High Guardian Spice - Tumblr: The CalArt Anime

[Fatsuit Shinji]

I'm not old enough to where I remember that. I remember the early aughts and the shipping that happened there (particularly in the anime community) but I never really realized how pervasive it was until about the past ten or fifteen years or so.

It's one of those "you had to live through it" things to know how bad and for how long it truly is. Moreso when it was possible to watch it metastasising in near real time. And the truly unfortunate lived through it simply by being in proximity to one or more of them, in this case shippers.

 

[Sleazy Car Salesman]

It's one of those "you had to live through it" things to know how bad and for how long it truly is. Moreso when it was possible to watch it metastasising in near real time. And the truly unfortunate lived through it simply by being in proximity to one or more of them, in this case shippers.

I will always consider myself blessed that I didn't engage actively with fandoms for anything I liked until fairly recently and I only ever read fanfiction to make fun of it. Really saved me a lot of exposure to this kind of shit growing up.

 

[Fatsuit Shinji]

I will always consider myself blessed that I didn't engage actively with fandoms for anything I liked until fairly recently and I only ever read fanfiction to make fun of it. Really saved me a lot of exposure to this kind of shit growing up.

Shipping is justifiably infamous for it being so destructive to where you're just passively watching a show and zero involvement with the "fandom" and will still get hit with their taint. And that's with an IP property that doesn't acknowledge the shippers. Those IP properties that do acknowledge the shippers it just made it worse for everyone. Then the mid 00ies came and the IP properties started passively or actively catering to them is when nobody can avoid them and their tainted presence.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Shippers were self-contained to their fanzines and it rarely left that containment unless someone took their Star Trek slashfic, tweaked it, and then published it as an original story. I hear that Ron Perlman Beauty and the Beast show had a cult following with its cat ladies audience, but that was typical of those kinds of shows.

And then The X-Files began airing, and the Internet had just become public. Shippers began to propagate in their natural habitat, and no one noticed/cared, especially when other famous '90s teen dramas got big fanbases online. Then Pokémon got involved.

It's a messy, messy history. Fascinating, but it definitely got out of hand thanks to the Internet.

 

[LiquidKid]

I'm not old enough to where I remember that. I remember the early aughts and the shipping that happened there (particularly in the anime community) but I never really realized how pervasive it was until about the past ten or fifteen years or so.

Put it this way, Spock X Kirk fanfic was the most common form of fanfiction one could find until the early 2000’s Harry Potter craze.

Shipping is justifiably infamous for it being so destructive to where you're just passively watching a show and zero involvement with the "fandom" and will still get hit with their taint. And that's with an IP property that doesn't acknowledge the shippers. Those IP properties that do acknowledge the shippers it just made it worse for everyone. Then the mid 00ies came and the IP properties started passively or actively catering to them is when nobody came avoid them and their tainted presence.

That’s sort of the modern style of shows and comics. No plot, but tons of lore and no characters, but tons of ship bait. They want to be famous in social media, not stand any test of time. Everyone wants the brony community which was all fanfic and fan porn, no one wants to be remembered for making a quality product because that takes effort, and this was HGS’s issue for sure. We got tastes of lore but never a plot and the characters had no depth but had tons of shipping flags.

Shippers were self-contained to their fanzines and it rarely left that containment unless someone took their Star Trek slashfic, tweaked it, and then published it as an original story. I hear that Ron Perlman Beauty and the Beast show had a cult following with its cat ladies audience, but that was typical of those kinds of shows.

And then The X-Files began airing, and the Internet had just become public. Shippers began to propagate in their natural habitat, and no one noticed/cared, especially when other famous '90s teen dramas got big fanbases online. Then Pokémon got involved.

It's a messy, messy history. Fascinating, but it definitely got out of hand thanks to the Internet.

Fanfic was mostly circulated at comic cons and Star Trek convention in the pre-internet days. It wasn’t uncommon to see a writer in the artist’s alley with a printed out version for sale. This method still exists in Amazon publishing, they just change the names around to avoid a lawsuit. 50 Shades of Grey wasn’t unique for doing this, it was just unnaturally popular.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Also it's worth pointing out that "shipping" is a mentality. It's more than just a piece of the fandom, it's "everything". It's "the way of life". You have fans in which is this is all they do, is "ship it". Raye is a shipper, she's open about it, and she's never left that mentality, and that's obviously affected how she approaches her personal identity, and her work because she just wants to "ship it" a.k.a. jill to it. Shippers can find each other and cater to their own, and the more militant ones have the damaging "for us or against us" mindset that isolates more than unites. There's a reason a big stereotype among shippers is about how immature and inexperienced they are about relationships, including friendships. It's a fact a lot of shippers tend to be loners, whether because of their autism or something else.

I'm open about being a shipper (ffs the shipping community thread is still one of my favs on this site), so I can get into her head better than I really like to, and it's really astounding just how easily one gets lost in and remains in that state of mind well into adulthood. Call it arrested development or what-have-you, but if someone's still a big shipper well into life, that's a sign they have it way too comfortably made and just have nothing better to do with their life, or are just that addicted to the Internet, either-or. I'm honestly surprised Raye still continues to ship so late into her life because she actually was once in a relationship in college. She may or may not have fucked her boyfriend for all I know, but she did have a love life at one point. I say this because at the start of the decade, I was still active in shipping, and then I found myself dating, and then getting married, and so shipping had to take a backseat in everything, if not just be shelved in general.

So on top of life getting busier, my mentality towards it changed, and I stopped getting involved with shipping. I still have my favorites, of course, but I haven't developed attractions to newer ships in years, partly because I just stopped getting involved in newer fandoms, and partly because I have shifted my approach to "shipping". I have stopped saying I write "shipfics" and instead say I write "romance", which I would say has been accurate for a long time. There's an actual difference between "romance" and "shipping" when you get down to it. "Shipping" is the mentality where you take two (or more) characters and think they look cute together, and so you put them into random cute scenarios in art, writing, or whatever it is you want. "Romance" is an actual genre of storytelling in which you're exploring the relationship between two (or more) characters and seeing the how the characters are proactive and reactive to it. It's a perspective change that legitimately puts a story on a whole 'nother level from your typical shipfic, and savvy readers and writers notice this.

Now I'm only still rubbing elbows with shipping because lol Internet and my husband still likes shipping and I'm pretty much the only one who gets him so I humor him because I love and dote on him, so by extension, I still get how someone like Raye continues to be into it. However, this is clearly hurting her ability to progress as a creator, and she needs to realize this sooner than later. The sooner she stops obsessing over having to literally ship anyone and anything together to "appease" the Tumblr masses, the better she'll present her characters as three-dimensional so that way it really wouldn't fucking matter if the characters were lesbians with each other or not. The problem is, she had surrounded herself with other like-minded people, so no one is there to say "Hey, shouldn't we work on flaws and traits first?" before going on about how "cute" lesbians totally are.

TL;DR Raye literally fails as a creator because she doesn't know how to people.

 

[invisibult plus+]

Shipping is justifiably infamous for it being so destructive to where you're just passively watching a show and zero involvement with the "fandom" and will still get hit with their taint. And that's with an IP property that doesn't acknowledge the shippers. Those IP properties that do acknowledge the shippers it just made it worse for everyone. Then the mid 00ies came and the IP properties started passively or actively catering to them is when nobody came avoid them and their tainted presence.

That’s sort of the modern style of shows and comics. No plot, but tons of lore and no characters, but tons of ship bait. They want to be famous in social media, not stand any test of time. Everyone wants the brony community which was all fanfic and fan porn, no one wants to be remembered for making a quality product because that takes effort, and this was HGS’s issue for sure. We got tastes of lore but never a plot and the characters had no depth but had tons of shipping flags.

Part of the problem with shipping is that while some shippers become adults, but they never really grow up. When I was a kid, I remember seeing discussions devolve into shipping wars, even when it's a shounen manga or an FPS. Fast forward around a decade, and shows got lost in the sauce of lesbian tea party drama. Some of it was due to storyboarders also being writers, or an inexperienced showrunner, or pandering, or a personal agenda, but the end result was the same. It got me disillusioned with animation for a while because seeing shippers run a show puts those tendencies in plain sight. Specifically, shipping is destructive because it seriously does come to a point where you don't understand how people work, like this v

TL;DR Raye literally fails as a creator because she doesn't know how to people.

Also if you throw preestablished everything traits out the window just to ship, then you have failed as a writer.

I mean, I can understand it. Intimate relationships (for lack of better words) are an integral part of the human experience. They can have a purpose in storytelling, especially for character development. Not just as motivation, but a basis and a method hence the term "chemistry", but ultimately, even if it's a romance, they have to serve the story, not the other way around. If you throw characters and plots around with no intention, no direction, and nothing to say, then you're not actually telling a story. You're not making a show. All you're doing is playing dollhouse. You can have the most elaborate dollhouse ever, but eventually people will get tired of it and move on because it's just masturbation. Cooming with extra steps. There's no real point, no purpose besides getting you off or getting you richer.

 

[LiquidKid]

Also it's worth pointing out that "shipping" is a mentality. It's more than just a piece of the fandom, it's "everything". It's "the way of life".

Shipping at its core is more than just plucking two characters together, it’s picking them and then trying to use the source material and whatever you decided is accurate about the character to force whatever you saw as “sexual tension” into reality. The CW shows really perfected this into a science.
Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, Vampire Diaries, all of those shows exists to give paper thin characters with nothing premises to preteen girls so they could argue over who was the better couple and why. Even worse, in these shows, every guy usually ends up in a relationship with every girl at one point or another, a total Greek play of everyone fucks everyone. They then take this mentality to other fandoms and start going “X and Y are the canon ship, but this sucks because X has a much better relationship with Z if you consider their past and my bias for self-identifying as X while having crush on Z.” Etc etc. Shiptrash, as they’ve both been dubbed by others and themselves only get into fandoms to try and find their fabled OTP of the series and it is beyond cancerous.

doesn't know how to people.

This bit is a common problem with regular writers too though. Often times, the role of spouse or partner causes the character to lose any purpose outside of filling that role, and it mainly falls down to the fact that the author only had one story they wanted to tell and didn’t think of the way to make it work.
For most TV shows, the issue really comes across when the “will they/won’t they” dynamic the show was built on gets broken and the two characters finally end up as an item. This calls back to the famous Gilligan’s Island principle. “You can do literally anything you want in the episode, but no matter what, it just end with Gilligan still being stuck on the island. If Gilligan manages to get off the island, you have no show.” While this is mainly used in context of a show or book series’ gimmick, it also relates to characters. The struggle in their relationship dynamic it their Gilligan’s island and the moment they fix that struggle, they’ve left the island and they lost their purpose for existing. A good writer uses this to create a new struggle for the characters to overcome, but most just use it to soft write the spouse character out of the show because they ran out of ideas for them.

I mean, I can understand it. Intimate relationships (for lack of better words) are an integral part of the human experience. They can have a purpose in storytelling, especially for character development. Not just as motivation, but a basis and a method hence the term "chemistry", but ultimately, even if it's a romance, they have to serve the story, not the other way around. If you throw characters and plots around with no intention, no direction, and nothing to say, then you're not actually telling a story. You're not making a show

Romance is often a trick to garner easy emotions from the audience. Outside of the overly cynical, every normal human has a deep desire for love and companionship, so it’s easier to sympathize with a character trying to find love or to get invested in two characters having a budding romance.
But in storytelling, the characters need to have a goal and motivation. For most romance stories, this means that both Characters must be missing something or have some sort of flaw that can only be resolved through the connection to the other character. “I’m an angry soul who only lives for revenge!” “I’m a weak soul who has compassion but doesn’t have the strength to achieve the freedom in life I desire” logic would show that the angry soul would be taught compassion through interacting with the weak soul and in turn can be the strength the weak soul needs in life. They compelled each other and discover that the key to a happy life was in the love they developed. That’s the most basic of basic storytelling.
The problem is that in the modern day, characters aren’t really allowed to have flaws and god forbid a male character offer something to improve the life of a female character. So instead we get characters that at very best would seem like casual friends but most often appear as a daily annoyance and shippers eat them up because “they blushed! That means they wanna fuck!” Or “they hugged one time, that means they secretly love each other.” Or “that bully is only mean because they’re too afraid to show their love.” None of these characters have the complexity in their relationships to suggest anything other than “we’re coworkers” but for the emotionally starved, that’s all we get

 

[Cave Fisher]

Yeah I'm not gonna lie, all this "shippers are a cancer" shit sounds schizo as all hell, but the "ships" in this show are really bad. Even the Sage/Snapdragon one (which for a show like this, it's SUPER surprising that the only actually healthy one is the straight one) feels more or less crammed with them suddenly blushing around each other instead of actually liking each other that much.
Sage and Rosemary were clearly intended to be the endgame, but even then, most of their ship moments just feel like yuri bait, and their interactions outside of that don't really seem that natural, especially since Sage isn't even close to reasonable enough to act as the straightman of their dynamic.

Anyway, a kinda autistic complaint I have about the characters( There's like one conversation about this series people have a year, just let me have this) is how Rosemary's main weapon is a sword and she's been interested in using them since she was a kid, but despite that, she seemingly has no idea how to actually use one, constantly treating the one she got from her mother as a toy, and for a school setting, nobody ever sits her down and goes "Hey, maybe you should stop casually swinging around your sword so you don't accidentally maim a student" even after one of her first interactions with the other members of her team is almost slicing one of them in half, or she fucks around and breaks part of it, or she almost dies from a crab thing because she told sage to drop it on her sword for no reason (then proceeded not to bring up said life-threatening wound for literally no reason)

 

[Tasty Tatty]

Shipper is just an euphemism for coombrain.

Character 1 says "hi" and character 2 says "hi" back and a shipper will say "wow, they should fuck".

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Anyway, a kinda autistic complaint I have about the characters( There's like one conversation about this series people have a year, just let me have this) is how Rosemary's main weapon is a sword and she's been interested in using them since she was a kid, but despite that, she seemingly has no idea how to actually use one, constantly treating the one she got from her mother as a toy, and for a school setting, nobody ever sits her down and goes "Hey, maybe you should stop casually swinging around your sword so you don't accidentally maim a student" even after one of her first interactions with the other members of her team is almost slicing one of them in half, or she fucks around and breaks part of it, or she almost dies from a crab thing because she told sage to drop it on her sword for no reason (then proceeded not to bring up said life-threatening wound for literally no reason)

It's clear that Rosemary has some kind of calling to be a swordsman, so if Raye was hoping for a second season to make it a more "serious" season to where one episode could've had her maim or nearly kill someone and have her open her eyes to her immaturity and learn to take things serious for realsies now, she should've sown the seeds for that. Instead, Rosemary is literally shown to be a dumbass who jeers at (rightful) criticism over her dangerous swordsmanship and therefore doesn't learn a damn thing. The fact no instructor at the academy ever once mentions her irresponsibility or even makes threats to put her in some detention hall or other disciplinary action really and truly feels like some oversight, or just goes to show this academy is run by incompetent buffoons (and sex pests, likely).

 

[invisibult plus+]

They compelled each other and discover that the key to a happy life was in the love they developed. That’s the most basic of basic storytelling.
The problem is that in the modern day, characters aren’t really allowed to have flaws and god forbid a male character offer something to improve the life of a female character. So instead we get characters that at very best would seem like casual friends but most often appear as a daily annoyance and shippers eat them up because “they blushed! That means they wanna fuck!” Or “they hugged one time, that means they secretly love each other.” Or “that bully is only mean because they’re too afraid to show their love.” None of these characters have the complexity in their relationships to suggest anything other than “we’re coworkers” but for the emotionally starved, that’s all we get

It’s basic but they don’t even bother to do that much. Anything remotely flawed or complex is interesting. That means a challenge, even a tiny bit, and that’s too much for the kidults that make up target audiences, so writers do the bare minimum. Plus, writing is hard and the path of least resistance is easy. Modern writers often have this mentality for both characters and their lore so the audience can build those elements for them. It drives interest and engagement. I don’t mean to sound snobby or overly critical, I just think that it’s a symptom of larger problems in the industry.

 

[Sleazy Car Salesman]

I just think that they should have made Rosemary more of an underdog since New Magic is so ungodly strong that Rosemary's ideal of the swordfighter is an old concept that has little to no place in the modern world of Guardians. She's become the victim of 3.5E disease where the wizard is just plain better and it would be at least minimally interesting to see her either go full shonen protagonist and the sheer power of her will and dedication eventually lets her keep up and surpass these faggot mages or to watch her become some kind of new paradigm of gish that this world hasn't yet produced or at least seen refined quite yet.

 

[Cave Fisher]

It's clear that Rosemary has some kind of calling to be a swordsman, so if Raye was hoping for a second season to make it a more "serious" season to where one episode could've had her maim or nearly kill someone and have her open her eyes to her immaturity and learn to take things serious for realsies now, she should've sown the seeds for that. Instead, Rosemary is literally shown to be a dumbass who jeers at (rightful) criticism over her dangerous swordsmanship and therefore doesn't learn a damn thing. The fact no instructor at the academy ever once mentions her irresponsibility or even makes threats to put her in some detention hall or other disciplinary action really and truly feels like some oversight, or just goes to show this academy is run by incompetent buffoons (and sex pests, likely).

They kinda fucked up by setting up so many things for season 2 BEFORE having one actually confirmed, so when the show became dead and buried, they just left a ton of orphaned plot hooks that will never go anywhere, like Rosemary's intended development into the team's cool strong leader we were seeing glimpses of in the fight with Mandrake, Snapdragon's trooning out, the fact that Mandrake really, really looks like he's related to Rosemary's family but it's never commented on, and the literal last second evil mom twist, and the reason the triumvirate's so desperate to murder a bunch of high school girls because they healed a tree. (Like is the rot pollution, a side effect of new magic, a biological weapon? What?)
Season 2 would definitely have been the more serious season, but the audience for a hypothetical season like that would never have been interested in a whole season of boring shit like Sage being sad because she lost an argument with Thyme.

could've had her maim or nearly kill someone and have her open her eyes to her immaturity and learn to take things serious for realsies now, she should've sown the seeds for that

They did that. Twice. Once with Olive, and the other time with that sea dragon, and it didn't change shit. The students are just kinda...given free reign to do whatever the fuck they want except for the one time Caraway gets on Snapdragon's case for getting violent in the exact same episode where he congratulates the students at their use of violence.

I just think that they should have made Rosemary more of an underdog since New Magic is so ungodly strong that Rosemary's ideal of the swordfighter is an old concept that has little to no place in the modern world of Guardians. She's become the victim of 3.5E disease where the wizard is just plain better and it would be at least minimally interesting to see her either go full shonen protagonist and the sheer power of her will and dedication eventually lets her keep up and surpass these faggot mages or to watch her become some kind of new paradigm of gish that this world hasn't yet produced or at least seen refined quite yet.

This show's unironically the biggest example I've ever seen of sword fighters being useless in a world with magic. What reason is there for literally anybody in the academy to still be using regular weapons if there are fuckers out there doing the dragon ball bullshit a wounded Mandrake and Sage were pulling out in the last episode? There's no way in hell Rosemary would be able to keep up with her hand-me-down sword outside of very specific circumstances. (I really wish I had a pic of this that didn't happen to be one of her keeping up with her hand-me-down sword, but I did NOT feel like rewatching the series to find an example of Mandrake's bullshit)

 

[Sleazy Car Salesman]

This show's unironically the biggest example I've ever seen of sword fighters being useless in a world with magic. What reason is there for literally anybody in the academy to still be using regular weapons if there are fuckers out there doing the dragon ball bullshit a wounded Mandrake and Sage were pulling out in the last episode? There's no way in hell Rosemary would be able to keep up with her hand-me-down sword outside of very specific circumstances.

Which is why I said that Rosemary could either buck the system and say "Who cares if you little faggots are throwing whizzaps from shapow sticks? I CAST FIST!" (Like a proper gook cartoon protag) or she could become the first in a new era of Gish fighters that the show doesn't seem to have except for Thyme, but Thyme is more of a ranger or druid than a full on Gish.

 

[TheAmbiguousLurker]

They did that. Twice. Once with Olive, and the other time with that sea dragon, and it didn't change shit. The students are just kinda...given free reign to do whatever the fuck they want except for the one time Caraway gets on Snapdragon's case for getting violent in the exact same episode where he congratulates the students at their use of violence.

Hey, they took Aster calling Rosemary stuck up very seriously.

 

[Cave Fisher]

Hey, they took Aster calling Rosemary stuck up very seriously.

The severity they treat Aster with is pretty funny when I'm like 100% sure Rosemary and Amaryllis call Thyme fantasy-themed racial slurs offscreen.

 

[Sleazy Car Salesman]

The severity they treat Aster with is pretty funny when I'm like 100% sure Rosemary and Amaryllis call Thyme fantasy-themed racial slurs offscreen.

Rosemary probably not. Sage? Absolutely.

 

[LiquidKid]

See this on /co/ and was able to verify that the post and Raye’s reply is real.

Raye is now applying for a basic bitch Executive Assistant job that pays the same money that a McDonald’s employee makes in California

 

[BScCollateral]

Raye is now applying for a basic bitch Executive Assistant job that pays the same money that a McDonald’s employee makes in California

Good for her. A low-tier job is more dignified than sponging.