#there's this weird trend between modern social media censoring things into oblivion

[myfandomrealitea]

"Understanding that fiction is not reality. It does not create victims."

I don't know if I can agree with that, there definitely have been instances where shipping has created victims, real people shipping to be exact.

Both Harry Styles & Lois Tomlinson from One Direction and Camila Cabello & Lauren Jauregui from Fifth Harmony have publicly spoken about how fans shipping them put a major strain on their respective friendships and how they would like fans to stop.

Ofc most ships will never reach the amount of popularity needed to actually become a real life problem, but it is possible.

Fiction does not create real victims in that if I write about someone being raped, nobody is actually getting raped. Nobody is a victim of what happens within my fanfiction.

Just like the very legal defence of how thoughts are not actual crimes. I can think about overthrowing the government. But it only becomes an actual crime if I prepare to, or try to.

Likewise, I can write about all the murder I want. It doesn't make me an actual murderer.

Fiction does not create real victims.

Fanfiction itself is not to blame for how actual, real people, interact with and expose content to other real people. It wasn't people writing fanfiction who made those celebrities uncomfortable. It was the actions of the people who bombarded them with inappropriate content and interactions.

Mark Fischbach and Sean McLoughlin are a prime example of this. They knew people shipped them. They knew people wrote explicit fanfiction and drew explicit fanart. They didn't care. It was a separate part of their fandom they did not involve themselves in.

It only began to cause, as you say, real life problems when certain people began to harass their real life partners over it, began to tag them in or send them explicit content, and began to try forcing Mark and Sean to actually fanservice them.

Mark and Sean didn't ask people to stop shipping them. They asked people to stop forcing the ship on them in real life. They asked people not to harass their partners, not to send them explicit pornography, and not to force them to change how they behave in order to make it easier to construe it as romantic or sexual.

What people do with content will always be more inherently harmful than the actual content itself.

That is, again, why respect is such a huge part of proshipping and the RPF community. Why there are certain rules we follow and processes we follow in order to not be those people. The heavy emphasis on why things like tagging are so important is not only for our sakes, but for the sakes of the people we are using creatively. The only way they can avoid certain content is if we religiously give them the tools and meet the criteria they need us to in order to be able to.

#sephiroth speaks #myfandomrealitea #reality #fandom #not discourse #or is this bordering on discourse #proshipping #proship #fanfiction #fanart #there's this weird trend between modern social media censoring things into oblivion #and fans somehow becoming even more disrespectful of real people