Another warmup doodle with another rant attached, you’ve been warned!
For everyone who has been concerned about my absence, I’m sorry to have scared you, but I’m alive! With the stresses of this pending move, I really can’t handle baby warriors shitting their britches over ships I draw on a regular basis. Once we’re down in NC and settled in, I’m sure I’ll be back with the usual spit and vinegar. Until then, like the Crewniverse, I just find the baby war tiring as hell.
“Imagine being heterosexual enough to ship pewey.”
I’m pansexual, and most of the active shippers in the Pearl/Mayor Dewey tags I’ve seen are also part of the LGBT+ community. A lot of us keep repeating that, as I am now, but that seems too complicated for the ship haters in the tags. It’s just so much easier to dismiss us all in favor of a strawman narrative like the one above. Funny that, in a grand crusade to Stop Lesbian Erasure In Headcanons, some posters are positively eager to erase real peoples’ identities, to mock them, to invalidate them.
Some LGBT+ people ship Pearl/Mayor Dewey. Some can’t stand it. Others are indifferent. What matters is how you act around real people in regards to your cartoon fandom. So far, ship haters have stormed into the little shipping sandbox over there in the corner and tried to kick down all the castles.
Lesbians who have posted in support of the ship have been called “traitors”, called liars, labeled as having “issues”.
Pan/bi shippers who headcanon Pearl like themselves, as you can see in my doodle? Yeah, we’re faking it too. This reminds me of the fallout after Korrasami–even though Bryan flat-out said “Despite what you might have heard, bisexual people are real!”, parts of the fandom and several publications insisted they were lesbian anyhow. We just can’t possibly exist. (The personal irony here is that I started opening up on Tumblr and especially in the SU fandom about my own sexuality because I felt I’d be safe. Boy was I wrong!)
“Ace? What’s that?”
“Mul….ti….shipping…?”
Don’t forget, we’re talking about personal headcanons here.
There is no Change.org petiton to make Pewey canon.
Making Pewey canon is not one of the hot topics in the next Presidential election.
There is no letter writing campaign to Cartoon Network demanding Pewey be made canon.
No one is holding anyone’s pet hostage until Pewey is made canon.
So this particular group of ship haters don’t want us to see ourselves in personal headcanons unless it toes their line, and they continue to give this loving show one of the most hateful fandom reputations I’ve seen while they enforce that “rule”.
Why?
Some nebulous reason that typically involves juvenile insults against the character Mayor Dewey, and the word “lesbophobia” tossed around like salad.
Ship haters, you need to step up your game, if you honestly have the courage of your convictions. Shipping has never impacted the actual production of a show. Calling shippers names changes nothing. Spamming tags changes nothing. Just take me for example, I’m still drawing what you don’t like, doo-diddy-hoo~! Meanwhile, by the sound of it, a lot of you are spamming at people who have long since blocked you. Productive!
What you need to do is take all this vitriol directly to the Crewniverse. After all, they are the ones sanctioning the shipping. They encourage it. They even draw it themselves. And they dare to call your actions “harassment”. All that makes them lesbophobes, right? So many of you also tag your hate with “Jaspis” to the point it shows up in related searches on “pewey”–look at what Rebecca just drew! Surely, she is the enemy!
So go on. Spam them for real change. Hell, boycott the show, how can you support it when the creators refuse to support you? Sure, you might get banned off whatever social media platform you choose to launch your attack from, but then you can just boycott that too! How dare they not bend their rules to let you give the Crewniverse what they deserve!
Shit, while you’re at it, go call Pearl’s VA a “boring straight” and mock her husband.
I’m not laying bets that any of you will do any of that. You don’t give a damn about it unless it’s just against shippers shipping things you don’t like. You only punch down because you know it’s largely safe and easy, and I’m sure it makes you feel very powerful. You want to bully. That’s it. You’re cowards. You don’t put your money where your mouth is, but your mouth is too full of shit to hold anything else, anyhow.
Thank goodness the Crewniverse isn’t a petty lot like you, because the show would never exist if they were.