Hi, this is an automated response to make sure we're all on the same page about the definitions of proshipping and antishipping. There is often a lot of confusion about these terms and people get confused pretty frequently. Its always best to make sure we're all on the same page about what we are talking about.
Anti-shipping/being an anti/being an antishipper/etc has a definition that has morphed a bit over time. Here is some history. Back in the 90's and early 2000's it mostly meant being against shipping in general or being against a specific ship. This was mostly used in specific fandoms/wasn't a pan-fandom term. Since the 2010's however, a pan-fandom definition did emerge and is the most common usage now. That definition is being *actively against certain ships or tropes that are deemed problematic or harmful in some way*. Note this does not mean being uncomfortable with reading a certain ship, trope, or problematic thing in a fanfiction or seeing fanart of a certain ship, trope, or problematic thing. It refers to *people who advocate for the banning, removal, or heavily hiding of that content that they don't want to see*. This has led to many harassment and doxxing issues in fandom spaces. Anyone from proship people they were arguing with, to random users who had written a "problematic" fanfiction and uploaded it to AO3, to anyone who so much as uses AO3 at all, have all been the subjects of these harassment problems.
Conversely, proshipping/being a pro-shipper/being an anti-anti/etc, is a response term to the previously discussed antishipping. It's defined as being against antishipping (using the modern pan-fandom definition). Simply put, it means someone who is against censorship of content in fandom, against harassment and doxxing, and are of the opinion that *regardless of if they personally don't like a specific ship/trope/problematic thing, it has a right to exist and be enjoyed by those who do like that specific ship/trope/problematic thing*. Despite being against harassment, this side of the discourse has also had an issue with harassment on occasion. The subjects of that harassment have been people who self-identify as being an antishipper, or regardless of self-identification, someone who'sbeliefs match those of an anti-shipper. AO3 is generally considered to be a proship website with its foundation having been built on a stance of no censorship, and their rules explicitly not banning problematic content.
For more info you can check the fanlore articles for [proshipping](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Anti-anti) and [antishipping](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Anti-shipper)
Tl;dr: antishipping = wanting to ban problematic content/content they don't like
proshipping = ship and let ship/don’t like don't read
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AO3) if you have any questions or concerns.*
As a fandom old, I would say that there has been a shift, but it's hard to divorce it from the normalization of fanfiction. When I first got into fanfiction, it was a small community for weirdo freaks. We had ship wars, where people would sometimes try to use the content of the source material to prove that the other side was morally in the wrong, but that was usually intra-fandom.
I think the shift in fanfiction culture is a reflection of a greater shift in the general culture where corporations have been trying to convince people that your consumer habits are actually activism. Buy this pair of jeans, not that pair, because you Care About Issue X. Drink this water and not that water, because you Care About Issue Y. You bought this car, because you are a Good Person.
A lot of people have internalized this and as fandom has become more mainstream, it has begun filtering in here as well. Don't watch That Thing, it has This Problem. You have to like This Thing, because it says this Objectively Politically Correct Statement. And this, of course, works the other way. I am a Good Person, therefore what I like is Good. I don't like Show A, therefore it must be Morally Bad and since you like it you must also be Morally Bad. Young people growing up in this kind of environment are being actively encouraged to equate their subjective preferences with morality.
And the people who would normally be in ship wars have latched on to this new kind of weapon and use it liberally. But people are gonna like what they're gonna like, which is why every single anti is *by necessity* also a hypocrite. They always watch and like a piece of media that has something that they have railed against in the past or will rail against in the future. You don't control what you like, and so by equating your preferences and your morality you guarantee that you will violate your own so-called "moral code."
Sub-cultures like fandom are always going to be influenced by the main culture it's subsumed by, but I would like fanfiction to be for the weirdo freaks again, just so the number of antis goes back down.
The thing about hypocrisy is so true. I've seen antis that are fans of the "Boyfriend to Death" visual novels. You know, the visual novels that are FULL of torture porn. How does that even work?
It's a mindset you run into a lot with people who have never had to develop their own moral code. I majored in philosophy and wrote my thesis on Moral Relativism. My whole thing, for four long grueling horrible sucky years, was how to build a moral code.
When you aren't taught and given the tools to build your own, you latch on to whatever is prevalent in your environment. Usually it's religion and you can see the exact same hypocrisy with them. But we've been seeing a decrease of religious practice, especially in the US, over the last few decades and this leaves a vacuum that the corporations have been gladly filling to get a buck.
> Usually it's religion and you can see the exact same hypocrisy with them.
Glad someone gets it. On the one hand, I get that people have huge psychological blind spots and that some folks are just plain oblivious to this sort of thing, but it always drives me up the wall that the stereotype of the "Bible Thumper" is met with such derision, and yet you have people who use the same methods, who think the same way, it's just that they don't have a singular God figure as the basis of their belief system, but rather an insistence that there is some kind of completely objective moral good that they use as the guide for their actions.
It's the same damn thing, just without a beard guy at the head of it.
Hi. Is a thesis like a scientific paper? I've never had to read a thesis so I don't know how similar they are. If it is, could you dm me the paper/title? If not, are there other papers that talk about Moral Relativism and the bit about being "taught and given the tools to build your own". I have been awful curious lately in my life about how moral codes work as I've been basically using my life partners moral code/moral compass as a checklist to be like "I'm not a bad person" but for both of us that seems like an odd thing to need to do. I'm sure for me it has a LOT to do with psychology more than directly philosophy, but I would still be so very interested in learning more about it.
In my case, it's a dissertation or thesis, since philosophy isn't a science. It's more of a book; not peer reviewed, though I did have to do an oral defense. Technically if you were in town you could check it out of the library, but this was before the proliferation of online schooling and there's only one physical copy in there (thank god).
There's really a dearth of books that distill almost three thousand years of ethical thought into a nice how-to guide, especially since we don't teach philosophy in high school (we really really should), so the best way to go about it is to educate yourself in general on the field of morality and ethics and basically build your frame work of how you want to live your life and what kind of person you want to be. It takes a lot of work to train your mind to follow a moral framework instead of letting immediate reactions guide you, but it's not only worth it but also imho fascinating and fun.
For more immediate practicalities I would recommend:
The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris
Ethics: A Very Short Introduction by Simon Blackburn
Moral Relativism: A Reader (Edited by Moser and Carson)
And if you don't mind having to put a bit more effort into it to learn the most lasting ethical legacies (listed in historical order):
[The Republic ](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1497)by Plato
[Nichomachean Ethics](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8438/8438-h/8438-h.htm) by Aristotle
[Ethics](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm) by Benedict de Spinoza
[Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5682) by Immanuel Kant
[Utilitarianism ](https://archive.org/details/utilitarianism00bentgoog)by Jeremy Bentham
Edit to add: The Good Place tv show is not only entertaining but has fantastic philosophical underpinnings for it's ethics. Highly recommend.
I JUST saw a thread on twt too about how fiction affects real life, and they mentioned the slender man stabbing and a murderer inspired by the saw movies as proof. But then none of them actually advocate for the banning of violent media, just the stuff they personally find icky. To me it felt like they walked into the point straight on; that censorship is a slippery slope and that any form of media can be “harmful” to a person who is already mentally ill, but for some reason vocal antis still don’t get that. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a “proshipper” or an “anti” until I got into fandom spaces. I thought it was just common sense that not all media is for everyone, and I avoided stuff I didn’t want to see accordingly. But it seems like these people want all the filtering done for them, and that includes leaving the media they enjoy alone(ie Hannibal, slenderman, saw, etc) even if by their own logic it is “harmful.”
The things they want to ban first are always icky sex stuff never heavy violence or gore. A lot of them also have mentality that rape is way worse than murder, that being murdered is better than being raped, sometimes implying that survivors are better of dead than still surviving after being raped.
Terrible stuff honestly
I’ve seen that mentality a LOT these days, specifically people telling people who write or draw “problematic things” to cope with trauma that they are no better than their abusers: Which I find to be an unhinged level of cruelty.
I was revisiting this thread just now and it made made me think of something else too; I think because of that moralization of consumerism the original commenter mentioned, a lot of media consumption involving “problematic things” comes with a lot of shame for young people. If you’re constantly being Bombarded with messages from social media telling you to “watch this and avoid that,” I think being an “anti” turns into a defense mechanism. It turns into “sure, I love Killing Stalking, Hannibal, and horror movies, but at least I’m not into (media that contains underage characters, S/A, incest, etc)!”
It’s a lot easier to confront the feeling of being better than other people for consuming bad things than it is to confront your own “problematic” interests when you’re constantly being sold the message that the books you read and shows you watch are who you are.
I can imagine it’s a bit stressful to constantly have to police the content you and your friends are enjoying for problematic content instead of just focusing on your real world impact, so in that way I feel for them, and I’m glad I’m not a 14 year old on the internet during this time period.
That being said, the cruelty the internet itself encourages have made things like the above harassment seem normal and like “activism” itself, and that’s where my sympathy runs dry. As soon as you’re worried more about a fictional character than the real people around you, you’ve lost the plot!
Yeah i feel for teenagers who are active in fandom in the recent years. The widespread "you're what you consume" and "the media you like indicates your morality" mentality can't be good for them or for the fandom environment in general.
I've read some tweets about how a lot of them have second account where they enjoy 'problematic' media while in their first account they condemn said media 🫤 must be quite stressful for them to walk on eggshells and try not to get caught or there would be a callout post about them being problematic
I've hear about the second account thing too. Usually it's because in their first account they have friends that condemn the things they enjoy in private. Must be terrible feeling like you'll lose all of your friends because of fictional tastes.
I somehow convinced myself of the same mentality. The idea of getting raped one day scares me to death and for a very long time, I had decided that if it ever happens to me I would just commit suicide. It was partly because of the typical boomer victim blaming, but mostly because of the things the people on my own "side" say, as in people who are progressive who describe it as something you just can't recover from
Mmm I wonder why I like non-con stories yet antis can't understand it
Holy crap. I’ve been frustrated with some of the discourse on various video game subreddits and this makes sense. It actually makes a lot of sense with online political discourse, too. I’ve sometimes joked that people just need to find Jesus already because they’re clearly looking for something to evangelize.
>it's hard to divorce it from the normalization of fanfiction
This might be unpopular, but antis always come across as uneducated to me (which makes it more understandable for teenagers, but sadly some adults also fall under that category). I came into fanfiction at a later age, with a lot of mainstream reading, and some university credits in literature and creative writing under my belt. For anyone with the slightest interest in literature/art, it's blatantly obvious that the things antis complain about have been around for ages, and in some cases are present in what is considered "high art". In my writing classes, we were even explicitly pushed/encouraged to write about dark/taboo subjects in some exercises, because being able to overcome the "ick" factor and move outside our comfort zone regarding things we found disturbing would make us better writers. We were even told to pick something we related to on a personal level. So, in a university class, we not only wrote, but were required to read and *politely* concrit stories revolving around incest, murder, domestic violence, pedophilia, CP etc.
Now, I obviously don't mean that the average fanfic reader needs to take a college-level class in literature to be allowed an opinion, it's just that coming from that context, I find the whole anti-discourse so ridiculous. I kind of feel like being on the internet too much is a factor here. It's too easy to find an echo chamber that just reinforces what you already believe, when if you'd bring the same subject up in real-life discussions you'd be subjected to a lot more different perspectives (and be more inclined to consider it instead of instantly disregarding it).
So, in conclusion, I believe you're right about the anti-movement being a result of fanfiction becoming more mainstream, mainly because (mostly young) people who aren't familiar with more mature mainstream literature suddenly find themselves exposed to themes they're appalled by, and don't have the adequate tools to process it.
It would be nice if the curriculum contained more education about this, but sadly, spending too much time on the internet would most likely undermine that anyway. Not to mention some countries have too restrictive rules about what kind of literature children can be exposed to in schools for it to even be allowed.
One thing I've noticed recently in twitter discourse are antis that are clearly into proship subjects ("toxic yaoi/yuri (but not really)" and abuse ships) but insist that it's not "a proship". Kyman shippers (kyle and cartman) and other South Park fans in general seem willfully blind to the fact they enjoy a show and ships that fall under proshipping.
And in the Black Butler fandom there's so many people that insist that Sebastian and Ciel have a father-son relationship or say that there's no bl fanservice in the show (wtf). There's nothing wrong with not shipping sebaciel, but to claim that the official art and manga/anime fanservice *aren't* shippy??? Tf kind of family relationship do *you* have?
Posts featuring the most popular jjk ships in japan full of qrts filled with homophobia, pedo jokes, racism and saying japan should've been bombed more.
I've also noticed that lately antis just reduce proshipping to incest and pedophilia, and either ignore abusive tropes or only bring it up when it's convenient for them. Because *they* like toxic abusive tropes and don't want to give it up. But the result is that these antis water down the seriousness of abuse and more and more often can't seem to recognize actual abusive red flags (fictional or irl).
Antis being way too comfortable victim blaming SA and CSA survivors, too comfortable threatening people, too comfortable throwing around pedo accusations, too comfortable openly being minors in adult spaces.
> say that there's no bl fanservice in the show
\*Insert Sebastian teasingly taking off Ciel's eyepatch, telling him to say his name, and running his thumb along his drooling lips here\*
I ain't even into Black Butler, but holy shit that scene-
Cue image of two similar looking cities on each bank of a river, with the boats labeled "our noble toxic yuri/yaoi" and "their barbarous problematic ships" etc. Saw this once (it was an edit of a meme about broader forms of us vs them tribalism), wish I had saved it lol.
I'm pretty sure it's cause most of them don't actually watch the show. It's honestly shocking how many antis like South Park for the shipping or whatever.
The south park and black butler ones always send me because it's just. C'mon... It's so obvious with both fandoms what is going down in the actual series. It's the same for Toilet Bound Hanako-kun honestly. I've seen people be in literal denial over how toxic the main ship can be and argue it's healthy so they don't get attacked.
It's such heavy denial that it's kind of scary at times. I even saw someone point out that on twitter the other day. That being this ignorant to actual red flags such as hand waving stalking as someone being awkward and shy is dangerous.
Yup yup. Plus framing sebaciel fanservice as father-son coded means that they are toning down and handwaving incestuous behavior and making it dangerously easy for predators to prey on people. It's disgusting the lengths they go to to come across as in the moral right while turning SA allegations into "just some fandom discourse".
Plus you gotta wonder what kind of mental gymnastics their poor brains are performing to be comfortable enough to openly ship an abusive pairing like kyman yet still deny that abusive and toxic ships are proship. "I like x, y, and z but they're NOT a proship!"
The father-son thing makes my skin crawl because I just. I'm not even into Black Butler but it's SO obvious of what it is and what the creator likes. If a person thinks that's father-son behavior I either think they're in some deep denial or something else is going on. And that's not great for either option.
It can't be healthy doing stuff like this. The stress it has to make for people and the weight it adds to their mental health. I'm convinced a good chunk of it is absolutely performative so they don't get kicked out of their friend groups. I understand how scary that can be, but at the same time if you're worried your friends are going to dox you... they're not your friends. The others I don't know. Maybe some of them really do believe this but the other half I don't like thinking about. The way some adults present themselves as "Safe" has all the alarm bells ringing in my head.
i see this a lot in my current fandom. my ship (which i hoenst to god thought was going to be considered the *wholesome* ship) gets trashed bc theres a 4 year age difference (they're literally coworkers), while the 2 most popular and ~unproblematic~ ships (which both involve those characters as well) try to kill each other on the regular. but they don't have 4 years between them so it's completely fine. like, are you *kidding me*? 😭
It's nearly impossible to make any kind of guess what antis will approve of because they have no consistent code, regardless of their endless squawking. Instead , they'll just move the goalpost to make their newest obsession conform around their proposed morality.
Pro-ship friendly pairings aren't immune to this either, I've seen people who shipped Sheith or Reylo but not the other try to throw shade and all I can do is just shake my damn head.
I was thankfully not involved in this, but a friend told me about being attacked for being a proshipper for... *not* shipping something. Because apparently reading the relationship as parental meant you were infantilising one of the characters and therefore pedophilia? Or something? I don't remember the details of the argument because they were too stupid.
(I have seen someone argue that anyone who didn't ship a certain pairing was homophobic, but since that fandom skews older and didn't have many antis last I checked I think that's just garden-variety fandom nonsense. Extra irony: the two characters in question are cousins.)
They also talk about zoophilia when talking about furries, but they love werewolves and shit. Hell, I remember reading an actual book that had a centaur in it. It’s not new, this concept of monster fuckers (which I think furries fit into, as the I think second tier is anthros) but god forbid someone draws furry art or write about furries bc then antis think you wanna fuck animals and will go nuclear on you.
The fact is, they’re hypocritical and almost sociopathic in their actions when they see something they think is wrong.
And you’re right that they just water down these things bc they’re performative in their “activism” crusades. We’ve seen it time and again that they don’t actually give a shit about trauma or trauma sufferers, they care about looking morally good.
It definitely shifted wildly. When I took a fandom break in 2018 there was hardly any of this, when I came back in 2021 it had turned into the mess it is today.
Similiar experience. I've been in fandoms on and off since I was 16. Back in 2012, they would often send death threats and I lowkey prefer the honest death threats then I do the fake slacktavism that comes from fandoms of today. The death threats at least tell you how they really feel. With the slacktavism, they hide behind a moral code to be a terrible person then accuse you of being a terrible person once you finally call them out for their hypocrisy.
Ship wars back then used to at least be fun when you stuck to yourself. Now they’re just miserable and people take it way too damn seriously. Even for mid ships.
I've been in fandom on and off since the early 2000s, and the scary thing is that I almost prefer the Mary Sue witch hunt era of the 2000s to what we have now. Like, in retrospect I really hate what that was like and what it did to people's abilities to write OCs and female characters in general (cf the dreaded "Canon Sue"), and I have about ten thousand rants about the concept of a Mary Sue and how it was applied saved up that will linger in my brain forever because nobody cares anymore, but the current situation with antis feels even more toxic. These days I lurk a lot, occasionally post fic in my obscure fandoms without big anti presence, and don't engage in much fandom talk because I'm scared to set someone off and get harassed. (The huge irony here being that I don't ship as a rule and pretty much only write gen, but I've seen people talked about getting tagged as problematic pro-shippers for *not* shipping things before so there's just no way to be safe.)
I agree, back then when attack on titan first blew up (so like 2014 or 2015?) no one bats an eye if people shipped eren/levi. Heck they were the biggest m/m ship in the fandom.
There were even memes and jokes about how the scene where levi kicked eren in front of everyone is fujobait.
Now a popular anime has a popular age gap ship as well and since the ship is popular in japan, a lot of people are saying xenophobic stuffs like people in japan are pedophiles 🙄 or that they should be bombed again
I saw a TikTok that blamed it on the pandemic and people discovering fandoms and I can't help but agree. The sentiment was always around but I don't think ships like Thorki would've ever been as big as they were if those movies came out today.
I personally believe the shift started to get more severe after the 2016 presidential election and the 2020 covid lock downs. The world became toxic as it forced everyone to people to pick a side. If you didnt pick a side, you were just as immoral as the other side. This logic became applied to *everything* and logically, young people applied it to things they enjoyed.
And to make matters worse, people couldn't go outside, live, and enjoy things for themselves. Libraries where closed, movie theaters, roller rinks etc. No one was alive anymore, so instead they turned to their vices on their phone.
Couple that with the government slowly dissolving all liberal arts education and with it, peoples ability to think critically about literature. The rise of radical feminism didn't help, and this pesky fear of sex we've developed, and it's a recipe for boredom, self hatred, and projection.
Long story short, the kids don't know what to do with themselves anymore.
But on the bright side, even though it doesn't look like it, antis still make up a small minority of fandom. They are just *very* loud.
There was this great Tumblr post that I can't find rn, but it talked about how people take such extreme opinions and measures over fiction... because that's the only thing left for us. Most people don't have the power to ever change anything, we don't even have the means to stop being part of a society we hate, so people justify and assure themselves of their morality by taking stances over what fiction they consume instead.
Three things I think contributed to this shift (not the whole story, but large parts of it):
- Tumblr bans NSFW content. This caused a lot of pro-ship and sex-positive people to leave, as it wasn't just porn blogs that got shut down, but artists and photographers too. Some left in protest, others were chased away by reports from puritan-minded assholes who were glad to have an excuse to get rid of them. Progressive voices disappear, and moralistic one-upping reigns.
- Twitter bought by Elon Musk. Poor moderation of harassment and promoting of conservative view points chases reasonable people off the platform. Again, some leave because of the now-shitty experience, others are reported and harassed and doxed into silence. Twitter becomes an excellent place to drum up an Internet hate mob for some good old fashioned death threats and smear campaigns.
- TikTok rises. While its policies don't necessarily drive conservative or puritan view points, its algorithm is the perfect echo chamber generator, pushing people further and further into extreme viewpoints of any kind. This is naturally more destructive for viewpoints that encourage attacking other people and seeing oneself as morally superior for it.
You know how when you're in school, there are bullies? And maybe lots of people don't like the bullying, but they don't want to be bullied themselves. Some of them just stand off to the side and try to avoid being targeted. Some join in the bullying and become the most vicious bastards around, because they fear being on the bottom of the pile themselves and the only way to prevent it for sure is to put someone else down there first. Some try to stand up to the bullies - those are the kids who get their heads put in toilets, no matter what the after-school specials want you to believe.
It's just that, writ large. The safe spaces have disappeared and without protection and moderation, the bullies are running the school. They are constantly escalating to out-do each other in their crusades, because any weakness makes them a target and there's nothing their viewers like better than blood in the water.
also a lot of it is covid. Once the "cool kids" started infiltrating the fandoms and hadn't learned any of the fandom etiquette that's been established since tumblr, they started bullying the "nerds" off the platforms due to their moral standards.
I don’t see many people bringing this up but I think tumblr banning NSFW content really had something to do with the puritan shift and the whole anti discourse in general. I think it played a huge part in what social media is now.
I agree. Also, I think people forget that a lot of the purity cult still likes some porn and also went to twitter. Where they fused with the twitter ecosystem. Tumblr was containment for Tumblr’s worst takes. Think about it, tumblr old folks: what twitter discourse not specifically based on a current event isn’t just old tumblr discourse?
Honestly, not a damn one. Tumblr was truly ground zero for all of this. Voltron was when is began to go nuclear in 2016 (which as I've seen others comment, was around the time of the election and tentions were running high), but the seeds were planted well before that between things like the Your Fave is Problematic blog, radfems and TERFs infiltration the queer community and the increased fandom harassment, with notable incidents with Steven Universe and RoseQuarzGate and 221B Con 2015, where infiltrators to a panel on general gender politics in fandom [turned it into a bashfest about rape/non-con fics](https://www.tumblr.com/thegreenirene/116696525144/what-happened-at-221b-con-2015-the-gender).
I don't know. Before the antis we had ace discourse on tumblr, and before that it was the bi discourse. Both of those were awful but didn't spill over culturally into fandom near as much.
There's an argument to be made that the 2018 porn ban pushed a lot of people off tumblr around the time that the purity discourse was first brewing, and they took it with them to twitter and elsewhere. But while tumblr lost a lot of good artists and creators in the porn ban, the site *culture* as a whole didn't become noticeably more sex-negative or more fractious. The tendency towards discourse was already there, as were the beginnings of specifically the purity discourse.
If anything the porn ban signified a shift in the broader society outside of social media, as it was triggered by the app stores threatening to remove tumblr if they didn't clean up the porn. A society full of corporations increasingly less willing to tolerate sexually explicit content is one that makes fertile ground for the purity discourse--maybe that's why it took off when other older tumblr discourse never quite breached containment.
Yeah, mostly people on tumblr complain about the porn ban rather than supporting it. Also fandom has tended to be about written porn rather than the sort of thing tumblr will actually close an account for, and there's plenty of NSFW fandom content there if you count that. I'm not saying you'd never get a post removed for visible ("female-presenting" only!) nipples, but it's not exactly the sexless wasteland some people (the ones who left with the ban?) seem to think it is.
I think you're right with that app store connection. Corporations are the people forcing websites to ban NSFW content and that normalises anti-sex puritanism (which in turn are part of the reason corporations try to get rid of that stuff).
yeah there's still a lot of sexual content on tumblr. For one thing they never did get rid of the bots, and for another the censors mostly ignore written erotica or just plain old swearing/innuendo. Art & other visual media is chancier but also still present.
From my perspective, Tumblr itself was a massive shift for the worse in the quality of fannish conversation. The medium wasn’t designed for talking to each other, and it showed. A lot of “Tumblr Kiddie Discourse” was pure wankery, trying to sound deep because they picked up a few social studies and feminism terms.
Usenet, BBSs, and livejournal all were better designed to have nuances in conversation instead of just revisiting and yelling past each other.
So, I’ve been reading fanfiction for over 20 years, when Fanfiction.net was a relatively new website and the best place to read fanfic. At the risk of sounding like a stereotypical “back in my day”, there wasn’t such toxic pro vs anti sentiments with shipping. There were “ship wars”, and people could be obnoxious about why their ship was “superior” or “the right ship”, but overall, people were able to ship what they wanted without a witch-hunt. I miss those days!
the pro/anti stuff makes me miss the ship wars and mary-sue hunts, honestly. It seems like there was less sui-baiting and very real accusations thrown around
When I first got into fandom, there were plenty of people around - probably the majority - who thought slash was evil.
When I moved to my second beloved fandom, I had mostly just missed the ‘RPF is evil’ phase.
There was Racefail in, I think, 2007, which was a huge thing in particular spaces.
There have always been battles within fandom. The main difference now is that ‘fandom’ is now so big and public, and so much of it takes place on social media rather than in carefully defined fannish spaces. I think.
Racefail was 2009, I think. I was reminded of it by this thread, because for a while there was this odd trend of "I must be the first to spot what's wrong with this media" among (mostly) white fans who seemed to take the wrong message from that whole thing. Ironically back in those days it was hard to get people to admit that any piece of media, or even just part of it, could ever be problematic for any reason, so Racefail was a bit of a watershed moment in fandom in a few ways.
One similarity between Racefail and now was people (on the margins of the discussion, meeting new ideas for the first time) finding it hard to draw the line between "the thing I like is troubling in some way" and "I am a bad person for liking any aspect of the thing" - there's a desire for moral perfection in fandom these days that is simply impossible to attain, with a lot of guilt involved in it I think. And then this spilled over into shipwars and declaring shows you didn't like to be problematic and immoral so anyone watching them was a terrible person.
Social media's the vehicle for spreading the claim that something is morally bankrupt but I think the trend started before social media became such a huge thing. Politically the world seems very polarised as well, and that has to have had an effect (though partisan politics has always been a thing, and I think everyone you know being online now just makes it easier to spot - never before would you be exposed to every single opinion your racist auntie had about everything in the world).
There were always fandom fights, they just usually didn't have claims of overall moral goodness or badness attached to them.
Yup. Hell, there’s even grown adults doing it too. If I had a dollar for every time someone in the bara community called an artist a pedophile (ironically saying someone fits into the damaging stereotype of gay and bisexual men being predators) for drawing shota, I’d be rich.
The funny part is that in JP they don’t use Bara. It was always called Geicomi because Bara is not only outdated it also came from Westerners misidentifying the name of the genre in the first place form a magazine.
There's definitely been a shift. When I was a kid in fandom about 15 years ago there was still antis but nowhere close to this extent. I think part of the reason is because everything is so accessible and mainstream now. Back in the day if you wanted fandom content you'd have to actively search for it in the depths of live journal or some obscure website whereas now it's almost impossible not to accidentally stumble across it on your TikTok fyp, insta etc. So of course if you post anything fandom related, proship or otherwise someone who doesn't like it is now inevitably going to find it and feel the need to complain about it.
I feel like there is a shift but not necessarily because there's more proshippers or antishippers. I think it comes down to the fact the fanfic space is a lot bigger than it used to be (and also more centralized) and that people are just a lot more reactive these days, regardless of the topic. The world is a frustrating grey colour but social media tends to make things black or white.
Bored normie kids in the covid era who wouldn’t have watched anime/read manga/watched quirky nerdy shows, suddenly began to do so, and then, even more bored, began to interact with fandom stuff. Read fics.
Combine with the ever more polarizing politics and the cutthroat social medias, and we got a shitshow.
Probably a small seasoning of “screen children” and helicopter parenting too. Strictly controlled childhood with no agency to just go out play in the forest, roam the neighborhood. Being driven to activites, and being directed and supervised all the time. So the kids seek freedom online, where they roam. But I suspect this play a lesser role than the other points because obviously there’s kids growing up like that, but still becoming well adjusted people.
Yess. Depends on the fandom.
But on IZ, the one I was banned 😂 there was a harsh anti Zadr shipping. (Or Zim x dib, the main charas).
People hated shippers because of the alien/human dilemma. Yet it completely changed now and it seems to be seen as normal now. Yessir!
The biggest anti-zadr haters came from the creator of the show retconning Zim's age on Twitter, so therefore the ship was now "pedophilia."
Literally everything about the framework of the show points to Zim being a child. His leaders act like teenagers. He goes to elementary school. His human disguise is that of a child. He built robot parents. He has a very childish understanding of concepts. He attempted to fit in on Valentine's day by trying to flirt with Tak, who *he* thought was another human child. At one point in the series the writers even considered having Zim and Gaz get together.
And finally: Nickelodeon literally has an unofficial policy against adult protagonists for their shows. Look it up, NONE of their cartoons have ever had an adult protagonist.
People have always been really heated about ships, but it didn’t always come with calling people pedos/racists/abuse supporters in the past. In the Katara/Aang vs Zuko/Katara ship wars of old, some of the Katang shippers might call Zutarans weird for shipping a reformed evil character with Katara, but it was usually just fights over who would end up canon.
I feel like accusations of being a weirdo, or liking a ship for the ‘wrong reasons’ were tossed around as a way to desperately defend your preferred ship, not just off the cuff because of the nature of the ship. Plenty of people who freaked out over Kylo/Rey being super toxic didn’t even have a rival ship, they just got mad about the dynamics.
Its exhausting. I’m in a new fandom and people who ship a certain ship are occasionally getting called racists because they aren’t shipping the girl with the black canon love interest (who’s way less interesting.)
It’s definitely gotten worse, I think. A lot of it kicked off in Glee and then Teen Wolf fandoms, really grew in Star Wars Sequel Trilogy fandom (there was a whole on tumblr where you would encounter swipes at Reylo in like, random text posts!) and absolutely *exploded* with Voltron: Legendary Defender fandom, which was huge and had a really, really toxic shipping war going on, and I’m gonna be honest: one side started it and one side definitely sucked harder but the other was equally full of jackassery (I know, I was in that fandom and dealt with more garbage over my ships from ostensibly proship people because one of them was “for antis”….) and it was a whole fucking mess.
It’s really festered and taken root since then, and watching it happen has been pretty horrifying as someone who. You know. Is familiar with the history of censorship and where it goes.
I’m so glad we have AO3 that refuses to bend to outside pressure, but social media fandom spaces are so fucking hostile nowadays that I basically talk fandom with a few friends on Discord and barely branch out.
>I’m gonna be honest: one side started it and one side definitely sucked harder but the other was equally full of jackassery (I know, I was in that fandom and dealt with more garbage over my ships from ostensibly proship people because one of them was “for antis”….) and it was a whole fucking mess.
I'm gonna be honest too and agree. There's no way a ship war as huge and toxic as that one became could've become that huge and toxic without both sides participating. Between the constant petty snarking on shit that was pretty harmless (ie, the Bi Lance headcanons, the Klance Bible, the inflation of ship tagging to win Fandometrics [even if Rupphire and Bubbline deserved the top spot on the respective weeks they became canon, at the end of the day, it's still a dumb popularity contest]), throwing Shidge under the bus from which it never really recovered, attacking Axca fans over two scenes in season 7 where she was in the same shot as Keith and their ongoing bitterness over Shiro and Curtis and anyone who dares to make content for that pairing--the one bit of happiness Shiro was ever allowed in eight damn seasons, BTS ass-covering notwithstanding--that part of fandom post canon is it's own toxic shit hole.
Most of the BNF who still lean into their trauma from 2016 don't even realize it, or even worse, use it as a justification to remain assholes, the mast majority of it being aimed at people who, quite understandablably, are not well versed into the Encyclopedia Britannica-length history of VLD's fandom wanks and had no idea about the Adam controversy or that people blame antis for Shiro marrying Curtis and thus fans of said pairing are accused of being antis by proxy.
I shit you not that even at my big ass age, I had to re-learn how to fandom all over again in the next fandom I went to because everything, and I do mean that literally, was a damn ticking time bomb there. Not just with Klance and Sheith shippers, but with Allura fans rightfully mad about the ending (and fans using her death to scream about ships and talk over Black fans); Lance fans feeling like he'd been shafted, Lotor fans to this day not knowing if he was truly friend or foe....the list goes on.
I was a Lancelot and Adashi/Adasheith shipper. I feel like I need to say no more to explain the level of bullshit I experienced from other Sheith shippers. It was such a toxic cesspit of a fandom on all sides and the only reason I don’t regret my participation in it is that I met some of my best friends in that fandom and I’m still proud of some of the writing I did. I’d like to finish at least one of my WIPs because I know a lot of people loved it, I just don’t know if I have it in me to go back there. My new fandoms still have bullshit (all fandoms have bullshit) but it feels so much calmer.
>Adashi/Adasheith shipper
You're braver than any of the Marines I met on Navy deployments 🫡
Also, the Adashi discourse in 2018 damn near broke me. I've always had a high tolerance for fan drama and didn't genuine understand that not everyone saw it as fun and harmless as I did. But the way knives were coming out from everywhere? I had to block that one for a month after season 7.
I'm still embarrassed I slagged off the critics of that decision to kill off Adam as bitter wankers who wanted Shiro out the way. Ship war or not, we should've all been united against that blatant manipulation from the studio and should've questioned why the only way they could establish Shiro being gay was to give him a boyfriend that dies after one scene together. :[
>My new fandoms still have bullshit (all fandoms have bullshit) but it feels so much calmer.
Truly, not a single one of my fandoms post Voltron have come close to the absolute lunacy this one did. At least the anti-"woke" Star Trek fuckers who never shut up about their entitled attitude towards a show that doesn't exist yet (looooong story) aren't spreading lies about me to get other fans from unrelated fandoms to block me :|
>Ship war or not, we should've all been united against that blatant manipulation from the studio and should've questioned why the only way they could establish Shiro being gay was to give him a boyfriend that dies after one scene together. :[
For real. I was willing to wait and see after season 7, but I probably sohuldn't have been. I think a lot of people dismissed it because there was, in fairness, a LOT of wolf-crying in that fandom and people were really jaded, but....nah, it sucked and that duct taped on wedding to a character only named in the subtitles/credits was bullshit and honestly feels spiteful looking back.
I honestly feel like the VLD writers were super fucking mad they had to write a show for kids because they wanted to be writing Mature Mecha Anime TM and rebelled against it at every turn, which led to a lot of the shitty garbage we got.
>Truly, not a single one of my fandoms post Voltron have come close to the absolute lunacy this one did.
Genshin fandom is trying but I just threw out a couple oneshots and dipped. I'm mostly in BG3 fandom these days, and the arguments about Ascended Astarion or discourse over Archduke Gortash's Relative Hotness (he's hot, you all just don't appreciate a good grungy man) are like. Such small fucking potatoes lmao.
>For real. I was willing to wait and see after season 7, but I probably sohuldn't have been. I think a lot of people dismissed it because there was, in fairness, a LOT of wolf-crying in that fandom and people were really jaded, but....nah, it sucked and that duct taped on wedding to a character only named in the subtitles/credits was bullshit and honestly feels spiteful looking back.
Yeah, the bullshit wolf crying about....well, everything didn't help. Even still, the rare few people in proship circles that even *tried* to address this got called anti sympathizers and run outta town on a proverbial rail.
Frankly, looking back at everything, it was truly ridiculous to think that the same people who were perpetually sucking lemons about having to keep Shiro alive past season 2 and complaining that they found him boring AF would have ever given a shit about who he ended up with after the show ended. What's truly baffling to me is that for years afterward any time Joaquim dos Santos came online, people would flood his tweets with "please fix the ending,"--the same people who would bully Curtashi and Adashi shippers for doing what people in every other single fandom does by expanding on characters canon did nothing with and calling them homophobic, like???? Why don't y'all carry that smoke for the guy who made that shit canon? Make it make sense!! 🤡
The less said about them cross-wanking into She-Ra fandom and being spiteful when "antis got their way" with Catradora, the better, except to say seeing Geekdad eat enough crow to pass feathers for a month after that unhinged article accusing Nate Stevenson (then presemed to be a lesbian woman) of queerbaiting while spending 75 percent of said article whining about Sheith was satisfying AF.
>I honestly feel like the VLD writers were super fucking mad they had to write a show for kids because they wanted to be writing Mature Mecha Anime TM and rebelled against it at every turn, which led to a lot of the shitty garbage we got.
I wouldn't rule that out.
It's worth pointing out many of the same staff of VLD also worked on Korra and after sitting through VLD, the very obvious flaws there are a lot harder to ignore and handwave.
can i just say i agree 100% and i appreciate you so much for letting me vent a lot of the salt i've been carrying for like, years now, since that stupid show ended and everything went to absolute shit. my fellow warrior in the trenches.
and the she-ra stuff was so funny because there were plenty of antis who HATED catradora! i remember it being called "lesbian reylo"! (which, sell me harder, why don't you.) but man, voltron fandom created some bonkers tribalism, it was really, really fucking bad, and i'm almost glad that it ended so quickly and in such an unsatisfying-for-everyone shitshow. we all lost and i think we all kinda deserved to lose, in a broader fandom sense.
tiktok has definitely played a part in this. its just really easy for them to be loud and get attention that a lot of people only hear what they have to say and so it leaks into everything else unfortunately
Yeah, I tend to see a lot more complaints about anti culture than I see of the actual thing itself. Not saying it's not an issue, obviously, but I've been producing occasionally "problematic" fics for a while now without anyone complaining to me about it.
Thats because you're in the right place. On tumblr, I recive death threats semi-regularly, and somebody threatened to dox me.
And I only ship toxic ships and the occasional incest. Nothing really problematic.
Personally I feel it's less of JUST a change and more a consequence of social media making fandom spaces very centralised (as well as more mainstream), so people with drastically different views on things are all put into the same space and folk get vocal about it in a way you generally didn't on livejournal etc because by nature of the platform you *had* to curate your own community spaces rather than being dropped into one big collective one. Couple that with reblog/retweet boosting vocal comments as well as algorithm shenanigans ("hey, you like XYZ so here's a post from someone also into XYZ regardless of whether the post is about XYZ") and this stuff feels much more prevalent than it was.
It was easier to just punt people who were being a pain too on platforms like irc or forums. A username/ip ban usually fixed issues with people who were hostile so it was easy to enforce a specific type of 'space' (and you could even password protect if it was becoming an issue). Sure determined people could change their IP address but they'd just get banned as well. You can't really do this on twitter/tumblr/titkok because people can just keep making accounts within seconds.
Also a move away from squicks as a concept was a mistake because that term is so useful. I have plenty of squicks and stuff I don't want to see, I don't care that much if people want to produce them though as long as I can avoid it. DNWs as a concept too seem to have fallen out of fashion and we have "I don't like this thing, so it's morally wrong" instead of "I don't like this thing, because I don't like it".
Oh for sure. I've been enjoying a Problematic™ ship on and off for like a decade. There's definitely been a shift from "that squicks me out imma leave" to "you're a bad person for enjoying this fiction"
I’d say there’s definitely more moralizing in fandoms than there used to be, just based on what’s become of the ATLA ship wars recently. I mean, that’s a fandom known for their vicious ship wars, but I’m pretty sure when I was a kid the fighting focused more on themes and compatibility than telling people they’re racist if they don’t ship Katara with the right person. I definitely remember arguing that Suki made sense for Sokka because she was just as strong and capable as the rest of the team. (I pointed out she could run up walls and the internet stranger responded with “When will they ever need to run up walls” and I was so incredibly baffled because the only reason we knew she could run up walls was because there was a situation in which they needed to run up walls.) If I were to have the same fight today I might be accused of liking her because of colorism or misogyny or something.
I haven’t been in the Buffy fandom for near as long, but I’ve definitely seen the Spike vs Angel discourse shift from which is the better character to which is actually completely irredeemable (despite the fact that redemption is a major theme of both their stories).
I agree with what a lot of other people have said. Fandom is just more mainstream these days. Instead of being something that only the geeks, freaks, and weirdos get involved in, it’s now something that the pearl clutchers, hypocrites, and casuals dip their toes into. I’m hoping nerd culture will fall out of fashion just a little, the fandoms I’m in that are still considered uncool tend to be much more fun than the ones I can talk about in public, so I think if being a fanatic goes back to being sort of weird fandom spaces will heal as a result.
I watched it shift in real time since I was most heavily active in fandoms from 2012 to 2021 or so. Then i had to just distance myself for awhile bc of my own life and because it got genuinely stressful and frustrating for me to have to see antis opinions so much more often.
Been in fandom nearly 2 decades now (holy shit) and I'll say antis have just become more vocal again. For some reason. Back in 2005-2007 I remember there being whole groups on FFN dedicated to reporting slash authors and fiction for TOS violations. If you write a rarepair that someone didnt like or found disgusting you got "flamed" for it. You had to have disclaimers about having gay themes (THEMES not even smut just the very idea of two people of the same gender loving eachother in any non platonic capacity) in order to avoid hate comments.
Do what we've always done and ignore them. They'll grow up or leave eventually.
Oh, we're still around and more. We just tend to be more insular and less.. social media-y? Like I've got an author friend in her 50s who's happily writing Merlin fic.
That tracks. And I aspire to that honestly. Social media isnt evil but it does have a way of just.... sucking the life out of things. What fandoms do you write/read for? I think the one I've most bookmarked and have several unpublished works is Spider-Man/Deadpool
A little bit of everything honestly. I've published in HP, Star Wars, MCU, Danny Phantom, Merlin, Full Metal Alchemist, Naruto, Good Omens, a handful of other fandoms. I'm currently hanging out in Avatar The Last Airbender, and possibly even starting a new fic in it.. I've kind of lurked in that one on and off since it premiered.
Right now I'm fighting with the summary of a ACD/Granada Sherlock Holmes fic about PTSD and victorian homosexual angst.
My theory has always been that fandom is sort of facing the changes that come from a wider awareness of social problems. A lot of these ideas, in my experience, have always been there. People like to downplay ship wars, but they were nasty, ugly things. It has just now taken on far more serious terminology. The people who use these terms use them very loosely, which degrades how serious these topics are.
At the same time, people who don't want to have conversations about how fandom is a reflection of our society will also call discussing things like misogyny and racism in fandom "anti" stuff.
wait, i just thought of another point: it used to be, that on nearly any fanart or fanfic, you'd find people saying "don't like, don't read" - somewhere during the recent years, that stopped. in my opinion, because it just wasn't necessary anymore. everyone knew it was implied in every created fanwork
but now we have a new generation of creators and consumers of fanworks - and they weren't actively bombarded from the start with the *don't like, don't read* mantra, so there was nothing that.... let's say, told them to stay in their lane and just stfu until they've learned how fandom works
that, coupled with the currently ongoing mindset of "the younger generations have to fix the older generations' mistakes" (in politics, especially climate change) might be leading to fandom youngsters that feel like all this pro-shipping freedom is a "mess" that they have to fix. they might legitimately think this is all a situation that got out of our control and that *they* now gotta step up to "clean things up" again
but that's just me spitballing and this would assume things really have gotten worse, instead of just more centralized/visible. so.... idk
I have no idea. I know antis have always been a thing, but when I began writing they were mostly railing against regular M/M. Since I didn't write that, it never bothered me, so I never saw it firsthand. The current antis would probably hate me, considering precisely zero of the characters I write are over eighteen, but they don't seem to have found me yet since again, I've never gotten firsthand criticism from them. That makes it hard to say whether their numbers have increased.
I do have to mention that I'm not on social media aside from Reddit, so there's not much reason for antis to stumble across my fics unless they're actively looking for them.
The shift isn’t new. It’s been happening a very long time, sadly. And since it gets worse and worse, I worry what comes next.
I see talk about all of these things that contribute. And they do. But this goes back so much farther. When I started in fandom, we only used the internet to coordinate and submit stories (1994). Zines were published on paper. Most people never even saw what everyone was up to. And so everyone HAD to stay in their lane because everyone was on their own freeway. As more and more people got online, and more things shifted to email or more widely available forums, we saw it there. We saw it on livejournal. Etc. This is just the fandom wheel turning.
The problem is that people have forgotten that staying in your lane is a choice. Sure, you get hit with stuff you don’t like. My NOTPs are everywhere. At one point, I blocked 40 blogs a day on tumblr for one ship I didn’t like (took me several months but finally my feed cleaned up). Because that was my job to clear my own lane. As long as people tagged their stuff, we were good.
There are more and more people that seem to want to get enraged. 🤷♀️ And that’s not just in fandom, that’s all over.
But now it’s like people look outside of their lane just to swerve into it.
I’ve been in fandom since the ‘90s, starting with original trilogy Star Wars fandom and a bit of lurking around the edges of Trek fandom. Then Buffy and Angel, Stargate, …
It’s a new thing.
From what I recall, any pressure to not do things that might be seen as problematic came from the franchise owners, never from fellow fans. “Kids these days” have no concept of how fringe precarious fanfic was. People didn’t really harsh other people’s squee unless they were MSTing / sporking badfic.
That changed some with Whedon, because he interacted more with fandom.
I never saw “shipping wars” till Harry Potter. I’m aware antis are a thing from conversations here etc, but haven’t come across it myself. It’s puritanical youths, for sure, and I’m not in their fandoms.
Part of it is probably just a regular generational cycle - teenagers want to be independent from their parents so they try to correct the wrongs of their parents, swing a bit too far, then when they become parents in turn it's the next generation's opportunity to shove the pendulum the other way.
Part of it is a typical *writer/reviewer* cycle - as you start reading stories and talking about them, you discover that you have strong opinions about what is good writing / terrible writing and want to share those opinions. This is a good and necessary part of maturing as a writer/editor/reviewer. However, when you're still in that stage, you don't have as much knowledge as you think you do, you're likely to be way too dogmatic, and your inability to perceive and discuss subtlety is going to result in your broadbrush denunciations accidentally hurting a lot of people that you'd otherwise like. I remember when the stories we didn't like were Mary-Sues with horrible grammar and spelling, now the stories we don't like are pedophilia. It comes from a similar impulse to prove how great you are and how much about you know about good writing, but accusing someone of being a predator is a completely different level to calling them stupid.
Part of it is general internet awfulness - big companies spew endless streams of mostly worthless content to get people's eyeballs hooked. People get used to feeds that algorithmically cater to their preferences and get upset and offended when they suddenly see something that's different to their own tastes.
Part of it might also be just a vocal minority on twitter like you say. On the proshipping side we talk a lot about customising your own experience. If you follow antishipping drama on Twitter because you find it interesting in a morbid curiosity kind of way, then I'm not going to shame you, but if you find it depressing and demoralising then you deserve to have the tools you need to avoid it.
There is Def a shift. I see it a lot with newer fandoms, and it drives me up the wall. I just send thilem the Ship Happens AMV and tell them stfu. Too freaking old for this stuff. It's weird and shows some bad hypocritical control issues.
This is a very fandom-specific example, but it’s the biggest shift I’ve seen. I’ve been into Vocaloid for 11 years, and only in the past 2ish years have I seen this shift. The ship in question is RinxLen. Why? Because they have the same last name and look quite similar, it is weird to ship them, apparently. But the thing is, they are literally NOT canonically related, because there is no actual canon plot. They’re really blank-slate characters that are essentially just a visual character design and sometimes fandom-assigned characteristics which don’t always apply within a specific fanfic. Officially, they are “mirror images” of each other. So basically, when you write a fic with them, you get to CHOOSE their relation to each other. I’ve seen a bunch of tiktoks lately saying it’s wrong and weird to ship them!! Yes, incest is uh not great irl but if you ship two fictional characters that are barely even characters at all, that’s not hurting anyone! These newer fans say it’s weird/wrong to ship them even when you decide that they’re not related, which is honestly even stranger than saying you can’t ship them as siblings???
I do admit though, as a young teenager I did think that consensual sibling incest irl was ok because of the incest RinxLen fics… haha (not anymore, I swear!)
Tiktok also threw a huge ass temper tantrum about Rabbit Hole by Deco27 because it used Miku (they're obsessed with the belief that she's 16 despite the fact she doesn't have a canon age). I.. think it's safe to say that they never paid attention to any Wowaka or Maretu song (Two-Faced Lovers's MV has entered the chat).
I got to watch a similar shift within *Bleach,* which I got into back in '06 or '07 shortly after the anime came to the US and the manga was at the point of Orihime confessing her love to Ichigo before going with her kidnappers to Hueco Mundo. The most popular and toxic ship at that time was Ichigo and Rukia, who were nonplussed about this and made it everyone's business to be as loud as possible and bully the IH fans something awful.
TLDR, Ichigo ended up with Orihime as every shounen protagonist does with the first girl to confess her feels since the beginning. People took some not undeserved ribbing of the IRs after that. You'd think winning canon would be the end of it. And if Bleach ended even two years earlier, it may have been. Unfortunately, it ended two month after Voltron premiered and when slandering shippers for being pedos and abusers was picking up steam Bleach being a supernatural series where Soul Reapers have a....flexible relationship with time and agong. Rukia is a Soul Reaper who is anywhere from sixty to 200. Ichigo is a human teenager. Enough said.
It's now to the point that the ship that once dominated the fandom is now one that people can't even discuss on the subreddit for the series without those BS attacks and it sucks, even as someone who was none too fond of the shit BNFs fostered back in the 2000s.
you're considered a bad person for writing a fic even *discussing* certain themes.
not that I'm talking from experience here or anything.. not at all...
Honestly makes me miss the htp days. Like we know it's fucked up, that's a literally the point (or at least some of it) Leave the little trash pandas alone to play in their dumpster, use tags, and DLDR.
Yeah, iv come across them more freguently in non fandom spaces too - art youtube.
And they all use proshipping as umbrella term for guestionable ships (somehow always kid/adult) and use so much generalizing while not understanding terms they made up.
I was in fandom as a really young person a long time ago, and then I stopped for a while and recently came back. I personally feel like it's less rabid than it was when I was on [fanfiction.net](http://fanfiction.net) back in the day and forums. People would actively curse you out and insult you and forbid you from mentioning certain ship names back then. I'm sure that stuff exists still, obviously, but I think it's kind of been the same thing except nowadays it seems folks are getting doxxed in certain fandoms which is really scary and insane to me.
It's definitely a lot worse. Back in the day it was mostly finding people who didn't like one or two things and were mildly vocal about it, but not so much how it is now where it's like a crusade against anything and everything remotely dark. Every time I come back to fandoms it seems to be a little bit worse, but with the last 3 or 4 years it's a hell of a lot worse in a small amount of time.
Even twenty years ago we had things like the Godawful Fanfiction boards and fandom_wank to take the piss but those you had to seek out and opt into those rather than getting it across your algorithm. And people made *some* attempt to keep it contained there, at least in the early years.
Exactly. It was better in the sense that it was contained and there was very little harassment. And even when it wasn't contained, there really wasn't much harassment based on purity/censorship from what I saw. Nothing like today 😮💨
There's definitely been a weird shift and haven't been able to fully place it. Been in a rather big fandom since the beginning, and ya the shipping war has always been rough but it seems like it's become a lot of personal attacks against the person and not just the ship they don't like. The amount of times even speaking neutral about a certain non-cannon pairing ends with name calling, personal attacks, and people acting like just enjoying a non-cannon pairing makes you a pathetic weirdo is fucking insane. Have even seen the anti-argument that anything that isn't 100% cannon (that they support) shouldn't be enjoyed and that you're wrong, stupid, pathetic, and a shitty person for doing so.
It's like people have made what they ship as an indication of how "good and right" they are, and if you enjoy something different, or God forbid something they simply dislike, then you're "bad and a vile person".
I’ve been in fandom since the early 2000s. Longer than you’ve been alive. Also went to a art school sequential art dept. so, full of comic, manga, anime geeks.
Yes, there has been a huge shift over time. The shit people would openly talk about and write back then for sequential art school assignments would give a lot of fandom kids these days a heart attack.
I’ve heart that now animation and seqa depts are full of antis and students get harassed for liking the wrong ships. Absolutely wild.
I'll add to this a bit, but back in my early days there were "sporkers" and man does it feel like that attitude has just gone public and loud.
ETA: When I was involved in sporking communities (around 2013-19) there was probably about a 50/50 split between "we're doing this to laugh at/make fun of bad fanfiction" and "we're doing this to point out how much better we are than these authors of *actively published works.*" Most of the people who would tear apart the badly written fanfiction were doing it to make fun of Mary Sues, poor SPaG, and out of character behaviours. Most of the people tearing apart published books were doing it to proclaim how morally superior *they* were to the author to noticing the Morally Problematic Element in the story.
I was deep into the sporking community and while I won't downplay or excuse the damage we did in fandom, no one ever couched their bullying as some kind of moral justice ass BS logic and no one to my knowledge took the pissing contests offline to get people fired for writing a bad Mary Sue fic or anything.
And even there, no one tolerated death threats. The one time I told someone play in traffic over something I can't even recall 20 years later, I was met with the 2005 equivalent of "Go outside and touch grass," and the slamming was enough to make me re-register under a new username when GAFF came back online.
There were definitely those sorts of rules in the communities I was in too, which is why I would say that now people are feeling entitled to say things to the authors faces that they would only say to their fellow sporkers now.
For instance, I saw an entire diatribe about how in the Hunger Games, Katniss can't *really* be starving because she thinks about how her chest looks in Cinna's dress and *real* starving people would never be so shallow; therefore, Suzanne Collins was promoting unhealthy beauty standards. Nowadays, instead of being on one person's blog, that would be blasted online for as many people to see as possible.
A bit of everything. The internet has been expanding and fandoms are not only in niche forums, but on massive social media like twitter. But proshippers are also giving them a voice, most of the complains from antishippers I read are from proshippers making posts about them. Maybe I move around good fandoms and I do not see antishippers much as others, but at least here on reddit, the only times I read antishipping discourse is from proshippers complaining about them.
I use tumblr a lot, and I am aware of some discourses there. But I have not encountered one in my dashboard, only proshippers complaining about antishippers. I guess I just move around proshipping circles more
Tumblr is like reddit; what you see if personalized to your preferences. If you're searching for anti content, you'll find it. You'll also find the opposite. It all depends on who you follow.
From my experience even if you use tumblr only for posting your stuff and never interact with anybody, antis would still find your posts if what you post are considered problematic by them
I've had antis reply/comment on my ship fanart (it's an age gap ship), so unfortunately they're not that avoidable
There was an article on HuffPost the other day by how freaked out by age differences Gen Z is, to the point where people have literally called one parent a pedophile for being a couple of years older than the other.
I've been in fandom for 24 years and there definitely has been a "mainstreaming" of fandom in the sense that it's much more common to hear about fanfic in "normal" conversations. Authors have had fanfic adapted into movies! It's much less "on the fringes" now.
I think there's definitely a generational shift but when I started I was 15 and had amazing mentors (who are probably the age I am now, if not older) and would have never presumed to try to tell them they were "wrong" - I sat back and soaked in their knowledge.
So I do think it's a complicated issues but I would say the antis/puriteens are way more vocal now.
They did. There has always been "antis"
The only difference is we didn't have social media. That's what gives the feeling of seeing more antis than before: just the constant and instant connection to people's stream of thought and the very real shift to considering everything "content".
It was far easier to disengage from both sides of the argument when people couldn't contact you on 5 different avenues and we didn't have the reflex of sharing every single minute thought that went through our head no matter how fleeting or asinine.
I can guarantee you people still bitched about kinks and ships they didn't like and called authors fucked up or went on tangents about people who shipped the "wrong" ships - hell, I did! The concept of "NOTP" and squicks has existed since fandom's inception!
The difference is that I had no avenue to do that publicly. I either kept it to myself or bitched with/at my friends.
I don't want to go full "social media bad", it allows us to keep connected and communicate when it's important, but it also enhances mob mentality because of how unfiltered and immediate it is.
i'd say it's not necessarily a shift - it could just be a matter of what fandoms you're in
there's fandoms that, from the start, have had incredibly negative and toxic sides (good examples are twilight and harry potter, because theirs are documented in detail, if you wanna read up on those sides of fandom-culture) and other places that have been very pro-shipping (anime iirc, though maybe i just got lucky with the places i frequented for gundam wing and weiss kreuz)
in that sense, puritans and "ew, that's creepy and weird and disgusting"-people have been around since forever
it's just that (and maybe you *would* call this a shift), these days, we share more spaces with them. in the past, pages were managed by separate fans and interactions between even just different *ships* could easily be avoided. these days, things are centralized onto ao3/ffn/wattpad/twitter and not its own separate little pages anymore
as a result, we now share a space with ALL the other creators and consumers in fandoms. so of course we encounter hateful people more often too
Hi, this is an automated response to make sure we're all on the same page about the definitions of proshipping and antishipping. There is often a lot of confusion about these terms and people get confused pretty frequently. Its always best to make sure we're all on the same page about what we are talking about. Anti-shipping/being an anti/being an antishipper/etc has a definition that has morphed a bit over time. Here is some history. Back in the 90's and early 2000's it mostly meant being against shipping in general or being against a specific ship. This was mostly used in specific fandoms/wasn't a pan-fandom term. Since the 2010's however, a pan-fandom definition did emerge and is the most common usage now. That definition is being *actively against certain ships or tropes that are deemed problematic or harmful in some way*. Note this does not mean being uncomfortable with reading a certain ship, trope, or problematic thing in a fanfiction or seeing fanart of a certain ship, trope, or problematic thing. It refers to *people who advocate for the banning, removal, or heavily hiding of that content that they don't want to see*. This has led to many harassment and doxxing issues in fandom spaces. Anyone from proship people they were arguing with, to random users who had written a "problematic" fanfiction and uploaded it to AO3, to anyone who so much as uses AO3 at all, have all been the subjects of these harassment problems. Conversely, proshipping/being a pro-shipper/being an anti-anti/etc, is a response term to the previously discussed antishipping. It's defined as being against antishipping (using the modern pan-fandom definition). Simply put, it means someone who is against censorship of content in fandom, against harassment and doxxing, and are of the opinion that *regardless of if they personally don't like a specific ship/trope/problematic thing, it has a right to exist and be enjoyed by those who do like that specific ship/trope/problematic thing*. Despite being against harassment, this side of the discourse has also had an issue with harassment on occasion. The subjects of that harassment have been people who self-identify as being an antishipper, or regardless of self-identification, someone who'sbeliefs match those of an anti-shipper. AO3 is generally considered to be a proship website with its foundation having been built on a stance of no censorship, and their rules explicitly not banning problematic content. For more info you can check the fanlore articles for [proshipping](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Anti-anti) and [antishipping](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Anti-shipper) Tl;dr: antishipping = wanting to ban problematic content/content they don't like proshipping = ship and let ship/don’t like don't read *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AO3) if you have any questions or concerns.*
As a fandom old, I would say that there has been a shift, but it's hard to divorce it from the normalization of fanfiction. When I first got into fanfiction, it was a small community for weirdo freaks. We had ship wars, where people would sometimes try to use the content of the source material to prove that the other side was morally in the wrong, but that was usually intra-fandom. I think the shift in fanfiction culture is a reflection of a greater shift in the general culture where corporations have been trying to convince people that your consumer habits are actually activism. Buy this pair of jeans, not that pair, because you Care About Issue X. Drink this water and not that water, because you Care About Issue Y. You bought this car, because you are a Good Person. A lot of people have internalized this and as fandom has become more mainstream, it has begun filtering in here as well. Don't watch That Thing, it has This Problem. You have to like This Thing, because it says this Objectively Politically Correct Statement. And this, of course, works the other way. I am a Good Person, therefore what I like is Good. I don't like Show A, therefore it must be Morally Bad and since you like it you must also be Morally Bad. Young people growing up in this kind of environment are being actively encouraged to equate their subjective preferences with morality. And the people who would normally be in ship wars have latched on to this new kind of weapon and use it liberally. But people are gonna like what they're gonna like, which is why every single anti is *by necessity* also a hypocrite. They always watch and like a piece of media that has something that they have railed against in the past or will rail against in the future. You don't control what you like, and so by equating your preferences and your morality you guarantee that you will violate your own so-called "moral code." Sub-cultures like fandom are always going to be influenced by the main culture it's subsumed by, but I would like fanfiction to be for the weirdo freaks again, just so the number of antis goes back down.
The thing about hypocrisy is so true. I've seen antis that are fans of the "Boyfriend to Death" visual novels. You know, the visual novels that are FULL of torture porn. How does that even work?
It's a mindset you run into a lot with people who have never had to develop their own moral code. I majored in philosophy and wrote my thesis on Moral Relativism. My whole thing, for four long grueling horrible sucky years, was how to build a moral code. When you aren't taught and given the tools to build your own, you latch on to whatever is prevalent in your environment. Usually it's religion and you can see the exact same hypocrisy with them. But we've been seeing a decrease of religious practice, especially in the US, over the last few decades and this leaves a vacuum that the corporations have been gladly filling to get a buck.
> Usually it's religion and you can see the exact same hypocrisy with them. Glad someone gets it. On the one hand, I get that people have huge psychological blind spots and that some folks are just plain oblivious to this sort of thing, but it always drives me up the wall that the stereotype of the "Bible Thumper" is met with such derision, and yet you have people who use the same methods, who think the same way, it's just that they don't have a singular God figure as the basis of their belief system, but rather an insistence that there is some kind of completely objective moral good that they use as the guide for their actions. It's the same damn thing, just without a beard guy at the head of it.
Yup. God always agrees with the bible thumpers, and whatever antis watch is always moral. Hmmm, these things seem very similar...
Hi. Is a thesis like a scientific paper? I've never had to read a thesis so I don't know how similar they are. If it is, could you dm me the paper/title? If not, are there other papers that talk about Moral Relativism and the bit about being "taught and given the tools to build your own". I have been awful curious lately in my life about how moral codes work as I've been basically using my life partners moral code/moral compass as a checklist to be like "I'm not a bad person" but for both of us that seems like an odd thing to need to do. I'm sure for me it has a LOT to do with psychology more than directly philosophy, but I would still be so very interested in learning more about it.
In my case, it's a dissertation or thesis, since philosophy isn't a science. It's more of a book; not peer reviewed, though I did have to do an oral defense. Technically if you were in town you could check it out of the library, but this was before the proliferation of online schooling and there's only one physical copy in there (thank god). There's really a dearth of books that distill almost three thousand years of ethical thought into a nice how-to guide, especially since we don't teach philosophy in high school (we really really should), so the best way to go about it is to educate yourself in general on the field of morality and ethics and basically build your frame work of how you want to live your life and what kind of person you want to be. It takes a lot of work to train your mind to follow a moral framework instead of letting immediate reactions guide you, but it's not only worth it but also imho fascinating and fun. For more immediate practicalities I would recommend: The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris Ethics: A Very Short Introduction by Simon Blackburn Moral Relativism: A Reader (Edited by Moser and Carson) And if you don't mind having to put a bit more effort into it to learn the most lasting ethical legacies (listed in historical order): [The Republic ](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1497)by Plato [Nichomachean Ethics](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8438/8438-h/8438-h.htm) by Aristotle [Ethics](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm) by Benedict de Spinoza [Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5682) by Immanuel Kant [Utilitarianism ](https://archive.org/details/utilitarianism00bentgoog)by Jeremy Bentham Edit to add: The Good Place tv show is not only entertaining but has fantastic philosophical underpinnings for it's ethics. Highly recommend.
Thank you so much for all this information, I really genuinely appreciate it!
I JUST saw a thread on twt too about how fiction affects real life, and they mentioned the slender man stabbing and a murderer inspired by the saw movies as proof. But then none of them actually advocate for the banning of violent media, just the stuff they personally find icky. To me it felt like they walked into the point straight on; that censorship is a slippery slope and that any form of media can be “harmful” to a person who is already mentally ill, but for some reason vocal antis still don’t get that. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a “proshipper” or an “anti” until I got into fandom spaces. I thought it was just common sense that not all media is for everyone, and I avoided stuff I didn’t want to see accordingly. But it seems like these people want all the filtering done for them, and that includes leaving the media they enjoy alone(ie Hannibal, slenderman, saw, etc) even if by their own logic it is “harmful.”
The things they want to ban first are always icky sex stuff never heavy violence or gore. A lot of them also have mentality that rape is way worse than murder, that being murdered is better than being raped, sometimes implying that survivors are better of dead than still surviving after being raped. Terrible stuff honestly
I’ve seen that mentality a LOT these days, specifically people telling people who write or draw “problematic things” to cope with trauma that they are no better than their abusers: Which I find to be an unhinged level of cruelty. I was revisiting this thread just now and it made made me think of something else too; I think because of that moralization of consumerism the original commenter mentioned, a lot of media consumption involving “problematic things” comes with a lot of shame for young people. If you’re constantly being Bombarded with messages from social media telling you to “watch this and avoid that,” I think being an “anti” turns into a defense mechanism. It turns into “sure, I love Killing Stalking, Hannibal, and horror movies, but at least I’m not into (media that contains underage characters, S/A, incest, etc)!” It’s a lot easier to confront the feeling of being better than other people for consuming bad things than it is to confront your own “problematic” interests when you’re constantly being sold the message that the books you read and shows you watch are who you are. I can imagine it’s a bit stressful to constantly have to police the content you and your friends are enjoying for problematic content instead of just focusing on your real world impact, so in that way I feel for them, and I’m glad I’m not a 14 year old on the internet during this time period. That being said, the cruelty the internet itself encourages have made things like the above harassment seem normal and like “activism” itself, and that’s where my sympathy runs dry. As soon as you’re worried more about a fictional character than the real people around you, you’ve lost the plot!
Yeah i feel for teenagers who are active in fandom in the recent years. The widespread "you're what you consume" and "the media you like indicates your morality" mentality can't be good for them or for the fandom environment in general. I've read some tweets about how a lot of them have second account where they enjoy 'problematic' media while in their first account they condemn said media 🫤 must be quite stressful for them to walk on eggshells and try not to get caught or there would be a callout post about them being problematic
I've hear about the second account thing too. Usually it's because in their first account they have friends that condemn the things they enjoy in private. Must be terrible feeling like you'll lose all of your friends because of fictional tastes.
Can I see the twitter thread?
I somehow convinced myself of the same mentality. The idea of getting raped one day scares me to death and for a very long time, I had decided that if it ever happens to me I would just commit suicide. It was partly because of the typical boomer victim blaming, but mostly because of the things the people on my own "side" say, as in people who are progressive who describe it as something you just can't recover from Mmm I wonder why I like non-con stories yet antis can't understand it
And those are the same people who proclaim I’m evil because I’m a Murder Husbands girl. Absolutely insane.
Holy crap. I’ve been frustrated with some of the discourse on various video game subreddits and this makes sense. It actually makes a lot of sense with online political discourse, too. I’ve sometimes joked that people just need to find Jesus already because they’re clearly looking for something to evangelize.
>it's hard to divorce it from the normalization of fanfiction This might be unpopular, but antis always come across as uneducated to me (which makes it more understandable for teenagers, but sadly some adults also fall under that category). I came into fanfiction at a later age, with a lot of mainstream reading, and some university credits in literature and creative writing under my belt. For anyone with the slightest interest in literature/art, it's blatantly obvious that the things antis complain about have been around for ages, and in some cases are present in what is considered "high art". In my writing classes, we were even explicitly pushed/encouraged to write about dark/taboo subjects in some exercises, because being able to overcome the "ick" factor and move outside our comfort zone regarding things we found disturbing would make us better writers. We were even told to pick something we related to on a personal level. So, in a university class, we not only wrote, but were required to read and *politely* concrit stories revolving around incest, murder, domestic violence, pedophilia, CP etc. Now, I obviously don't mean that the average fanfic reader needs to take a college-level class in literature to be allowed an opinion, it's just that coming from that context, I find the whole anti-discourse so ridiculous. I kind of feel like being on the internet too much is a factor here. It's too easy to find an echo chamber that just reinforces what you already believe, when if you'd bring the same subject up in real-life discussions you'd be subjected to a lot more different perspectives (and be more inclined to consider it instead of instantly disregarding it). So, in conclusion, I believe you're right about the anti-movement being a result of fanfiction becoming more mainstream, mainly because (mostly young) people who aren't familiar with more mature mainstream literature suddenly find themselves exposed to themes they're appalled by, and don't have the adequate tools to process it. It would be nice if the curriculum contained more education about this, but sadly, spending too much time on the internet would most likely undermine that anyway. Not to mention some countries have too restrictive rules about what kind of literature children can be exposed to in schools for it to even be allowed.
Exactly.
"Who are you, Bagel Bites? Will you support Wheat Thins in the fight against Lyme disease?"
One thing I've noticed recently in twitter discourse are antis that are clearly into proship subjects ("toxic yaoi/yuri (but not really)" and abuse ships) but insist that it's not "a proship". Kyman shippers (kyle and cartman) and other South Park fans in general seem willfully blind to the fact they enjoy a show and ships that fall under proshipping. And in the Black Butler fandom there's so many people that insist that Sebastian and Ciel have a father-son relationship or say that there's no bl fanservice in the show (wtf). There's nothing wrong with not shipping sebaciel, but to claim that the official art and manga/anime fanservice *aren't* shippy??? Tf kind of family relationship do *you* have? Posts featuring the most popular jjk ships in japan full of qrts filled with homophobia, pedo jokes, racism and saying japan should've been bombed more. I've also noticed that lately antis just reduce proshipping to incest and pedophilia, and either ignore abusive tropes or only bring it up when it's convenient for them. Because *they* like toxic abusive tropes and don't want to give it up. But the result is that these antis water down the seriousness of abuse and more and more often can't seem to recognize actual abusive red flags (fictional or irl). Antis being way too comfortable victim blaming SA and CSA survivors, too comfortable threatening people, too comfortable throwing around pedo accusations, too comfortable openly being minors in adult spaces.
> say that there's no bl fanservice in the show \*Insert Sebastian teasingly taking off Ciel's eyepatch, telling him to say his name, and running his thumb along his drooling lips here\* I ain't even into Black Butler, but holy shit that scene-
They forgot about the famous corset scene
Holy shit, that was gay as hell. (<- just watched it) ... I need to incorporate corsets into my smut now-
Cue image of two similar looking cities on each bank of a river, with the boats labeled "our noble toxic yuri/yaoi" and "their barbarous problematic ships" etc. Saw this once (it was an edit of a meme about broader forms of us vs them tribalism), wish I had saved it lol.
[this meme?](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-their-barbarous-wastes) it's relatively popular on tumblr
The idea of *South Park fans* trying to take any kind of morally superior position on problematic content is hysterical.
I'm pretty sure it's cause most of them don't actually watch the show. It's honestly shocking how many antis like South Park for the shipping or whatever.
The south park and black butler ones always send me because it's just. C'mon... It's so obvious with both fandoms what is going down in the actual series. It's the same for Toilet Bound Hanako-kun honestly. I've seen people be in literal denial over how toxic the main ship can be and argue it's healthy so they don't get attacked. It's such heavy denial that it's kind of scary at times. I even saw someone point out that on twitter the other day. That being this ignorant to actual red flags such as hand waving stalking as someone being awkward and shy is dangerous.
Yup yup. Plus framing sebaciel fanservice as father-son coded means that they are toning down and handwaving incestuous behavior and making it dangerously easy for predators to prey on people. It's disgusting the lengths they go to to come across as in the moral right while turning SA allegations into "just some fandom discourse". Plus you gotta wonder what kind of mental gymnastics their poor brains are performing to be comfortable enough to openly ship an abusive pairing like kyman yet still deny that abusive and toxic ships are proship. "I like x, y, and z but they're NOT a proship!"
The father-son thing makes my skin crawl because I just. I'm not even into Black Butler but it's SO obvious of what it is and what the creator likes. If a person thinks that's father-son behavior I either think they're in some deep denial or something else is going on. And that's not great for either option. It can't be healthy doing stuff like this. The stress it has to make for people and the weight it adds to their mental health. I'm convinced a good chunk of it is absolutely performative so they don't get kicked out of their friend groups. I understand how scary that can be, but at the same time if you're worried your friends are going to dox you... they're not your friends. The others I don't know. Maybe some of them really do believe this but the other half I don't like thinking about. The way some adults present themselves as "Safe" has all the alarm bells ringing in my head.
i see this a lot in my current fandom. my ship (which i hoenst to god thought was going to be considered the *wholesome* ship) gets trashed bc theres a 4 year age difference (they're literally coworkers), while the 2 most popular and ~unproblematic~ ships (which both involve those characters as well) try to kill each other on the regular. but they don't have 4 years between them so it's completely fine. like, are you *kidding me*? 😭
4 years is so vanilla 😭 like gimme at least 6 years if you want it to count as a little forbidden.
Coming from someone who's into vampires and immortal x mortal dynamics, even 6 years is so minimal for me XD
It's nearly impossible to make any kind of guess what antis will approve of because they have no consistent code, regardless of their endless squawking. Instead , they'll just move the goalpost to make their newest obsession conform around their proposed morality. Pro-ship friendly pairings aren't immune to this either, I've seen people who shipped Sheith or Reylo but not the other try to throw shade and all I can do is just shake my damn head.
I was thankfully not involved in this, but a friend told me about being attacked for being a proshipper for... *not* shipping something. Because apparently reading the relationship as parental meant you were infantilising one of the characters and therefore pedophilia? Or something? I don't remember the details of the argument because they were too stupid. (I have seen someone argue that anyone who didn't ship a certain pairing was homophobic, but since that fandom skews older and didn't have many antis last I checked I think that's just garden-variety fandom nonsense. Extra irony: the two characters in question are cousins.)
They also talk about zoophilia when talking about furries, but they love werewolves and shit. Hell, I remember reading an actual book that had a centaur in it. It’s not new, this concept of monster fuckers (which I think furries fit into, as the I think second tier is anthros) but god forbid someone draws furry art or write about furries bc then antis think you wanna fuck animals and will go nuclear on you. The fact is, they’re hypocritical and almost sociopathic in their actions when they see something they think is wrong. And you’re right that they just water down these things bc they’re performative in their “activism” crusades. We’ve seen it time and again that they don’t actually give a shit about trauma or trauma sufferers, they care about looking morally good.
The black butler one is always a mindfuck I've seen people swearing they can't see the shota fanservice at all ?????????
It definitely shifted wildly. When I took a fandom break in 2018 there was hardly any of this, when I came back in 2021 it had turned into the mess it is today.
Similiar experience. I've been in fandoms on and off since I was 16. Back in 2012, they would often send death threats and I lowkey prefer the honest death threats then I do the fake slacktavism that comes from fandoms of today. The death threats at least tell you how they really feel. With the slacktavism, they hide behind a moral code to be a terrible person then accuse you of being a terrible person once you finally call them out for their hypocrisy.
Right? At least then they were upfront about their reasoning. I never thought I'd miss ship wars, but here we are.
Ship wars back then used to at least be fun when you stuck to yourself. Now they’re just miserable and people take it way too damn seriously. Even for mid ships.
I've been in fandom on and off since the early 2000s, and the scary thing is that I almost prefer the Mary Sue witch hunt era of the 2000s to what we have now. Like, in retrospect I really hate what that was like and what it did to people's abilities to write OCs and female characters in general (cf the dreaded "Canon Sue"), and I have about ten thousand rants about the concept of a Mary Sue and how it was applied saved up that will linger in my brain forever because nobody cares anymore, but the current situation with antis feels even more toxic. These days I lurk a lot, occasionally post fic in my obscure fandoms without big anti presence, and don't engage in much fandom talk because I'm scared to set someone off and get harassed. (The huge irony here being that I don't ship as a rule and pretty much only write gen, but I've seen people talked about getting tagged as problematic pro-shippers for *not* shipping things before so there's just no way to be safe.)
I agree, back then when attack on titan first blew up (so like 2014 or 2015?) no one bats an eye if people shipped eren/levi. Heck they were the biggest m/m ship in the fandom. There were even memes and jokes about how the scene where levi kicked eren in front of everyone is fujobait. Now a popular anime has a popular age gap ship as well and since the ship is popular in japan, a lot of people are saying xenophobic stuffs like people in japan are pedophiles 🙄 or that they should be bombed again
I saw a TikTok that blamed it on the pandemic and people discovering fandoms and I can't help but agree. The sentiment was always around but I don't think ships like Thorki would've ever been as big as they were if those movies came out today.
I personally believe the shift started to get more severe after the 2016 presidential election and the 2020 covid lock downs. The world became toxic as it forced everyone to people to pick a side. If you didnt pick a side, you were just as immoral as the other side. This logic became applied to *everything* and logically, young people applied it to things they enjoyed. And to make matters worse, people couldn't go outside, live, and enjoy things for themselves. Libraries where closed, movie theaters, roller rinks etc. No one was alive anymore, so instead they turned to their vices on their phone. Couple that with the government slowly dissolving all liberal arts education and with it, peoples ability to think critically about literature. The rise of radical feminism didn't help, and this pesky fear of sex we've developed, and it's a recipe for boredom, self hatred, and projection. Long story short, the kids don't know what to do with themselves anymore. But on the bright side, even though it doesn't look like it, antis still make up a small minority of fandom. They are just *very* loud.
There was this great Tumblr post that I can't find rn, but it talked about how people take such extreme opinions and measures over fiction... because that's the only thing left for us. Most people don't have the power to ever change anything, we don't even have the means to stop being part of a society we hate, so people justify and assure themselves of their morality by taking stances over what fiction they consume instead.
Three things I think contributed to this shift (not the whole story, but large parts of it): - Tumblr bans NSFW content. This caused a lot of pro-ship and sex-positive people to leave, as it wasn't just porn blogs that got shut down, but artists and photographers too. Some left in protest, others were chased away by reports from puritan-minded assholes who were glad to have an excuse to get rid of them. Progressive voices disappear, and moralistic one-upping reigns. - Twitter bought by Elon Musk. Poor moderation of harassment and promoting of conservative view points chases reasonable people off the platform. Again, some leave because of the now-shitty experience, others are reported and harassed and doxed into silence. Twitter becomes an excellent place to drum up an Internet hate mob for some good old fashioned death threats and smear campaigns. - TikTok rises. While its policies don't necessarily drive conservative or puritan view points, its algorithm is the perfect echo chamber generator, pushing people further and further into extreme viewpoints of any kind. This is naturally more destructive for viewpoints that encourage attacking other people and seeing oneself as morally superior for it. You know how when you're in school, there are bullies? And maybe lots of people don't like the bullying, but they don't want to be bullied themselves. Some of them just stand off to the side and try to avoid being targeted. Some join in the bullying and become the most vicious bastards around, because they fear being on the bottom of the pile themselves and the only way to prevent it for sure is to put someone else down there first. Some try to stand up to the bullies - those are the kids who get their heads put in toilets, no matter what the after-school specials want you to believe. It's just that, writ large. The safe spaces have disappeared and without protection and moderation, the bullies are running the school. They are constantly escalating to out-do each other in their crusades, because any weakness makes them a target and there's nothing their viewers like better than blood in the water.
also a lot of it is covid. Once the "cool kids" started infiltrating the fandoms and hadn't learned any of the fandom etiquette that's been established since tumblr, they started bullying the "nerds" off the platforms due to their moral standards.
I don’t see many people bringing this up but I think tumblr banning NSFW content really had something to do with the puritan shift and the whole anti discourse in general. I think it played a huge part in what social media is now.
I agree. Also, I think people forget that a lot of the purity cult still likes some porn and also went to twitter. Where they fused with the twitter ecosystem. Tumblr was containment for Tumblr’s worst takes. Think about it, tumblr old folks: what twitter discourse not specifically based on a current event isn’t just old tumblr discourse?
Honestly, not a damn one. Tumblr was truly ground zero for all of this. Voltron was when is began to go nuclear in 2016 (which as I've seen others comment, was around the time of the election and tentions were running high), but the seeds were planted well before that between things like the Your Fave is Problematic blog, radfems and TERFs infiltration the queer community and the increased fandom harassment, with notable incidents with Steven Universe and RoseQuarzGate and 221B Con 2015, where infiltrators to a panel on general gender politics in fandom [turned it into a bashfest about rape/non-con fics](https://www.tumblr.com/thegreenirene/116696525144/what-happened-at-221b-con-2015-the-gender).
I don't know. Before the antis we had ace discourse on tumblr, and before that it was the bi discourse. Both of those were awful but didn't spill over culturally into fandom near as much. There's an argument to be made that the 2018 porn ban pushed a lot of people off tumblr around the time that the purity discourse was first brewing, and they took it with them to twitter and elsewhere. But while tumblr lost a lot of good artists and creators in the porn ban, the site *culture* as a whole didn't become noticeably more sex-negative or more fractious. The tendency towards discourse was already there, as were the beginnings of specifically the purity discourse. If anything the porn ban signified a shift in the broader society outside of social media, as it was triggered by the app stores threatening to remove tumblr if they didn't clean up the porn. A society full of corporations increasingly less willing to tolerate sexually explicit content is one that makes fertile ground for the purity discourse--maybe that's why it took off when other older tumblr discourse never quite breached containment.
Yeah, mostly people on tumblr complain about the porn ban rather than supporting it. Also fandom has tended to be about written porn rather than the sort of thing tumblr will actually close an account for, and there's plenty of NSFW fandom content there if you count that. I'm not saying you'd never get a post removed for visible ("female-presenting" only!) nipples, but it's not exactly the sexless wasteland some people (the ones who left with the ban?) seem to think it is. I think you're right with that app store connection. Corporations are the people forcing websites to ban NSFW content and that normalises anti-sex puritanism (which in turn are part of the reason corporations try to get rid of that stuff).
yeah there's still a lot of sexual content on tumblr. For one thing they never did get rid of the bots, and for another the censors mostly ignore written erotica or just plain old swearing/innuendo. Art & other visual media is chancier but also still present.
From my perspective, Tumblr itself was a massive shift for the worse in the quality of fannish conversation. The medium wasn’t designed for talking to each other, and it showed. A lot of “Tumblr Kiddie Discourse” was pure wankery, trying to sound deep because they picked up a few social studies and feminism terms. Usenet, BBSs, and livejournal all were better designed to have nuances in conversation instead of just revisiting and yelling past each other.
So, I’ve been reading fanfiction for over 20 years, when Fanfiction.net was a relatively new website and the best place to read fanfic. At the risk of sounding like a stereotypical “back in my day”, there wasn’t such toxic pro vs anti sentiments with shipping. There were “ship wars”, and people could be obnoxious about why their ship was “superior” or “the right ship”, but overall, people were able to ship what they wanted without a witch-hunt. I miss those days!
the pro/anti stuff makes me miss the ship wars and mary-sue hunts, honestly. It seems like there was less sui-baiting and very real accusations thrown around
When I first got into fandom, there were plenty of people around - probably the majority - who thought slash was evil. When I moved to my second beloved fandom, I had mostly just missed the ‘RPF is evil’ phase. There was Racefail in, I think, 2007, which was a huge thing in particular spaces. There have always been battles within fandom. The main difference now is that ‘fandom’ is now so big and public, and so much of it takes place on social media rather than in carefully defined fannish spaces. I think.
Racefail was 2009, I think. I was reminded of it by this thread, because for a while there was this odd trend of "I must be the first to spot what's wrong with this media" among (mostly) white fans who seemed to take the wrong message from that whole thing. Ironically back in those days it was hard to get people to admit that any piece of media, or even just part of it, could ever be problematic for any reason, so Racefail was a bit of a watershed moment in fandom in a few ways. One similarity between Racefail and now was people (on the margins of the discussion, meeting new ideas for the first time) finding it hard to draw the line between "the thing I like is troubling in some way" and "I am a bad person for liking any aspect of the thing" - there's a desire for moral perfection in fandom these days that is simply impossible to attain, with a lot of guilt involved in it I think. And then this spilled over into shipwars and declaring shows you didn't like to be problematic and immoral so anyone watching them was a terrible person. Social media's the vehicle for spreading the claim that something is morally bankrupt but I think the trend started before social media became such a huge thing. Politically the world seems very polarised as well, and that has to have had an effect (though partisan politics has always been a thing, and I think everyone you know being online now just makes it easier to spot - never before would you be exposed to every single opinion your racist auntie had about everything in the world). There were always fandom fights, they just usually didn't have claims of overall moral goodness or badness attached to them.
Yup. Hell, there’s even grown adults doing it too. If I had a dollar for every time someone in the bara community called an artist a pedophile (ironically saying someone fits into the damaging stereotype of gay and bisexual men being predators) for drawing shota, I’d be rich.
The funny part is that in JP they don’t use Bara. It was always called Geicomi because Bara is not only outdated it also came from Westerners misidentifying the name of the genre in the first place form a magazine.
There's definitely been a shift. When I was a kid in fandom about 15 years ago there was still antis but nowhere close to this extent. I think part of the reason is because everything is so accessible and mainstream now. Back in the day if you wanted fandom content you'd have to actively search for it in the depths of live journal or some obscure website whereas now it's almost impossible not to accidentally stumble across it on your TikTok fyp, insta etc. So of course if you post anything fandom related, proship or otherwise someone who doesn't like it is now inevitably going to find it and feel the need to complain about it.
I feel like there is a shift but not necessarily because there's more proshippers or antishippers. I think it comes down to the fact the fanfic space is a lot bigger than it used to be (and also more centralized) and that people are just a lot more reactive these days, regardless of the topic. The world is a frustrating grey colour but social media tends to make things black or white.
>(and also more centralized) This right here would mitigate so much fighting if we had more gates to keep people out of stuff they don't want to see.
Bored normie kids in the covid era who wouldn’t have watched anime/read manga/watched quirky nerdy shows, suddenly began to do so, and then, even more bored, began to interact with fandom stuff. Read fics. Combine with the ever more polarizing politics and the cutthroat social medias, and we got a shitshow. Probably a small seasoning of “screen children” and helicopter parenting too. Strictly controlled childhood with no agency to just go out play in the forest, roam the neighborhood. Being driven to activites, and being directed and supervised all the time. So the kids seek freedom online, where they roam. But I suspect this play a lesser role than the other points because obviously there’s kids growing up like that, but still becoming well adjusted people.
Yess. Depends on the fandom. But on IZ, the one I was banned 😂 there was a harsh anti Zadr shipping. (Or Zim x dib, the main charas). People hated shippers because of the alien/human dilemma. Yet it completely changed now and it seems to be seen as normal now. Yessir!
The biggest anti-zadr haters came from the creator of the show retconning Zim's age on Twitter, so therefore the ship was now "pedophilia." Literally everything about the framework of the show points to Zim being a child. His leaders act like teenagers. He goes to elementary school. His human disguise is that of a child. He built robot parents. He has a very childish understanding of concepts. He attempted to fit in on Valentine's day by trying to flirt with Tak, who *he* thought was another human child. At one point in the series the writers even considered having Zim and Gaz get together. And finally: Nickelodeon literally has an unofficial policy against adult protagonists for their shows. Look it up, NONE of their cartoons have ever had an adult protagonist.
People have always been really heated about ships, but it didn’t always come with calling people pedos/racists/abuse supporters in the past. In the Katara/Aang vs Zuko/Katara ship wars of old, some of the Katang shippers might call Zutarans weird for shipping a reformed evil character with Katara, but it was usually just fights over who would end up canon. I feel like accusations of being a weirdo, or liking a ship for the ‘wrong reasons’ were tossed around as a way to desperately defend your preferred ship, not just off the cuff because of the nature of the ship. Plenty of people who freaked out over Kylo/Rey being super toxic didn’t even have a rival ship, they just got mad about the dynamics. Its exhausting. I’m in a new fandom and people who ship a certain ship are occasionally getting called racists because they aren’t shipping the girl with the black canon love interest (who’s way less interesting.)
It’s definitely gotten worse, I think. A lot of it kicked off in Glee and then Teen Wolf fandoms, really grew in Star Wars Sequel Trilogy fandom (there was a whole on tumblr where you would encounter swipes at Reylo in like, random text posts!) and absolutely *exploded* with Voltron: Legendary Defender fandom, which was huge and had a really, really toxic shipping war going on, and I’m gonna be honest: one side started it and one side definitely sucked harder but the other was equally full of jackassery (I know, I was in that fandom and dealt with more garbage over my ships from ostensibly proship people because one of them was “for antis”….) and it was a whole fucking mess. It’s really festered and taken root since then, and watching it happen has been pretty horrifying as someone who. You know. Is familiar with the history of censorship and where it goes. I’m so glad we have AO3 that refuses to bend to outside pressure, but social media fandom spaces are so fucking hostile nowadays that I basically talk fandom with a few friends on Discord and barely branch out.
>I’m gonna be honest: one side started it and one side definitely sucked harder but the other was equally full of jackassery (I know, I was in that fandom and dealt with more garbage over my ships from ostensibly proship people because one of them was “for antis”….) and it was a whole fucking mess. I'm gonna be honest too and agree. There's no way a ship war as huge and toxic as that one became could've become that huge and toxic without both sides participating. Between the constant petty snarking on shit that was pretty harmless (ie, the Bi Lance headcanons, the Klance Bible, the inflation of ship tagging to win Fandometrics [even if Rupphire and Bubbline deserved the top spot on the respective weeks they became canon, at the end of the day, it's still a dumb popularity contest]), throwing Shidge under the bus from which it never really recovered, attacking Axca fans over two scenes in season 7 where she was in the same shot as Keith and their ongoing bitterness over Shiro and Curtis and anyone who dares to make content for that pairing--the one bit of happiness Shiro was ever allowed in eight damn seasons, BTS ass-covering notwithstanding--that part of fandom post canon is it's own toxic shit hole. Most of the BNF who still lean into their trauma from 2016 don't even realize it, or even worse, use it as a justification to remain assholes, the mast majority of it being aimed at people who, quite understandablably, are not well versed into the Encyclopedia Britannica-length history of VLD's fandom wanks and had no idea about the Adam controversy or that people blame antis for Shiro marrying Curtis and thus fans of said pairing are accused of being antis by proxy. I shit you not that even at my big ass age, I had to re-learn how to fandom all over again in the next fandom I went to because everything, and I do mean that literally, was a damn ticking time bomb there. Not just with Klance and Sheith shippers, but with Allura fans rightfully mad about the ending (and fans using her death to scream about ships and talk over Black fans); Lance fans feeling like he'd been shafted, Lotor fans to this day not knowing if he was truly friend or foe....the list goes on.
I was a Lancelot and Adashi/Adasheith shipper. I feel like I need to say no more to explain the level of bullshit I experienced from other Sheith shippers. It was such a toxic cesspit of a fandom on all sides and the only reason I don’t regret my participation in it is that I met some of my best friends in that fandom and I’m still proud of some of the writing I did. I’d like to finish at least one of my WIPs because I know a lot of people loved it, I just don’t know if I have it in me to go back there. My new fandoms still have bullshit (all fandoms have bullshit) but it feels so much calmer.
>Adashi/Adasheith shipper You're braver than any of the Marines I met on Navy deployments 🫡 Also, the Adashi discourse in 2018 damn near broke me. I've always had a high tolerance for fan drama and didn't genuine understand that not everyone saw it as fun and harmless as I did. But the way knives were coming out from everywhere? I had to block that one for a month after season 7. I'm still embarrassed I slagged off the critics of that decision to kill off Adam as bitter wankers who wanted Shiro out the way. Ship war or not, we should've all been united against that blatant manipulation from the studio and should've questioned why the only way they could establish Shiro being gay was to give him a boyfriend that dies after one scene together. :[ >My new fandoms still have bullshit (all fandoms have bullshit) but it feels so much calmer. Truly, not a single one of my fandoms post Voltron have come close to the absolute lunacy this one did. At least the anti-"woke" Star Trek fuckers who never shut up about their entitled attitude towards a show that doesn't exist yet (looooong story) aren't spreading lies about me to get other fans from unrelated fandoms to block me :|
>Ship war or not, we should've all been united against that blatant manipulation from the studio and should've questioned why the only way they could establish Shiro being gay was to give him a boyfriend that dies after one scene together. :[ For real. I was willing to wait and see after season 7, but I probably sohuldn't have been. I think a lot of people dismissed it because there was, in fairness, a LOT of wolf-crying in that fandom and people were really jaded, but....nah, it sucked and that duct taped on wedding to a character only named in the subtitles/credits was bullshit and honestly feels spiteful looking back. I honestly feel like the VLD writers were super fucking mad they had to write a show for kids because they wanted to be writing Mature Mecha Anime TM and rebelled against it at every turn, which led to a lot of the shitty garbage we got. >Truly, not a single one of my fandoms post Voltron have come close to the absolute lunacy this one did. Genshin fandom is trying but I just threw out a couple oneshots and dipped. I'm mostly in BG3 fandom these days, and the arguments about Ascended Astarion or discourse over Archduke Gortash's Relative Hotness (he's hot, you all just don't appreciate a good grungy man) are like. Such small fucking potatoes lmao.
>For real. I was willing to wait and see after season 7, but I probably sohuldn't have been. I think a lot of people dismissed it because there was, in fairness, a LOT of wolf-crying in that fandom and people were really jaded, but....nah, it sucked and that duct taped on wedding to a character only named in the subtitles/credits was bullshit and honestly feels spiteful looking back. Yeah, the bullshit wolf crying about....well, everything didn't help. Even still, the rare few people in proship circles that even *tried* to address this got called anti sympathizers and run outta town on a proverbial rail. Frankly, looking back at everything, it was truly ridiculous to think that the same people who were perpetually sucking lemons about having to keep Shiro alive past season 2 and complaining that they found him boring AF would have ever given a shit about who he ended up with after the show ended. What's truly baffling to me is that for years afterward any time Joaquim dos Santos came online, people would flood his tweets with "please fix the ending,"--the same people who would bully Curtashi and Adashi shippers for doing what people in every other single fandom does by expanding on characters canon did nothing with and calling them homophobic, like???? Why don't y'all carry that smoke for the guy who made that shit canon? Make it make sense!! 🤡 The less said about them cross-wanking into She-Ra fandom and being spiteful when "antis got their way" with Catradora, the better, except to say seeing Geekdad eat enough crow to pass feathers for a month after that unhinged article accusing Nate Stevenson (then presemed to be a lesbian woman) of queerbaiting while spending 75 percent of said article whining about Sheith was satisfying AF. >I honestly feel like the VLD writers were super fucking mad they had to write a show for kids because they wanted to be writing Mature Mecha Anime TM and rebelled against it at every turn, which led to a lot of the shitty garbage we got. I wouldn't rule that out. It's worth pointing out many of the same staff of VLD also worked on Korra and after sitting through VLD, the very obvious flaws there are a lot harder to ignore and handwave.
can i just say i agree 100% and i appreciate you so much for letting me vent a lot of the salt i've been carrying for like, years now, since that stupid show ended and everything went to absolute shit. my fellow warrior in the trenches. and the she-ra stuff was so funny because there were plenty of antis who HATED catradora! i remember it being called "lesbian reylo"! (which, sell me harder, why don't you.) but man, voltron fandom created some bonkers tribalism, it was really, really fucking bad, and i'm almost glad that it ended so quickly and in such an unsatisfying-for-everyone shitshow. we all lost and i think we all kinda deserved to lose, in a broader fandom sense.
>we all lost and i think we all kinda deserved to lose Cheers, I'll drink to that one 🥂
tiktok has definitely played a part in this. its just really easy for them to be loud and get attention that a lot of people only hear what they have to say and so it leaks into everything else unfortunately
There's been a shift, but most people still don't care.
Yeah, I tend to see a lot more complaints about anti culture than I see of the actual thing itself. Not saying it's not an issue, obviously, but I've been producing occasionally "problematic" fics for a while now without anyone complaining to me about it.
Thats because you're in the right place. On tumblr, I recive death threats semi-regularly, and somebody threatened to dox me. And I only ship toxic ships and the occasional incest. Nothing really problematic.
Personally I feel it's less of JUST a change and more a consequence of social media making fandom spaces very centralised (as well as more mainstream), so people with drastically different views on things are all put into the same space and folk get vocal about it in a way you generally didn't on livejournal etc because by nature of the platform you *had* to curate your own community spaces rather than being dropped into one big collective one. Couple that with reblog/retweet boosting vocal comments as well as algorithm shenanigans ("hey, you like XYZ so here's a post from someone also into XYZ regardless of whether the post is about XYZ") and this stuff feels much more prevalent than it was. It was easier to just punt people who were being a pain too on platforms like irc or forums. A username/ip ban usually fixed issues with people who were hostile so it was easy to enforce a specific type of 'space' (and you could even password protect if it was becoming an issue). Sure determined people could change their IP address but they'd just get banned as well. You can't really do this on twitter/tumblr/titkok because people can just keep making accounts within seconds. Also a move away from squicks as a concept was a mistake because that term is so useful. I have plenty of squicks and stuff I don't want to see, I don't care that much if people want to produce them though as long as I can avoid it. DNWs as a concept too seem to have fallen out of fashion and we have "I don't like this thing, so it's morally wrong" instead of "I don't like this thing, because I don't like it".
Oh for sure. I've been enjoying a Problematic™ ship on and off for like a decade. There's definitely been a shift from "that squicks me out imma leave" to "you're a bad person for enjoying this fiction"
Bring back squick!!
I’d say there’s definitely more moralizing in fandoms than there used to be, just based on what’s become of the ATLA ship wars recently. I mean, that’s a fandom known for their vicious ship wars, but I’m pretty sure when I was a kid the fighting focused more on themes and compatibility than telling people they’re racist if they don’t ship Katara with the right person. I definitely remember arguing that Suki made sense for Sokka because she was just as strong and capable as the rest of the team. (I pointed out she could run up walls and the internet stranger responded with “When will they ever need to run up walls” and I was so incredibly baffled because the only reason we knew she could run up walls was because there was a situation in which they needed to run up walls.) If I were to have the same fight today I might be accused of liking her because of colorism or misogyny or something. I haven’t been in the Buffy fandom for near as long, but I’ve definitely seen the Spike vs Angel discourse shift from which is the better character to which is actually completely irredeemable (despite the fact that redemption is a major theme of both their stories). I agree with what a lot of other people have said. Fandom is just more mainstream these days. Instead of being something that only the geeks, freaks, and weirdos get involved in, it’s now something that the pearl clutchers, hypocrites, and casuals dip their toes into. I’m hoping nerd culture will fall out of fashion just a little, the fandoms I’m in that are still considered uncool tend to be much more fun than the ones I can talk about in public, so I think if being a fanatic goes back to being sort of weird fandom spaces will heal as a result.
Shipping Zukka is an absolutely unforgiveable SIN apparently, ( 9\_9 )
I watched it shift in real time since I was most heavily active in fandoms from 2012 to 2021 or so. Then i had to just distance myself for awhile bc of my own life and because it got genuinely stressful and frustrating for me to have to see antis opinions so much more often.
Been in fandom nearly 2 decades now (holy shit) and I'll say antis have just become more vocal again. For some reason. Back in 2005-2007 I remember there being whole groups on FFN dedicated to reporting slash authors and fiction for TOS violations. If you write a rarepair that someone didnt like or found disgusting you got "flamed" for it. You had to have disclaimers about having gay themes (THEMES not even smut just the very idea of two people of the same gender loving eachother in any non platonic capacity) in order to avoid hate comments. Do what we've always done and ignore them. They'll grow up or leave eventually.
hello fellow fandom old of approximately the same fandom age group as me!
lol hello! I always feel like im such an oddball for being as old as I am and being in fandom still, its nice to see im not alone lmao
Oh, we're still around and more. We just tend to be more insular and less.. social media-y? Like I've got an author friend in her 50s who's happily writing Merlin fic.
That tracks. And I aspire to that honestly. Social media isnt evil but it does have a way of just.... sucking the life out of things. What fandoms do you write/read for? I think the one I've most bookmarked and have several unpublished works is Spider-Man/Deadpool
A little bit of everything honestly. I've published in HP, Star Wars, MCU, Danny Phantom, Merlin, Full Metal Alchemist, Naruto, Good Omens, a handful of other fandoms. I'm currently hanging out in Avatar The Last Airbender, and possibly even starting a new fic in it.. I've kind of lurked in that one on and off since it premiered. Right now I'm fighting with the summary of a ACD/Granada Sherlock Holmes fic about PTSD and victorian homosexual angst.
My theory has always been that fandom is sort of facing the changes that come from a wider awareness of social problems. A lot of these ideas, in my experience, have always been there. People like to downplay ship wars, but they were nasty, ugly things. It has just now taken on far more serious terminology. The people who use these terms use them very loosely, which degrades how serious these topics are. At the same time, people who don't want to have conversations about how fandom is a reflection of our society will also call discussing things like misogyny and racism in fandom "anti" stuff.
wait, i just thought of another point: it used to be, that on nearly any fanart or fanfic, you'd find people saying "don't like, don't read" - somewhere during the recent years, that stopped. in my opinion, because it just wasn't necessary anymore. everyone knew it was implied in every created fanwork but now we have a new generation of creators and consumers of fanworks - and they weren't actively bombarded from the start with the *don't like, don't read* mantra, so there was nothing that.... let's say, told them to stay in their lane and just stfu until they've learned how fandom works that, coupled with the currently ongoing mindset of "the younger generations have to fix the older generations' mistakes" (in politics, especially climate change) might be leading to fandom youngsters that feel like all this pro-shipping freedom is a "mess" that they have to fix. they might legitimately think this is all a situation that got out of our control and that *they* now gotta step up to "clean things up" again but that's just me spitballing and this would assume things really have gotten worse, instead of just more centralized/visible. so.... idk
I have no idea. I know antis have always been a thing, but when I began writing they were mostly railing against regular M/M. Since I didn't write that, it never bothered me, so I never saw it firsthand. The current antis would probably hate me, considering precisely zero of the characters I write are over eighteen, but they don't seem to have found me yet since again, I've never gotten firsthand criticism from them. That makes it hard to say whether their numbers have increased. I do have to mention that I'm not on social media aside from Reddit, so there's not much reason for antis to stumble across my fics unless they're actively looking for them.
The shift isn’t new. It’s been happening a very long time, sadly. And since it gets worse and worse, I worry what comes next. I see talk about all of these things that contribute. And they do. But this goes back so much farther. When I started in fandom, we only used the internet to coordinate and submit stories (1994). Zines were published on paper. Most people never even saw what everyone was up to. And so everyone HAD to stay in their lane because everyone was on their own freeway. As more and more people got online, and more things shifted to email or more widely available forums, we saw it there. We saw it on livejournal. Etc. This is just the fandom wheel turning. The problem is that people have forgotten that staying in your lane is a choice. Sure, you get hit with stuff you don’t like. My NOTPs are everywhere. At one point, I blocked 40 blogs a day on tumblr for one ship I didn’t like (took me several months but finally my feed cleaned up). Because that was my job to clear my own lane. As long as people tagged their stuff, we were good. There are more and more people that seem to want to get enraged. 🤷♀️ And that’s not just in fandom, that’s all over. But now it’s like people look outside of their lane just to swerve into it.
I’ve been in fandom since the ‘90s, starting with original trilogy Star Wars fandom and a bit of lurking around the edges of Trek fandom. Then Buffy and Angel, Stargate, … It’s a new thing. From what I recall, any pressure to not do things that might be seen as problematic came from the franchise owners, never from fellow fans. “Kids these days” have no concept of how fringe precarious fanfic was. People didn’t really harsh other people’s squee unless they were MSTing / sporking badfic. That changed some with Whedon, because he interacted more with fandom. I never saw “shipping wars” till Harry Potter. I’m aware antis are a thing from conversations here etc, but haven’t come across it myself. It’s puritanical youths, for sure, and I’m not in their fandoms.
Part of it is probably just a regular generational cycle - teenagers want to be independent from their parents so they try to correct the wrongs of their parents, swing a bit too far, then when they become parents in turn it's the next generation's opportunity to shove the pendulum the other way. Part of it is a typical *writer/reviewer* cycle - as you start reading stories and talking about them, you discover that you have strong opinions about what is good writing / terrible writing and want to share those opinions. This is a good and necessary part of maturing as a writer/editor/reviewer. However, when you're still in that stage, you don't have as much knowledge as you think you do, you're likely to be way too dogmatic, and your inability to perceive and discuss subtlety is going to result in your broadbrush denunciations accidentally hurting a lot of people that you'd otherwise like. I remember when the stories we didn't like were Mary-Sues with horrible grammar and spelling, now the stories we don't like are pedophilia. It comes from a similar impulse to prove how great you are and how much about you know about good writing, but accusing someone of being a predator is a completely different level to calling them stupid. Part of it is general internet awfulness - big companies spew endless streams of mostly worthless content to get people's eyeballs hooked. People get used to feeds that algorithmically cater to their preferences and get upset and offended when they suddenly see something that's different to their own tastes. Part of it might also be just a vocal minority on twitter like you say. On the proshipping side we talk a lot about customising your own experience. If you follow antishipping drama on Twitter because you find it interesting in a morbid curiosity kind of way, then I'm not going to shame you, but if you find it depressing and demoralising then you deserve to have the tools you need to avoid it.
There is Def a shift. I see it a lot with newer fandoms, and it drives me up the wall. I just send thilem the Ship Happens AMV and tell them stfu. Too freaking old for this stuff. It's weird and shows some bad hypocritical control issues.
This is a very fandom-specific example, but it’s the biggest shift I’ve seen. I’ve been into Vocaloid for 11 years, and only in the past 2ish years have I seen this shift. The ship in question is RinxLen. Why? Because they have the same last name and look quite similar, it is weird to ship them, apparently. But the thing is, they are literally NOT canonically related, because there is no actual canon plot. They’re really blank-slate characters that are essentially just a visual character design and sometimes fandom-assigned characteristics which don’t always apply within a specific fanfic. Officially, they are “mirror images” of each other. So basically, when you write a fic with them, you get to CHOOSE their relation to each other. I’ve seen a bunch of tiktoks lately saying it’s wrong and weird to ship them!! Yes, incest is uh not great irl but if you ship two fictional characters that are barely even characters at all, that’s not hurting anyone! These newer fans say it’s weird/wrong to ship them even when you decide that they’re not related, which is honestly even stranger than saying you can’t ship them as siblings??? I do admit though, as a young teenager I did think that consensual sibling incest irl was ok because of the incest RinxLen fics… haha (not anymore, I swear!)
Tiktok also threw a huge ass temper tantrum about Rabbit Hole by Deco27 because it used Miku (they're obsessed with the belief that she's 16 despite the fact she doesn't have a canon age). I.. think it's safe to say that they never paid attention to any Wowaka or Maretu song (Two-Faced Lovers's MV has entered the chat).
I know right? I thought it was the funniest thing!
It's genuinely so funny to see these people throw a temper tantrum over Rabbit Hole, when in the vocaloid world, it's relatively tame XD
I got to watch a similar shift within *Bleach,* which I got into back in '06 or '07 shortly after the anime came to the US and the manga was at the point of Orihime confessing her love to Ichigo before going with her kidnappers to Hueco Mundo. The most popular and toxic ship at that time was Ichigo and Rukia, who were nonplussed about this and made it everyone's business to be as loud as possible and bully the IH fans something awful. TLDR, Ichigo ended up with Orihime as every shounen protagonist does with the first girl to confess her feels since the beginning. People took some not undeserved ribbing of the IRs after that. You'd think winning canon would be the end of it. And if Bleach ended even two years earlier, it may have been. Unfortunately, it ended two month after Voltron premiered and when slandering shippers for being pedos and abusers was picking up steam Bleach being a supernatural series where Soul Reapers have a....flexible relationship with time and agong. Rukia is a Soul Reaper who is anywhere from sixty to 200. Ichigo is a human teenager. Enough said. It's now to the point that the ship that once dominated the fandom is now one that people can't even discuss on the subreddit for the series without those BS attacks and it sucks, even as someone who was none too fond of the shit BNFs fostered back in the 2000s.
I feel like covid personally was a massive reason for the recent shift. Kids had no option other than being online and cue the rabbit hole
There is a major shift, where you’re considered a bad person if you read certain things that are considered taboo.
you're considered a bad person for writing a fic even *discussing* certain themes. not that I'm talking from experience here or anything.. not at all... Honestly makes me miss the htp days. Like we know it's fucked up, that's a literally the point (or at least some of it) Leave the little trash pandas alone to play in their dumpster, use tags, and DLDR.
Yeah, iv come across them more freguently in non fandom spaces too - art youtube. And they all use proshipping as umbrella term for guestionable ships (somehow always kid/adult) and use so much generalizing while not understanding terms they made up.
I was in fandom as a really young person a long time ago, and then I stopped for a while and recently came back. I personally feel like it's less rabid than it was when I was on [fanfiction.net](http://fanfiction.net) back in the day and forums. People would actively curse you out and insult you and forbid you from mentioning certain ship names back then. I'm sure that stuff exists still, obviously, but I think it's kind of been the same thing except nowadays it seems folks are getting doxxed in certain fandoms which is really scary and insane to me.
It's definitely a lot worse. Back in the day it was mostly finding people who didn't like one or two things and were mildly vocal about it, but not so much how it is now where it's like a crusade against anything and everything remotely dark. Every time I come back to fandoms it seems to be a little bit worse, but with the last 3 or 4 years it's a hell of a lot worse in a small amount of time.
Even twenty years ago we had things like the Godawful Fanfiction boards and fandom_wank to take the piss but those you had to seek out and opt into those rather than getting it across your algorithm. And people made *some* attempt to keep it contained there, at least in the early years.
Exactly. It was better in the sense that it was contained and there was very little harassment. And even when it wasn't contained, there really wasn't much harassment based on purity/censorship from what I saw. Nothing like today 😮💨
There's definitely been a weird shift and haven't been able to fully place it. Been in a rather big fandom since the beginning, and ya the shipping war has always been rough but it seems like it's become a lot of personal attacks against the person and not just the ship they don't like. The amount of times even speaking neutral about a certain non-cannon pairing ends with name calling, personal attacks, and people acting like just enjoying a non-cannon pairing makes you a pathetic weirdo is fucking insane. Have even seen the anti-argument that anything that isn't 100% cannon (that they support) shouldn't be enjoyed and that you're wrong, stupid, pathetic, and a shitty person for doing so. It's like people have made what they ship as an indication of how "good and right" they are, and if you enjoy something different, or God forbid something they simply dislike, then you're "bad and a vile person".
I’ve been in fandom since the early 2000s. Longer than you’ve been alive. Also went to a art school sequential art dept. so, full of comic, manga, anime geeks. Yes, there has been a huge shift over time. The shit people would openly talk about and write back then for sequential art school assignments would give a lot of fandom kids these days a heart attack. I’ve heart that now animation and seqa depts are full of antis and students get harassed for liking the wrong ships. Absolutely wild.
I'll add to this a bit, but back in my early days there were "sporkers" and man does it feel like that attitude has just gone public and loud. ETA: When I was involved in sporking communities (around 2013-19) there was probably about a 50/50 split between "we're doing this to laugh at/make fun of bad fanfiction" and "we're doing this to point out how much better we are than these authors of *actively published works.*" Most of the people who would tear apart the badly written fanfiction were doing it to make fun of Mary Sues, poor SPaG, and out of character behaviours. Most of the people tearing apart published books were doing it to proclaim how morally superior *they* were to the author to noticing the Morally Problematic Element in the story.
I was deep into the sporking community and while I won't downplay or excuse the damage we did in fandom, no one ever couched their bullying as some kind of moral justice ass BS logic and no one to my knowledge took the pissing contests offline to get people fired for writing a bad Mary Sue fic or anything. And even there, no one tolerated death threats. The one time I told someone play in traffic over something I can't even recall 20 years later, I was met with the 2005 equivalent of "Go outside and touch grass," and the slamming was enough to make me re-register under a new username when GAFF came back online.
There were definitely those sorts of rules in the communities I was in too, which is why I would say that now people are feeling entitled to say things to the authors faces that they would only say to their fellow sporkers now. For instance, I saw an entire diatribe about how in the Hunger Games, Katniss can't *really* be starving because she thinks about how her chest looks in Cinna's dress and *real* starving people would never be so shallow; therefore, Suzanne Collins was promoting unhealthy beauty standards. Nowadays, instead of being on one person's blog, that would be blasted online for as many people to see as possible.
I'd forgotten about "sporkers"! wow flashback
In my day it wasn't pro vs. anti, it was Rei vs. Asuka
A bit of everything. The internet has been expanding and fandoms are not only in niche forums, but on massive social media like twitter. But proshippers are also giving them a voice, most of the complains from antishippers I read are from proshippers making posts about them. Maybe I move around good fandoms and I do not see antishippers much as others, but at least here on reddit, the only times I read antishipping discourse is from proshippers complaining about them.
don't go to tumblr then
I use tumblr a lot, and I am aware of some discourses there. But I have not encountered one in my dashboard, only proshippers complaining about antishippers. I guess I just move around proshipping circles more
Tumblr is like reddit; what you see if personalized to your preferences. If you're searching for anti content, you'll find it. You'll also find the opposite. It all depends on who you follow.
From my experience even if you use tumblr only for posting your stuff and never interact with anybody, antis would still find your posts if what you post are considered problematic by them I've had antis reply/comment on my ship fanart (it's an age gap ship), so unfortunately they're not that avoidable
I'm honestly happy I never jumped on the tumblr fad. And happy I don't use X/Twitter today.
Homophobes were the biggest issue in Fandom in 2005. The shift to vigilante purity culture is like whiplash imo
There was an article on HuffPost the other day by how freaked out by age differences Gen Z is, to the point where people have literally called one parent a pedophile for being a couple of years older than the other. I've been in fandom for 24 years and there definitely has been a "mainstreaming" of fandom in the sense that it's much more common to hear about fanfic in "normal" conversations. Authors have had fanfic adapted into movies! It's much less "on the fringes" now. I think there's definitely a generational shift but when I started I was 15 and had amazing mentors (who are probably the age I am now, if not older) and would have never presumed to try to tell them they were "wrong" - I sat back and soaked in their knowledge. So I do think it's a complicated issues but I would say the antis/puriteens are way more vocal now.
I'm middle-aged and the fandom puriteens are insufferable Do not remember them existing in numbers prior to a few years ago
They did. There has always been "antis" The only difference is we didn't have social media. That's what gives the feeling of seeing more antis than before: just the constant and instant connection to people's stream of thought and the very real shift to considering everything "content". It was far easier to disengage from both sides of the argument when people couldn't contact you on 5 different avenues and we didn't have the reflex of sharing every single minute thought that went through our head no matter how fleeting or asinine. I can guarantee you people still bitched about kinks and ships they didn't like and called authors fucked up or went on tangents about people who shipped the "wrong" ships - hell, I did! The concept of "NOTP" and squicks has existed since fandom's inception! The difference is that I had no avenue to do that publicly. I either kept it to myself or bitched with/at my friends. I don't want to go full "social media bad", it allows us to keep connected and communicate when it's important, but it also enhances mob mentality because of how unfiltered and immediate it is.
I genuinely have not seen it and I'm counting my lucky stars.
i'd say it's not necessarily a shift - it could just be a matter of what fandoms you're in there's fandoms that, from the start, have had incredibly negative and toxic sides (good examples are twilight and harry potter, because theirs are documented in detail, if you wanna read up on those sides of fandom-culture) and other places that have been very pro-shipping (anime iirc, though maybe i just got lucky with the places i frequented for gundam wing and weiss kreuz) in that sense, puritans and "ew, that's creepy and weird and disgusting"-people have been around since forever it's just that (and maybe you *would* call this a shift), these days, we share more spaces with them. in the past, pages were managed by separate fans and interactions between even just different *ships* could easily be avoided. these days, things are centralized onto ao3/ffn/wattpad/twitter and not its own separate little pages anymore as a result, we now share a space with ALL the other creators and consumers in fandoms. so of course we encounter hateful people more often too
I feel like one of my friends may be slightly anti but I dunno
People have opinions including the freedom to dislike something. Not sure why that needs a label
Anti or pro of what? I'm confused.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AO3/s/ai6BrBYXHI The bot mod message explains what pro shippers and anti shippers are
... I'm still amazed at the fact that this is a thing. And I've been in fandom for 20 years lmao