Well, they’re not voting for best rep, they’re voting for their favorite ship. If you were truly voting for best representation, would you actually pick Posie? Actually, lemme go see what the other ships are, I have no idea.
Okay, right, you could say some of these are better than Posie on paper? More screentime, more story, etc? So then you realize how little sense it makes to go by the metric of Better Representation? That’s a never ending and totally pointless competition. Totally pointless.
Those conversations are super relevant, absolutely, but on a more macro level, discussing trends and stats. Why do people as a whole gravitate to this thing or that thing. People will like what they like. Why they like them, again, tackle that on a macro level, but you can’t just use those arguments to say one specific ship is better than another specific ship because…does that ever work? Will somebody who’s invested in a ship suddenly drop it? Well, that depends on if your goal is just to declare your ship better or if it’s your goal to actually reach people.
We’re basically continuing the same ship wars as always, just with different vocabulary. This ship is better because it’s canon, because it’s got POC, because it’s same-sex, because the actor is queer in real life and on and on. Certainly there are traits in characters and ships that are rarer and that make them naturally more valuable to us, since they’re usually rarer because people deliberately were not writing them but again, trying to tell someone what to ship will never work.
And anon, I think you must not know me at all, because I have a ton of subtext ships. I could talk about the historical significance of subtext ships for underrepresented groups or why a dearth of screentime and plot still pushes people toward them even in the presence of canon ships but at the end of the day, people will like what they like, and this is surely the one space where they can be allowed to?