Me: *sees excellent new hateship where both characters seem to get a thrill out of bickering and fighting and challenging each other* yes good Me: *sees people shipping them in a fluffy way* ...eh Me: *sees people going "why would you ship them they hate each other" * that's the POINT
Ahhh, I just got an ask about a fic I mentioned I'm writing, and the person is all excited for it and junk... but I can't tell if they're excited for straightforward happy shipping or not, and this is going to be a nasty story where both characters use each other for lots and lots of emotional self-harm. I wish I could tell, because usually like, just looking at the characters in the ship gives you a decent idea of what emotional range you're likely to hit. And these two are plenty antagonistic. But they're also freshly super sympathetic and both having a hard time, and it causes me great pain (in the best way) to hurt them further, and I'm waffling on whether the person is expecting to see the hurt heal or if they're excited to see them both hurting worse I mean, I'm super pleased with myself no matter what they think, and I'm going to get all excited and enthusiastic when I reply, because it's what I do, but blarghagghghhhh what is reading social signals how do
I know it's not cool to hate on self-inserts and self-insert shipping, and I don't even talk about this on Tumblr because I don't want to make people feel bad about it, but... ...for a good half of the antis who have caused the most grief in my fandom, once you peel back the layers of SJ justification, what they're actually mad about is that they've got a crush on [insert popular character]. They're very pissed that people don't want to read/fawn over/make fanart of their AU in which he marries them and has a million babies, so they take it out on the popular canon-character ships their fave is in. (Also they tend to be friends with the other half of the antis, who would prefer no ships at all but will hold up their friends' canon/self-insert het ships as the "pure alternative" to the canon-character m/m ships, which have all been declared Bad for Reasons.) So now I have a knee-jerk reaction against people who self-ship with characters who are part of an OTP I'm very attached to. I wish it weren't that way, but it is :/
Star Wars has few enough girls as is, and it always leaves a bitter taste in my mouth when people downplay their importance or write them out of their own stories entirely for the sake of their dude/dude ship. Happens a lot with Rey, and it's. Like, whatever, people have every right to like a thing their own way, nobody can or should force someone to care more about Rey than Hux or whatever. I just. Bluh.
Personally I don't consider it incest unless there's an actual starting-in-childhood-familial relationship between people, because what makes incest wrong is the betrayal of trust and the fucked-up power dynamics and all of that other stuff. The genetic problems with potential offspring in het pairings are really the least wrong thing about actual incest. But I'll accept genetic relationship (though not much beyond first cousins), and I can certainly understand why that would count for tagging purposes. If you are not closely genetically related to someone and you ALSO did not grow up with them and have a relationship with them growing up with all the confounding power dynamics that make incest a problematic thing, it's not incest and I will not tag it as such. It's not that I don't care about other people's feelings, it's that I really feel that if you don't use the same definition of a word that at least 75% of the other people who speak your language use, it's on you to be aware of what your limits are and read the names in the pairings. The rest of us can't read your mind.
One of the characters we're talking about was adopted as an adult, but was raised by the same person starting at 8 or 9 years old. The other was adopted at 13 when the first was an older teenager. Exact age of character A varies at this point; canon is a mess. Canon is also a mess with regards to what extent they actually consider each other siblings. Hence why I suggested the tag "pseudo-incest," which is what I have seen the various pairings in this situation tagged with. (On another note- an adult considering a 9-year-old whom he is raising as a full equal and partner in crime fighting is pretty fucked up in its own way. ... have I mentioned I frickin love the train-wreck clusterfrack that is the bat-fam? cause I do. ^x^)
shipping gripe: Spoiler: davekat why do people continually present davekat as a relationship that cured both of their respective issues? like, i love davekat, as i'm sure anyone who's talked to me for more than thirty seconds knows, but i am so. damn. tired. of comics that have karkat saying "i no longer hate myself because you loved me" and dave magically getting over his trauma because he...dated karkat AND ANOTHER THING, the vast vast majority of davekat content acknowledges dave's trauma (which is fantastic, dgmw, i eat that up), but doesn't think karkat has any trauma at all. to the point where i've seen a comic that shows when they both cry, with dave crying over a ptsd trigger and karkat crying at a movie with dave's dialogue saying, essentially, that karkat had been through some shit but it was over so it "didn't bother him any more" i know it's probably because karkat's trauma is inherently less relatable than dave's, but it seems so obvious to me. like, yes, that is how trauma from literally fearing for your life if you bled works. that's how trauma from your friends killing each other in front of you works. once it's over it doesn't bother you at all any more. yep. i just, rgh! i don't want karkat to be dave's rock all the time, their dynamic is not one of the comforter and the comforted, that's not how they work. they're traumatized socially awkward assholes, it's not going to be all grand romantic gestures and happily ever afters, stop pulling the teeth out of their relationship!
I guess I just think people can read pairing tags? If you look at a pairing and you feel more 'nay' than 'yay', skip the fic. The Bat-Fam is incredibly fucked up and anyone who is looking for fics that ship members of the Bat-Fam with each other probably knows that already, right? What really is going to matter in this situation is whether the reader thinks of them as siblings, and you can't predict that. A tag like "pseudo-incest" raises more questions than it answers for someone like me, because I do not know what it means. There are multiple aspects of the thing "incest" that trigger/upset/squick people. Does this tag mean "I'm being safe because they consider each other family in many versions of the canon?" or does this tag mean "the more powerful 'sibling' is using his power against the other one"?
Also, I think...the fandom matters. If you're writing a fic about a normal children's show like Sofia the First, where bad shit happens but it's always resolved by the end of the show, usually with some kind of lesson, warn and rate high, because the chances that your readers' sensibilities are delicate are good, and even if they're not, they may very well like dark stuff in other fandoms but not that one. Gravity Falls can be a grey area because for some reason it managed to maintain a Y7 rating despite massive amounts of body horror, crimes committed by main characters, a villain that's basically what if you gave the Joker near-divine powers and less empathy and understanding of how humans work, severe sexual harassment of one 12 year old by another one, etc. Probably because a lot of the really shitty things in it were played for laughs. Homestuck? Please. The Bat-Fam, inter-bat shipfics? Not so much.
okay but this. just. this. I'm writing a humanstuck DaveKat fic and I'm struggling on how to put Karkat's trauma in there because like. it has to be humanstuck for the setting, but dammit, I refuse to write a fic where one character magically no loner has trauma and is a rock for the other. like, Dave and Karkat are both fucked up and. I. don't know how to articulate it but--as a traumatized mentally ill person who is in relationships with two other traumatized mentally ill people, I can't be a rock for them and they can't be one for me but we do our best to care about each other and just kind of. get better and support each other as best we can while still having our shit. we don't get better because we're fixing each other, we just kind of support each other as best we can while getting better in our own time, and it goes both ways. and I think what always bothers me is that I see a LOT of "one character in the ship is traumatized and/or mentally ill, the other is a rock free of problems" and this is not how it works in my experience? I don't know how to explain what it is I'm looking for, because I am not a rock free of problems for anyone, but--we support each other, it goes both ways in the relationship, it's not just one of us supporting the other at all times, because WE BOTH HAVE PROBLEMS THAT IS HOW PEOPLE WORK and don't even get me started on "true love heals all" bullshit, which is basically what "this mentally ill/traumatized character is no longer mentally ill/traumatized because of LOVE" is.
I prefer to err on the side of caution when it comes to tagging, honestly. "Canon Typical Violence" is really handy for that, because sometimes when you're reading fic for Watch Dogs you aren't actually in it for the lovingly detailed descriptions of Aiden crushing a dude's skull like it's nbd, but it's not like... unexpected.
i'm very sleepy so this might not be entirely coherent but if you're looking for suggestions on how to get karkat's trauma into the fic, i have a few ideas! no pressure to use or agree with or like them, but in the hopes they might help: Spoiler: suggestions i generally write human karkat with a marginalized identity in several ways, and living with a family that isn't exactly pro-whatever identity, and/or has very specific ideals for how to be a 'good' version of that identity, which imo is a good way to get karkat's whole "desperately trying to be a Good Enough second class citizen, to be good enough that people will forgive him for inherently being [a mutant/queer/whatever]" i also tend to give him kind of a shitty (although more emotionally and less physically as compared to, say, dave) home life, to account for the 'lashes out at people as a defense for having emotions/being insecure" etc and just other general karkatisms, but really i've found that karkat internalizing a lot of institutional prejudices against himself and his inherent identity is how i like to get a karkat-flavor personality but god. god. yeah, i see one character being a rock for the other all the time and it's so frustrating. i wanna see characters caring for and helping each other when the dynamic isn't a clear-cut "poor traumatized babbu" and "helper who has no problems" that's not something i can relate to! i imagine that's not something most people can relate to, and it sure as hell isn't one i want to see when i'm seeking out fic about two traumatized people who found each other at the end of the world
I screamed about it at great length in the fanfic gripes thread, but this is a trope that I hate with all my heart, in everything, which kind of sucks for me because it's a pervasive narrative in every kind of fiction. Which I understand! It's compelling, to have someone trying to "save" someone else. But it absolutely doesn't work that way, and so many times it's handled so badly
"Canon Typical Violence" is a good tag, by which I mean: I can look at it and know what that means. I understand the impulse to err on the side of caution, but doing it with tags that have meanings which are open to multiple interpretations (like "I'm tagging this just to be safe" vs "this is everything that's awful about incest, but the characters are not really related") doesn't help either the person who wants to avoid something specific or the person who wants to find something specific. (Yes, this is your daily reminder that the purpose of tagging is not just to try and telepathically determine if there's anyone out there who might find something in your fic upsetting. It's also there to help you find the audience that is looking for the fic you wrote.)
Another thing that you can do with human Karkat if you feel up to the challenge (because you do have to get it right) is write him as a refugee from somewhere else where he was literally in danger of being killed every day for some reason he couldn't help. Those places do exist in our world. And seeing your whole family killed might not be that different from seeing your friends killed, idk.
I mean... "Abuse" is a tag that gets used a lot that is so broad that I end up rolling the dice every time I crack open a fic with it. Are we talking emotional abuse? Verbal? Physical? It's easy to assume that it's probably physical and then someone comes out of nowhere with the Mother Gothel nonsense and whelp, there goes my evening. And that's without touhing the definition clusterfuck that is the "Dubious Consent" tag. So a combination of tags and authors notes would be the most effective, imo. Because the "Pseudo-Incest" tag gives a heads up that there's some kind of content here, and then the authors notes can elaborate.
karkat is trans think about it: small angry hiding something out of fear/feeling like a freak blood (P*riod) fear of relationships highly dedicated to conformism i actually have a long running headcanon of karkat being trans/a trans analogue i could get into this shit *heavy breathing*
