[ SECRET POST #6539 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6539 ⌋

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


01.



__________________________________________________



02.



__________________________________________________



03.



__________________________________________________



04.



__________________________________________________



05.



__________________________________________________



06.



__________________________________________________



07.
















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 37 secrets from Secret Submission Post #935.
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)]

Hm... as someone who is in fandoms with antis and fandoms without antis, it's a lot easier to be chill about other fans' behavior in the fandoms without antis. Once you know there are active antis operating in your fandoms, it IS really hard to do anything fannish in that fandom without also keeping fairly detailed tabs on who the antis are or might possibly be. The reason why is that antis make the stakes really high. You have no idea what they are going to accuse you of and to who and how they are going to use personal information you might mention offhand against you.

For this reason, I just CANNOT be in Discord servers where there are antis who might see/screencap my messages and share it out of context without me knowing, or who might use references to places I've lived to figure out my wallet name and dox me. Also, antis are much more crypto about their opinions nowadays, so it often takes me months sharing servers with antis before they drop offhand that they think "noncon fic endorses rape" or that "people who write an underage ship must necessarily be attracted to children or then why else would they write that?" Because of that, I need to be VERY meticulous about monitoring what people say in my fandom spaces, and I need to infer from social connections who is also likely to be an anti based on how they interact with the public anti-adjacent content of people I know to be antis. This "keeping tabs" and "doing background checks" sounds insane from an outsider's perspective and just as cliqueish and gossip-y about other fans as antis are, but this is a necessary act of self-preservation not because this is fandom but because it is specifically a fandom *with a contingent of active antis* who think their opinions about the damage of fiction are objectively correct and will harass and make extreme accusations about fans who write fiction they don't like as a direct result of that conviction.

Also, there are some important differences between the anti harassment behavior and the paranoid proshipper behavior. Namely, I do not harass or dox antis for any reason, and the reason why antis are not welcome in my spaces is because of the way they treat real people, not based on the art they consume or produce.

Anyway, my main point here is that I think a lot of the suspicion and paranoia that proshippers have in fandoms that have a significant set of antis -- while obviously undesirable -- is just rational and unavoidable because of the dangers of letting even ONE anti into a semi-private space like a Discord server, and the dangers of not warning unknowing bystanders off antis (who often don't appear to antis on the surface because, as I mentioned, antis are more crypto nowadays) and possibly implying by reblogging their content that I as a proshipper think they are also a proshipper when this is not in fact the case. A lot of behavior like keeping tabs on people and doing background checks and avoiding anyone who doesn't put "proship" on their bio is in fact needed to protect yourself in fucked-up fandoms.

[(Anonymous)]

Personally, I think it takes two to tango in our recent fandom atmosphere because both sides make it unbearable for each other they are just far too blind to notice that.

For example when I was a baby (16-18) I could participate in secret santa events because they were all for general audiences, but recently most of them are 18+ because people insist allowing nsfw into the event.

My personal experience was that even after I cut connection with a proshipper friend of mine and blocked them on all fronts because there came a moment when I couldn't really bear their gaslighting, dismissive and passive agressive behaviour anymore. They apparently did the same, yet somehow always tailed me in the fandom even attempting to push me out of my own spaces and talk behind my back that lead me to be under heavy monitoring and landed me with several blocks from mutuals. Nobody even asked why I blocked that person, they just assumed it was my ascension to "antidom" not a response to several months worth of abuse because the reality doesn't suit the narrative they want to apply there.

For me the whole state of fandoms feels like when people living in the GDR would report their neighbours for suspicious activities and calling the agencies if someone's hat just tipped a bit forward. Except both sides are actively reporting on each other.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT.

That experience sucks and I'm sorry that you've experienced that kind of behavior in fandom -- I am also no stranger to these kinds of gossipy/talking-about-people-behind-their-back dynamics in fandom. However, I think you are either not understanding or just ignoring my larger point?

I am not denying that proshipper behavior can be paranoid and antisocial; that was my point. I am saying that ultimately this is what happens when you have a fandom culture where at any point in time someone might dox or harass you based on their feelings about the immorality of fiction. When you have people like this in fandom, the walls come up. For exmaple, when you said that you feel like you're living in a society where neighbors are constantly grassing on each other, that is exactly how I also feel as a proshipper! I am only disagreeing with the "it takes two to tango" -- actually, no, it only takes active antis in fandom in order to turn everyone -- anti or no -- into paranoid behavior police. I am merely pointing out that, causally speaking, it is antis who start this behavior, and the proshipper paranoia is the inevitable result. I do not see paranoid behavior like this happening in fandoms where there is no anti presence, even though everyone is a proshipper by default and vocally agrees with the proship position. I ONLY see it in fandoms where there is a history of anti harassment and people being vocal about calling people pedophiles on the basis of the fic they write.

I also think you are conflating the behavior of individual people who subscribe to anti vs. proship positions with the *morality* of the anti and proship positions themselves. Toxic people like your ex-friend have existed since I've been in fandom, long before antis and proshippers were a thing. As people have mentioned above, the anti position is (IMO) inherently immoral and toxic. There is no "nice" way to be an anti IMO. This doesn't mean, however, that the opposite is true, that there is no "mean" way to be a proshipper... Undeniably, that person was stalkery, passive-aggressive, and shitty to you in a *specifically proshipper-flavored way.* However, (1) people who are toxic are always going to use whatever ideologies people around them buy into in order to continue to be abusive and harassing, and (2) that doesn't mean that there is a moral equivalence between the anti and proship positions just because you can find toxic people on both sides, or that "it takes two to tango." Sometimes you have to recognize that political opinions can be right or wrong regardless of how awful the people who espouse them are, and that's how I feel about anti and proship. Proshippers can be awful people. The proship position is still unambiguously right and the anti position is still unambiguously wrong.

IDK, I feel like we're kind of talking past each other here. I'm talking about a false moral equivalence being drawn between anti and proship positions and explaining how the root cause of proshipper paranoia is anti presence, whereas you seem to be making the point that it is possible to be toxic in a very proshipper way, which... yes. I agree. Because it is possible to be toxic in an X way, for all X. I just do NOT agree with the framing that proshippers are equally culpable as antis in making a toxic fandom environment. Individual people can be toxic and justify their toxicity through whatever ideology including proship ideology. And even non-toxic proshippers can contribute to the toxic paranoia in fandoms, but only when antis have made their presence known in the fandom first. Once antis show up and flex their muscles, it's a downward paranoia spiral and the only way to salvage social spaces in the fandom is to police membership carefully to keep antis out, which contributes to fandom paranoia. But the root cause of the widespread paranoia is antis, not proshippers.

DA

[(Anonymous)]

+1

Seeing the reaction to all of this has led me to the conclusion that this is the exact same thinking that got the US into this mess for the second time: "Sure, repubs/antis are bad, but dems/proship haven't been doing enough/are assholes/a dem/proship was mean to me once/aren't pleasing me in particular, so they're both bad and I refuse to support the ones who aren't making things shitty." Same story, different names.

It's also very telling when someone says it "takes two to tango" when the tango is a bully relationship and the victim fights back. It depends on victim blaming which only ever helps the bully.

[(Anonymous)]

For example when I was a baby (16-18) I could participate in secret santa events because they were all for general audiences, but recently most of them are 18+ because people insist allowing nsfw into the event.

I'm genuinely not seeing the issue here. If the majority of the people who sign up for the secret Santa are over 18 and are okay with creating/receiving 18+ content, why shouldn't that be allowed? There's nothing stopping people from running all-ages secret Santas if they want, and surely if there are enough people in the fandom who aren't interested in 18+ content then there won't be any shortage of offers to contribute.

[(Anonymous)]

Majority of fandoms are too small for two santas and some people will sign up for everything, but then fall out midway.(And let me not bring up how badly they are organized.) Personally, I pefer all-ages events too with a separate nsfw side, because I see that lot of oldschool community building methods are being forgotten once the veterans leave and 18-22 years old creators are standing dumbfounded in front of something as simple as a ship week or exchange.

[(Anonymous)]

+1