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

[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.