Content warning: discussions of sexual content, racism, kink, abuse, and queerphobia.

To preface this post: language matters. The media we consume matters.

Fiction can be a lot of things: a true depiction of the societies in which we live, a utopia, a dystopia, a means by which to cope with personal traumas, generational traumas, or societal traumas, a reflection, a character study, simple good old-fashioned erotica, or something else entirely. In all of these, there is one common thing to keep in mind: people are writing what they know, want to know, or want you to know.

That being said, and I've talked about this before, there is a sort of disturbing trend on the rise in terms of fiction, fanfiction and fandom spaces in general; and that is the seeming rise of purity culture. How does it relate to queerness and other marginalized communities, though? Well, simply put, mainstream media doesn't often afford queer, racialized, diasporic, poor, or otherwise marginalized people to have control of their own stories. Nor to write an honest depiction of relationships we may have with others. It's very infrequent that we get a multifaceted queer person, or a multifaceted person of colour. Autistic representation and depictions of those who are mentally ill also suffer in media. In short, mainstream media is a reproduction of those who hold power in society, and those who oppress.

People have combatted this by engaging in fan-media, shipping culture, fiction, and there are a lot of fiction pieces out there that portray violence, abuse, kink, relationships, racism, homophobia in honest ways. At least, more honestly than mainstream media. There are always exceptions, of course. Purity culture, in some ways, seeks to sanitize these narratives.

We fanfiction and fandom oldheads have phrases that get pulled out when purity culture rears its ugly head: Ship and Let Ship (SALS). Your Kink Is Not My Kink (YKINMK). Don't Like; Don't Read (DL;DR). Oldheads also know to tag appropriately and to Mind The Tags.

There is a bit of a language and experience gap in fandom, as well as if you take a look out the window and see that yes, we are falling into end-stage capitalism and early-stage fascism going on in the world today. If you're following so far, you'll understand that fandom, media depictions of characters, and language is a microcosm of all of that. Let's define a few major issues in media at large.

Toxicity

We'll define toxicity here as the reluctance to, or outright criticism of the depiction of "unsavoury" kinks, or "unsavoury" pairings. "Unsavoury" unfortunately seems to mean "any pairing or trope that I don't personally agree with or support." Let's take an example: fiction or fanfiction that includes a romance with a significant age gap. Whoever writes this story has more than enough right to write this story, because in its best interpretation, it's a reproduction of something that goes on in society every day. Another example: emotional, domestic, or sexual abuse. Those things also happen to many people on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately, censoring those stories or preventing them being written and shared does not guarantee that all abuses or unsafe power dynamics suddenly disappear from society as we know it.

This is, of course, part of a larger discussion about censorship; which will absolutely be covered in a future blog post. The short version is that you cannot have a little bit of censorship. The best you can do is engage critically with media, and realize that it is indeed fiction, even when abuses occur in society on a daily basis. I will expand more on this point in the final section. In the spirit of critical engagement: I hope you, the reader, realize that just because someone reads about dark themes in media, it does not mean that they support abuse, unsafe power dynamics, kinks, violence, or other such "taboo" topics.

Queerbaiting

We'll define queerbaiting here as the accountability for mainstream media (or lack thereof) to depict queer relationships openly. Queerbaiting as a term refers to "baiting" those in the queer community into consuming media with a same-gender pairing, a queer relationship, a queer person, and then dropping the storyline, retconning, cancelling, or not supporting such media in the meta-fiction (outside of the confines of the fictional media).

Because queerbaiting is so common, even in the tender year of 2025, the onus is almost entirely put on the fandom itself to create the media that people actually want to consume and engage with. We're all but starving for depictions of queers in media that look like us, act like us, and perhaps have some of the same experiences as us. We are desperate to be seen and engaged with as people, is why I feel queer fan-media is so popular.

Fandom-generated media and mainstream media run parallel and concurrently, as well. Sometimes a queer ship becomes canon (one distinct example is Supernatural, which is honestly the "safest" choice of anything to go canon. Can you tell I'm bitter?), and the showrunners still queerbait in the end in the sense of not letting the character or relationship to run its course.

Fetishization

Fetishization is a bit of a fraught subject, and I'll do my best to approach it delicately here. There is definitely fetishization in media and fan-media that actively causes harm - one that immediately comes to mind is racialized fetishization, in which people/characters are defined by racial stereotypes and dishonestly. This type of fetishization would be something like the assumption that people of certain races are aggressive, masculine, feminine, passive, submissive, dominant, etc. These depict racialized individuals by a set of standards that are not in place for white individuals. Sexual fetishization is another, particularly with same-gender pairings, or with gender-bent pairings. These depict gay men, lesbians, transgender and intersex individuals by a set of stereotypes, and not by any standard that society uses for cisgender and heterosexual people.

A good rule of thumb to have is allowing characters to be multifaceted. Another good rule of thumb is to not "ship" real people. Some people still do that, and some people prefer one-dimensional characters that they can project their fantasies upon. Gross!

Many people have said that straight, cisgender people shouldn't be interacting with queer media (fanmade or otherwise) at all; and that doing so is fetishization. That's not always the case, and there are clearly bigger issues with fetishization, as I have outlined above.

All of this to say (and this ties into the last point): you should not assume that everyone is cisgender and heterosexual (and certainly: alloromantic or allosexual), not even when that is what is considered "normal" for society. There are people out there engaging with fanfiction who have yet to learn a few things about themselves.

Closeted Queerness

...Which brings us to our penultimate point. Closeted queerness. There are, and have been in the past (especially in fandom spaces), a lot of people who engage with media, or indeed society, as an ally. Anecdotally, I personally read a lot of m/m fanfiction before I came out as transgender, without even connecting the dots that the feelings I was feeling were gender envy and gender dysphoria until YEARS later.

People who engage with queer media have a spectrum of reasons why they do so, and one of which can be a matter of safety. Some people may want to fulfill a fantasy of desire: it could be romance, it could be sexual, it could be towards gender transition. Do not assume that engagement is fetishization, simply because we all have our paths to walk. Do engage in critical thinking!

Ship and Let Ship?

So when, to bring it all back, should we ship and let ship? When there are no active harms being perpetuated in media. When we have critically engaged with media and fan-media. When we have opted out of engagement when something is not our cup of tea.

One last thought that I have on this topic is as such: if heteronormative media is allowed to portray toxic themes, harmful themes, frank sexual content, depictions of abuse, etc.; queer media must not have to be purified in order to meet the same level of visibility.

Especially when a lot of us are doing it ourselves, for free, and on our own time.