mechastation: That last bit’s about newmann, huh
Assuming you’re serious and not a troll: not the ship. More the shitty, shitty, shitty way that certain people who do ship it react to learning about Vanessa Gottlieb.
See, for example, 10,000,000 posts in the Vanessa Gottlieb tag giving lots of reasons about why she doesn’t really “count” as canon. They range from factually wrong (only in one source!) to misogyny (if she’s a model, she must be stupid, and there’s no way she is _________! so it’s implausible she is married to hermann!) to biphobia (queer identities are important, and we should promote them in fandom, and how can Hermann be queer if he’s married to a woman?) to deeply ugly, racially-tinged stuff where people actually post things that say it’s okay to ignore Vanessa because she is “exotic” or since she is only in canon to be a “prize” for the white dude.
I don’t know how much of that gets posted regularly because I have a large and extensive ignore list, so I only see the people who haven’t posted Vanessa hate to the tag. On the other hand, so much of what I saw was from the same damn playbook that fandom ALWAYS takes when criticizing women of color, particularly and especially black women who “get in the way” of ships where the characters in said ships are played by white people – see the stuff that was said, for example, by Sterek shippers in Teen Wolf fandom about Braeden.
My all-time favorite shit-talking about Vanessa Gottlieb in her tag, which you might see if you go back far enough, is the one who said that the idea of Hermann being married to Vanessa Gottlieb made them “viscerally” ill. :D :D Good to know that the idea of a white man being in a loving, committed relationship with a black woman grosses at least one person out that much! :D :D
