@tinkdw mentioned you in a post

@rosemoonweaver interesting addition! Yeah I wasn’t going into the details specifically of good or bad ships tho I accept it comes across as such more specifically trends of shippers which In my experience def has fallen into this division as I stated. Agreed with all your points about why people ship things, as I said, each to their own! However I heavily HEAVILY refute the concept that disliking yet more power imbalance / dark “saviour” rhetoric in Twilight/50 shades is misogynist.

If that’s your experience, that’s fine, however I felt it was important to point out the multitude of reasons people ship what they do. 

I will say, however, that a good way of really finding out what draws people to things is to ask them and not just use your own observations. You may not have gone into detail about “good” ships vs “bad” ships, you implied there were “good” ships and “bad” ships. I take issue with this, but I’ve said my piece on it already. 

I never said disliking power imbalances or “dark saviors” and the themes in Twilight/50 Shades was misogynistic. What I said was:

Lastly, I’m gonna go to bat for Twilight here a bit. Can we please stop slamming 50 Shades and Twilight as if they’re the worst thing a teenage girl or young woman can read or enjoy? Please? Look, the trope of shitty dudes being changed by the women they love isn’t new. It’s old as hell and most often comes up in literature written by women, for women. […]

I know I’m on a tangent now, but I really need to say that I dislike the undercurrent of misogyny that sits inside the bashing of things like Twilight. Sure, it’s mass media and we ought to be critical of it, but that doesn’t mean it should get blamed for all ills and for “sending a bad message”.

My issue with the way we talk about things like Twilight and 50 Shades implies a certain lack of critical thinking on the part of young women. I never said you were being a misogynist, nor did I say disliking those things was misogynistic, but I can’t help but notice that whenever we talk about these kinds of fiction (”we” as in all people who talk about these things) we put an extra pressure on these kinds of fiction. 

The history of literature written by women, for women is full of darker elements. Power imbalances and dark dangerous men, wide-eyed optimistic women, and scandalous affairs are all staples of romance, dating back to capital-R Romantic literature. You don’t have to like that. No one has to like that, but it exists. The misogynistic undercurrent comes in when we use Twilight (and 50 Shades) as the height of “crap I don’t want young women to read”. And of course I have to ask why? Why shouldn’t teen girls read it? It’s not well written, sure, but that’s not the reason most folks give. The reason most folks give is that it’s bad for them somehow, that reading Twilight is somehow damaging. Again, why? Because teen girls are impressionable and will think this is the kind of relationship they should be striving for? Can’t they understand the difference between a romantic fantasy that means nothing, one where they can live vicariously through a fictional character and date the bad body without actually ever being in any danger of anything more than a paper cut? 

My problem, as I stated before is that the undercurrent of the argument assumes teen girls will want to emulate the relationships they read about. The undercurrent of arguments that some fiction is somehow bad for women is that women need to be protected from the things they write for themselves as fantasy. It assumes a lack of critical thinking skills that isn’t present when we talk about why teenage boys shouldn’t read about trouble boys who get into fights and get themselves hurt. We don’t really have those kinds of conversations about literature aimed at young men. We don’t talk about how war novels or spy novels or the like are bad for boys. And frankly, if we started I’d be very skeptical of those conversations. I’m always hesitant to lay the societal ills at the feet of art, no matter how well done that art is. 

My problem wasn’t liking or disliking themes or tropes in fiction, my problem is the underlying idea that these themes or tropes are harmful specifically to the people who love them the most because they will love those things and that is somehow a bad thing.