This Blog Helped A Younger Me Realize She Was Proship, Because I Agreed With Everything And Was Like

This blog helped a younger me realize she was proship, because I agreed with everything and was like “huh maybe I don’t care about silly lego ships as much as my online peers made me think I did”.

I enjoy things in relative peace now :)

I'm so very honored I could be part of your journey. Experiences like yours are why I'm here.

Minor rant, but I recently found your blog and think you may find this amusing (of course ignore as well if i misjudged! 💕)

I got into a baffling conversation with someone I share a server with, and it reminded me again that “antis” just… don’t think. Ever. And I knew that, but getting hit in the head with the reality always throws me for a loop no matter how many times it happens.

In my current fandom, I tend to only write character studies, longer plotty fics, slice of life, and that type of thing. It’s simply what currently has my attention. I do have content on my AO3 antis would drop dead at, but for a different fandom than is for the above server, so I don’t think this person (or others) realise that. Shows that they do know how AO3 filters work, as they’ve said they filter for this ship/fandom on my page, but that’s a different issue all together

Anyway, this person was *stunned* when I said I ship and let ship, and am 100% proship, full stop, no matter what. She seemed convinced that all proshippers write and like “evil (her words) content”. I of course mentioned that I’ve written all of AO3’s content warning, read it in fic, published books, and said content is 100% in the book I’ve been slowly writing, and that i support it. But I digress.

Where the conversation truly lost the plot was when she brought up that I don’t like certain themes, and am admittedly picky af with what I read??? And yes, I am. As are a lot of people. She could not comprehend this. She (and a few others who jumped in) seemed to think that, aside from proship meaning problematic ship, it also means someone who is proship has nothing they don’t like. I just. Okay. Maybe I’ve curated my fandom and online presence too well, but I’ve thankfully avoided this line of thinking before. I’d say I hope it’s not common, but I feel like it probably is 🙃

I have so many boundaries and things i hate. I am, at my core, a hater. My dms with small friend groups are full of me hating on tropes, ships, etc, I hate. But I could not give a flying fuck if others like them, and wow she could NOT get this. I have writers on AO3 I’ve blocked because I don’t like how they write certain things, or just don’t like how often they appear in the tag. I have no issue with them as people, I just know how to curate my fandom experience.

One of the people who was contributing to the conversation reached out afterwards in DMs and seems to (hopefully) be rethinking things, and realising that they’re very much proship. Picky with what they like, but proship. Small and unexpected victories!

Every day I grow more concerned for society as a whole.

The 'proship means problematic thinking' thing I can vaguely understand because its been an anti-propaganda tagline for so long, and they're very effective at being loud enough to be convincing.

But the rest?

Lordy.

I know there's a lot of advice for handling things like depression and its so fucking easy for people to say "just do this and you'll feel better!" and I hate that, I fucking despise it, but I'm also gonna throw in my two cents about what is personally helping me get out of bed some days and genuinely, not kill myself.

Its taking care of nature.

Seriously. It sounds stupid and some days it feels stupid, but I put up bird feeders because I live in a semi-rural area where human activity is decimating the local bird population and options for safe feeding. So I put up bird feeders. And now I have like 83 different birds flocking to my garden on the daily and screaming at my window if the feeders are empty. And I've seen generations of baby birds brought to my garden by their parents because this is where the food is.

And I researched what plants and flowers were native to my area and I spent like $5 on a few different seed packets and sprinkled them around the grass and the sad empty flowerbeds and the lawn because the bees have nothing to eat and that's awful and it turns out wildflowers will fucking GROW the moment you look away, but now every spring and summer my lawn is a pretty little multi-colored bug haven.

And I've even gotten the chance to save a few little bug lives because of it. I've taken in cold-shocked bees and given them a warm little tupperware to recover in. I've fed bugs sugar water to get their energy back to take their food home. I've given dying bugs a sheltered, safe place to spend their last moments.

I planted a veggie garden. And I know I'm very lucky in that I have the space to do that, but also, you can grow a lot of things indoors. My friend has literally the smallest apartment you can imagine but she grows chives in her bathroom and grows five radishes at a time in a pot in the kitchen. Literally five. But it makes her so happy every single time she pulls them up or trots off to the bathroom to snip some chives.

I pick trash up every two weeks. The pick stick was like $4 online and I just put the bag out with my bi-weekly trash pick-up and its disgusting but but nobody else is gonna do it and I've only got finite time on this earth. If nobody else is going to pick up that can, I will. Because some innocent wild animal doesn't deserve to get hurt by human ignorance, and I deserve to walk home and see pretty flourishing nature instead of depressing discarded trash like I feel like most days.

I've left water out for the wildlife and watched hedgehogs, local dogs on their walks, squirrels and all sorts stop by to take a drink, because humans are fucking selfish and we're making something as basic as water so hard to access for anyone but ourselves, but I can fix a little bit of that just by putting out a bowl. Sometimes I don't even have to remember to fill it because the rain will fill it for me, and its kind of like nature's way of saying "you're helping me so I'm going to help you out too." Which is neat.

Like most days I do not want to be living on this earth but my god earth did not get a choice about us living here, and we're ruining it, and it actually feels so good to help stop and un-do a little bit of that destruction.

And you don't even have to try everything I do. If the only thing you've got the spoons to do is buy one bird feeder and you only remember to fill it once a month, its still something. That once a month could mean the difference between starvation and a full belly to a bird.

Again, none of this is obligatory and I'm not saying at all this is some magical cure for depression, but personally these things are things which are helping me slowly find things to keep getting out of bed for and things to feel a sense of self worth and satisfaction over. I feel better both in and about myself when I feed the birds, when I see the bugs in the garden, when I pick up the trash.

If its something you haven't considered yet, it might be worth a try.

https://www.tumblr.com/myfandomrealitea/755278666189160448/httpswwwtumblrcommyfandomrealitea75092172920?source=share

not that it matters but i think the mic emoji was trying to be like the interview handing over the mic rather than mic drop personally I think we should do a poll XD

I will cede to the results.

(Either way it was still stupid.)

i hope this doesn’t need to be said but just in case

you might have seen people talking about sudowrite and/or their tool storyengine recently

and just like… don’t. don’t do it. don’t try it out just to see what it’s about.

for two main reasons:

1) never feed anything proprietary into a large language model (LLM, eg ChatGPT, google bard, etc.).

this means don’t give it private company information when you’re at work, but also don’t give it your original writing. that’s your work.

because of the way these language models work, anything you feed into it is part of it now. and yeah, the FAQ says they “don’t claim ownership” over anything and yeah, they give you that reassuring bullshit about how unlikely it is that the exact same sentence will be reconstructed—

but that’s not the point.

do you have an unusual way of constructing sentences? a metaphor you like to use? a writing tic that sets you apart from the rest? anything that gives you a unique writing voice?

feed your writing into an LLM, and the model has your voice now. the model can generate text that sounds like it was written by you and someone else can claim it’s theirs because they gave the model a prompt.

don’t feed the model.

2) the other reason is that sudowrite scraped a bunch of omegaverse fic without consent to build their model and that’s a really shitty thing to do, because it means people weren’t given the chance to choose whether or not to feed the model.

don’t feed the model.

if you want to do drama sometimes why don't you want to do drama ALL the time <- some people apparently

My favorite thing is when people think this blog makes up the entirety of my existence when I don't think throughout an entire day I actually even spend a full hour on it.

I might pop on 2-3 times to check if I'm getting a lot of messages or there's a lot of action going on with a post, but consecutively I think the longest I've spent online is 30 minutes and that's because I was researching while typing up a post.

I'm only online right now because I'm sat on the floor watching my bread bake and need a distraction so I don't open the oven every two minutes.