As someone who has had The Queer Experience of people who would rather I just be "normal" and not a "freak", having family who would rather I kill myself/be dead than have a queer family member, let me tell you, I don't have any patience for the whole thing of suicide baiting over things that don't affect you and aren't about you. And I think that makes a lot of this extra upsetting when coming to fandom and having people refuse to leave you alone, it hits those buttons for a lot of us and the fighting about this kind of thing makes so many people so tired and it plays on so many people's emotions that a lot of people just want to eschew even getting into it all together. I think too many people in fandom these days over-identify with the fiction they're reading/watching and anything that contradicts that feels like a personal attack, it feels like it must have this tremendous detonation on the real world when someone likes something in fiction that you don't, but it just doesn't actually work that way. A ship in fandom is not in a 1:1 relationship with reality, nothing in fiction is, but what is in a 1:1 relationship with reality is the boundaries you cross when you harass and hurt real people over their ships. And that will always be vastly more important--if you can't handle decent personal boundaries with real people over ships, that is the real problem here. It's fine to be squicked by things, almost everyone has them! And it's fine to talk about trends in fandom, because sometimes things do come from bigger social trends, like there is a lot of racism in fandom that I think it's important to talk about. But sending death threats or doxxing people still ain't the way to handle that, babes. Anyway, as anyone familiar with the series has probably picked up on, yeah, Knives/Vash is my ship of choice in the fandom, there's a very particular vibe between them that just gets me. And it's fine that people might be squicked by that, I'll tag anything to do with them in that light (because I'm also interested in them purely platonically), but it's also fine that I like what I like in my space scifi western show. (So, heads up for anyone reading this, I will always tag with either #plantcest or #plantcest for blacklist if it contains commentary about them, but isn't relevant to the tag/I don't want to put it in the tag for some reason.) Because, man, any series where the entire story is centered on the conflict between them, where no one else really ever matches the intensity either of them have for the other, where one of them is literally doing everything for the other person, where they wouldn't just be willing to burn down the world for that person, they're actively trying to burn it down for the other, that kind of teeth in a dynamic is delicious. I love love love conflict between characters that love each other so desperately, where the conflict is central to who they are, that the other person loves them for being the person they are, even as it drives them apart because they can't accept the things that person is doing, that is MY JAM.