#pro ship vs anti ship discourse is just POINTLESS

[trickstarbrave]

"this is to say nothing of the grown adults on social media who make discoursing on the "opposite side" their full time hobby when really they are only making the situation worse in an effort to feel morally superior" Lol these are the people who are defending the ability to enjoy things in fiction without being policed. I can't believe you can have such an insight into the problem and then completely miss the point by acting insufferable to the people advocating for just letting people enjoy what they like. You're no better than the people who send death threats honestly since you want to ally with the people who want to police every online space and censor people. They'll come for you next, and none of us will be there to defend you from the antis when they decide your fiction is morally reprehensible

i debated not answering this because you are being rude and annoying and i dont like this kind of pointless arguing, but let me make this clear:

you are not helping address the problem. acting morally superior and righteous in the same brand of obnoxious is just about as much of "activism" as the "pro-shippers" who do it too. all you are doing is picking fights to get high off the rush of anger and dopamine. you are not "advocating" for anything. you are not addressing any of the problems. you are not fundamentally changing anyone's minds.

you are working on a bland, black and white mentality that ignores the complex reasons behind stuff. just by me saying that you have jumped to "so obviously you like sending people death threats and support it and are no better than the people do that" just like how the people who don't like your weird incest ships think you must obviously be an irl abuser.

"anti" means nothing. neither really does "pro-shipper". this us vs them mentality has to die before we see any progress. we cannot just keep using the internet for outrage. instead of arguing with people online and making stupid arguments about how actually your fiction IS moral and is actually better than other people's stuff and that everyone who doesn't think exactly like you do must love sending people death threats, you could try doing something actually fucking productive. push back against censorship online. disrupt algorithms. educate people that engaging with content they don't like on algorithm websites means they will see more of it. create a forum to freely share stuff with less harassment and vitrol. stay educated on what bills have lead to this censorship and push back against them or protest about new ones that keep being introduced.

all i can see from asks and posts like this is: you dont want things to change. you don't really care about the reasons behind it. you are right and other people are wrong because you don't like them. you like arguing online because you get a rush from it. you are doing this because you like fucking "winning". you dont care if you don't change a single person's mind because you enjoy the moral superiority you imagine you have. which are all the reasons the equally obnoxious people you hate and insist you are nothing like keep arguing with you. it is an endless cycle because you all enjoy the cheap thrill of arguing and bitching online that feeds into our worst impulses as human beings. i know im not one to fucking talk because i've also been known to jump into internet arguments, but i can at least recognize the problem and try to address it.

so long as you continue to act like this and act like your behavior is self righteous activism, this kind of shit will create a feedback loop. literally deactivate your fucking discourse blog, stop getting into pointless arguments online, and do literally anything else to address the problem. stop thinking that when i am addressing harmful mentalities online that feed into negativity and bullshit that you are immune to it because you're smarter or better than the people you disagree with. you're not. you're obnoxious.

if you send another anon i will be blocking you. knock it off. grow up.

[rosatherad]

i wrote this in the replies of another post but i think this could be its own so here, some of my thoughts on fandom purity discourse

pro-ship/anti-ship discourse seems to be mostly a tool to create an us-vs-them situation, to demonize each other and attack each other endlessly. and i say this as someone knee-deep in the discourse. thats not to say its pointless discourse, that its not important in some way. but its also not an enormous thing either. its origins are but a small part of a larger problem (or two, or three, depending on how you look at it etc)

get christian puritanism and queerphobia and impressionable young progressives who just want to do the right thing and fandom spaces and put them all together and you get the first anti-shippers, get antis doing anti stuff for long enough and you get the first reactionary pro-shippers, and the more time passes the more these two extreme ends get further and further apart

and then both sides are calling the other a cult, calling the other groomers and predators, creating strict walls to separate each others spaces while simultaneously infiltrating them to start fights, both sides bonding by talking bad about the other, extreme pro-shippers and extreme anti-shippers are mirror images of each other

these problems could all be solved i think if people were willing to calm down and listen to each other, to mend the miscommunications, to understand each other and elaborate their points with patience and openness and NUANCE. but unfortunately, social media cultivates the opposite

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i do block people with "proship dni" and anyone else i see who shares their dislike of proshippers, because i think those boundaries should be respected. but i won't say "antis dni" in return. i want to get along. if people want to talk to me about it, i want to have conversations with them, not to convert them to my side or to tell them how wrongbad they are. i would give anyone the chance to have a good-faith chat about the discourse, i'll answer questions to the best of my ability.

[catbishonen]

Just wondering are you proship? I love your art btw 🥰

short answer is yes i’m proship, thanks for liking my art!

long one is i think pro-ship vs anti-ship discourse is pointless internet drama. but i support the proship side since i don’t care what anyone do with their fav imaginary pixel dolls. it doesn’t matter and there shouldn’t have been any argument at all. bring this up in a conversation with people outside of fandom spaces and they’ll think you’re a weirdo 🥴

[tired-fandom-ndn]

how do you feel abt the "anti vs proship" thing being pointless, and "despite the fact that antis, this 'anti anti' thing wasn't necessary in response"? i definitely find myself agreeing with proshippers in general, though I distanced myself from the community, but what do you think of it? would you say making it look like a battle between 2 communities did more harm than good?

This is complicated.

On the one hand, shipping discourse is pointless. It's beyond pointless. It's just absolute bullshit that means absolutely nothing off of social media and it's a pointless excuse to harass and hurt real people over fictional characters. It's also just repackaged ship wars taken about 5000000x too far.

On the other hand, antis do not exist in a vacuum and their ideologies and behaviors are in line with very real and serious issues that transcend fandom discourse. You've got people using leftist language to support actual censorship.

And when I say "censorship", I don't mean the bullshit most anti-antis mean when they use that word, referring to being banned on social media or "cancelled" for whitewashing characters or whatever. I'm talking about antis very explicitly and openly supporting art and literature sites being shut down, books being removed from libraries or outright banned, laws being made to criminalize "obscene" art, and even people being arrested and put in prison over drawings and stories.

I still remember all the posts with antis cheering about ao3 being banned in different countries. That shit is scary.

And I do think it's vitally important that we fight against those ideologies in any way we can, whether they're coming from conservative lawmakers or supposed leftists online. We are living in a society where every bit of our existences have become monitored, where thought crimes becoming criminalized is a very real risk we could end up facing in the near future, and we cannot give even the slightest bit.

But the pro-ship and anti-anti communities don't really focus on that either and just keep centering around fandom discourse. Which is frustrating because there is so much we should be paying attention to instead, like where anti ideologies are even coming from.