Living in a canon would always be a dodgy thing, yes! Who wants to be caught up in the world ending, or even all that extra mundane drama?
Also re. the racism, while it is there (our society is racist, our mainstream media including our fandom canons reflect that, and fandom is part of society and therefore also biased and racist), you can't do that sum as proof with one canon and one specific ship. People who are strongly drawn to an F/M foe!yay ship (or possibly an F/M Beauty and the Beast trope), are unlikely to ship an M/M hero-buddy-type ship anyway. And those tropes have been popular in fandom forever; they didn't suddenly pop up to enable people to avoid shipping the supposedly 'progressive' ship here or anywhere else. We can point to overall trends, racist bias in finding white actors more attractive overall (therefore often the hub of shipping in their fandoms), but we can't do any This One Ship/Fandom/Character = All the Problems in Society/Fandom equations. In individual examples it just breaks down, because the way we human beings consume fiction is so intensely personal and complicated that it is impossible to say why anybody likes (or ships) anything without talking to them in some depth - and even then, they may not understand it themselves. Even when a canon - say old canons in particular - might be in itself unquestionably racist, you can't even make the equation that everyone who likes it or is fannish about it is themselves racist, because, as I said, the reasons why we consume fiction and how we interpret it are so complex and personal, you would definitely at least need to at least be getting into algebra or something other than simple addition or multiplication.
no subject
Also re. the racism, while it is there (our society is racist, our mainstream media including our fandom canons reflect that, and fandom is part of society and therefore also biased and racist), you can't do that sum as proof with one canon and one specific ship. People who are strongly drawn to an F/M foe!yay ship (or possibly an F/M Beauty and the Beast trope), are unlikely to ship an M/M hero-buddy-type ship anyway. And those tropes have been popular in fandom forever; they didn't suddenly pop up to enable people to avoid shipping the supposedly 'progressive' ship here or anywhere else. We can point to overall trends, racist bias in finding white actors more attractive overall (therefore often the hub of shipping in their fandoms), but we can't do any This One Ship/Fandom/Character = All the Problems in Society/Fandom equations. In individual examples it just breaks down, because the way we human beings consume fiction is so intensely personal and complicated that it is impossible to say why anybody likes (or ships) anything without talking to them in some depth - and even then, they may not understand it themselves. Even when a canon - say old canons in particular - might be in itself unquestionably racist, you can't even make the equation that everyone who likes it or is fannish about it is themselves racist, because, as I said, the reasons why we consume fiction and how we interpret it are so complex and personal, you would definitely at least need to at least be getting into algebra or something other than simple addition or multiplication.
*hugs*