100 Femslash Ships

Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

Love is stored in the pencil marks on notebook pages gleefully handed over into a friend’s hands. It is stored in the emails and discussions and too-late chat messages rambling on and on about plots that never come to be. It’s stored in the art and vids we share, the characters we love, and the worlds we create.

And “What if” holds so much capacity for love. What if they didn’t die? What if something changed? What if they fell in love again and again? What if they were somewhere else, someone else? What if all that went wrong went right, and just this once: Everybody lives!

What if our ships never passed in the night? Where would we be without each other?

Where would we be without the comment chains between us. Our gleeful excitement of sliding into each other’s DMs to ramble deep into those good nights. The endless waves of boop notification as Tumblr descends into April Fools madness, and we are both determined to win this war. Where would we be without our gifts to each other and our “I thought of you”s?

Today, I scroll through an event tag in awe of the fanart being made and the comments being left, knowing I had a hand in creating this opportunity. I find love stored in the stick figures and first baby steps of an artist just as much as it is stored in their masterworks. In the “this is my first time trying _” and the “back on my bullshit” tags, in the shared celebrations of everyone’s achievements, and in the server-wide “Happy Birthday!”s.

Fandom is trembling hands reaching out across a seemingly endless chasm only to realize it’s really not that big at all. And when I think of love for it, I think of all this. How it is a network of connections waiting to be made and an endless fountain of creativity waiting to burst forth. And all you have to do is pick up a pen, a paint brush, a keyboard, whatever you want, and reach out—

Love is stored in the distressed emoji reactions from my friends when they realize I chose That One Prompt, even as they vibrate in excitement because I am finally, properly joining them in their fun.