Look, I'm not someone who wants yuletide to have a ton of shipfic. I like that it doesn't match ships and gen is always okay. My ideal yuletide wouldn't even have character matching, it would be all any/any for everyone and if you can't think of three small fandoms where you're happy with anything you shouldn't sign up. I acknowledge I'm never going to get that, and YT is drifting further away from that every year.
But a lot of people do want ship matching, and a subset of those people have figured out how to do a yuletide that gets them ship matching. This clearly hasn't broken YT in a fundamental way, so formalizing it won't break YT either.
But any system that relies on certain people doing an end run around the stated rules is not a system where everything's fine! If I had said "Walter Wasp keeps getting the venture capital because he knows the unwritten ways in but Ayesha Inner-City can't even get a meeting," the correct solution would not be "maybe Ayesha Inner-City should start her own venture capital firm."
Yuletide shipfic is obviously way lower-stakes, and honestly I don't really care that much whether ship matching happens or not in YT. But the underlying system issue is structurally the same, when you set up a theoretically-open system that allows insiders to do things outsiders can't even see. And this kind of response annoys the crap out of me, because claiming that this kind of system access inequity isn't any kind of problem on this scale makes it harder to see it in bigger-stakes systems too.
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But a lot of people do want ship matching, and a subset of those people have figured out how to do a yuletide that gets them ship matching. This clearly hasn't broken YT in a fundamental way, so formalizing it won't break YT either.
But any system that relies on certain people doing an end run around the stated rules is not a system where everything's fine! If I had said "Walter Wasp keeps getting the venture capital because he knows the unwritten ways in but Ayesha Inner-City can't even get a meeting," the correct solution would not be "maybe Ayesha Inner-City should start her own venture capital firm."
Yuletide shipfic is obviously way lower-stakes, and honestly I don't really care that much whether ship matching happens or not in YT. But the underlying system issue is structurally the same, when you set up a theoretically-open system that allows insiders to do things outsiders can't even see. And this kind of response annoys the crap out of me, because claiming that this kind of system access inequity isn't any kind of problem on this scale makes it harder to see it in bigger-stakes systems too.