proficwarriorcats - Tumblr blog

[proficwarriorcats]

how people react to the content you create is NOT your responsibility

if you create fictional content that..

Squicks people out

Triggers people

Portrays immoral acts in a positive light

Romanticises immoral acts

Contains depictions of illegal acts

then it is not your responsibility if people have a negative reaction to such topics.

What is your responsibility is using tags, trigger warnings, and content warnings on the content you create.

And that goes both ways.

It is also your responsibility to filter tags, and keep in mind trigger/ content warnings.

If you are old enough to be on the internet, you are old enough to curate your online experience.

Creators, fanfiction writers, artists, and other creative people are not here to

parent you

Inform your morals

Educate you about laws

And curate your experience for you.

It is not victim blaming for simply stating that other people's interpretations, morals, messages, and information that they receive from your content is not your responsibility.

Because again,

THAT IS YOUR YOURS! THAT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY!

[proficwarriorcats]

me: i don’t want to see jellyfish so i will blacklist the tag #jellyfish

people with no common sense: je11yf1sh, je11¥fi5h, j*llyf*sh, je//ÿf!sh, j3ï||yf¡sh, gel lee fisk

result: cannot account for the sheer amount of possible ways to alter the word jellyfish

conclusion: i have to see jellyfish now.

Once again, tumblr is not tiktok, tag properly.

[proficwarriorcats]

Image I found on twitter that just sums up everything perfectly

[proficwarriorcats]

Reminder that you can create a free business account on PayPal to mask your identity, but these people? Still not safe to commission from.

Also, you should never commission NSFW on PayPal if you can avoid it, but I don't have suggestions for alternatives for that.

Technically not a DNI but still a bit baffling (what do they mean by proshipping?)

[proficwarriorcats]

I'd love to hear your take on the whole "fiction affects reality" debate. Because from where I stand, it's evident that fiction affects reality: otherwise, we wouldn't say that representation matters. If I may be so bold to consider religious texts like the Bible a piece of fiction: people are still using it to justify real-life actions.

The most prominent example in news media is the relationship between violent games and real life violence, I think. I checked Google Scholar and a recent (2021) meta analysis on the causal relationship between violent video games and violent behavior showed "a significant and positive effect" which was reduced but maintained when controlled for already existing aggression levels, with a peak in early adolescence (age of 14). According to the research, earlier meta analyses showed similar results.

Now, there's a lot to say about publication bias etc, but even these examples don't make me believe that we should censor "problematic media", because a) there's always more than one influence on people's behavior, and b) it's a slippery slope because who decides what's "good" and what's "bad"?

At the same time, people who claim that fiction doesn't affect reality don't make sense to me and I'd much rather see a strong analysis presented for why "fiction affects reality" is a bad reason to want to censor certain types of media, than the false dichotomy that either you believe that fiction affects reality == censorship is good OR fiction doesn't affect reality.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

--

Your tone sounds genuine. Your content sounds like bait.

First of all, "fiction is not reality" is a rallying cry of people who think fandom karens should mind their own business.

It never meant that fiction has no effect on reality. It meant that fiction does not mind control people and does not have a 1:1 effect where readers do the bad action from a book they just read. It means that depiction of murder or pedophilia or whatever is not the same thing as literally committing a crime. Thought crimes are not real. Fantasies aren't inherently bad. Yadda yadda.

The only people arguing about "fiction does not affect reality" are shitty antis making a strawman of their opponents' arguments because their own intellectually flaccid scare tactics don't stand up to scrutiny.

Second of all, cite your sources.

Ten seconds on google scholar found me this:

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly: A Meta-analytic Review of Positive and Negative Effects of Violent Video Games by Christopher John Ferguson; Psychiatric Quarterly volume 78, pages 309–316 (2007)

The abstract includes the following:

Results indicated that publication bias was a problem for studies of both aggressive behavior and visuospatial cognition. Once corrected for publication bias, studies of video game violence provided no support for the hypothesis that violent video game playing is associated with higher aggression. However playing violent video games remained related to higher visuospatial cognition (r x = 0.36).

Publication bias isn't just a small factor here. It's a key factor.

--

Here's the thing, I can give you a very good argument of the type you asked for. It's as simple as alcohol.

Alcohol is physically bad for us. Some people drive drunk.

Do most people think all alcohol drinking should be banned as a consequence? No. Because the fact that some people overindulge or drink while pregnant or drunk drive like a fucking idiot is not the fault of the people who can drink responsibly.

However...

What's the point of such an argument when your starting premise is garbage? Video games don't cause violence. Fictional sex crimes don't cause actual sex crimes. Even bothering to explain why "responsible" consumption of Bad Media is okay like my alcohol example is opening the door to these idiotic starting premises.

I find it telling that you don't specify which google scholar results you were looking at.

--

Representation matters because that actually is an area where we've seen some demonstrable effects from fiction. When fiction reinforces stereotypes and conventional wisdom, it tends to strengthen how people already see the world. This is quite different from fiction depicting something taboo.

Fiction is plenty capable of reinforcing the idea that minorities are gang members or that women are hysterical and make false accusations. It is not capable of making people think bestiality is socially normal.

Representation also matters in proportion to how many eyeballs are on that media. We should hold big Disney movies to a high standard and Disney overall to a higher one still. We don't need to worry about each and every individual work having a specific type of rep, especially if those individual works are more niche.

[proficwarriorcats]

If anyone new here is confused about why I'm so vehemently proship, please tell me how you look at an aggressive bully beating the shit out of some guy who's just minding their own business and decide to take the side of the bully.

[proficwarriorcats]

A Dose of Reminders

[proficwarriorcats]

Y’all do know that proshippers can tell you’re not proship when you call certain ships “proships”, right?

Cause like, pretending to be a proshipper to try to worm your way into the community for receipt-gathering purposes… requires you to accurately pretend you’re a proshipper. And that means using the most basic terms correctly.

You also know you don’t have to profess your love for extreme age gap ships and parent/child incest to accurately fake it, right? Wouldn’t it be easier to just say “oh yeah I’m proship I just don’t like the taboo ships personally” if you didn’t actually ship the really fucked up thing? Cause like, I don’t like a lot of the ships that other proshippers get into, but I’m still proship cause I mind my business and block tags rather than screaming at people about how they’re personally responsible for the actions of some abusive piece of shit they don’t even know.

I’m just saying. Every time antis try to pretend to be one of us in order to infiltrate, they make their misunderstandings of our community extremely blatant. This is what happens when your entire understanding of a group is based off what people who hate them say about them.

[proficwarriorcats]

It's actually really important to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it.

[proficwarriorcats]

It never ceases to trip me out how often I post pro-ship stuff very openly only for some people that follow me to have "pro-shitters die" in their description. They either have somehow missed that I am openly against censorship, or just plug their ears and hum. I don't even get anon hate over it. I'm just surprised.

yeah it’s ridiculous

[proficwarriorcats]

hey! please don't let fanpol convince you that you're a bad person because of the fiction you enjoy or support!

if you like horror or taboo content, you're not a bad person!

if you like problematic ships or characters, you're not a bad person!

if you use darkfic or just any fictional content in general that isn't antiship-approved to cope, you're not a bad person!

remember, fiction isn't morality! it can't make you a good or bad person! your actions are the only thing that matter. fiction is your space to do whatever you want and explore dark subjects safely. :)

[proficwarriorcats]

how anti-shipping fosters, encourages, perpetuates, and glorifies abuse in fandom (masterpost)

these subjects come up again and again, so I wanted a masterpost of links to what I’ve written about how fandom anti-shipper culture is tightly related to abuse in fandom.

note: predators, abusers, and bullies are present everywhere in fandom, not just in anti-shipping or pro-shipping (or neutral) circles. this is because abusers will use whatever they have available to them as a tool for abuse. learn warning signs of abusive and/or controlling behavior; these will be far more reliable red flags than what a person ships in fandom.

my objections to anti-shipping (in brief) & an alternative solution to predators in fandom.

I believe that many antis are coming from a genuine place. I just strongly disagree with where your focus lies and your chosen methods of dissemination. In fact, I feel that anti-shipping actively aids predators, for reasons which I’ll try to summarize in brief here.

Anti Shipping is Abusive, The Post

the anti-shipping community is a great place for abusers because it encourages people to develop unquestioning loyalty to and trust of internal authorities, become deeply vulnerable to shame cycles, isolate themselves from outsiders, and avoid critical thought or skepticism of rhetoric.

The icing on the cake is that the things that antis say are ‘bad bad bad’ - incest, ‘pedophilia’ (they mean csa), and abuse - barely even resemble actual incest, csa, and abuse. As a result, when confronted with the real thing I suspect most anti-shippers are completely defenseless.

no matter how hard some anti-shippers try to deny it, they cannot both stop shipping/prevent the creation of potentially harmful content and also condemn harassment and threats.

By demanding/requiring that others change their behavior on sites where antis have no moderating authority, they create loopholes for and/or implicitly approve of action taken to force people to comply with anti-shipper demands. this silent approval gives antis unspoken permission to exaggerate, lie, and create scaremonger material about anything or anyone they disapprove of or want to silence. It also gives abusers in the anti ranks an overlooked ‘blind spot’ from which they are allowed to harass, defame, dogpile, threaten, blackmail, doxx, suicide bait, and assault people who don’t change in response to anti demands.

an unfunny joke about antis

the funny thing about bullies - especially self-righteous bullies that travel in packs, such as antis - is that 99.8% of the time they come out on top of any conflict they get into. this is because as long as a bully’s opponent gives even the slightest fuck about playing fair, being kind, and giving the benefit of the doubt, they will never out-bully a bully.

Miscellaneous:

anti-shippers help abusers hide in a sea of false flags.

anti-shippers perpetuate the false belief that it’s easy to spot an abuser by what they ship, or their age, or some other obvious, easy to see flag.

it’s usually anti-shippers that are deliberately pushing adult content on kids - ostensibly to ridicule it, but still inappropriate

anti-shippers gaslight fandom

Cultlike & authoritarian aspects of anti-shipping (how it traps people in anti-shipping friendsgroups & makes it difficult to leave):

harassment and abuse of others as a form of signaling loyalty to the anti-shipping cause

regarding cults and cultlike communities (and how easy it is to get sucked in)

anti-shippers benefit from an impossible task because the goal is feeling good about themselves by putting other down

antis endanger themselves by learning information that contradicts their worldview, which perpetuates anti-intellectualism.

‘ i didn’t read this but it’s awful’ - loyalty signalling, anti-intellectualism, and a form of harassment rolled together

and finally a few links to my favorite external resource that very beautifully describes why anti-shipping works the way it does:

How Good People and Well-intentioned Groups Go Bad

How it Feels to Be a Bigot

Things About Brainwashing [Everybody] Needs to Know

How to Recognize Gaslighting

How to Recognize a Moral Abuser

[proficwarriorcats]

anyway, proshippers are cool btw

[proficwarriorcats]

You deserve to have a safe space.

[proficwarriorcats]

I’m not trying to attack you, but do you know that proshipper means someone who supports and romanticizes pedophilia, incest, and abuse? Your reblog on that post seems to read that you think antis just hate on people for having ships they don’t like. But it’s completely different than that. Just looking on the proshipper side of Tumblr and the internet and you can see people happily shipping children and adults and making nsfw content of such things.

i appreciate that you're not being outright hostile, but i have to say, that on its own put you above basically every anti i've interacted with.

i understand where antis are coming from, i really do. there are a lot of things on the internet that make me deeply uncomfortable, including the minor/adult ships that you mention. i don't want to anything to do with those kinds of ships and i would be happiest if i never saw them again. which is why i'm proship.

nine times out of ten, if i see that kind of ship brought up on my dash, it's because i was following an anti without realizing it, and they brought it up unprompted and untagged, to talk about how bad it is that they exist. they are the ones putting that kind of content in front of my face and making it harder to avoid.

the thing about people who ship those ships is that they're generally very aware that not everyone wants to see that kind of content, and so they tag it. they make sideblogs to talk about it. they don't go out of their way to shove it in people's faces. that means i, and everyone else who doesn't like it, can avoid it.

what antis want is for it to not exist at all. they want the tags to be purged and blocked, and for anyone who uses those tags to have their accounts deleted. and sure, that might get rid of some of it, but do you know what would happen to the rest? it would stop being tagged. people who don't want to see it wouldn't have the tools to avoid it. this isn't just a hypothetical, that's what's happened any time a fan space has tried to do that.

that's not even getting into the rabbit hole of what should be banned and what shouldn't. obviously any content that depicts real children or real life abuse shouldn't exist and shouldn't be allowed to be posted, but basically any platform that people use already enforces those policies, and there's not much of a slippery slope to go down there. if it involves real living breathing people being abused, it's bad. end of discussion.

but the same can't be said for fiction. ask ten antis for a specific list of all the content that should be banned, and you'll get ten different answers. what about kink? what about roleplay? what about horror and murder and anything that involves fictional characters being graphically tortured? what about people using art to process terrible things that have happened to them? what about art that uses dark themes as a horror element? if you just want to ban anything questionable to anyone, that's the line of thinking that gets any mention of lgbt existence banned. and again, this isn't just a hypothetical, this has happened before, and that's generally where it leads.

i know, from personal experience, that antis do, in fact, send harassment to people just for shipping things they don't like. i've gotten accused of absolutely vile shit for shipping two fictional characters who were both consenting adults. i've seen ship wars turn into moral battlegrounds, over ships that an average person wouldn't bat an eye at.

the thing about "romanticization" is a whole other can of worms. the anti logic goes like this: if someone sees something (even if it's very obviously fictional) in a positive light enough times, they will start thinking it's okay in real life, and go on to hurt real people. the problem with that is that it's just. blatantly untrue.

if it were true every horror movie fan would be a serial killer, every person that studies dark media would be an unhinged psychopath, and everyone who is into ddlg would be a pedophile. but they're not. they just aren't. people have directed movies just as fucked up as the darkest shit on ao3, and are still capable of being normal human beings who know right from wrong in real life.

even if someone is that impressionable, scrubbing away the existence of every piece of questionable content isn't going to solve their problem, because they're still going to be vulnerable to con men, scams, and cultists. the only thing that would actually materially help someone like that is developing their own morals and critical thinking.

children are also more impressionable, and there's a lot of content that's not suitable for them, but that doesn't mean that content shouldn't exist. it just means that they should stick to spaces designed for them (which most social media sites, tumblr included, are not) or, if they're old enough to be responsible for their experience online, they, or a trusted adult in their lives, should block and filter out things that they aren't comfortable with.

which is what everyone on the internet should be doing. it's what i do, and it's made the internet a much more pleasant place to be. and it's why i sometimes worry for antis mental health, especially teenagers, because they're being told it's right and moral to seek out content that makes them uncomfortable and to engage with the people making it. and that's just. really bad. it's not good for the creators that they're harassing obviously, but it's also really bad for them! it's not healthy to seek out things that make you feel bad, and it's a terrible internet safety lesson to teach minors that it's okay for them to seek out and engage with people making adult content.

individual harassment and crusading is never going to succeed at removing dark content from the internet. it just isn't. at best you might get a small percentage of people who create that content to stop sharing it, at worst you're just going to make people stop tagging it, and either way, you're exposing yourself to things that make you feel bad, when you don't have to.

if you want to materially change the type of content you see, you can. the block button is your friend, use it liberally. same with content filtering and tag blocking.

[proficwarriorcats]

when did fandom change "don't harass people" into "don't harass good people"?

like... you know being anti-harassment is about not harassing people, period? you can't see a post talking about how it's wrong to harass people for any reason, and then add in the tags "unless it's x group or x type of people" or reblog it in agreement only to get caught harassing people later on.

you can't make "exceptions" if you claim to be against harassment. anti harassment has to include people you disagree with, or just "bad people" in general. otherwise it's not anti harassment. it's just "hey don't harass anybody unless it's these types of people, then go ham."

idk why people think it just magically turns into something else when they go after "bad people". it's not "justified", it's not "doing the right thing", it's not "protection".

it's harassment.

what you're doing is harassment.

[proficwarriorcats]

Honestly, I am terrified for antis who say they were groomed into accepting real abuse because of proshippers "romanticizing" it in fiction. People say that around the age of 14, they accepted fictional abuse and real abuse as totally okay, as if they were the exact same thing.

When I was a mormon, I believed that you could only consume pure, unproblematic media, fictional or otherwise, or else you would become a sinner. Mormons don't believe in the dichotomy of heaven and hell, and nothing can get you cast out of god's kingdoms for all eternity unless you were one of Satan's original followers, meaning you would have never been born on earth in the first place, but sin is still considered a horrific taboo that will separate you from your more righteous family members and from your heavenly father himself.

I believed that impure media would taint my soul until I could find a way to repent, I believed that even just thinking something bad was the same as doing it, I believed that I was always being watched over, without even a single private thought all to myself, constantly scared about being judged for thoughts and feelings I had no control over and crying for days when I realized I couldn't have crushes on real people (I later discovered I was demisexual/demiromantic, but at the time I thought I was just broken, and that it was my fault).

I thought that thoughts lead directly to action in almost all circumstances, AND EVEN STILL when I read about fictional incest for the first time, I just kind of accepted that this fictional universe had different rules from real life.

You get it?

I was 14, drowning in the biggest purity cult on the entire planet, and even I could easily tell the difference between fiction and reality. It wasn't even something I had to consciously think about. I had some inkling of a real mind locked away under all the indoctrination, so when I discovered the antishipping cult for the first time, I was really just confused (until they bullied me into the same submission and fear I had just run away from in mormonism, but that's another story).

So the question remains; If seeing age gap and shipcest romanticized in a fictional context by random-ass proshippers is enough to make you accept abuse in real life in your teens, then what the fuck kind of purity cult were you forced into from childhood? What kind of abuse did you face to make you think like that? What kind of abuser was horrible enough and thorough enough to make you think that way?

Something tells me you may be blaming the wrong people.