important to know here, too, is that i was still really shy about interacting with other fans, so i deliberately didn't join their discord server when it was founded, nor did i post in the Tag on tumblr (essentially the community center in those days). as such, whatever influence i may have had wasn't from direct conversation w/other fans.

entering the bnha fandom, i remember being like, "wow! the popular ships are all so nice, since none of them are like, teacher x student levels of age gaps! i feel like i can actually be chill about all of these." like yeah, tododeku was more popular by A Lot, but i didn't really see any reason to beef with them, and since there was nothing especially ~Problematique™~ abt tdmm, i figured there wouldn't be any reason for us to feud.

unfortunately, we went to war with the tododekus anyway.

i don't know which side started it. maybe we did, since i remember seeing some people occasionally cross-tag posts complaining abt tdmm's lack of popularity with #tododeku (and #momojirou), specifically citing how unfair it was that tododeku had so many shippers by comparison as their reasoning for doing so. which was, like, super fucking rude of them.

however, i also remember that tododekus would also crosstag their hate from time to time, more often than i remember seeing tdmm shippers doing it to them.

the allegations?

honestly. being older now, this is actually kind of funny to look back on, because the reasons tddk shippers came up with for hating on tdmm are such goddamn nothingburger arguments. like.

todomomo sucks because…

• it's bland/boring/basic
• they have no chemistry
• it's heteronormative
• "he respects her" isn't a good enough reason

like. it's so funny, isn't it? especially compared to eremika, where they had ol' reliable ( "it's incest" ) to toss at us to make us look bad. todomomo was so inoffensive as a ship that haters didn't really have anything meaningful to invoke the logic of disgust against us.

so they fell back on even older reliable ("it's homophobic")!

here's how that became the most common argument against tdmm:

1. headcanon todoroki as gay and yaomomo as a lesbian.
2. decide that your headcanon is, if not actually canon, then heavily implied, or at the very least, universal.
3. start treating the characters like they are real people, because wanting gay men to be with women and lesbians to be with men in real life is obviously homophobic.
4. profit!

now, ofc eremika got these allegations, too, because every m/f ship ever will have its shippers called homophobic. it's like law of the land at this point. but the eremika shippers weren't all that bothered by it, either because they were secure in their own queerness (or allyship) or because we had bigger fish to fry (the incest nonsense). as i talked about earlier, a lot of eremika shippers also had a healthy enjoyment of yumikuri and jeanmarco.

and when i first got into tdmm, i think we were trending towards something similar, with kiri­baku, an m/m pairing, as a not-uncommon side pairing in tdmm fic— esp. what i'd consider to be the Big WIP of the time, she wishes for your happiness, by monochromo. (side note, but i miss u monochromo… you fucking got it!!!!)

and then, shit happened— which, in the interests of being polite, i shan't detail here— and kiri­mina + baku­camie, both m/f pairings, became the ships-of-choice for kirishima and bakugou. which i think sucks bc bakugou was like a nephew to me; his and kirishima's canonical hand-holding cured the last of my internalized homophobia.

and from there, the popular shipping tastes surrounding tdmm became more and more distinctly heteronormative.

the effects of voltron

okay. this is the point where i have to go on a bit of a tangent about voltron again. and this will make sense and be important in a bit.

fandom folk history posits that bnha inherited a huge part of the voltron fandom once voltron ended. though i can't prove this with certainty, approximately 16% of voltron authors on ao3 also have written bnha at the time of this writing, so. i don't think it's an unreasonable thing to claim.

(proof of the 16% claim)

anyway, the voltron thing is relevant bc i get the impression that its radical moralization of shipping and fannish activity started polarizing of fandom into basically the Hets and the Fujos as the two major factions of The Yaoi Wars. and this happened while i was having my 2019 hiatus, so i wasn't really watching things all that closely.

like, okay. that STUPID convoy of het ships in tdmm was not there when i went on hiatus. WE STILL RESPECTED KRBK WHEN I WENT ON HIATUS!!!!

and when i came back, the fandom was unlike anything i'd ever seen before tbh.

shipping biases based in past experiences

prior to 2019 or so, accusations of homophobia against m/f shippers felt more baseless because haters were looking at a single (usually the person's favorite) ship of the particular fandom they shared. they didn't consider that a lot of these people were really into queer pairings on the side, or in previous fandoms, or were shipping it bisexually/asexually!

but when i came back, the homophobic accusations i think started to hold more weight. because once you have this fucking convoy of m/f ships and only m/f ships, that's when the homophobia accusations start to hold a bit more water, in my opinion.

like, yes, it's tokenistic to say, "i'm not homophobic because i also ship these gay ships."

but not having any gay ships at all isn't doing you any favors either, guys. i'm just saying!!!!

times have changed since i was first introduced to this hets v. fujos conflict, ofc. the misogyny of The Fujos™ has gone from violent exclusion of women to, like, just sweeping them sweetly aside, which they will now use to claim they are not being misogynistic at all.

like, i get it. the m/fs were arguably homophobic when they were doing the tokenism, but it wasn't as homophobic as what they've been doing without said tokenism. in turn, the m/ms were definitely misogynistic back in the day, and they are Less So now with their sweeping of women under the rug.

but it is still A Misogyny. something-something, not all misogyny is created equal.

but accusations of bigotry, no matter how faintly colored those biases may be, still fucking suck to receive, esp. when you're actively trying not to be a shitty person. and i think what happened is that people treated minor/internalized expressions of bigotry as having the same weight as overt or even violent expressions of that same bigotry. the stain was equally deep no matter how much blood spilled on your clothes.

so the hets were like, "they call us homophobic even when we know that not to be true, so the things they enjoy leave a bad taste in my mouth now" and veer away from queer ships altogether bc the damn annoying m/m shippers will also be annoying abt their swept-aside f/f ships when it comes to dunking on m/f ships.

like, there's this veneer that obnoxious m/m enjoyers often end up varnishing over f/f ships that will often tarnish those f/f pairings in the eys of m/f shippers. and because there are so many m/m shippers doing this varnishing compared to genuine f/f enjoyers who get it (and who will often relate to the m/f shippers' plights), it leads to a bias against f/f ships as well due to terrible past experiences.

meanwhile, the m/ms consider f/fs to be allies, and there are enough m/fs in fandom for their pushback against casual fandom misogyny to actually be felt in The Discourse. thus, a lot of the obnoxious m/ms will develop biases against m/fs as a result of bad experiences with shippers, regardless of whether those shippers had actual shit taste or not.

"""""heterophobia"""""

HOO BOY. where to begin with this one?

i guess the first thing i should clarify is that although shippers would, on very rare occasions, complain about haters being "heterophobic" in private, i'd say it was mostly understood that heterophobia is Not A Thing. at least, not in the same way homophobia is.

more frequently, shippers would self-soothe against harassment and discourse by saying that the opposition only hated tdmm "because it was straight." which i think does have a credible basis, considering the hypocrisy i witnessed in ereri shippers bashing mikasa for being an alleged mary sue despite basically just being the female childhood friend version of levi.

at least, that's how it felt when i went on hiatus. coming back in 2020, i noticed that the tdmm fanon and side ships had rather codified themselves to be in alignment with the tastes of one big name fan— who i respected a lot and considered a contemporary— and it was…

well, the more i refamiliarized myself w/the community, the more i realized my tastes no longer fit in.

part of this is because i had changed a lot during my hiatus year. my childhood gender non-conformity had long been left simmering, and 2019 was the year it began caramelizing into my gender troubles. i also began to suspect— and eventually came to conclude— that i'm aromantic alongside my already-established asexuality. considering the fact that i'd been grappling with the shitty emotional fallout of what i'd considered to be my last crush for the past four or five years, the realization of my aromanticism was hardly a comfort.

in short: my colors started coming in much more strongly than i'd imagined growing up.

that, combined with my newly-developed taste for more complex relationships colored by grief, regret, and the desire to live, did not mesh well at all with what i call "the disneyfication of todomomo".

the perfectly-perfect, saccharine-sweet taste of todomomo

smth we tdmm shippers often heard as a reason for people not liking the ship was that "todomomo seem too perfect together", or something in that vein. (see: boring, bland, etc.) it didn't excite a lot of people.

and when i first got into the ship, i didn't really see a problem with that. they were sweet and shy and self-indulgently fluffy in the ways i too hoped to experience someday. plus, the portrayals of them in fic at the time engaged with their flaws enough that the accusations of "perfection" just sounded kind of like "their relationship isn't founded in innate conflict or hardship" to me.

when i went on hiatus, one of my contemporaries— the one who'd become quite the bnf— started a new longfic, right when she n i both finished our longfics of that time. and i trie dreading n commenting on it as its chapters came out because i too was a fan of her work, but i fell off pretty quickly due to my offline emotional hardships. i picked it up again upon recovery and refamiliarization w/the community, but i found myself entirely unable to stomach the… overly sanitized and sweetened versions of the characters.

(and also all the characters were acting heteronormatively :/)

this defanged, declawed version of todomomo put me off enough that i wrote a whole meta essay on it back in the day, and i think that my argument for imperfection was warranted and was NOT just me strawmanning because i've seen tags on fics calling tdmm "your perfect couple as per usual."

i resented that.

i resented a lot of things going on in bnha and tdmm by the time i bitterly divorced the fandom at the end of 2020. and i don't like the person i was by the end of my time there, so you'll have to forgive me if it seems like i'm skipping over parts at times.

when i returned to bnha in 2020, my major wip was not todomomo-focused, but rather, dual-focused on kamijirou and kiribaku because i liked those ships a lot (and when i wrote for snk, i made the decision to always strive to be a variety writer).

and whiel many tdmms absolutely loved kamijiriou— it was perhaps our closest sister pairing, after all— (almost) No One who knew me for tdmm would try out my krbk. (cece if you're reading this hi. star too.)

which utterly baffled me!!!!! bc i remembered reading fics focused on pairings i liked well enough but weren't otps while in snk and soul eater simply bc i liked n trusted the author. this was something i saw other fans do, too. this was, to my understanding of the time, common practice in fandom.

i thought these people liked me! like, bear in mind the fact that even to this day, my todomomo fics are by far my most popular works, if judged by hits and kudos. even on hiatus, i received the occasional comment and quite regular kudos on my work. when i joined a discord server for a tdmm fandom bang, people recognized me and gushed about my writing.

i thought about this more than i should have, looking back. like, remember how earlier i mentioned that the kirishima and bakugou ships-of-choice for todomomo shippers had become bakucamie and kirimina by the time i returned to bnha? it wasn't uncommon for artists to get harassed on tumblr n twt for Only liking m/f bnha ships, normally by m/m shippers. for tdmm, those dicks would usually be tododeku shippers, but i would imagine that for bakucamie and kirimina, that harassment would have come from kiribaku shippers, thus souring the insulated tastes of the greater tdmm server (and community) members on the ship entirely.

there were a few other things discussed in that fandom bang server that led me to the conclusion that it was more of a combination of two things:

1. tastes became more singular while i was away, and those who didn't multiship the Common Het™ Convoy generally didn't care enough to read non-todomomo shipfic.
2. entrenched heteronormativity blurred the line with casual homophobia.

being A Gay™, the casual homophobia/deeply entrenched heteronormativity raised my hackles. in response, i began to write tdmm more visibly queerly— to lesser and lesser audience— until finally, i just kind of burst, latching onto the first rising fandom that caught my eye and leaving bnha in a bitter divorce.

a tangent about aromanticism

growing up, i believed in love at first sight because i thought i was the type to experience it. that's what happened to me all four times i ever considered myself to be experiencing a crush growing up, after all. there would be this guy i hadn't noticed before; then suddenly, BAM! it was as if i was suddenly seeing him in a different light and would become instantly obsessed with him for ~about two years, after which it would pretty much fade away and i'd be normal for like a year.

wait, why does this sound familiar?

something i think about not infrequently is the fact that my time having crushes growing up and my fandom era have been, thus far, entirely mutually exclusive. and maybe that will change!!! but it'll be ten years since my last romantic feeling this coming october, so i've stopped counting on it.

something i have noticed, though, is that my shifts in fandom follow an eerily similar pattern to how i fell in love as a child. which has kind of led me to wonder:

were all those crushes i had growing up just adhd hyperfixations on boys?

are my otps functionally identical to what i called crushes growing up????

there was a period of time in high school where i wanted to have a crush on someone so badly, i ended up picking a guy on purpose based on what my friends had told me abt him and doing, like, the usual crush routine about it despite having never met him for want of a class together. nat and i picked out codenames, talked about hairbrained schemes to get me to meet him, the works!!!

and there was a period of time where it felt like i had a crush on this guy. i mean, my heart definitely beat fast at the thought of him.

but i don't actually remember unconsciously thinking about him all that much. it was always kind of deliberate, to see if i could have a crush on him.

and then he graduated early and i was like. "oh okay" and the whatever-it-was (it was comphet i was comphetting myself) went away with little, if any, effort.

i guess the point i'm trying to make here is that jjk might very well have been kind of analagous to that comphet experience. but at the same time, there were other factors at play, too

my getting into genshin was a whirlwind of otherwise-unrelated events that swept me up in a perfect storm and brought me here. briefly, they can be understood as:

1. nat started playing genshin thanks to chilumi fanfiction
2. the jjk manga went on an indefinite hiatus soon after the first anime season ended
3. i got impersonated on ao3

that time i got impersonated

i think we can all agree i don't talk like that lol.

this comment was left on a fic abt edeleth from fire emblem: three houses. i could make this into a long and complicated story, but i've told it a number of times by now, so i think i know how to keep it relevant to this pedigree's point of showcasing how my experiences in different ships, fandoms, and communities have shaped my current viewpoint on fandom.

now one of the last fics i wrote for bnha before leaving was actually a collaboration w/star about minacamie, a ship the two of us basically made up and invested in out of spite for the tdmms who decided to collectively ship bakucamie and kirimina over kiribaku.

and remember how i mentioned that, alongside writing n talking abt nbmk to a lesser extent than itfs, i joined (and became active in) a nobamaki discord server for a time?

for those who don't know (like me at the time), edeleth is like. the biggest f/f pairing in the fe3h fandom, as far as i'm aware. this is relevant because although i never got to the bottom of this mystery (and i'm over it now), i rather suspect that this incident is in some way related to discourse and/or harassment against f/f shippers.

like, there's almost no other relation i can wrap my mind around here, because, like, fun fact!!! i don't know any of the people who were mentioned in this comment or had their names smeared in similar incidents, though i learned some things in my digging around. such as the fact that the ashtree mentioned in the comment was in their mid-to-late twenties at that time LMAO. the only reason i knew this happened was because the author's friend messaged me on tumblr about it, saying that they felt i deserved to know.

(the other theory i have behind this is that someone was trying to harass a trans lesbian who happened to write a lot of f/f for gacha games. but maybe she, too, was incidental in her receipt of similar hate comments impersonating other fandom authors. i really don't know.)

but anyway, in my week-long obsession to try to dig up the truth, i ended up getting lured into genshin via star telling me about xiao and xiaoven and getting so obsessed w/them i stopped caring abt the impersonation, and the rest is like history at this point. but there's still a key takeaway from this impersonation debacle!!! which is that i caught a glimpse of the harassment f/f shippers can sometimes regularly endure.