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[prosshi]

@the-great-ladyg Hope you don't mind I'm answering in a post, hun, I just have a lot to say about this!!

I think the reason Antis don't attack big name authors it's because Antis are "brainless". And no I don't mean this in the ableist sense, I mean this in the sense that they don't think for themselves. They're victims of mass media fearmongering, they like or dislike whatever is dictated by the general level of current tolerance.

Everyone has read big name author books with questionable themes. The thing is, nobody brings that up because it, genuinely, doesn't matter. So the public doesn't ponder about the nature of those questionable themes, and if they do, because the general public it's a lot more smart than Antis give them credit for, disregard it as simple fictional content and for what it is: As something that doesn't matter.

Now, because there's been such an upraise in fandom puritanism in the last few years ―I'm not sure why but what I am sure of is that there's not just one source of why―, people do stop and ponder about these things. And because there is a widespread fear and sense of "urgency" and "danger" about these things, Antis thusly are born.

Think of it as the tide-pod challenge a few years back. There most likely wasn't a huge number of kids who did it; a big part of the reason many did was because of the mass media reports about the subject. But Gen-Z got blamed and labeled and attacked for it just because there was a mass media panic about an issue that pretty much no one was seriously considering at the time.

Same with proshipping. The amount of proshippers who do genuine harm is nothing compared to the amount of proshippers who are just normal, everyday people. Mass panicking over this only breeds more hostility towards proshippers, who are in turn more reachable and brought up in reachable social media; i.e. TikTok, Twitter, etc.

[prosshi]

So this happened. On The Proship Fanfic Site.

I responded nicely. Starting with “Thank you for attaching your name so I’ll be sure you’ll receive this response!”

[prosshi]

You know, one time I read a fanfic and it triggered my psychosis, sent me into a month long episode THEN a whole year later I was on ao3 just mindlessly scrolling, I came across the fanfic title and it gave me a panic attack, but something compelled me to click it, i didn't read it but i did scroll through it, why? mental illness.

So like... ya

This is me responding to your old(?) post about someone else's fiction not being able to hurt you, this is probably just a me thing but mental illness makes you do things and react to things in insane ways that sometimes you cant control. I knew while reading that it was affecting me in some way, but I kept reading because well, I'm mentally ill, and then a month of my life dissapeared lol

I think I'm trying to make a point about something but I'm not sure

I did after the fact comment to the author and just kinda, told them about what happened, but I didn't harrassed them or something, -

-but when something does what this fanfiction did to me then you're basically obligated to let the creator know I think(they are a really good writer), I'm an adult and the fanfic was in the ballpark of something I would read and if like, 59% of it was taken out and it had a happy ending I would be fine but oh well

Oh boy, I'm starting to have a panic attack just typing this out holy hell anyways uh, I'm not disagreeing with you(?) but I am saying, don't be too quick to dismiss someone who says a piece of fiction fucked with them? idk sorry, have a good one

My friend, the fiction didn't harm you.

Your mental illness harmed you.

Random writers on the internet are not responsible for managing your mental illness for you.

You are responsible for managing your mental illness.

I knew while reading that it was affecting me in some way, but I kept reading because well, I'm mentally ill

This is self harm. You were engaging in self-harming behavior by continuing to read a fanfiction that you knew was triggering to you.

👉 You are responsible for managing your mental illness.

👉 Writers are not responsible for managing your mental illness for you.

And I hate to tell you this but messaging the author about it was absolutely harassing the author.

[prosshi]

This zine, and I cannot over emphasize how funny this is, is for Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire

[prosshi]

I wish age gap discourse hadn't spiraled the way it has because I want there to be a safe space to say "Men in their 40s who date 25 year olds aren't predators, they're just fucking losers"

[prosshi]

I think the funniest thing I learnt today was that antis DID try to make their own ao3, but the restrictions made it impossible to do anything.

Nobody on the site could agree on one solid concept of "moral" and "immoral", so it spawned a plethora of huge arguments and the site had to be shut down.

And the tagline was "good fiction for good people."

Make of all that as you will.

[prosshi]

"not an anti not a proshipper but a secret third thing (adult with a job and bills)"

I CANNOT keep explaining to people that framing having a job as 1) exclusive of having fandom hobbies and 2) what makes someone an "adult" is both ableist and framing "productivity" as more important than anything else, especially in a time of horrible unemployment and nearly unchecked exploitation of workers. Join some anarchist and anti-work movements and then get back to me.

[prosshi]

sorry every age gap is problematic now. yeah the only ethical relationship left is twincest it's the only way to avoid a power dynamic

[prosshi]

I absolutely will die on this hill, access to fiction that makes your skin crawl and open discussion about it is the best way to keep that skin crawling fiction from happening in reality.

It doesn't matter if it is ~positively~ or negatively portrayed. If you censor it, we don't talk about it, then we can't protect against it.

[prosshi]

People seem to have forgotten that "proship" was the Fandom norm for the longest time.

Only, it wasn't called proship. It was called ship and let ship. Or minding your own buisness.

If someone had a ship you didn't like or thought was gross, you would avoid them. If they drew art or wrote stories you didn't agree with or like, you would ignore them.

There were tags like smut, whump, and angst to tell people about things they might not want to read. And then dead dove: do not eat for taboo subjects and especially gritty fic.

Then people started to ignore that. Younger fans started to bully people because they disagreed with shipping certain characters. Whether it be because it "wasn't canon", they thought it was gross, or they just didn't like it.

These people began calling themselves "anti-ship"

Pro-ship became a label to show that someone was against anti-ship.

Eventually, the anti-ship movement began to die down. So do you know what they did? They started accusing people. Of being pedophiles, groomers, rape supporters, and more. All because they wrote or drew things that these people didn't like.

They began claiming that THEY were the Fandom norm, and that these "proshippers" were the bad people. They started claiming that proship stood for "problematic shipping"

Due to this, the term "pro-ship" is often misconstrued as to what it means. Many people don't even KNOW what it means.

It means "anti-censorship".

It means that we support someone's right to produce art, no matter how gross, no matter how taboo, no matter how "problematic"

Because it's not hurting anyone.

If it's something you don't want to see? Block the person. Block the tag. Say in your bio that you don't like it. That's what they're FOR!

This was discussed in earlier days of fandom.

"I wonder why people would read a story in a genre they don't care for, then take the time to let the writer know that sure enough, they didn't care for it. That would be like me going to a restaurant, ordering a slice of cherry pie, then asking that the chef be brought out so I can say "I don't like cherry pie, and I didn't like yours either." To continue this analogy into its usual fannish outcome, the chef would say "Well gee, lady, why did you order it?" And I'd say, "Are you questioning my right to order cherry pie?"

-Unknown 2002

Except now, it would be like the person who didn't like the cherry pie and ordered it anyways then demanded that no restaurant serve cherry pie because it was poison. Not only is it a ridiculous request, it's blatantly untrue.

[prosshi]

while i admit that i'm a little glad to see people starting to take anti's and their conservative bullshit a bit more seriously it is incredibly frustrating to see people being.... surprised? that antis would start trying to dictate what counts as a 'problematic'/predatory/grooming relationship in real life in ways that are incredibly harmful and ableist and queerphobic like

we've been telling y'all this is where they were headed for years now, you don't get to surprised pikachu face about it just because they've moved on to harassing people over their real life relationships as well as the fictional shipping ones when y'all were the ones going 'i'm above this debate and everyone involved in it is a fucking idiot'

we told you to take this seriously, we told you this would happen, and here we are. the antis have been sending us death threats, doxxing people and engaging in endless harassment campaigns for decades - over increasingly queerphobic, racist and ableist ideas of what is a 'problematic' ship - and it's been fucking ignored because it was just 'stupid fanwank'

and now we have people saying shit with their whole chest like

'if you knew your partner as a minor you're both predators getting off to the memory of them as a kid' - which comes from 'aging up characters to write about them having sex is bad'

'finding an autistic person attractive is predatory because people with autism are basically children mentally' - which comes from 'characters can be ""minor coded"" because of disability, behaviour and even height'

'even if you're both adults having an age gap over 2 years (or some other arbitrary number) means the older person is grooming the younger person' - which comes from similar age-gap 'discourse'

'african american people being in a relationship with white people & non-black POC is predatory because white people/non-black POC don't have the same depth of experience and mental maturity as black people (yes this is one i have actually seen someone say, not a straw man, tiktok is a wild place - i've also heard of similar musings about trans people being in relationships with cis folk but i can't recall a specific instance)' - which stems from the idea that all relationships must be equal in every way lest there be a power imbalance, because all power imbalances are inherently abusive

i have yet to stumble across a single accusation of 'problematic' real life arguments that doesn't have a deep root in anti-ship rhetoric and discourse. it's just now it's escaped the containment of fiction and people are getting harassed or judged over real life relationships as well.

[prosshi]

what if we distorted the word antiship the same way antis distorted the word proship

"antiship means you're okay with suicide baiting"

"you can't really be antiship, you support creators that wrote about (gasp) MURDER. I guess when you pay money for it, its different."

wait a second, both of these are true.

[prosshi]

I can and will take "if it doesn't hurt anyone it isn't wrong" to its extremes always, there is no exception, there is no making up reasons why something that makes me uncomfortable is wrong, I mean it with my whole heart and soul.

[prosshi]

Full offense and pun fully intended, but I genuinely think the very existence of "dead dove, do not eat" was a fucking canary in the mines, and no one really paid attention.

Because the tag itself was created as a response to a fandom-wide tendency to disregard warnings and assume tagging was exaggerated. And then the same fucking idiots reading those tags describing things they found upsetting or disturbing or just not to their taste would STILL click into the stories and give the writer's grief about it.

And as a response writers began using the tag to signal "no, really, I MEAN the tags!"

But like.

If you really think about it, that's a solution to a different problem. The solution to "I know you tagged your story appropriately but I chose to disregard the tags and warnings by reading it anyway, even though I knew it would upset me, so now I'm upset and making it your problem" is frankly a block, a ban and wide-spread blacklisting. But fandom as a whole is fucking awful at handling bad faith, insidious arguments that appeal to community inclusion and weaponize the fact most people participating in fandom want to share the space with others, as opposed to hurting people.

So instead of upfront ridiculing this kind of maladaptive attempt to foster one's own emotional self-regulation onto random strangers on the internet, fandom compromised and came up with a redundant tag in a good faith attempt to address an imaginary nuance.

There is no nuance to this.

A writer's job is to tag their work correctly. It's not to tag it exhaustively. It's not even to tag it extensively. A writer's sole obligation, as far as AO3 and arguably fandom spaces are concerned, is to make damn sure that the tags they put on their story actually match whatever is going on in that story.

That's it.

That's all.

"But what if I don't want to read X?" Well, you don't read fic that's tagged X.

"But what if I read something that wasn't tagged X?" Well, that's very unfortunate for you, but if it is genuinely that upsetting, you have a responsibility to yourself to only browse things explicitly tagged to not include X.

"But that's not a lot of fic!" Hi, you must be new here, yes, welcome to fandom. Most of our spaces are built explicitly as a reaction to There's Not Enough Of The Thing I Want, both in canon and fandom.

"But there are things on the internet that I don't like!" Yeah, and they are also out there, offline. And, here's the thing, things existing even though we personally dislike or even hate or even flat out find offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable existing is the price we pay to secure our right to exist as individuals and creators, regardless of who finds US personally unpleasant, hateful or flat out offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable.

"But what about [illegal thing]?!" So the thing itself is illegal, because the thing itself has been deemed harmful. But your goddamn cop-poisoned authoritarian little heart needs to learn that sometimes things are illegal that aren't harmful, and defaulting to "but illegal!" is a surefire way to end up on the wrong side of the fascism pop quiz. You're not a figure of authority and the more you demand to control and exercise authority by command, rather than leadership, the less impressive you seem. You know how you make actual, genuine change in a community? You center harm and argue in good faith to find accommodations and spread awareness of real, actual problems.

But let's play your game. Let's pretend we're all brainwashed cop-abiding little cogs that do not own a single working brain cell to exercise critical thinking with. 99% of the time, when you cry about any given thing "being illegal!!!" you're correct only so far as the THING itself being illegal. The act or object is illegal. Depiction of it is not. You know why, dipshit? Because if depiction of the thing were illegal, you wouldn't be able to talk about it. You wouldn't be able to educate about it. You wouldn't be able to reexamine and discuss and understand the thing, how and why and where it happens and how to prevent it. And yeah, depiction being legal opens the door for people to make depictions that are in bad taste or probably not appropriate. Sure. But that's the price we pay, creating tools to demystify some of the most horrific things in the world and support the people who've survived them. The net good of those tools existing outweighs the harm of people misusing them.

"You're defending the indefensible!" No, you're clumsily stumbling into a conversation that's been going on for centuries, with your elementary school understanding of morality and your bone-deep police state rot filtering your perception of reality, and insisting you figured it out and everyone else at the table is an idiot for not agreeing with you. Shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and read a goddamn book.

[prosshi]

Fandom as a whole is not “minor-friendly”

Nor should it be.

If you want to live in a “Children of the Corn”-style bubble of innocence and purity, well, to me, that’s a startling approach to adolescence, but every generation’s got to find its own way to reject the one before, so: do as you will.  But you can’t bring the bubble to the party, kids.  Fandom, established media-style fandom, was by and for adults before some of your parents were born now.  You don’t get to show up and demand that everyone suddenly change their ways because you’re a minor and you want to enjoy the benefits of adult creative activity without the bits that make you uncomfortable.  If you think you’re old enough to be roaming the Internet unsupervised, then you also think you’re old enough to be working out your limits by experience, like everybody else, like I did when I was underage and lying about it online.  If you’re not old enough to be roaming the Internet unsupervised and you’re doing it anyway, then that’s on your parents, not on fandom.

If you were only reading fic rated G on AO3, if you had the various safe modes on other media enabled, you would be encountering very little disturbing material, anyway (at least in the crude way people tend to define “disturbing” these days; some of the most frankly horrifying art I have ever engaged with would have been rated PG at most under present systems, but none of that kind of work ever seems to draw your protests).  In the end, what you really want is to be able to seek out the edges of your little world, but be able to blame other people when you don’t like what you find.  Sorry.  Adolescence is when you get to stop expecting others to pad your world for you and start experiencing the actual consequences of the risks you take, including feeling appalled and revolted at what other people think and feel.

Now, ironically, fandom’s actually a fairly good place for such risk-taking, as, for the most part, you control whether you engage and you can choose the level of your engagement.   You can leave a site, blacklist something, stop reading an author, walk away from your computer.  Are there actual people (as opposed to works of art, which cannot engage with you unless you engage with them) who will take advantage of you in fandom?  Of course there are.  Unfortunately, such people are everywhere.  They will be there however “innocent” and “wholesome” the environment appears to be, superficially.  That’s evil for you.  There are abusers in elementary school.  There are abusers in scout troops.  There are abusers in houses of worship.  Shutting down adult creative activity because you happen to be in the vicinity isn’t going to change any of that.  It may help you avoid some of those icky feelings that you get when you think about sex (and you live in a rape culture, those feelings are actually understandable, even if your coping techniques are terrible), but no one, except maybe your parents, has a moral imperative to help you avoid those.  

In the end, you’re not my kid and you’re not my intended audience.  I’m under no obligation to imagine only healthy, wholesome relationships between people for your benefit.  Until you’re old enough to understand that the world is not exclusively made up of people whose responsibility it is to protect you from your own decisions, yes, you’re too young for established media fandom.  Fandom shouldn’t be “friendly” to you.  

[prosshi]

[prosshi]

People who like horror movies and games are freaks. "Oh but the gore isn't REAL!" yeah, well, it looks real. Why the hell are you engaging with the kind of content if you "supposedly" don't condone it in real life? Why are you watching torture porn if you don't condone actually torturing real people?

There's no difference between watching someone get tortured to death in a SAW film and watching an actual murder take place. It's all disgusting and ILLEGAL and anyone who watches or creates gore content is BASICALLY a murderer already. DNI you fucking criminal freaks!