Fandom.

It’s a thing. And boy oh boy has it spawned many a thing.

One such thing is shipping.

You’ve got your fluff ships like Finnrey/JediStorm and StormPilot; your ironic trash ships like Kylux, Huxtaka, and Huxma; and your actual trash ships like Reylo and Darkpilot. There’s also crack ships, which are your never-in-5-bajillion-years-would-this-actually-happen-but-it-would-be-hella-if-it-did ships. And a lot of the ships are gay. Just supes gay.

And shipping spawns fanfic. How else are you going to get to see the characters do what you want them to do? Especially if it’s gay.

Now, this might seem a little tangential, but it does fit in.

Shipping band members, who are real people with real relationships, with each other has/does happen(ed). It’s a little ethically questionable, but it happens nonetheless. And yeah, it’s usually gay. These are boy bands after all.

Naturally, there’s a lot of self-insert fanfic, because who hasn’t dreamed about dating a star or several? But basically every ship is gay.

I’m going to stick to the Big Three with this, each of which conveniently has a prevalent ship: Peterick, Ferard, and Ryden. All of these ships contain the lead singer + another band member. Interestingly, the other band member goes first in all cases. Though I guess Pate, Grank, and Brenan don’t sound as good.

First, Fall Out Boy. Peterick is the result of enough people deciding that the most and least aesthetically emo members of the band would make a good couple. A quick perusal of the search refinements for “peterick” on fanfiction.net show that most of the writers are in it for the smut, as many of the fics are rated T (teen) or M (mature) with romance being the most popular category. A look down the page shows that many of the fics mention slash in the descriptions. And it’s not talking about a scary movie slasher flick, it means that you wouldn’t need Freud to tell you that that isn’t a pipe.

And then to My Chemical Romance. Not quite sure how we got Ferard, but part of it probably has to do with it being a little too much to ship Gerard and Mikey, because incest is a thing few shippers will dabble in. This appears to be once again a smut ship, as it too has mostly T and M ratings on Fanfiction.net, with the highest category of romance.

And lastly, Panic! at the Disco. Ryden has given us what is most likely the most iconic piece of bandom slash ever: the milk fic. Now, Ryden is apparently actually a name according to the descriptions on Fanfiction.net, which lends more titles to the search, but there is still a high proportion of T and M fics; and if the milk fic is any indication, this is also a smut ship.

Now, you’ll probably notice two things. My answers are very form and I haven’t linked the milk fic.

And that’s because the milk fic is really what I want to talk about.

Every fandom has its iconic fic. It doesn’t even have to be good, it just has to be well known. For example, My Immortal is probably the most well-known Harry Potter fanfic, and it’s a hot mess. The spelling and grammar are a mess, and it was so 2007 that even 2007 couldn’t handle it. It also gave us this opening paragraph that will live on forever:

Hi my name is Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way and I have long ebony black hair (that’s how I got my name) with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Amy Lee (AN: if u don’t know who she is get da hell out of here!). I’m not related to Gerard Way but I wish I was because he’s a major fucking hottie. I’m a vampire but my teeth are straight and white. I have pale white skin. I’m also a witch, and I go to a magic school called Hogwarts in England where I’m in the seventh year (I’m seventeen). I’m a goth (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly black. I love Hot Topic and I buy all my clothes from there. For example today I was wearing a black corset with matching lace around it and a black leather miniskirt, pink fishnets and black combat boots. I was wearing black lipstick, white foundation, black eyeliner and red eye shadow. I was walking outside Hogwarts. It was snowing and raining so there was no sun, which I was very happy about. A lot of preps stared at me. I put up my middle finger at them.

So as you can see, you don’t have to be good to be iconic. And this is the case of the milk fic. The spelling and grammar are far better, but what it entails is definitely as off putting.

If you’ve been intrigued, read Gerard Way’s live tweets of him reading it first. They summerize well without going into details.

If you still want to read it, evaluate your choices. It gets . . . intense. This is not the time to take one for the team and read it.

Anyway, I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, it’s 6 AM and I’m pushing 900 words. I guess my main point is write fanfic all you want, but if you’re going to explore gay relationships, use characters that can’t get real people tied up in them, as some fanbases can take shipping to the extreme and try to “force” the band members into the relationships that only exist in their heads.

Still want to read the milk fic?

Here you go. (NSFW x 1000)

You’ve been warned.

Think of your top 5 favourite artists/bands.

They likely have one thing in common, and it’s not just their genre.

There’s a 90% chance that they all have a VEVO for their music videos.

Basically, if you’re signed to a major record label, you’re gonna have a VEVO.

Pop-Punk groups tend to avoid the major labels, what with the whole stick-it-to-’em/rebellion thing, with many starting on labels like Fueled By Ramen and Decaydance, then moving on if they get big enough.

Only one of the Holy Trinity has managed to escape VEVO. Panic! continues to be on the Fueled By Ramen label despite their mainstream success.

Now, imagine that you’re a popular-but-still-not-mainstream pop-punk band, and Interscope Records has offered to sign you. You accept of course, what could be better?

You make an album, and it’s different from your usual and you know that, but you think it’s still good.

The critics like it; but your fans, they don’t.

You’re All Time Low and the album is Dirty Work.

It remains their only major label album.

This brings up the concept of musical identity. While the album fits the sound of pop-punk, it does not fit the sound of ATL. It sounds like Alex Gaskrath singing, but it does not sound like an All Time Low song.

The album did well enough, selling over 100,000 copies.

Another band that has some experience in this are is surprisingly Panic!. They have stayed consistent in neither style nor lineup since the beginning. Their consistency consists of Brendon Urie, an album every 3-ish years, and “I Write Sins, Not Tragedies.”

Some of their more outlandish genre tags include electropop, baroque pop, psychedelic pop/rock, and vaudeville. They’ve even gotten to the point of the Wikipedia pages for the albums refer to them solely as pop. The punk is gone. But yet, the fans remain.

Twenty Øne Piløts is also interesting in this respect. While there is singing, most of what they do is rap about pop-punk topics to a pop-punk background. And they’ve gained a major following and a major label.

While most of the pop-punk bands started out sounding pretty similar (to the point that a newcomer would hear them as one and the same), they’ve branched out pretty far stylistically. But it looks like pop-punk is the mafia. You’re in until you’re dead, and even then, you’re still in.