[ SECRET POST #5953 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5953 ⌋

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


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 25 secrets from Secret Submission Post #851.
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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I think the reason why "anti" as a term is confusing is because (1) not all fandoms have anti/proship camps/factions/squabbling (so for people outside these fandoms, it's easy to just not know what antis are or why people are so upset over them), and (2) it used to be the case that people openly self-identified as "anti"s, but there has been such a fandom-wide backlash to and criticism of being anti that now people who have the exact same opinions that old antis had will be coy about whether they identify as an anti, often saying outright that they are not an anti (but...).

To me, the core of being an anti (whether or not someone self-identifies as an anti) is believing that one's fictional tastes reflect one's actual values and that writing morally bad content is promoting those bad morals in wider society and therefore is a harmful act. So if you read/write non-con, you are a rape apologist. If you read/write incest, you are an abuse apologist (because all incest is abusive for antis). If you read/write underage content, you are a pedophile.

A lot of antis' terrible behaviors are downstream of this core belief: If you think someone is literally a pedophile based on a fic they posted to AO3, then yes, it is morally justified to call out, warn people about, and harass that person out of fandom. If you think fiction with certain relationships is inherently harmful, then yes, it makes sense to want to ban or suppress content for it or try to demonetize platforms that host such content. These are all things that antis do, and like someone above mentioned, the analogy to other conservative movements like anti-abortion and book-banning campaigns is clear, not necessarily in the opinions themselves (antis are not anti-abortion) but in the notion that a conviction of something being inherently harmful (which is NOT agreed upon in fandom) leading to fervent campaigns that essentially have the effect of curtailing liberties and free speech, and inflicting harm on so-called "bad" people ("abusers"). (Think about the anti-abortion analogy and how anti-abortion people believe it is justified to blow up or threaten to blow up clinics or to issue death threats to doctors who perform abortion procedures, because they believe the moral stakes are so high -- lives are literally at stake here!)

One thing that makes the whole anti/proship debate also more confusing is that antis tend to engage in ridiculous behaviors even beyond what I described above. In particular, antis tend to slot rival pairings into one of the "bad pairing" categories on very tenuous grounds and then accuse anyone who ships that pairing of being a rape apologist/abuse apologist/pedophile. Take for instance Klance shippers in VLD fandom -- they are infamous for accusing a rival ship (Sheith) of being abusive because of a mentor/mentee relationship and an age gap that honestly is not a big issue/would not necessarily be a problem in real life, and then on that basis engage in callouts and harassment because anyone who is a Sheith shipper must therefore be an abuser and predator openly operating in fandom. Or you'd get Amethyst/Peridot shippers accusing the rival Lapis/Peridot ship of being pedophilia because Peridot, while she is a sentient gemstone cartoon character with no clear age or maturity, is nevertheless "child-coded" in her depiction because she is short and has a childish personality.

Even if you did believe in the core beliefs of antis (that what you read/write in fiction maps 1-to-1 onto your real-life sexual tastes and morals), this reaching is unjustified and ridiculous, so antis get widely mocked for this kind of desperate ship war rationalization behavior, which of course is very old in fandom!

But in my opinion, anti vs. proship isn't about how fervently you engage in ship wars (which antis trying to rebrand now make it out to be; by being quiet about their anti status, they now accuse proshippers of "taking shipping too seriously" by having a whole identity based around shipping and therefore being the REAL bad guys in fandom who need to grow up and get a life) but more about what your model is of hurt and harm in fandom (do you think shipping is tantamount to abuse and is hurting real people?) which tends to lead to unpleasant and antisocial behaviors if you think posting noncon/incest/underage fanfiction to AO3 is essentially being a groomer/abuser.

[(Anonymous)]

this is a great comment that summs it up perfectly, thank you!