fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #4089 ]

[ SECRET POST #4089 ]

⌈ Secret Post #4089 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

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Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
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When did organized, self-identified anti-shippers/"antis" become a thing? Are they an outgrowth of regular ship wars (Kataang/Zutara, Harmonians vs. Dramione vs. Harry/Ginny, etc.), and when did opposing certain ships on moral grounds become such a significant part of fandom?

When SJ became an accepted weapon to use in ship wars.

I think there were elements to it on LiveJournal, but I think tumblr's feature of being able to create single-purpose sockpuppets made it mainstream.

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

When message boards, communities, and other more regimented fandom spaces went poof or became ghost towns and were mostly replaced by tumblr and twitter and other “wild west” fandom spaces without clearly defined boundaries, would be my guess.

Especially with stuff like tumblr mobile picking up on any use of a term, preceded by “anti” or not, and making it look like a tag. Suddenly mudslinging between groups of opposing fans wasn’t metaphorically someone in one group reporting on the ridiculous/wrong/evil/stupid shit that they spied another fandom/ship doing in another house down the block. Instead they were all doing shit to annoy each other in one or two big rooms that had constantly shifting partitions made of glass for walls that sometimes vanished entirely.

Oh yeah, "tagging" is not community.

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

When the quickest way to shut down an argument shifted from "point and laugh at whoever disagrees with you" to "accuse your opponent of being problematic." There was always some of this, but Tumblr gets blamed because it removed a lot of the obstacles by severely limiting the ability to actually have a discussion about a given topic. Tumblr, by the nature of the platform, shifted us from livejournal-style catfights to more of a high school gossip model. So instead of communities devoted to convoluted meta about the comparative merits of pumpkin pie and waterfowl, you get "anyone who ships X is a racist homophobe, pass it on!"

As far as early places where this behavior was present, some of the seeds of "anti"-ism were there in the anti-Twilight community - attacking and ridiculing Twilight fans, arguing that Twilight was morally damaging to young women, and that the books' messages to young women would negatively influence their behavior in real life.

Which, personally, is all true.

I'm sorry you had so little guidance in your life that you let a book series have so much influence over it.

DA
Yeah, I'm not a friend of Twilight myself but I did read a lot of creepy stories when I was a kid and still didn't turn into a serial killer...

+1

The Twilight hatedom really did lay a lot of the groundwork.

Antis have been a thing in some form or other as long as fandom has existed, afaik. I don't know a ton about pre-Trek fandom history, but since fanfiction and stuff like that existed I'm sure people frothing at the mouth about other people's fannish opinions existed as well.

Final Fantasy 7 was probably my first exposure to the concept of antis (though we didn't call them that back then). Although many fans liked and shipped both Aeris AND Tifa with Cloud, there were also a hell of a lot of people who stanned one or the other. The ship wars were fairly vicious, with lots of flames left on fics of the "wrong" ship and lots of anti-Tifa/Aeris meta being written. At the height of it I even knew of a couple of anti-Aeris and anti-Tifa shrines. Like, entire websites dedicated to why one girl or the other was awful.

Then Harry Potter came along and somehow the fanwank managed to be even worse. It was a bigger fandom for a bigger canon, and there were a lot more rival ships. Plus, HP happened when fandom was transitioning to spaces like LJ where people were congregating in bigger communities, which allowed there to be a lot more friction between people. (Before, a lot of fandom took place on moderated forums/messageboards or on individual personal websites. It was easy to leave a flame on someone's fic before LJ, but hard to harass them since they didn't have any sort of journal or social media to stalk.)

HP also added ship "purity" to the mix, due to the blood purity politics and real-world allegories present in the book. That meant that antis weren't just outraged bc a ship rustled their jimmies, they were outraged bc if you shipped Dramione you were RACIST!!!1!

The same sorts of patterns happen in most fandoms if they're large enough, particularly if certain factors are present like if there's rival ships or the fandom primarily appeals to teen or young adult women. (Not a whole lot of antis in something like Call of Duty fandom.) Someone mentioned Twilight above. Supernatural is another great example (Wincest vs Destiel).

Around the same time as Twilight and SPN taking off, social justice was becoming a major MAJOR talking point in fandom. Like, it's always been a thing (bc fandom has always had a lot of queer, disabled, or otherwise minority-status women in it). But in the mid-00s in the final heyday years of LJ it really took off with things like sf_drama, fanficrants, and others directly connecting fandom spaces and discourse to social justice spaces and discourse.

As everyone jumped ship to tumblr, the general fandom trend towards social justice continued. But tumblr combined the formats (and posting cultures) of LJ/FB and 4chan/anon imageboards in way that was perfect for antis to thrive. Tumblr encourages people to use it as a blog, putting personal info out there for trolls to harvest. But it also lacks any sort of moderation or method to keep people from trolling other users. And the lack of organized communities on the site means that small micro-communities form, often with their own distinct cultures. This helps encourage the weird drank-the-koolaid cultish mentality you see among a lot of groups of antis, because they're able to isolate themselves in their own fannish bubble where they can say whatever they want.

tl;dr they've always been around to some extent, but modern fandom culture made them more plentiful

...because they're able to isolate themselves in their own fannish bubble where they can say whatever they want.

I dunno, though. I remember plenty of message boards and communities that were echo chambers and bubbles. But they were more discrete than they are now, where there’s only a couple humongous fandom platforms that host pretty much everything in one big stew of opinions.

I can think of four or five separate message board/forums for one of my fandoms, not counting the fringe ones that only certain fans with axes to grind hung out on, and big disagreements within a fandom would spawn splinter forums or fansites. Now when groups of fans disagree, where thd fuck do they go so the opposing factions can calm down or at least glower at each other and snark about each other from a bit of a remove? For a lot of fandoms, there’s just twitter and tumblr, and some fandoms are only active on one or the other.

There’s no distance, and no way to get any. Fans and antis (haters/flamers/whatever else we used to call them) can’t really get away from each other.

I'm of the strong opinion that online communities need three things: people, boundaries, and a big fat banhammer.

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepis!

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[ SECRET POST #4089 ]

When did "antis" become a thing?

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Let me give you some history!

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