Oh man, wow, okay, I have two answers for you Anon, short and long.
Short: OMG, no, I don’t mind at all if you read me! I don’t like anti-Steve content either!
Also, before we get to the long answer, I need you to understand that everything I’m about to say is yelling at fandom, and not at you. In fact, I am gently hugging you while yelling at fandom over your shoulder. Just hold that in your mind.
Long Answer:
So, what you said crams an incredible amount of information about present-day fandom into two sentences. I’d like to break it down a little because I want to dispel some of the toxic myths that are flying around in fandom culture.
One, it is truly mind-blowing to me that in the span of about five years, fandom has gone from Tony/Steve being the massively dominant ship to a person believing that if they like Steve Rogers they can’t like Tony Stark or vice versa. For decades, they were the best of friends in comics, and fandom loved both their friendship and the super gay subtext it contained. Even after the comic book Civil War, where Steve and Tony basically argued the exact same thing as the movie, they were a heavily dominant ship. I don’t think the movie changed that, necessarily – I think fandom culture did, more on that below.
And I’m okay with the ship losing people. There’s still tons of fanfic out there, it’s not that I’m mad I get less content now, I consume less content now anyway. It’s this bizarre idea that if you like one character you cannot like a character who is in opposition to them, even if those two characters still have a relationship. Or if they don’t!
It is okay for two characters to fight with each other and even spend time hating each other and for them to both be protagonists, and for you to still like them both. This isn’t a dysfunctional divorce, you don’t have to choose, whatever Marvel and the more toxic side of fandom is telling you. One of the reasons my old Stealing Harry fic is so popular (aside from being kidfic) is that I wrote Sirius Black and Severus Snape as two thoroughly damaged war veterans who hated each other not because one was good and one was bad but because they were very different people who had a long history of being assholes. They could both still be likable characters. And because of that, they could both experience growth into Non Assholes in my story.
You can like Steve Rogers and still like Tony Stark. Or like Steve Rogers and just not give a shit about Tony Stark. I love them both deeply, separately and as a partnership. And so I don’t allow haters on my dash. Of either of them.
And that leads us to point two. Not allowing haters on my dash isn’t some kind of purity thing. It’s not a form of CASTING OUT ALL WHO DISAGREE, there’s no ideology behind it. Not that I could stop them reading me anyway – even if you ban someone, they can still read your tumblr unless you password-lock it, and we’ll come back to banning in a minute.
Not allowing haters on my dash is about the active curation of my fandom experience and no one else’s. I like Tony Stark so I don’t want to see people hating on him. I do have friends who don’t care about him one way or the other, and some who don’t like him, but the difference is that when they don’t like something…they ignore it and talk about the stuff they do like. I do the same with them. We aren’t haters. We’re just people with disparate interests.
When there is a culture of hating on any character, which is apparently what the tonky stank thing is about (according to reports; I haven’t seen it for myself), it tends to be less about that character and more about an excuse to indulge in a kind of mob-based negativity. If it’s interesting to examine canon critically, that’s one thing, I could and often do engage in critical discussion of canon. If it’s fun to hate a character so you do a lot of it as a pastime, or all your critical focus is on one specific pinpoint of canon that you just hate so much, then, well, you are enjoying hating something, and that’s…not a great mental place to be, tbh. (We saw this in Torchwood with the antigwenallies, so it’s not new, it’s just in a new fandom.) It’s essentially schoolyard bullying where you feel okay about it because the victim is fictional.
And I’m not here to say “Stop, you are hurting Tony Stark’s feelings.” He doesn’t exist, he has no feelings to hurt. But bullying is like an addiction – it’s an unhealthy outlet for people who haven’t got healthy ones.
So, here’s part three: you can’t stop haters reading what you say, but I don’t even bother trying. I don’t care who reads me because I only care about what I consume and where my work goes, and someone else’s reading involves neither of those. Besides, you can tell people not to read you, but someone who hates something you love is still probably going to do it.
If they make a nasty comment, then you can ban them, but that goes back to curating your own experience. Banning is best when used to shield you from hearing their voice or to stop them putting your work on their blog. Like unfollowing someone, it’s not meant to indicate a difference of opinion, it’s meant to remove that harmful influence from your life. Because even if someone you TRULY HATE is reading your blog passively and not commenting, you pretty much have no way to tell. So why worry? Maybe they’ll learn something.
So that’s pretty much my ban policy: I don’t ban people unless a) they’re motivated solely by a desire to ruin someone’s fun or b) I don’t like the content of their blog and don’t want my name appearing on it (porn bots, Nazis, misogynists, etc). There’s a significant overlap, for sure.
Anyway, in closing, it is possible to like multiple characters even if fandom is telling you otherwise, your fannish experience is your own to control and not a stick to hit people with, and I don’t care who reads me because they will anyway and also I want to model good, healthy fannish behavior for those who do, especially for those who maybe haven’t learned that healthy behavior yet. I do my best, anyway.
Good, isn’t it? 😉 I have a weakness for big tanks and pretty fliers, just as I have a weakness for all the many flavours both ships can come in (from the mutual, somewhat reluctant admiration society to the snarky push-and-pull to the mind games).
Also, I just get such a kick out of the idea of Tarn originally being drawn to Pharma for the Megatron Aesthetic ™ and only afterward having that, “Oh, no, I actually like him,” moment.
Okay, I frickin’ adore the Earth Is Space Australia business, so here’s my two cents. Someone did a great post about laughter as a fear response and how freaky that would be to aliens.
There’s another thing we do when we’re about to go into battle and we’re scared out of our minds.
So Alien Steve is minding his own business as the new guy on the Starship Incandescent. It’s a mixed ship, about half human, a quarter Silesian, and the rest a grab bag of species, but he hasn’t had any major problems so far. Then the pirates show up and shoot out their FTL drives so they can’t escape, and they’re outnumbered ten to one, and he calculates their odds of survival at very low. The comm link is still active, so they can hear the pirates laughing as they get ready to tear the Incandescent open and vent them all into vacuum. At least the end will be quick.
And Human Steve starts chanting. It makes no sense. Human incantations are for birth anniversaries, or aquatic grooming rituals, or for the ancient rite of passage known as “ka-ra-oke”. This is not a time of celebration. It is a time of preparing for imminent and ugly death by gravity cannon. But every human on the bridge starts chanting, too.
The pirates aren’t laughing anymore. Human Steve wraps his fingers around the main gunnery controls, and the crew descends as one into battle.
Teradecads later, his students will beg him for the story of how the Incandescent destroyed the Tyn’x Syndicate. To this day he credits their victory to the invocation of the great Human battle god Queen.
And the damndest thing, Alien Steve will say later, is the way they all knew the chant. Not just knew it, but agreed that this was the right one to use. Because the thing about humans, Alien Steve will tell his student, the thing to remember is that they spar recreationally, and they do it *all the time* and over the most meaningless things. Appropriate chants for a situation are an especially common thing to spar over, and it’s exceedingly hard to tell just how recreational it is sometimes.
(There are reports of sparring sessions that got so out of hand they almost jeapordized entire missions. Alien Steve has a friend whose fur still stands on end in fear at the thought of the human utterance, “Turn that off or so help me God I am turning this ship around.”)
The point is, Alien Steve will say, the humans on that mission had very different ideas about appropriate chants. They were well behaved about it, but Human Janet and Human Steve especially seemed to worship Gods who demanded very different chants. And yet, when Human Steve began invoking the war god, Human Janet was the first to join in.
Humans have been scientifically determined to have no hivemind or psychic abilities, but sometimes Alien Steve has to wonder.
One thing I really adore about Tom King’s Batman (This is from I Am Gotham with David Finch) is that he takes the Moore/Miller “Isn’t Batman craaaaaazyyyyyy” approach and then flips it on its head, showing the repetition and the obsession, the unhealthy coping mechanisms, and then asks the simple question, why are they unhealthy? They kept him alive, kept him together, helped him become a better person, didn’t they? It takes the mentally ill aspect of Batman’s character and separates it, utterly, from the “Sociopathic villain” perception it seemed to go hand in hand with, explaining that, yes, Batman can be mentally ill, and yes, Batman can still then be an inherently, unambiguously good person
“well, that’s not ideal” whenever something is going wrong
“we are in the timeline that god abandoned” whenever i’m mildly inconvenienced
“can’t you see that your fighting is tearing this family apart?” whenever two or more coworkers are arguing
referring to taking medication as “eating medicine”
“time to go back to prison!” when putting animals back in their cages
referring to inanimate objects as (s)he, particularly when i break something and say “oh no, he’s dead.” this concerns them especially when i follow it up with “that’s not ideal”
“what are they gonna do, fire me?”
I work in a blood bank, and constantly refer to blood types as flavors, such as “Oh, you need two units? What flavor is he?” And my older coworkers just look at me confused but my coworker that’s my age doesn’t miss a beat and responds “A Pos”
this is probably my favorite comment on this post so far
“So, how much are we taking?”
“Maybe this much?” *draws a line across his thigh* “Just to be sure.”
– orthos discussing an ancle fracture
Oh, man I completely forgot my explanation for the triage system:
Red: Actively dying
Orange: Might die
Yellow: Might eventually die
Green: Won’t die
Which genuinely seems to disconcert people, and I’m not sure why.
Decepticonsensual's Armada 