Salting sour fruits i.e. lemons makes them sweeter. The salt reacts with the sour acids to make a more neutral chemical. It kills the sour so you can taste the sweet.

Wow. I had no idea! Ya learn smtg new every day 😀

Maybe that applies to fandom in some way, too… bc the joke “When you’re motivated to write smut out of spite,” that’s being salty about someone’s sour opinion about a ship, I would guess, and OP writing smut of that ship just to rebel, that’s the sour to the saltiness? 

Salty, sweet, sour, bitter, spicy, umami… all the flavors can be applied to fandom, too, and they’re all of value. We consume canon, fanon, etc… we create our own. This is probably not any kind of definitive statement on flavor (partly bc they’re lumping umami and salty? oddly?) but this article has some interesting info on flavor interactions that could probably be applied to fiction/media/fanworks/etc….

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