Fandom Pet Peeves

Fandoms have some pretty serious problems in terms of gate keeping and attacking people with different ships or thoughts on a chatacter or even for daring to be a fan that is white/cis/straight/male.

But just to highlight a minor annoyance, being a rare pair shipper can be disheartening since at best there’s a handful of usually poorly written fanfics and maybe some subpar fan art and at worst you are outright ignored or viciously attacked by the fandom for setting a foot outside of the main ships that have 10 million+ fanworks of them.

Personally I don’t mind oc x canon or self inserts. But experiences on my old account on deviantart and even my new one I have grown to have some peeves.

1)  people claiming a canon characters as theirs.I once self shipped by making a persona who would date zane from ninjago( plz do not kill me I was just a cringey kid). Granted I tried my best to make it so it made sense, but it just made me happy. I knew other girls liked Zane too but I did not care as it also made them happy too. Had a chick get nasty though cuz she thought Zane was hers. I thought she was a troll, she was not. She was serious. She got banned eventually because she kept pulling the same thing with other fan girls.

- hypocrisy. I use to have OCs related to canon as their child. Had some one I use to rp with complain that I should “ be original “. Turns out, when I did go original their character turned out to also be either the child of that character or the partner of that character. Basically did not want to role play and “ change their story”.

- people using me to live out a fantasy. Often I did a decent job at playing canon characters. Same person only wanted me to play the canon so they could satisfy their fantasy for their oc or self ship.

• people who white-knight the content and/or the creator and think they're flawless. people can dislike something, and people can still like a thing and criticize it (with all the critiques I have on some of my fav things you'd think I hate them lol)
• Some race & LGBT HCs/AUs because some of them end up being offensive & downright fetishizing. Example: that one modern Hamilton AU. I'm all for LBGT & PoC rep don't get me wrong but some people take it too far (yaoi fetishists/fujoshis, people who overemphasize 'poc' features to the point it's basically a caricature)
• K adding onto what people said here but the whole "people believe a character to be one way & this way only" to the point people who don't are shafted and put down. Reguardless if it's canon leaning or they wanted to explore a HC/AU. It's one thing if the person's making something involving noncon & pedophilia, but it's another if it's something like "i headcanon this character to be more tough or soft"
• People gatekeeping fan characters because it's not like FCs were made for fun. idc how well it fits canon if the kid wants to make a rainbowcore god half-dragon who's dating Steve minecraft let the kid do it! Goes for adults too. If it's not pedo,noncon, & they aren't harrassing anyone let them have fun god damn it (also imo the people who are against "cringe" ocs end up being way more obnoxious & toxic than the people who make said characters because they out there making whole ass blogs & channels dedicated to bullying kids. If you're that hateful at least do it in a private discord & leave it at that smh)

Your usual me writing in paragraphs again whoops haha

1. "Dont interact if you ship these characters/like this character/headcanon this character as (insert gender or sexuality here)" or stuff along those lines. I made a whole rant about that before that I won't go into here but. Man I see a lot of that these days and it really bothers me. It's basically discrimination to tell people not to interact just because they kin a character you hate or like a fandom with a controversial creator (especially that last one, because what if they don't know about the creator's actions? I know I personally dont pay attention to the life of plenty creators. Tbh I probably couldn't even name half of them.) And like.. there's no need to put a giant notice under EVERY SINGLE ONE ONE OF YOUR POSTS saying "don't interact if.." Do you really dislike this thing so much that you have to go through that effort? Let people do what makes them happy in their fandom :(  (the only exceptions to this are when it involves pedophilia or homophobia.. because then yeah, better not interact with me either andnkf)

2. CHARACTER GENDER DISCOURSE! this is a huge problem I've seen in a lot of fandoms I'm in and it bothers me so much! If a creator chooses not to assign a character to a specific gender identity, they are leaving it up to the fandom to interpret however they want. Sexuality too! Unless made obvious by the creator, the fandom is free to headcanon anything. I literally see people quick to block others simply because they used a different gender pronoun for a character. Simple headcannons like identifying a character by a gender don't define someone's entire being.

 3.  Personal one: when the main ship in a fandom (or "fandom otp" as I like to call it) is absolutely everywhere and all other ships get ignored/barley any content. This one's just me I bet because man have I noticed I tend to rarepair (OOF) and the main fandom otp is always one I don't really care for or even a ship I dislike :') like, I understand y'all love your fandom otp but can I please scroll through, for example, some Attack on Titan fanfiction without basically every single one of them being Erin x Levi? I search for a fic on Ao3 and there's 10,000 results but when I filter out the fandom otp it suddenly becomes 20. I know I can't do anything about this.. its just that there is always that one particular ship the fandom chooses to obsess over and all other ships get either very little content or ignored completely.

I have quite a few more but they're and mostly out of personal experience and irrelevant. Fandoms are chaos and the best option is to just enjoy what makes you happy because honestly screw people sometimes :>

My fandom pet peeves:

•  Main character: *kills everyone in sight*

    Fans: *squealing*

    Side character: *kills a nasty guy or two for the good reasons*

    Fans: OMG What a f**king monster!!!

• Ships that make no sense: Shipping two straight men, or shipping gay male with a female, or shipping adult with a child.
• Underrated and overrated characters
• Underrated and overrated fandoms
• Groups made by idiots who remove people just because they can, for no reason.
• Judgmental idiots
• Everyone talking about main characters and never mentioning side characters. BIG YAWN.

I also kinda hate the shipping thing. It probably depends.. but for the most part it's a little weird. Cannon X Cannon is also questionable for me but only if it's extremely akward. Like imagine Yoshi in love with Miku for example. Idk why I thought of this rn. Just a random example xD

My pet peeve is when people start attacking games and tv shows because of the stupidest things possible, or because something is too hard to obtain. Like the pokemon SW&SH thing and when they literally try to cancel anyone who has a diff opinion. I try to stray away of those communities as far as I can :/

another one is when people ship two characters together and attack anyone who has a different opinion, even if the ship they’re shipping isn’t even cannon. It can get very toxic and annoying and I try to stray away from people who do this as much as possible 

i don’t rlly mind if people ship themselves with cannon characters, just as long as they stay respectful and don’t attack people who ship that cannon character with someone else.