Sing me a bawdy song, make me merry

After doing some Tumblr-surfing, mostly looking for femslash art because what the fuck else would I be doing on Tumblr:

-I'm seeing some people being all "Omg how can you still ship ( spoiler ) after the latest updates revealed it to be dysfunctional and toxic! You must be a really terrible person!" It takes me back to those halcyon days in BSG fandom when people would get all pearl-clutchy at the fact that some fans shipped Kara/Leoben. Would this be an appropriate time to do a Fallout parody?

"Fandom... fandom never changes..."

Seriously people, if you can't wrap your head around the concept of shipping a dysfunctional/abusive fictional relationship because it's a glorious twisted trainwreck, then you don't belong in fandom. And you certainly don't belong in Homestuck fandom, where those kind of ships are common and frequently canon.

-There's also been some debate about whether ( spoiler ) is in fact a dysfunctional/abusive relationship, or whether it's totally normal in context. I think it's pretty clearly the first one. ( Elaboration )

-Prior to the latest updates, there was some speculation that ( spoiler ) happened because of magical mind-control, specifically that ( spoiler ) I was very relieved when this turned out not to be the case, because characters having agency and making bad decisions of their own free will and their friends having to deal with that fact is much more interesting than the old "easily fixed brain-washing" chestnut.

-There was also one detail from the update that had a lot of people freaking out and me just confused: ( spoiler )

Let's talk about SHIPPING!

Homestuck, with its bisexual trolls and endless doppelgangers, is basically a multishipper's paradise, to the point where it can get kind of confusing. So after I made a flowchart of canon relationships in Homestuck, I made one for all my ships.



OH GOD THERE'S SO MANY WHAT THE HELL

(Purple means vacillating between red and black.)

And that isn't even all of them. I also ship All The Ladies/All The Ladies, but most of those wouldn't fit on here.

So now that I've organized (?) them, it's time to gush about them all.

( Starting in the upper right )

Homestuck has officially eaten my brain, and unlike with poor neglected JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, this time there's a freaking massive fandom available to fuel my new obsession.

While surfing for fanart and fanfic porn, let's not kid ourselves, it's almost all porn up in my "Fic" bookmarks folder, but anyway I was struck by how ship-happy this fandom is. They seem enthusiastically dedicated to shipping Everyone/Everyone, to the point where I wondered if there are even any shipwars in this fandom. I knew that some ships were controversial (John/Vriska, Kanaya/any male character, the incest ships, etc), but I'd yet to see evidence of any traditional ship-vs-ship death-matches.

TV Tropes confirmed what I suspected: Homestuck fandom is similar to Naruto fandom in that the sheer volume of characters and viable pairings ensure that any given shipwar will have difficulty building up size, influence, and venomosity simply because the majority of the fandom have their balls in completely unrelated courts. When only a fourth or a fifth of the fans give any degree of crap about your shipwar, it's not going to make much of an impact. Compare this to a fandom like Avatar, which was utterly dominated by a single shipwar through the show's entire three-season run; it was rare to find someone who hadn't picked a side, and the two factions had such drastically different interpretations of the main characters' personalities, the core themes of the show, and even basic plot elements that it made it nigh impossible for the two groups to have a civil conversation, even if said conversation was about something totally unrelated to shipping!

However even big sprawling canons still produce a few bitter shipping rivalries, even if they're small and contained, and according to TV Tropes, the one in Homestuck fandom that refuses to die down is Dave/Terezi vs. Karkat/Terezi. Which is completely hilarious to me because one of the first Homestuck fics I ever read was this glorious gem of a chatlog fic in which Terezi, Dave, and Karkat discuss their mutual desire to boink each other and try to decide what type of relationship each side of the triad should be having, and eventually they conclude that a threesome is the best solution. And bing, suddenly I have a new OT3. As a result, I cannot begin to take the D/T vs. K/T debate seriously. It's like debating whether to have a cookie or a glass of milk. Besides, why should Terezi have to choose just one guy? Terezi is awesome! She gets all the guys! All of them!

Besides, I was sold on the spadey potential of Dave/Karkat ever since that priceless chatlog where Karkat chewed out Dave and John for flirting with troll ladies and drew them an adorably terrible dating diagram, and also this happened:

CTG: ok later windbag
?CG: STRIDER FUCK OFF
?CG: AND BY FUCK OFF I MEAN FUCK OFF RIGHT BACK HERE AND LISTEN, YOU INSUFFERABLE PRICK.

Heeeeeeeee. :3

So yet another person on my flist has gotten hooked on Avatar, and when I heard about this, I experienced the usual confusing mixture of "Yaaaay Avatar is the best ever!" and "Gaaaaah PTSD memories of Avatar fandom's horribleness!" And while discussing the show, the topic of shipping naturally came up, as did the topic of age gaps. Of course I'm referring to how a lot of Avatar fans, mostly Zutara shippers but some other people as well, were creeped out by the fact that Aang is 12 and Katara is 14 and they're the main romance of the show.

And I guess I understand this in theory. But especially now that I've been in fandom for a long time and am looking back on this in hindsight, I have a hard time empathizing with the "ewww age gap" argument because, well, let's be real here: I have seen and shipped waaaaay more questionable things than "12-year-old boy + his 14-year-old female best friend."

The current example that leaps to mind is a series I've recently gotten hooked on which oddly enough has a very similar shipwar situation to Avatar fandom. In this series, the main canon romance and the ship that is by far the most popular in the fandom is between the heroine and the angsty brooding bad-boy jerk-with-a-heart-of-gold villain-who-isn't-really-that-bad guy. Yeah, it has a similar appeal to Zutara. But unlike either of the main ships in Avatar fandom, this relationship is extremely sexually charged. The guy in this equation acts much like a male Femme Fatale, constantly teasing and flustering the heroine, invading her personal space, making suggestive remarks, licking her ice cream cone, tricking her into thinking he's going to whisper seductively in her ear and then chomping her ear instead, etc. He's like the male equivalent of that stock anime chick who's always glomping the male lead and shoving his face in her boobs. Whenever he's around the heroine, his whole attitude just drips with seduction, and even though she tries to act all impervious, he's very good at getting under her skin.

How old are these characters? The girl is 12. The guy is 17.

Ohhhhhh snap.

Yeah, I'm talking about Shugo Chara. And for the record, I ship it whole-heartedly, in spite of the "CALLING CHRIS HANSEN" aspect. But you see what I mean, right? It's pretty hard for me to take the "Katara/Aang age gap is icky" crowd seriously at this late stage when I'm busy being distracted by Amu and Ikuto being LOLWRONG in every single scene they share. A 12-year-old and a 14-year-old holding hands and occasionally kissing each other on the cheek looks pretty vanilla to me when compared to a lot of the other ships I've seen in various fandoms and canons, and especially when compared to Miss Elementary Schooler and her cat-eared high-school-aged boy-toy.

I guess the gist of this post is a) my years in fandom have drastically decreased my ability to be weirded out by things and b) I really need to talk about Shugo Chara and how it is the most brilliant piece of female-oriented fanservice ever.