There’s a story my mother once told me that I’ll never, ever forget.  She told me about how she took me out one day when I was little, and I would point to things and say that I wanted them.  You know, a toy, or ice cream, or whatever.  She told me how annoying it was, and how I was acting like a brat and how she was starting to get irritated with me.  Just as she was about to raise her voice she realized… 

… I was acting the way she use to act.

I was doing the same things she would do, so how could she get mad at me for, well… acting like her?

I just realized that this is fandom for me.

Sure, I reblog things that say, “You shouldn’t do that,” and I agree with them.  No, you shouldn’t judge a person based on their ship, or their favorite character, or series, and things like that.  But I just realized, while I was talking to a friend about it, that… this is something we’ve all done, at some point.

We’ve all judged a person based on their ship.  We’ve all thought that our ship was the greatest ship and if you tried to tell us otherwise, you were dead wrong.  We’ve all hated a character for getting “in the way of our ship.”  It’s… a part of fandom.  

I use to do these things.

Back when I was into Gundam Wing, I was 16.  The pairing to ship was Heero and Duo (1x2) and the character to hate was Relena.  And I did it all.  I hated that girl something fierce and I wrote those fics, sometimes bashing her.  And there was no ship greater than mine, if you couldn’t see the love between Heero and Duo there was something wrong with you.  And if you shipped something else you were shipping wrong, because YOU HAVE TO SHIP THESE TWO O.K.?!  And if you shipped them with someone else… heaven help you.  I would point out those promotional pictures with something simple, like a hand on the shoulder, or that one scene in that one episode that one time that, clearly, showed that they were in love.  I did all of that.

Now, I could care less who you ship.

It started small, with my partner, because she shipped Wufei and Duo, which… I found kinda weird, but… I really liked talking with her, and she also shipped Heero and Duo (which was like, “whoa wait you can have multiple ships?!”)  Then there was Yu Yu Hakusho, with the Mukuro bashing, and I couldn’t see why she was hated so much because I thought she was awesome, but “she got in the way of the Hiei/Kurama,” and… I started to see something wrong with that.  But I think it was the Naruto fandom that made me really change.  There was so much hate for Sakura for “getting in the way of the SasuNaru,” even if she had moments of wanting to help bring Sasuke back for Naruto’s sake.  Then I realized that no one obsesses over Sasuke as much as Naruto, and if he were a girl, we would be calling “her” an idiot for trying so hard on a guy who could care less.  And then, the SasuNaru fandom itself started arguing over who was on top, and it got pretty nasty, and just… I realized… why?

But I need to stop denying that I use to be “that person,” and getting angry over “that person” is a bit hypocritical of me because, once upon a time, that was me.  It’s just a part of fandom, it’s something that happens, and years ago I was that girl.  Yes, I think it’s silly now, but it took me a while to reach this point, because honestly, at this point, if I hated everyone who shipped differently from me or liked the things I don’t like, I wouldn’t have very many friends.  Like, I’ll casually say how I hate Twilight, and I have a couple of friends who kinda squirm a bit because they like it.  Years ago, I would be bashing them until I lost my voice, but now I’m like, “… oh, well hey that’s fine,” and we proceed to talk about something we all like.  

But, for a moment, I forgot that I use to be “that person,” and that’s my fault.       

… oh god this revelation is just like my mother’s revelation am I turning into my mother?!