#tw: proshipping

[kota-corner]

Anyone else find both Bramble x Squirrel and Ash x Squirrel to be very toxic- not only because they both treat Squirrel very poorly, but they're both technically related to her(vomit noises)!!! I feel like the Erins could've avoided the inc*st ships by simply having more cats in each clan- even if they aren't fleshed out well, it's better than resorting to family members being shipped together. Personally I want to do my own AU/revision of the series once I'm done reading the current main books in all the series, and that's one thing I'm gonna change. No BrambleSquirrel or AshSquirrel.

[jackalsprey]

This is a vent piece. You have been warned.

I hate, hate, hate, fucking HATE toxic fandoms. Or more specifically, fandoms that are for the most part, full of beautiful people, content, and amazing ideas, but then...those awful, absolute motherfuckers show up and make things horrific and make you wish you were never there.

My first complaint? To the MHA fandom. I *adore* MHA and Iida is my favorite character I've had in a while - but the ships. The fucking ships. People ship Tsuyu with Aizawa. Deku and All Might. Overhaul and Eri. Todoroki and Dabi. Endeavor and Dabi.

Need I say more?

Now, to my newest hyperfixation, Ace Attorney. I love you. I devour the content in the wrightworth tag. But why- why do you, small community of bastards lurking within, defend Von Karma? Why do you defend him? And even fucking ship him with MILES?! That's disgusting on so many levels.

Von Karma is 65 when we meet him. Miles is 24.

VK literally raised him from the age of 9.

He was an abusive father.

He murdered Miles' father.

I just...

...

I hate being in fandoms sometimes.

I hate that there are people who advocate for these disgusting things to be canon. And to even sometimes be carried over into real life.

There are many fine lines between interesting, kinky, and flat out wrong. But in the cases above? The definition could not be cleared.

Your Honor?

The prosecution is ready to continue.

[peskygirl13]

It was brought to my attention earlier this morning that I had reblogged a post from a proshipper.

Please know that I don’t know who it was and was unaware that they were a proshipper and have full intentions of deleting the post and blocking them. The person who alerted me to this has not told me who or what the post was yet, so I have not done it yet, but once I do I will let you all know.

To anyone reading this, if you know what I reblogged/who I reblogged from please let me know and I apologize if I offended anyone or make you uncomfortable.

I apologize again, and please stay safe out there.

[pleasantspark]

DEAR SHIPPERS,

Stop hiding abusive ships under the guise of enemies to lovers! If its blantly abusive, then its abusive! That's why I think Enemies to Lovers can be problematic in some fandoms. Abuse is not MEANT to be romanticized nor quirky. ITS A REAL LIFE Issue! Regardless of the context. DONT SHIP TWO CHARACTERS THAT ARE EITHER IN A DOMESTIC/ABUSE RELATIONSHIP!

[animentality]

[theautisticfroglord]

anyways parents who record/post their autistic child having a meltdown are awful people :)

[crimson-rain-smoked-flower]

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.

[kiwisandpearls]

“This fiction could be used to groom minors!”

I hate to break this to you but literally any type of fiction can be used to groom minors. Even “unproblematic” fiction.

[pawberri]

The key problem with "proship vs anti" discourse is that the most extreme versions of each side, the ones who actually bother to identify with these labels, accepted each others worst takes as arguments they had to debate. "Fiction =/= reality" is, in practice, an absurdly reductionist, anti-intellectual, thought-terminating-cliche that dictates we can learn nothing about a person via art and that their fiction reflects no political or moral messaging worthy of critique. In response to this, the "puriteens" who are too young to possibly hope to articulate their discomfort, to untangle their position from what is often real trauma experienced online, simply argue "yes, fiction influences and reflects reality in a 1 to 1 capacity." They, and people who want to use the groundwork they laid to make bad-faith callouts, make bad arguments about how the action of engaging in problematic fiction is on equal ground to real life abuse, or is a clear indicator of interest in real life abuse. Both of these arguments are terrible, but each side seems to radicalize the other further and further into their own brands of anti-intellectual reactionary belief. "Proshippers" become libertarian absolutists about free speech and view all transgression as righteous and alternative and therefore leftist. They gain a reactionary nostalgia for the past, desiring a time when people didn't seem to care about the implications of art. "Antis" become authoritarian and hypervigilant for signs of moral decay, at their worst, willing to align themselves with government bodies that offer carceral solutions to the debate. They are willing to use harassment as a tool of punishment, which then leads to false accusations and a fear of openness that puts people at risk of being triggered via obfuscation. (That said, proshippers also take part in plenty of harassment.)

I will say that I believe both of these movements are equally sensitive to co-opting by right-wing forces. We see the authoritarian tendencies of anti culture in harassment campaigns and even the way Republican law makers co-opt "grooming." The proship/fic crowd has such extreme nostalgia for the past that I often see people align themselves with the cultures of 4chan or other happily right-wing websites. They so heavily reject the idea that a drawn sexual depiction of a child could reflect any desire that they are disinterested in analyzing what the motivation behind the depiction is. i.e If we track the history of lolicon in Japan we do find that is, yes, countercultural, but that counter culture is right wing, very misogynistic, and defensive of patriarchial Japanese culture as it is and was including its culture around rape and abuse. Plenty of fictional content works as radicalization material, and radicalization material needs to be ambiguous. There is a valid reason to be hesitant to trust people who consume this content, even if I do not believe most of them will ever be dangerous towards children. The mere presence of sexuality is not enough to make a movement left wing. This kind of thing can again be seen in right-wing libertarian movements in the US. (And even leftist movements can be bigoted and even "pro-pedophilia" or otherwise disinterested in social reform around abuse.)

Is all content with elements of age-play this way? No. But to me, that is why kink media deserves to be treated as art and analyzed, critiqued, treated seriously. It doesn't have to do anything to anyone to be worthy of a moral critique. Said moral critique just doesn't warrant harassment and cruelty and reactionary exaggerations of the person consuming said content.

Anyway, what's my point in saying all this? I don't know. I'm just begging you to tag your God damn content with specific tags instead of random and nebulous shit like "dead dove" or "dark content", and also begging you to stop harassing people who do tag their content so I don't have to guess what "dead dove" and "dark content" mean. No one will erase incest kink fics or people who feel sickened by the idea of them off this earth because we aren't god, but we could at least all be responsible about tagging, flagging, and age-gating our stuff.

[sparkling-pink-lemonade]

Saw a post of an anti saying that they are leaving AO3, as they are too uncomfortable to post their fics there now. The reason? They found out one of their long time readers was a proshipper, despite their fics having proship dni. And how "that includes silent readers too, I don't want you all looking at my content."

My brother in christ, you are posting on the fiction freedom site. The proshipping site. Dnis aren't god damn restraining orders. They are one tool in helping you display your boundaries. It's still on you to enforce your boundaries. You post something publicly, you forfeit your ability to regulate who can view your work. If you're obsessive enough, you can regulate who actually interacts with your work by stalking each person in the kudos list, comments, or bookmarks and then blocking snyone you don't like, but you do not get a say on who may silently read your posts. Not unless you private your work and only show it to specific people.

And if you don’t want proshippers to interact, get off the profic site.

[locustgirl]

not to be radical or whatever, but i think that maybe calling women and queer people “pedophiles” for fanfiction is actually not the activism you think it is

[skumhuu]

Proshipper = you're against censorship and harassment over fiction & curate your experience on the internet to have a healthy distance from things that make you uncomfortable

Antishipper = you're okay and even encourage harassment towards "freaks" and "weirdos" society deems acceptable to hurt

[peskygirl13]

I don't get why you're apologizing? You can reblog from whoever you want. If people are bothering you about it, they need to block and leave you alone. It's not like you reblogged from a terf/nazi/pedo

From what I know about proshippers they think that problematic ships such as abuse, incest, and/or pedophilia are ok to ship as long as it is completely fictional and tagged, and I don't agree with that.

I don't support proshipping and I even if I did I know it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. I didn't know the post was made by a proshipper and, while it was a mistake, I regret having people interact with them through me.

I know my job isn't to please everyone, my blog is my space to fill with what I enjoy, but this wasn't something I enjoy and I want people to feel safe in my blog.

[anti-anti-vents]

All this discourse has me remembering things

Like, how as a young kid, before I had the words for it, I was writing HELLA darkfic. Like at 10-12 years old, I was writing the most fucked up shit I could think of. Stuff antis would consider “pedophilic”, such as (real example, trigger warning) a world in which young girls were raised in isolation, given numbers instead of names, sold to adult men as soon as they hit puberty, and losing value with each year they gained, ABS eventually being killed at 17 if they’d not yet been bought.

Yeah, it’s really not any wonder that I ended up destroying all of these writings, never sharing or completing any of them. At 10 years old, long before I was aware of this debate, I was already ashamed of myself for exploring these topics and thoughts in the only way I knew how. Possibly the only healthy option for me at the time. I feel so bad for kids like me who are growing up on the internet, seeing confirmation of their fears that people will see them as a bad person for creating that type of fiction. For even entertaining those ideas in your head. I hope they turn out okay and reclaim some creative liberty for themselves.

And honestly? I may need to nourish that ashamed little kid inside me too. I haven’t written in years; I lost all motivation some time in 2020. And when I think back on everything I’ve ever written, when I think of those dark fics, I hate to admit it, but they’re the only thing I truly ever wrote for myself and myself only, without showing anybody else. And that’s important I think. I want to rediscover my creative process, and uncover all the little things about myself I’ve been pushing down for years.

Art is healing and art is discovery. Antis can stay mad that we’re doing these things through obscene means. It only encourages me more. And I hope to do the same for others.

[theautisticfroglord]

I genuinely hate when people invalidate demiromantic/demisexual/other labels in general by saying somethin like "OMG!!!! why do these labels exist that's how every relationship is!!!!! what has this generation come to?!!?,!?!!"

some people out here are dating someone they just met two days ago. while it literally took me two whole years of getting to know someone before having a crush on them. can y'all please not find excuses to invalidate aspec/arospec people. thanks

[extremeshinjienthusiast]

minors are allowed to speak out against child rape fantasy, actually. and you shouldn’t fucking silence them or have the nerve to calm THEM puritans, actually.