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

[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.)