nonbinarypastels:

nonbinarypastels:

tbh don’t ever bother asking me whether i ship this pairing or that pairing, just assume the answer is either yes, i could be persuaded, or i don’t know who those people are and block or follow my ass based on however that assumption makes you feel.

because i’m a multishipper and i don’t have notps. i play this game with myself whenever i don’t like a ship or i don’t get it or it even straight up physically repulses me where i go to ao3, sort by bookmarks, and read fic until i can figure out what the attraction is. and 99% of the time?? i can absolutely be persuaded by somebody’s good writing that the pairing has appeal in some way or some universe. some of my favorite ships now are ones that i absolutely hated before i conned myself into liking them.

so if there’s something i might ship that’s a dealbreaker for any of y’all just go ahead and assume i ship it and hit that block button because even if i don’t, i’m probably a few fics away from shipping it at any given moment anyway. 

🤷

and actually just to delve deeper into this, my thing is really simple:

i love to read

it is my favorite hobby

and when i choose what fiction i want to read, i am not doing that by pretending that my reading choices are some form of political activism or like they’re an extension of my morals or ethics – i am very simply looking for stories that are interesting to me on some level, that will capture my attention and elicit some kind of feeling from me because reading for me is a form of entertainment. 

the only caveat i have for the stories i read when i go looking for new content is that they not bore me.

my real world politics are not a factor in what fiction i read

my real world morals are not a factor in what fiction i read

my real world ethics are not a factor in what fiction i read

the only thing that factors into what fiction i read is whether or not the story is one that is interesting to me

so when you ask me “do you ship this, that, or the other?” it is utterly pointless because what i’m hearing is “is there ever any situation where a story about this relationship would interest you?” and the answer to that is a categorical yes because reading is my favorite thing to do and fandom is full of talented writers who spend their time wrtiing stories about characters in every conceivable combination, universe, and situation that they can think of – so of course the likelihood is extremely high that at some point someone is going to write a story about [insert problematique ship here] that is going to interest me and in the event that that happens i am absolutely going to read it and hope that i enjoy it

i do not read as an exercise in being Woke

i do not read only in accordance to what my real world morals and ethics say is right/wrong behavior in outside of books

i do not read as a way of proving to either myself or anyone else what my politics are

i read to be entertained because that is what reading fiction is to me: entertainment, a form of escapism, a way to intimately explore certain topics and ideas in a safe environment that i would not want to or cannot explore in the real world, something that says nothing about me or my worth or values as a person because the entire point of fiction is that it is not a 1:1 copy of reality and the entire point of reading it is to get away from our reality, whether for better or worse

and that approach to reading fiction? it’s completely fucking normal and has been for years to the majority of the people in the world who read it. it’s the ideas that your fictional tastes must correspond exactly to your real world morals or that you are tainted if you read ‘immoral’ fiction that are in the minority and have always been held by only the most regressive sort of people, the kind who would happily ban books and burn down libraries because the purpose of fiction and its separation from reality escape them.