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mindcrackloveSeeing as this topic got brought up in the gorram podcast, it's about time someone writes a handy explanation to what's going on here. This is meant to be a helpful introduction/FAQ for anyone discovering the shipping side of the Mindcrack fandom for the first time. Maybe you were linked here from the subreddit or elsewhere and have no idea what's going on, or perhaps you already know the basics and either find the whole idea weird, or you're honestly curious and want to know more. Maybe you're an actual Mindcracker. Regardless of who you are and why you're here: Hello! Thanks for stopping by.
So what is this place?
The header to this community defines us as "A ship-friendly Mindcrack community." It was started in August 2012 bymindcrack_love, referring to as the moderator, or more affectionately, "Ms Mod." The shipping side of the Mindcrack fandom officially started a month earlier in July, as a prompt post in Ms. Mod's personal journal, which has since been depreciated. This was all started as a desire for have a safe space to talk about shipping and share fan fiction outside of the main community located on the Mindcrack subreddit. Part of our philosophy is to open to all varieties of fanworks, and have those fanworks be as freely available to anyone who wishes to see it. For this reason anonymous viewing and commenting is enabled for all public posts; just be sure to read up on the rules if you plan on posting, anonymously or otherwise.
What is fandom?
Fandom is just a fancy word for a community of fans coming together through a shared interest such as a particular TV show or movie, and the culture those fans create by interacting with each other and the source of their shared interest. In our case, it's the Mindcrack brand, and I consider all the various communities that formed out of the shared interest of Mindcrack to be different parts of the Mindcrack fandom. All of the fanworks that come out of these communities are products of the fandom.
What is shipping?
Shipping derives its name from the word relationship, and refers to the phenomenon where fans of a particular fandom like the idea of two (or more) characters being in a relationship, often romantic or sexual in nature, but not always. In the case of Mindcrack, the people involved in popular video co-ops such as OOG or Orange Wool will often make homoerotic jokes about themselves, making for easy shipping material. We just take this to its logical conclusion.
You may have also heard the term slash, which is similar to shipping and gets its name from the / symbol between the names of the paired characters: i.e. Pause/Beef. The way I learned it, slash just refers to the shipping of same sex characters, though for our purposes, there's no significant difference between slash and shipping (especially since we're dealing with a sausage fest anyway), and I typically will use shipping out of preference.
What's the deal with fan fiction?
Yes, it exists, though there are not hundreds as Guude supposed. There's several dozen at best; we're still a growing niche in the fandom. You may be aware of the fan fiction list, which, at the time of writing this, is very outdated and is by no means a comprehensive list of all the Mindcrack fanfic we are aware of. If you want to find more, try searching under the fanfiction tag for more examples.
One thing I want to stress about fan fiction is that it is fundamentally no different from any other form of fan expression. It is born out of a desire to connect with the source material in a creative and expressive way. The same is true of things like fanart, song parodies, video remixes, and every other fan work that gets lauded on the subreddit every day. And yet fan fiction sometimes gets dismissed as a lesser art form, and I feel that this is largely tied to preconceived misconceptions that people often have about fan fiction in general, namely that it's all poorly written Ikea porn by 12 year olds with a tenuous at best grasp of the English language. And while I won't guarantee that everything will be a lyrically written masterwork, I want to dispel these assumptions that everything is garbage by virtue of it being fanfic. In fact I find a lot of it quite good in terms of the quality of writing and creativity of ideas. Like with every other creative medium, specific examples will vary in quality and content. There may be things you just don't like. But all of it was created by someone who enjoyed the Mindcrackers' videos enough to make up stories about them and want to write it down. Even if the result is a literary mess by most people's standards, I still find some value in its existence. And if it's not a literary mess on top of that, all the better.
To get back to the shipping aspect, yes, a lot of the fanfic deals with situations exploring various aspects of character relationships. And while rule 34 makes no exceptions, there is significantly less smut than you probably think. There is nothing about fan fiction that necessarily makes it about shipping and romance. It just happens that fanfic is often the vehicle for fans to share their love of a ship.
But we're talking about real people. Isn't this a bit weird?
Before I answer, I can assure you that everyone here has nothing but respect for the people we discuss and write about. But we do understand the controversial nature of this concern. I don't think anyone who has written fan fiction here ever intended it to be seen by the Mindcrackers. We don't seek to make them aware of it, out of the assumption it might make them uncomfortable, although as things are turning out, many of them already know about it. And that's okay if they don't mind it, but if they don't want to see it, we can be easily ignored.
So, is the writing and/or fantasizing of Mindcrackers in shippy situations disrespectful? I think it depends on how you look at it. If you look at fan fiction as an act of love, of course no disrespect is intended. But I'm willing to admit that intentions and reality don't always line up. Something else we do is stress that the fan fiction is, in fact, fiction. No one actually believes the Mindcrack guys are in relationships with each other. We know the innuendos are all joking. While we acknowledge that the Mindcrackers do not typically "play a character," we try to keep divisions between who they are as people and how we portray them as characters, because we don't want to offend. Fictionalized representations of real people are easier to justify being written this way than actual real people, like how their Minecraft skins are often not a reflection of who they are in real life. Other than that, I don't really have a satisfactory answer, although as most of the Mindcrackers who have confirmed that they know about the fic don't seem to mind it, that makes things a lot easier for us. Alternately, if any Mindcracker sincerely wishes to have no place in the world of fan fiction, we shall comply. It may hurt our wee fangendered hearts, but we're not going to ignore the direct wishes of a Mindcracker. Because we love you.
WHY???
Why ship at all? Why write fan fiction? What do we possibly get out of being involved in all this weirdness?
It's personal experience time (because that's all I have to work with, and I definitely encourage other members to share their reasons), and for me, I have actually never been involved in the shippy and fanficcy sides of fandom until this, and it happened mostly as a byproduct of this community. Back in the day when there was only the subreddit, I sometimes wished there was a more personal place to have discussions without the subtle but constant worry of the silent downvoters of reddit. Reddit is a good system for some things, but not for everything. So this place became that smaller alternative that I wanted, and once that had been established, it wasn't long before the shipping and fic writing rubbed off on me, unlocking my inner fangirl in ways I never knew were possible. But it was just a new means of interacting with the things I liked with other people who like the same things. I could never really find my niche in the community in terms of fanworks. I always wanted to create something from my love of Mindcrack, but I'm not much of an artist, I'm not musical, and my computer is too crap to do videos. As a result I'm all over the place in the ways I've creatively contributed to the fandom. The fan fiction just became a natural progression of that.
Why is there a quote from Guude in the header?
Because that was his way of unintentionally branding us as a community. We have officially been deemed "not that weird" by Guude himself. At least, I think that's what it means. This is also the reason for the "as lurked by guude boulderfist" tag.
Wait, so Guude is secretly reading everything I write? PANIC!
I'm just going to assume that everyone is secretly reading everything we write, but it's not a big deal. Guude's apparently been lurking for longer than I've been a member. Once you get used to the possibility that anyone could be watching, things go back to normal pretty quickly. And this isn't even the first time this has happened. Ask me about salad sometime.
What's up with salad?
Yeah, we have some really weird fetishes here. You'll never look at salad dressing the same way again. No. Salad is MC Gamer's code word for this community. This was posted shortly after this relevant thread, which was ostensibly a response to the discussions in this thread. Salad has been tweeted and given a shout out in Good Morning Mindcrack. Check the relevant community tag for other salad sightings.
(To existing members: so how'd I do? Did I miss anything? Should anything be changed or reorganized? Would you feel comfortable potentially linking this to people when appropriate?)
So what is this place?
The header to this community defines us as "A ship-friendly Mindcrack community." It was started in August 2012 by
mindcrack_love, referring to as the moderator, or more affectionately, "Ms Mod." The shipping side of the Mindcrack fandom officially started a month earlier in July, as a prompt post in Ms. Mod's personal journal, which has since been depreciated. This was all started as a desire for have a safe space to talk about shipping and share fan fiction outside of the main community located on the Mindcrack subreddit. Part of our philosophy is to open to all varieties of fanworks, and have those fanworks be as freely available to anyone who wishes to see it. For this reason anonymous viewing and commenting is enabled for all public posts; just be sure to read up on the rules if you plan on posting, anonymously or otherwise.What is fandom?
Fandom is just a fancy word for a community of fans coming together through a shared interest such as a particular TV show or movie, and the culture those fans create by interacting with each other and the source of their shared interest. In our case, it's the Mindcrack brand, and I consider all the various communities that formed out of the shared interest of Mindcrack to be different parts of the Mindcrack fandom. All of the fanworks that come out of these communities are products of the fandom.
What is shipping?
Shipping derives its name from the word relationship, and refers to the phenomenon where fans of a particular fandom like the idea of two (or more) characters being in a relationship, often romantic or sexual in nature, but not always. In the case of Mindcrack, the people involved in popular video co-ops such as OOG or Orange Wool will often make homoerotic jokes about themselves, making for easy shipping material. We just take this to its logical conclusion.
You may have also heard the term slash, which is similar to shipping and gets its name from the / symbol between the names of the paired characters: i.e. Pause/Beef. The way I learned it, slash just refers to the shipping of same sex characters, though for our purposes, there's no significant difference between slash and shipping (especially since we're dealing with a sausage fest anyway), and I typically will use shipping out of preference.
What's the deal with fan fiction?
Yes, it exists, though there are not hundreds as Guude supposed. There's several dozen at best; we're still a growing niche in the fandom. You may be aware of the fan fiction list, which, at the time of writing this, is very outdated and is by no means a comprehensive list of all the Mindcrack fanfic we are aware of. If you want to find more, try searching under the fanfiction tag for more examples.
One thing I want to stress about fan fiction is that it is fundamentally no different from any other form of fan expression. It is born out of a desire to connect with the source material in a creative and expressive way. The same is true of things like fanart, song parodies, video remixes, and every other fan work that gets lauded on the subreddit every day. And yet fan fiction sometimes gets dismissed as a lesser art form, and I feel that this is largely tied to preconceived misconceptions that people often have about fan fiction in general, namely that it's all poorly written Ikea porn by 12 year olds with a tenuous at best grasp of the English language. And while I won't guarantee that everything will be a lyrically written masterwork, I want to dispel these assumptions that everything is garbage by virtue of it being fanfic. In fact I find a lot of it quite good in terms of the quality of writing and creativity of ideas. Like with every other creative medium, specific examples will vary in quality and content. There may be things you just don't like. But all of it was created by someone who enjoyed the Mindcrackers' videos enough to make up stories about them and want to write it down. Even if the result is a literary mess by most people's standards, I still find some value in its existence. And if it's not a literary mess on top of that, all the better.
To get back to the shipping aspect, yes, a lot of the fanfic deals with situations exploring various aspects of character relationships. And while rule 34 makes no exceptions, there is significantly less smut than you probably think. There is nothing about fan fiction that necessarily makes it about shipping and romance. It just happens that fanfic is often the vehicle for fans to share their love of a ship.
But we're talking about real people. Isn't this a bit weird?
Before I answer, I can assure you that everyone here has nothing but respect for the people we discuss and write about. But we do understand the controversial nature of this concern. I don't think anyone who has written fan fiction here ever intended it to be seen by the Mindcrackers. We don't seek to make them aware of it, out of the assumption it might make them uncomfortable, although as things are turning out, many of them already know about it. And that's okay if they don't mind it, but if they don't want to see it, we can be easily ignored.
So, is the writing and/or fantasizing of Mindcrackers in shippy situations disrespectful? I think it depends on how you look at it. If you look at fan fiction as an act of love, of course no disrespect is intended. But I'm willing to admit that intentions and reality don't always line up. Something else we do is stress that the fan fiction is, in fact, fiction. No one actually believes the Mindcrack guys are in relationships with each other. We know the innuendos are all joking. While we acknowledge that the Mindcrackers do not typically "play a character," we try to keep divisions between who they are as people and how we portray them as characters, because we don't want to offend. Fictionalized representations of real people are easier to justify being written this way than actual real people, like how their Minecraft skins are often not a reflection of who they are in real life. Other than that, I don't really have a satisfactory answer, although as most of the Mindcrackers who have confirmed that they know about the fic don't seem to mind it, that makes things a lot easier for us. Alternately, if any Mindcracker sincerely wishes to have no place in the world of fan fiction, we shall comply. It may hurt our wee fangendered hearts, but we're not going to ignore the direct wishes of a Mindcracker. Because we love you.
WHY???
Why ship at all? Why write fan fiction? What do we possibly get out of being involved in all this weirdness?
It's personal experience time (because that's all I have to work with, and I definitely encourage other members to share their reasons), and for me, I have actually never been involved in the shippy and fanficcy sides of fandom until this, and it happened mostly as a byproduct of this community. Back in the day when there was only the subreddit, I sometimes wished there was a more personal place to have discussions without the subtle but constant worry of the silent downvoters of reddit. Reddit is a good system for some things, but not for everything. So this place became that smaller alternative that I wanted, and once that had been established, it wasn't long before the shipping and fic writing rubbed off on me, unlocking my inner fangirl in ways I never knew were possible. But it was just a new means of interacting with the things I liked with other people who like the same things. I could never really find my niche in the community in terms of fanworks. I always wanted to create something from my love of Mindcrack, but I'm not much of an artist, I'm not musical, and my computer is too crap to do videos. As a result I'm all over the place in the ways I've creatively contributed to the fandom. The fan fiction just became a natural progression of that.
Why is there a quote from Guude in the header?
Because that was his way of unintentionally branding us as a community. We have officially been deemed "not that weird" by Guude himself. At least, I think that's what it means. This is also the reason for the "as lurked by guude boulderfist" tag.
Wait, so Guude is secretly reading everything I write? PANIC!
I'm just going to assume that everyone is secretly reading everything we write, but it's not a big deal. Guude's apparently been lurking for longer than I've been a member. Once you get used to the possibility that anyone could be watching, things go back to normal pretty quickly. And this isn't even the first time this has happened. Ask me about salad sometime.
What's up with salad?
(To existing members: so how'd I do? Did I miss anything? Should anything be changed or reorganized? Would you feel comfortable potentially linking this to people when appropriate?)
