zenosanalytic:

orestian:

raptorific:

Not to be an old man but what happened to ship names that were just the characters’ names with a / or x between them? Like I shouldn’t need to solve some kind of Dungeon Riddle to know what characters are in the ship, you don’t need to say “I ship Candy In The Wind,” no one knows what that is, just say Charlie Bucket/Avatar Aang

tagged content searching happened and there was also some ancient discourse about how A/B meant A topped and that… was Homophobia™

You may not have noticed it, but any dash or slash in a tumblr tag makes it unsearchable, across tumblr and in your own blog, making said tag functionally useless for archiving. Still doesn’t explain the drop in AxB ship naming, but it’s one major reason why I’ve mostly used pun naming on this site since I always preffed / to x anyway. Also Dungeon Riddle Puns are just Gr8 and Wonderful so why NOT spend your day thinking up obscure, referential names?

But, this is the sort of question that practically DEMANDS thinly sourced grand anterior theorizing. I’d blame the Harry Potter fandom, and the fact that most folks on the internet right now spent at least some time in it at somepoint in their lives. The HP fandom certainly had / and x shipping names, but it particularly liked compound names(Drarry, ect) AND, more importantly, Nautical ship names(H.M.S. Pumpkin Pie, S.S. Loonie Lions, ect). I suspect that the popularity of Riddle Pun naming came from this pun-driven fad for nautical ship names in the HP fandom, mutated and accelerated by the Homestuck fandom which dropped the ship designation bit(”H.M.S.” and the like) and just used puns, since wordplay and reference were such big parts of HS itself.