I haven't scratched my head this much over fannish terminology since back when I first stumbled into HP and wondered wtf the "lemons" were everybody was talking about. We're not even talking about a new term or even a new-to-me term. It's an extremely common one, in fact: OTP.

Silly me, I peeked at metafandom today, read a very interesting essay on the importance of being aware on the context and baggage terms may have, then trotted off to read the comment elsewhere from which it had sprung. And apparently at issue is the idea that the very term OTP is confrontational and carries the implication that everyone else's pairing is wrong.

Um, what?

Not that I haven't seen ship wars. "My OTP is better than your OTP" isn't unusual. "My OTP has more canon to back it up than yours" is one I've seen lots too. "My OTP is THE One True Pairing and thus all others are invalid/stupid/squicky/whatever," though, is one that I've apparently been blessedly sheltered from. Since 2006. Which isn't that long, compared to many if not most of my flist, but also isn't exactly yesterday. In some of the wankiest fandoms on the internet, though I'm reminded daily that apparently the longer-lived a fandom is, the more batshittery it has time to breed.

At issue in particular is Ten/Rose versus Everyone Else, so maybe this is a primarily DW thing? Because I've grown very accustomed to people talking about their slash/het/femslash/crossover/insertothermodifierhere OTP, which implies that, for starters, they don't have just one true pairing at all, even just for themselves, never mind declaring it to be the only valid pairing for everyone. As I suggested in the comment I will probably live to regret having written, perhaps a better catch-all term would be MFP for "my favorite pairing," but I don't see that catching on anytime soon, if for no other reason than that using MF as a modifier for anything is just begging for trouble.

So, um, thoughts? Am I really that out of step to find such a literal interpretation of OTP a bit odd?

Meanwhile, I should get cracking writing and drawing stuff I got prompts for at hpcon_envy for a couple of my OTPs.