BOFQ is, once again, BITTER: Don’t try to teach your grandma to suck eggs

obsessionisaperfume:

auntiesuze:

obsessionisaperfume:

Here is what I have learned via bitter personal experience about fandom over the last 25 years:

• It sucks the wet farts out of dead pigeons when the most popular ship is not your ship.  (Because you CANNOT GET AWAY FROM IT.  And they WON’T SHUT UP.  And you CANNOT CONVINCE THEM THAT THEY ARE WRONG FOR SHIPPING IT.)  (BatB, Due South)
• It is possible for two diametrically opposed interpretations of canon to be equally viable and supportable in canon.  (Quantum Leap)
• No, really.  It is.
• There will be people who hate the characters you love the most.  And people will love characters you hate.  Extolling the fine qualities of the loved character will not convince people who hate that character that they should love him/her and will probably make them hate him/her even more, and telling them how horrible their favorite is will probably only make them love him/her more. (BatB,Due South)
• Calling people “monsters” who are “evil” because they like a character you hate is NOT OKAY. (BatB)
• Nobody is going to interpret the show the same way you do, even people who agree with you.  Some people are going to interpret it in a way that makes you go WTF???? (ALL OF THE SHOWS. ALL. OF. THEM. From here on out.)  And sometimes they can support their interpretation in canon.
• When it comes to fanfic, one person’s OOC is another person’s perfect characterization.  Because EVERYBODY PAYS ATTENTION TO SOME THINGS IN A CHARACTER’S BEHAVIOR AND IGNORES OTHERS.
• If you tell somebody, “You’re wrong,” you’d better have something from canon to back you up.  And they STILL probably won’t agree with you.
• Telling people how they should DO FANDOM because they’re doing it WRONG is just gonna piss them off and probably make them do what they were doing even harder.  This especially applies to writing fanfic or making fanart.
• And here’s the most important one.  Once you make peace with this one, your fandom experience will be much more pleasant:  People are gonna ship what they ship, no matter what you say to convince them that they’re wrong to ship it.  You cannot bully or shame people out of shipping their ship.  Neither can you reason them out of it if they interpret canon differently from you.  And the harder you try, the more you sound like white noise to them.

My one issue with the OP is that they are trying to convince others that their ship (the most popular one or others) is capital letters WRONG.

Um…that kinda goes against the rest of the post. Ship and let ship, I say. Yeah, it sucks when people love (and post constantly about) one that you don’t like, but…that’s life, ya’ll. We’re not all going to like the same things.

Me, I skip past the things I have no interest in and let those folks go about their business. If we all did the same thing, fandom would be a much more pleasant place for everyone. 🙂

(I’ve always been a canon BATBer, but don’t have an issue with those who like other pairings. I know the kind of rabid fans you’re talking about, though, and like…calm down folks!)

No, no, the whole POINT is “ship and let ship.”  Railing against a ship you don’t like is not going to stop people shipping it.  Just let them ship in peace. Don’t tell them they’re wrong or stupid or, God help us, delusional, because it is pointless and fruitless and just generally pisses everybody off.

Also, *hysterical laughter* at telling some of the BatB fans I knew to “calm down.”  That sure as fuck didn’t work either.