Meta Monday: Just in time to talk about DEAD PEOPLE

[dhampyresa]

yuuago : Hannibal/Scipio

Well, I think my feelings about the good ship Hannibal/Scipio are pretty well documented at this pint, but just in case, there's now a whole new tag for these two.

So I'm going to talk about something slightly different. I'm going to talk about how shipping dudes two thousand years dead helped me feel like I was finally doing fandom right.

In the parts of fandom I run in, not a friending meme goes by without the dreaded "What's your OTP?" question. I'm a gen person by nature and even worse, I tend to multiship. I never knew what to say to that question. Seeing everyone else come up with effortless answers made it feel like the unspoken assumption of the question (that everyone had to have an OTP) was true.

Now I know what to say!

(I still don't define OTP the way a lo of people seem to, though. For me it is a pairing I will always ship, not one I ship exclusively. Afaik, no one's written Hannibal/Maharbal or Aemilia/Scipio yet, but man I will be first in line to read it if they do.)

Honstely, though? There are SO MANY places where the assumption of 'everyone has an OTP' crops up. It's fucking EVERYWHERE. "The most trope-tastic fic about your OTP" Define OTP. "What would your OTP do?" How the fuck would I know. "Imagine your OTP" I DON'T HAVE ONE.

It gets tiring, after a while. It's a bunch of tiny reminders that you, personally, are Doing Fandom Wrong. (This is bullshit. There's no way to do fandom wrong, unless you hurt people, but that's not what it feels like.)

I wish people would be more open to people doing fandom differently. Not everyone has an OTP. Not everyone changes fandom every few months. Not everyone sticks with a single fandom for decades.

So now I'm a genficcer with a badly defined OTP. I'm still doing fandom wrong. I've stopped caring. You do you. I do me. Hannibal and Scipio can do each other.

Next time, I'll be talking about Greek mythology. (The Meta Monday Masterpost is here. If you want me to talk about anything, let me know over there.)

Comments

[yuuago]

The "one exclusive pairing" version of the term doesn't jive with me either. 6_9 I usually just throw definitions out the window and treat it more or less the same way you do. I think. (Or as "whichever is your favourite pairing at the moment" perhaps...)

Not caring is probably the best approach. xD

[dhampyresa]

I think the difference in meaning hinges on whether you interpret "True" as meaning "true for me the shipper" (ie: "I will always ship this, otherwise it's just a ship") or as meaning "true for the characters shipped" (ie "they are the only ones for each other ever, otherwise it's just a ship").

"Ship and let ship" (well, more like "fandom and let fandom") is pretty much my fandom motto, ngl.

[alasse_irena]

I would have defined OTP the same as you - it's that thing you will reliably ship forever...
Also, yes, I am naturally a gen writer, but I end up writing a fair bit of ship for exchanges, which is fine, but my favourite people are still the people who explicitly put in their letter, "Hey, if romance isn't working for you, friendship is fine too."
I do have a couple of OTPs around, but I rarely produce anything about them.

[dhampyresa]

Not so alone after all, yay!

Likewise. I don't mind write ships (not having OTPs, I don't really have nOTPs either) and I do try to taylor my fic to my recipient, but I do like for the option to be there.

My other OTP is Yoko/Khany from the Yoko Tsuno comics and I've never written for it. The canon is in French and writing fic for it in English is weird, but I can't write fic in French. :(

[morbane]

Saving the Hannibal/Scipio post to read later. :)

You're ahead of me! (If we are progressing through fandom the majority way, which we are not.) I do not have OTPs. Even in the sense of Eternal True Pairing. Nope, pretty sure I could fall out of fannish love with any pairing I first embraced.

I find a lot of OTP-style memes opaque. Even the gen ones. "If your favourite sibling pair went to the beach, what would they do?" / "Um... do you want me to write a story about that? Hang on, let's see if they ever expressed an opinion about the ocean in canon. What plot events could take them to the beach?" So on. I don't find it easy to think "what would X do" at all, unless I have a lot more context to develop from.

Do you feel that meme reinforces that pressure to Do Fandom the Right Way? I haven't, but we hang out in a lot of different threads.

(My version of doing fandom wrong: getting that exchange fic to a beta two days before reveals, AGAIN.)

[dhampyresa]

Let me know what you think!

We are definitely not! And you know, I go through phases of shipping Hannibal/Scipio more or less inatently.

I think you and I are very alike in this way.

Hum. Yes and no, I guess. There is pressure in places to Do Fandom the Right Way, but no one seems to agree what that Right way is.

(Given that I ended up giving myself extansions for the last two exchanges I ran, I can't throw stones.)

[metanewsmods]

May we link this on metanews? We also post on LJ and Tumblr.

[dhampyresa]

You may.

[gehayi]

In the parts of fandom I run in, not a friending meme goes by without the dreaded "What's your OTP?" question. I'm a gen person by nature and even worse, I tend to multiship. I never knew what to say to that question. Seeing everyone else come up with effortless answers made it feel like the unspoken assumption of the question (that everyone had to have an OTP) was true.

God, you too? I'm another multishipping genficcer, and I've been dealing with this for the past decade.

There are SO MANY places where the assumption of 'everyone has an OTP' crops up. It's fucking EVERYWHERE. "The most trope-tastic fic about your OTP" Define OTP. "What would your OTP do?" How the fuck would I know. "Imagine your OTP" I DON'T HAVE ONE.

I always interpret "OTP" as "that romantic and/or sexual pairing(s) that you find absolutely essential and will always ship, no matter what, to the point where your zeal is almost religious."

And this excludes me, too, because while there are pairings that I quite like in a "I think that these people go well together/would be cute/might make a good story" way and while there are also pairings that I find repugnant (anything involving physical, emotional and/or sexual abuse, for example), I don't get passionate about which characters are together and which aren't. I never have. The closest that I got was loving the Sirius/Remus pairing, and after Sirius left every last thing he owned to Harry (who was already rich, thanks to his parents) while ignoring his supposed best friend Remus (whom Sirius knew was broke and unemployed), I gave up on Wolfstar.

[violetemerald]

I've always been more in the gen sides of fandoms, but I've also had OTPs as well. If I had to pick one ship that I was most passionate about out of all of the ships I've ever shipped, I probably could literally look into my fanvideo creating history and fanfiction writing history -- and also watching/reading of others -- and count who did I look at the most for. But over time, I've become more and more of a multi-shipper, and it becomes practically meaningless. The memes going around tumblr about "your OTP" as if you have just one is silly. I'm mainly in TV show fandoms nowadays, and I keep joining new ones, marathoning old shows and watching newer ones. Sometimes it's easy for me to say yeah, in this show I have 1 OTP and no other passionate ships. But sometimes it's a tie between 2 or 3 or 4 ships I all love equally, and possibly most often, it's no OTPs. I like the story. The characters. Etc. But even if platonic OTPs were allowed I don't exactly have one. Most recently this came up for me with The Secret Life of the American Teenager, which I started binge-watching about a month ago on Netflix. I started watching because I have a few fandom friends who have been very into the show. And I can see why. I was giving it a chance, not expecting such a bad show to be quite so amazingly compelling. But I love it. But these fandom friends of mine ask "whose your OTP?" or even just "who do you ship?" and I tilt my head and try to decide, and then feel like I'm doing fandom wrong if I just don't care about ships at all. They're all interesting in their own ways. Some ships on TSLOTAT maybe I particularly hate for being ridiculously unhealthy, but then again even those can be hilariously fun to watch and I can imagine investing time in writing fix-it fanfiction about them. This experience is more common than you think, I'm pretty sure.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_profiterole_/]

Il me semble (ou c'est juste moi qui projette XD) que la plupart des gens listent plusieurs pairings dans la catégorie "What's your OTP?" des friending memes. Et même si tu as un fandom dominant à un moment, ce n'est souvent pas le même l'année suivante (bon, OK, j'en suis à 1 an et demi sur Steve/Sam, mais je shippe aussi un paquet d'autres couples/triades/moresomes chez Marvel).

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

C'est pas faux, mais ce qui me gêne c'est plus la présomption que la personne en face a forcément un OTP ou même shippe quelque chose de façon plus investie que "ouais, pourquoi pas *shrug*".

[http://users.livejournal.com/_profiterole_/]

Il y a aussi des gens qui listent des amitiés ou précisent qu'ils préfèrent le gen. Les questions des mèmes sont un peu des formules consacrées, pour faire le plus court possible, ne te prends pas trop la tête avec ça. Il me semble que c'est loin d'être une présomption forte et enquiquinante du genre les hétéros qui pensent qu'on est tous hétéros. *rolls eyes*

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

C'est pas un gro problème, c'est juste un peu chiant occasionellement et vu que, comme tu le sais, se plaindre est en France le sport national...

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I don't really do OTPs in the traditional sense either. For those sorts of memes, I tend to put my "favorite" ship of the moment, but even if I do have a favorite to point to, I never mind reading fics or meta that pair up one of the characters with someone else. And in some fandoms I haven't even had that much; quite often I've had an OTC (One True Character) instead, and will read any fic that focuses on them, regardless of gen or pairing.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

Thing is, I don't really have a favourite ship a lot of the time? My usual reaction is the same level of "why not" for almost every ship.

OTC! That's a nice concept. I do that a lot too.