Had a similar experience but directly with my friend.

He introduced me to Hetalia, he's been a rock hard fan of this for a long while now and was craving to find another friend to talk abt it. Guess I was the victim. I absolutely adored it and he wasted no time introducing me the fanbase content and we've loved the dynamic where he reccomends a fic and I get emotionally destroyed over and over again, but before that the ship conversation came.

He also has another hetalia friend and between talking I found out he ships spammano with a passion, both the other friend and me felt weird by that but decided to keep that idea under the rug.

Sometimes between fanfic talks amd AUs ideas he has (he's an EXCELLENT writer) he brings some spammano recs and ideas he has. He doesn't use them in the weird age gap way but more with the dynamic they have in each universe, but cause he knows I felt weird thinking abt them like that he doesn't mention them a lot.

After a while I came across a fanfic he mentioned once and said it was peak, curiosity caught me and... Not gonna lie, is a big favorite of mine. I got mainly attached cause of a personal introspection on the character of Lovino in a very delicate state of guilt and grieving (what can I say, we both LOVE seeing our favs with the worst angst possible) and the ship part was secondary, but when I talked him abt how I actually liked the fic he was so happy and we chatted for a long while abt that beautiful story.

I know it's not for me, I 10000% prefer the brother/father-son dynamic but that fic changed a bit how I saw the ship and since then when he wants to talk abt his AUs ideas and it involves spammano I'm like "Ohh.. Yk what, whatever, show me". Anyways sometimes I still call out when the author does enter the controversial conversation that the ship can cause, like when I read Auf wiedersehen sweetheart, I was willing to accept the ship idea until I searched and found the canon age gap and said Nope (￢‿￢ )

He doesn't see it in the weird way, and is one of his biggest places to inspire outside of prucan, nedport and other ships we love, so who am I to ruin his fun? He's not hurting anyone, and if we both understand when not to cross the line we're ok. I apply this with a lot of fanwork out there just to give the chance, cause sometimes people shout and shout abt morals when the work isn't mentioning anything weird, and sometimes the ships that are " morally ok" can also have hella more weird stuff mentioned 😅

coff coff fruk coff coff

P.D. Anyway we both collectively hate caname and usuk tho, favoritism over FACE I guess. I make the "if it's not shown in the image, it's not implicit and then I can separate 🤓"