colorcoded (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
colorcoded) wrote2026-08-11 06:51 pm
colorcoded) wrote2026-08-11 06:51 pm
Relationshipping / Incest Bingo card 2026 and a little mini-essay on antis in fandom
Once again, ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
relationshipping is running (nominations clean-up ongoing, with sign-ups opening soon!) and I'm running a round of incestbingo alongside it to encourage people to make treats. If you're interested, you can request or make a card over here.
Here's the card I got and will be working on:
Some random thoughts: One thing that's interesting is that this year I got "Spite Incest" on my card. This is a square where my intent was that you can fill it by taking a ship that antis in fandom claim is an incest pairing (through some very tortured reasoning) and therefore NO ONE is allowed to ship it, and responding by being like "OK fine, I guess it's incest now *writes shipfic for it anyway*"
Well, conveniently, I also recently came across this r/AO3 thread, which I can basically use to mine examples of this kind of pairing in fandom.
One thing that was interesting to me is how many of the commenters on the post were clearly taking the "anti" perspective of the character on the left and answering which non-related characters have "incest vibes" to them and so they found them unshippable -- I guess at least some of them mentioned stopping short of telling people they're not allowed to ship it, but not everyone did...
The other interesting thing was the couple of people mentioning that people do this for Zutara, and the discussion that this seems to be done by people who ship Kataang + Zukka. I haven't been in A:TLA fandom for many years (and of course when I was, this behavior was not present; also, Zukka was a basically-unheard-of rarepair). This led me to a bit of speculation and some random musings on the anti phenomenon:
- Okay, this is a bit "wild speculation/guessing", but a while ago, I read this post by comradekatara about the "klanceification" of Zukka in A:TLA fandom. I don't really agree with some of the OP's analysis here, but this post was the first time I encountered the theory that the reason why there are a lot of new Zukka fans in 2020s A:TLA fandom after it being a tiny rarepair during the show's initial run is that A:TLA absorbed a lot of former VLD fans of the Klance ship that projected Keith onto Zuko (AKA the serious red one) and Lance onto Sokka (AKA the funny blue one).
- Klance and VLD fandom is of course one of the most notorious sources of anti behaviors (with "Klantis" being the term used for the large number of Klance fan antis who made the fandom miserable not just for other fans but for many of the show's creative staff too). So now I wonder if this "IDK, Zuko and Katara seem sibling-like to me 🤷" line is itself a result of Zukka fans having largely been Klance fan antis in a previous fandom life, and again making use of arguments to sink the main "rival" pairing, which in this case is Zutara, since the other popular A:TLA pairing -- Kataang -- does not interfere with the Zukka ship...
- It is interesting to note in both the A:TLA case and the VLD case, the arguments that ships are sibling-coded (and are therefore incest) or have a problematic age gap/mentorship relationship (and are therefore pedophilia) can be applied equally well to basically all pairings involving the main characters of the show. So employing this argument is basically like a nuclear bomb that can be dropped on fans of ANY ship in the fandom.
- I think this is ultimately the core of the anti position and why it ultimately ended up accumulating detractors until the position crumbled: you have this argument that you can use on any rival ship as part of a play in a ship war in order to make it more costly for other fans to ship rival ships and even for the creators to make a rival ship canon. But most people don't pursue this kind of scorched-earth tactic because the reasoning is so subjective that, just as it can be applied to a rival ship, it will inevitably also be applied to your own ships. The people who DID, though, became antis, and the anti culture ultimately collapsed under its own weight due to the mental gymnastics antis performed in order to declare THIS ship incest/pedophilia while their OWN ship was totally fine, of course -- the hypocrisy just became too much for people to bear and people eventually got tired of tolerating people who used "your ship is problematic" as a weapon in a ship war.
Anyway, that is all just my speculation of what's going on with modern A:TLA fandom and the "Zuko and Katara have sibling vibes" position that is apparently popular now there. In any case, it seems clear that you can basically do this move of "Oh, I see them as siblings so it's gross to ship them u_u" to basically any pairing you don't like, as I think the examples given in the above post demonstrate. It's a bit of an exhausting part of fandom, although one that fortunately is easy to not give a fuck about if you're fine with incest ships! So that's my mini-rant.
(Random but it is also interesting to me how many of the examples in the r/AO3 post are from cartoons. I feel like animated canons/kids media consistently attract the most wanky/anti-filled fandoms, unfortunately!)
relationshipping is running (nominations clean-up ongoing, with sign-ups opening soon!) and I'm running a round of incestbingo alongside it to encourage people to make treats. If you're interested, you can request or make a card over here.Here's the card I got and will be working on:
| Ambiguous relationship | Codependency | Juggernaut or most obvious ship | Bad guys made them do it | One didn't know they were related |
| Raised to think incest is normal | You're the other half of me/One soul in two bodies | F/F twincest | Asleep | Status differences within household/Golden child & scapegoat |
| Disgust | Lost in the wilderness | FREE SPACE | Mythology/The Classics | Estranged/separated relatives |
| Desperate for love/attention | Stepmother | Opposites | Spite Incest | Incest to audience but not characters |
| Age difference/Age gap | Pining | Eager for approval/praise | Jealousy | Protectiveness |
Some random thoughts: One thing that's interesting is that this year I got "Spite Incest" on my card. This is a square where my intent was that you can fill it by taking a ship that antis in fandom claim is an incest pairing (through some very tortured reasoning) and therefore NO ONE is allowed to ship it, and responding by being like "OK fine, I guess it's incest now *writes shipfic for it anyway*"
Well, conveniently, I also recently came across this r/AO3 thread, which I can basically use to mine examples of this kind of pairing in fandom.
One thing that was interesting to me is how many of the commenters on the post were clearly taking the "anti" perspective of the character on the left and answering which non-related characters have "incest vibes" to them and so they found them unshippable -- I guess at least some of them mentioned stopping short of telling people they're not allowed to ship it, but not everyone did...
The other interesting thing was the couple of people mentioning that people do this for Zutara, and the discussion that this seems to be done by people who ship Kataang + Zukka. I haven't been in A:TLA fandom for many years (and of course when I was, this behavior was not present; also, Zukka was a basically-unheard-of rarepair). This led me to a bit of speculation and some random musings on the anti phenomenon:
- Okay, this is a bit "wild speculation/guessing", but a while ago, I read this post by comradekatara about the "klanceification" of Zukka in A:TLA fandom. I don't really agree with some of the OP's analysis here, but this post was the first time I encountered the theory that the reason why there are a lot of new Zukka fans in 2020s A:TLA fandom after it being a tiny rarepair during the show's initial run is that A:TLA absorbed a lot of former VLD fans of the Klance ship that projected Keith onto Zuko (AKA the serious red one) and Lance onto Sokka (AKA the funny blue one).
- Klance and VLD fandom is of course one of the most notorious sources of anti behaviors (with "Klantis" being the term used for the large number of Klance fan antis who made the fandom miserable not just for other fans but for many of the show's creative staff too). So now I wonder if this "IDK, Zuko and Katara seem sibling-like to me 🤷" line is itself a result of Zukka fans having largely been Klance fan antis in a previous fandom life, and again making use of arguments to sink the main "rival" pairing, which in this case is Zutara, since the other popular A:TLA pairing -- Kataang -- does not interfere with the Zukka ship...
- It is interesting to note in both the A:TLA case and the VLD case, the arguments that ships are sibling-coded (and are therefore incest) or have a problematic age gap/mentorship relationship (and are therefore pedophilia) can be applied equally well to basically all pairings involving the main characters of the show. So employing this argument is basically like a nuclear bomb that can be dropped on fans of ANY ship in the fandom.
- I think this is ultimately the core of the anti position and why it ultimately ended up accumulating detractors until the position crumbled: you have this argument that you can use on any rival ship as part of a play in a ship war in order to make it more costly for other fans to ship rival ships and even for the creators to make a rival ship canon. But most people don't pursue this kind of scorched-earth tactic because the reasoning is so subjective that, just as it can be applied to a rival ship, it will inevitably also be applied to your own ships. The people who DID, though, became antis, and the anti culture ultimately collapsed under its own weight due to the mental gymnastics antis performed in order to declare THIS ship incest/pedophilia while their OWN ship was totally fine, of course -- the hypocrisy just became too much for people to bear and people eventually got tired of tolerating people who used "your ship is problematic" as a weapon in a ship war.
Anyway, that is all just my speculation of what's going on with modern A:TLA fandom and the "Zuko and Katara have sibling vibes" position that is apparently popular now there. In any case, it seems clear that you can basically do this move of "Oh, I see them as siblings so it's gross to ship them u_u" to basically any pairing you don't like, as I think the examples given in the above post demonstrate. It's a bit of an exhausting part of fandom, although one that fortunately is easy to not give a fuck about if you're fine with incest ships! So that's my mini-rant.
(Random but it is also interesting to me how many of the examples in the r/AO3 post are from cartoons. I feel like animated canons/kids media consistently attract the most wanky/anti-filled fandoms, unfortunately!)