LONG THREAD AHEAD - just reflecting on my experiences in western and cn fandom, not meant to push any agenda or argue about anything (revolves arnd problematic ships tho)

read only if you interested about what my fandom experience has been like lololol

this whole "problematique ship" thing i've been seeing since i entered danmei has me thinking about how it's been different in western fandom, where the attitude towards it is more "whatever lol" due to the age and experience of the community?

let's start off with 2012 tumblr. superwholock was full of 13-16 y/os, but also 30y/os and above - part of the reason why i think there was a definite acknowledgement of

"look, sherlock drugging john IS problematic, but that's how their r/s is" - maybe because i curated my circles well, bc i definitely did see a lot of "omggg sherlockxjohn my cute yaoi babies" in the tag as well. but anyway point stands, it was accepted that

nothing was truly unproblematic, and that sometimes the problematic might have been the point. also, these fandoms were LARGE which meant that you might not even know something was an opinion at all! ever! (danmei is super squeezy in comparison) also, curate your circles.

hannibal got pretty popular in 2014-2015, and suddenly i saw quite a lot of teens in the hannibal fandom - but it was hardly "baby's first fandom" for anyone bc a lot of them jumped ship from other fandoms, and pretty much everyone accepted that hannigram was problematic

(i mean they might have been like "uwu flower crowns on murder husbands", but they weren't ignoring the "murder" part of murder husbands. there was domestic fluff in fics but definitely also mentions of cannibalism going on in the background.)

it was really only in 2016 when voltron hit that i started seeing the term "problematic ship" being flung around like prata even tho i stayed away from that fandom as far as possible; suddenly p*dophilia started being brought up and i was like "bruh what?"

like homestuck is another piece of media that features teens but..... i don't think i heard p*do accusations from it..... so like voltron was my first true brush with "antis" and my god i just wanna have fun on that blue hellsite so that was p annoying

and then other fandoms like kingsmen, the man in uncle - i didn't hear shit about anything "problematic", hell, people were writing d*ddy kink like there was no tomorrow and it even influenced other fandoms to write d*ddy kink

and then i entered danmei and saw "abusive", "problematic" again - stuff i vaguely saw ppl mentioning in my early days of sherlock and explicitly during vlt craze so i'm like "wheeew here we go again lmao" and sometimes it feels like i'm back in 2012 tumb|r lololol

anyway tldr; danmei too small, focus on making and consuming content you like, if people come after u for stanning problematic content just rmb that nothing is problem-free and they living in a fantasy

disclaimers: im still considered fandom baby, all this is personal exp only

also FUCK HOW COULD I FORGET ABOUT TEEN WOLF ok maybe vlt wasn't my first brush w antis (but the most memorable) bc there were so many p*do accusations around sterek but like equally vociferous sterek shippers so i just retreated to ao3 and quietly read fic lmaooooo

sterek had the benefit of really robust fan support so much so that i and many others legit thought they were the main characters of teen wolf before falling into that pit so it wasn't as divided as the she*th/kl*nce vlt battle, it was mainly stan vs non-stan