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Aug. 5th, 2022 07:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stardust_rifleJust, like, aggressively spitballing here, but I'm wondering if stricter T/B name order tagging practices could have helped avoid some of the worst Disk Horse that came out of the Old Guard Fandom.
Disclaimer:: I am not and never was part of that fandom, all of the drama I heard about was just second or third-hand, I would appreciate further thoughts from people who were actually there for that Disk Horse.
The reason I think this was that I was watching multiple POC in the Kaeluckae fandom talk about how important strict top-bottom tagging practices were important to them, because only sticking to one specific T/B dynamic for the ship was a very good way to avoid things that might trigger/upset them.
(For example, one person said that they only shipped Luckae because for them, a lot of Top!Kaeya slips into "sexually predatory brown man abuses innocent white guy". Someone else said that Kaeluc was the only one they shipped, because they didn't like the implications of "brown dude is super submissive to white dude".)
And I keep looking at The Old Guard drama, and what I see is people who seem to have realized that avoiding Top!Joe is a good way to avoid upsetting content, but they didn't have any way to act on that preference.
Some of this, is, of course, because the two blue hellsites have terrible tagging and filtering systems. But I think that some of it boils down to a lack of division between what can be two very different modes of writing a pairing. Whether or not we want it to be true, I think we (as fandom) have to realize that who's topping and who's bottoming can influence how a pairing is written pretty massively, and it's not unreasonable for people to have preferences/squicks/triggers in that regard.
(Note: I am not saying that the JP fandom way of doing things is automatically better, just that it has some benefits that I think people in ENG-speaking fandoms don't realize.)
Disclaimer:: I am not and never was part of that fandom, all of the drama I heard about was just second or third-hand, I would appreciate further thoughts from people who were actually there for that Disk Horse.
The reason I think this was that I was watching multiple POC in the Kaeluckae fandom talk about how important strict top-bottom tagging practices were important to them, because only sticking to one specific T/B dynamic for the ship was a very good way to avoid things that might trigger/upset them.
(For example, one person said that they only shipped Luckae because for them, a lot of Top!Kaeya slips into "sexually predatory brown man abuses innocent white guy". Someone else said that Kaeluc was the only one they shipped, because they didn't like the implications of "brown dude is super submissive to white dude".)
And I keep looking at The Old Guard drama, and what I see is people who seem to have realized that avoiding Top!Joe is a good way to avoid upsetting content, but they didn't have any way to act on that preference.
Some of this, is, of course, because the two blue hellsites have terrible tagging and filtering systems. But I think that some of it boils down to a lack of division between what can be two very different modes of writing a pairing. Whether or not we want it to be true, I think we (as fandom) have to realize that who's topping and who's bottoming can influence how a pairing is written pretty massively, and it's not unreasonable for people to have preferences/squicks/triggers in that regard.
(Note: I am not saying that the JP fandom way of doing things is automatically better, just that it has some benefits that I think people in ENG-speaking fandoms don't realize.)
