What Community Is Right For You?

what community is right for you?

hello! i thought this might be a good place to get started for resources. in my experience there are three large communities oriented toward a love of fictional characters, but it’s hard to tell where you might fit in best without more information. some people may fit in all three, and some may be drawn to only one.

the three communities i’m referring to are the selfship, fictoromantic/fictosexual and waifuist communities. they’ve all got their own internal sets of values and community culture. i’ve been involved in all three, so here’s what i’ve learned! this post will be updated with corrections as necessary.

selfshippers comprise a huge amount of those in relationships with fictional characters. the selfship community is very large, with the greatest portion of its presence on tumblr and deviantart. however, you’ll find selfshippers on many social media platforms.

selfship culture is a very nebulous thing because of the size of the selfship community. in general, selfshippers tend to treat their fictional relationships as media ships, and it varies from person to person AND ship to ship how serious any given commitment is. there are a good deal of minors in the community, as well as adults in their early and mid twenties. people older than that seem to be drawn to other communities, but obviously exceptions abound. there aren’t rules against polyamory.

fictoromantic/fictosexual communities are very different. in my experience the fict community is smaller and comprised of more adults, many over 25. fict communities usually treat these affections as an orientation rather than a lifestyle choice, in contrast to the other communities listed here. it seems many terms are shared with the selfship community (such as “fictional other”) but not always other things. ficts tend to be more serious about relationships to fictional characters, but that seriousness still varies from person to person, as there isn’t one accepted relationship model. there aren’t rules against polyamory, but some ficts do take offense to adults being interested in minor-age characters. the fict community is probably the smallest of the three, or at least has a very small tumblr presence.

waifuism is a little like selfship in that multiple people who consider themselves waifuists will inevitably disagree on a great deal. there are rules, and in my time i found rules are a very large part of any waifuist’s community experience, but they vary according to what community you’re in. because waifuism is usually perceived as a branch of anime culture, it tends to be pretty different from selfship OR fict communities. there are nearly no shared terms. attitudes about “3D” people range wildly, but such attitudes are generally a fair amount of discussion. the largest social media presences for waifuism are on reddit and on 4chan type boards. i only have experience with the two largest subreddits. polyamory is hotly debated here, as are many rules. depending on what particular community you’re in, people may be committed to the point of IRL celibacy or simply joking about a favorite character.

there’s certainly a lot going on when it comes to how people express their love and how they form communities. i’ve been deeply involved in these communities for about a year and a half, and i still get things wrong, so feel free to tell me about anything i should add or correct here. thanks for reading, and i hope it’s a helpful post!