widgenstain:

wyomingsmustache:

You know what I think the problem is?

People are mixing up the definition of ‘ship’ and ‘romanticize’

So when someone says “don’t ship x/y because it’s problematic”, what they mean is “These two/more characters have a dynamic that in real life would be harmful, so please don’t romanticize it and ignore the harmful aspects of it”.

But the trouble is, people like creepyships. I ship Director/Wash, and I one hundred percent ship it because it’s a creepyship, and I also one hundred percent make sure that it’s very clearly presented as creepy, from the cw’s to make sure I tag anything from that verse so I don’t inadvertently trigger someone.

And that’s shipping. It’s not always pretty, because sometimes you just want to explore the darker sides of humanity. It’s not wrong, because the characters aren’t real, they’re fictional. And fiction is and always has been an outlet for people to explore things that it wouldn’t be healthy for them to explore in real life.

In canon, Locus and Felix is an abusive relationship. There are loads of aus where their dynamic is reimagined, because people want to explore their relationship through a different lens. They’re not wrong, either. They’re taking characters they enjoy reading about and considering how things might be different if the setting was different. That’s the beauty of au’s. You peel away everything but the iron core of a character and see what’s left. A relationship that works in one verse won’t work in another. A relationship that works in one verse could be horrible in another.

All of those are shipping. Shipping is a very broad term: it literally just means “considering two or more characters in a romantic or sexual relationship” (it can also mean other kinds of relationships, but without any prefixes or modifiers that’s almost always what it means in this context).

Romanticizing is something very different. Romanticizing is looking at a ship and saying “hashtag-goals”. Romanticizing is looking at Felix and Locus’s relationship as it exists within canon and saying “that’s what I want, that’s what everyone should want”. Romanticizing would be looking at “not the right shade of blond” and saying that the Director’s behavior is correct, that it’s right, that it’s excusable.

But shipping =/= romanticizing, and not everyone ships a thing because they think it’s ideal. Sometimes people just want to enjoy their creepy ships. Some people just want to explore alternate dynamics. Some people just want to see i they can make something work. 

Stop telling them not to.

*dances-the-dance-of-yes-and-this*