fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #5743 ]

[ SECRET POST #5743 ]

⌈ Secret Post #5743 ⌋

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

01.

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02.

[What We Do In The Shadows]

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03.

[RPGs in general]

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04.

[We are Lady Parts]

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05.

[Usada Pekora]

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06.

[Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles]

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07.

[Cheers]

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08.

[The Princess Bride]

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09.

[Overwatch]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 40 secrets from Secret Submission Post #822.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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I'm really not sure, I have nothing more to offer than my own experiences. I think it all began with early 2020 when COVID hit and BLM was reaching another fever pitch, I was 14 when this all started and I noticed how social media expects teens to dedicate their entire internet lives to basically being activists.

Alot of teens (me included) developed extreme attachments to their favorite medias and characters because they couldn't do much socializing since everything was closed. Of course, people used this attachment and desire to advocate for a good cause to manipulate teens into pushing stupid bullshit like the whole "antishipper" beliefs. Plus, in the United States, we already have such a weird attitude towards things like pedophilia and incest in fiction that it's pretty easy to get American teens to think that writing about incest = approving of real life incest and shit like that.

Sorry if my writing here is nonsensical lol. I'm sure somewhere like Pillowfort has some meta-discussion about it.

Edited 2022-09-26 21:24 (UTC)

It definitely predates the pandemic, although everybody being way more online post-pandemic definitely kicked it up a notch.

If I was trying to trace it way back, I would say it started c. 2009, when fandom had its first big reckoning with racism in fandom. Which was good thing, don't get me wrong! But it also demonstrated to non-conservative fans that claiming certain stories/pairings were harmful for Good Moral Reasons was something they could do too, it wasn't just limited to crazy Christians who hate gays, and misogynist men! It also worked if you claimed you were doing it for good leftist reasons! So it took like zero time after that for people to adopt it from the good-faith antiracists as a method for bullying, silence and abuse.

It's been building in prominence since then, though, and the rise of social media platforms where it's much, much easier to bully strangers, and the just plain larger *numbers* of young teens openly active in fandom, have made it a lot more prominent.

But Anti(shipper)s as a named group with recognizable tactics goes back at least to c. 2016 when I first encountered it.

I don't know much about earlier antiship-esque activity, but I do know that weird far-right nonsense in fandom has been happening since the early 2000s and probably even a bit earlier (reminds me of the doubleca5t video about the Ms.Scribe saga with the anti-slash Christians in the Harry Potter fandom).

I notice that people in fandom keep bouncing between topics they fight over. First it was homophobia, then it was racism, now it's incest/pedophilia/other taboo sex things. Makes me wonder what's next.

It's much older than that, sadly. I was seeing huge dogpiles with false pedophilia accusations on Tumblr as early as 2014, in Sherlock fandom of all places - a show with no non-adult main characters at all!

You're right that it really picked up speed with the pandemic though. More people being more extremely online, teenagers not going to physical school, etc. And honestly more overlap with conspiracy theory groups like QAnon. It's not a coincidence that the "groomer" accusation became trendy in fandom and on the far right at about the same time.

It seems that this sort of stuff keeps picking up steam whenever society has another pedophile scare. I know that there was a lot of debate and fear about it in the 2000s, was the whole pedo-accusations of 2010s fandom a remnant of that?

I have a feeling that QAnon and antishippers are more intrinsically linked then seems apparent at first glance. I know it sounds a bit outlandish, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if far-righters are using fandom as a way to recruit teens.

One common effect that both have is hypervigilance, which makes people have pedophilia on the brain all the time, to the point of seeing it where it doesn't exist. I've seen at least three different pile-ons of artists who created work that, to someone who isn't whipped up into a frenzy by one of these cults, looks completely innocent and G-rated. Nothing sexual at all. To see pedophilia there, you'd have to be in a state of mind where you believe it's literally everywhere and you just have to "decode" something to see it. It's like those facebook memes about "signs" that white suburban moms are going to be "trafficked" out of the Target parking lot. If someone is in a state of fear and rage like that all the time, they're easy to manipulate by people promising safety and punishment for the "bad" people.

They both overemphasize "stranger danger" when the fact is that most children who are sexually abused are victimized by someone they know and have been conditioned to trust.

I think a lot of it comes down to actual abusers manufacturing this whole scare too. Think about it: you scare teens into thinking that pedophiles are all around them, but you convince them that because you are against these "pedophiles", that they can trust you. This is why there has been so many instances of grooming and manipulation within the antiship circle.

Knowing how many older fandom puritans have turned out to be groomers, I'm convinced this is it.

And their friends defend them because all that matters is that their fictional ships are healthy and the characters they like are unproblematic.

+1

It's all about the appearance of being healthy and wholesome. The better you are at presenting that outwardly, the more harm you can do.

This. It's all about having the right opinions and saying the right things, rather than actually doing the right thing. It's about appearing to be a perfect good person rather than actually putting effort into being a good person, even if you make mistakes.

AYRT

Yes, this. It's very common for real abusers to participate in a moral panic to divert attention from what they're doing, and for people to follow along blindly because they want to be seen as good people, and after all, the accusation is about the worst thing you can accuse somebody of, surely there must be some evidence for it, right? Right? (In reality even asking for evidence will put you on the sus list)

And also in some cases they don't want to deal with a difficult reality close to home, like a child is being abused by a family friend or a youth group pastor or a BNF who's actually showing minors porn all the time (under the guise of "look how evil this is") while encouraging them to open up about their trauma in private messages.

DA I made a secret about this a little while ago, but it hasn't been posted yet. But yeah, the constant moral panic about everything makes it very hard to address the behavior of the actual bad actors in fandom because it creates a smokescreen and diverts attention to people who aren't harming anyone with their fictional creations.

Pedophiles have basically become the only remaining group of people it is OK to unconditionally hate. You can't hate people based on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, appearance, weight, or religion anymore, at least not without being accused of being the bad guys yourselves and getting banned from Cloudflare, and hating people based on their political beliefs puts you at risk of having to defend your own political beliefs. And rapists and wifebeaters, sure, they're bad, but that *particular* one had an excuse, okay, so we'll uncancel that one.

But we can all get together to stone pedophiles to death! Nobody dares defend a pedophile!

And therefore if you want to whip a mob up into a frenzy of hate against someone you basically have to accuse them of being a pedophile, all the other excuses are too complicated now.

To be honest, I think there's sort of a distinction between fandom anti behavior on one hand and the broader societal trend towards puritanism on the other. They're obviously related but they're very different things.

With the fandom stuff, honestly, I think it's mostly just the fact that the sex-positive YKINMK attitude is something that people as a whole never signed on to. It was an ideal within Livejournal fandom that many people subscribed to, especially in the circles that eventually made and were identified with AO3. But even during that time period, it was absolutely not something that everyone agreed with. And there was no real cultural compact requiring everyone to sign up to that attitude. So as fandom expanded, it was inevitable that there would be cultural clashes around that idea. And that took the form of inflamed online crazy mob shit, because that's how the Internet in the age of social media mostly works.

YKINMK was agreed upon, though, simply by the fact that the bullying of people who wrote Not My Kink didn't happen. Was it always the case that most people hated the kinks they came across that weren't theirs, or hated kink entirely? Probably. But they kept the hate to themselves, and that's exactly what YKINMK is. It covers everything from "I am totally fine with seeing this kink, it just doesn't quite do it for me" to "I hate this kink with a burning passion, but I'm not going to make that anyone else's problem."

I think the idea that no one ever fought about kinks before 2009 is probably not correct. There were specific social circles where that was true, but I don't think it's a correct statement about pre-2009 fandom in general.

Like, there were times during that period where people would fight about whether *slash* was acceptable to write, let alone kinks.

I have a pet theory that it started with Twilight. Twilight wasn't just bad because you didn't like it or because it was a YA supenatural romance and you weren't a teen girl. No, it was bad because it was *harmful*. It was bad because it promoted *abuse*. It was bad because these poor innocent female babies were having their heads filled with evil, warping, *problematic* fiction. Seriously, it all sounds like Anti-Vomit now.

And fans, under attack with this rhetoric or joining in against a lower ranking fandom, noticed that it "worked" and adopted it.

That's a very good point! I also have a hypothesis of my own: teen fans that promote this pseudo-puritanism are unconsciously parroting what they have heard from far-right groups made of mostly older people, even though said teens would vehemently deny this.

Was there a particular outcry against Twilight from these sorts of groups when it first got popular?

I don't think this is really true, all of those arguments long predate Twilight and Twilight wasn't really a watermark thing in fandom to my recollection.

They did, but '''''fandom'''' didn't give a shit about Tipper Gore or the Comics Code authority or parental advisory stickers on CDs.

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[ SECRET POST #5743 ]

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DA

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