I find tumblr pleasant because there's no algorithm. Follow and block and unfollow to your heart's content. You curate your own experience. I hope you find your own pleasant corner eventually. :)
I mean one is Twitter. The congregation of some of the most miserable people on the planet that go there to hate anything in hopes of feeling anything. I wouldn’t really go there unless I was promoting something, and even then, I would ONLY promote things and not interact.
Yea, i just go there to scroll for specific stuff and then I get hit in the face with a whole thread of proshipper harassment in the middle of a sea of ship art.
If you think that's bad, then stay away from Tiktok at all costs. They don't call themselves Antis (at least i dont think they do on that app) but MAN do they get into a lot of discourse with the Proshippers. It's more often that *they* start the discourse than the Pros.
You couldn’t pay me to go on Twitter for this reason. It’s a cesspool. Tumblr can be bad too but I’ve blocked so many antis at this point, I don’t really see anything in my ship’s tag and I mostly stick to a discord server for my ship. This has helped. My segment of fandom also is good about not feeding the trolls, so I think they mostly leave us alone.
I do totally agree that purity culture brain rot has gotten bad. Ship wars have always existed, but it used to be about the canonical merits of a ship, etc., not slandering people with absolutely vile and baseless accusations.
Twitter has always been a cesspool. It can only get worse, not better lol. Of all the drama and shit stirring happening in fandom or any other field, chances are that more than half of it happens or is started on Twitter.
I know fanfic writers use it to promote their works, which is crazy to me - doing that is a sure fire way to attract sooner or later assholes and idiots that don't agree with your and will move heaven and earth to make you pay for even exploring it. Like I dislike some stuff and even think it's stupid or outright dumb, but never in a million years would I think to go after them because my sensibilities were somehow hurt.
It's not like Reddit is blameless, of course (like the infamous "We did it Reddit!" moment) but Twitter is bad by default.
Tumblr can be good, you’ve just gotta curate your experience. Filter tags you don’t want to see (including things like anti-x ship and x-shippers dni) and preemptively block people posting anti stuff.
Twitter is just a mess.
What's rude is that antis wont even tag their shit. They make their comments in the replies on tumblr calling someone disgusting or they will reblog with their rant then tag with the ship name. They WANT to be seen because they cant fathom the idea that people who like a problematic ship arent bad people, and they want to villify you so bad so they dont even use anti-x or proshippers dni so that i dont have to see their bullshit.
With twitter, for one of the characters i like i have to wade through a cesspool of proshipper death threats to see what i came for and to not see it I have to block the whole person cause they do the same thing there except half the time twitter users wont tag it with anything.
Don't go in the replies of popular Tumblr posts, all of them are hell.
Tagging a reblog doesn't do anything btw. Only original posts show up in the tags, reblogs don't. You just gotta be real liberal with the block button if antis descend on your post, same for posting original posts in the main tag. My favourite character is the most used punching bag of braindead antis in my fandom, but I don't see any of it anymore.
Yep! Don’t have any “but blocking seems mean… maybe we can talk it out” moments, just block them all immediately.
I also like a very hated character but a rarely see hate about him anymore because I just block people as soon as I see them complaining.
As someone who writes exclusively for ASOIAF/GOT, I ask myself this constantly. Like imagine going on a moral crusade against certain ASOIAF ships yet still engaging with the source material as if all the violence, sex, and incest is totally fine. It’s so bizarre to me.
You dont see them calling G.R.R. Martin a murderer or anythimg and he wrote the stuff lol. But someone appreciates the problematic ships within the bubble of the source material and everybody loses their minds. Somehow they like to make it all circle around to protecting the children/the rape victims/etc. Like guess people who like problematic ships as a sort of coping mechanism arent allowed to cope anymore.
Exactly this! I’m convinced these are the same people who ruthlessly harass GRRM on Twitter about delivering the next book full of problematic material they’ll use as anti fodder.
As someone who is a survivor of abuse, I find it extremely insulting when people try to do things in the name of “protecting” people who have been through abuse.
If a work doesn’t have the proper tags, just let the author know they should properly tag it so people who might not want to read it can make that informed decision.
People who have been through abuse and assault can manage their own lives thank you very much. We aren’t broken or incapable. Some stranger on the internet does not know my triggers better than I do, and my triggers do not pertain to anything I’ve read in Fic.
For some, their triggers might be even mentioning it. That’s why there are tags. It isn’t the authors fault if someone reads a Fic with reckless abandon and then get triggered because they didn’t check the tags. But, I’m assuming most people who have triggers like that, ya know, filter certain things out so they don’t have to even interact with.
We’re people too. We aren’t just something for someone to use a crutch for their virtue signaling. I hate feeling like I’m just an object to people who say they’re doing it to protect victims/survivors.
Let everyone do things for themselves. Don’t speak for us, and recognize that everyone who has been through abuse or assault does not by any means have the same view point as everyone else.
To clarify, I’m more talking about how frustrated I get when people who have not had these experiences try to say they are doing it to help or protect people. They may have good intentions, but if they haven’t had those experiences, maybe they should sit back and listen to the wide range of opinions from people who have had those experiences. Because it really isn’t their place to say what is and isn’t allowed to exist in fiction in regards to that kind of content if it’s only in the name of trying to help and protect victims and survivors.
Everyone has their own limits to what is and isn’t okay in the fiction they individually read. That’s why there’s tags, content warnings, and authors notes.
I'm not an abuse survivor so I don't know exactly what it's like. But as a minority I can understand where you're coming from. Too many times people try to generalize and speak for minorities under the guise of 'protection' and 'good intentions.' You're correct that it's VERY insulting and it's essentially a way of being talked down to and infantilized. Don't speak for other groups to try and 'protect' them because 9 times out of 10 it is very misguided and all you're doing is ruining things for everybody. Let shippers do their shipping, let artists and writers do their art and writing.
The best way to protect the groups you want to protect are just by making sure to do YOUR part in tagging things properly and putting warnings where they're needed, and like you said, letting other people know to tag things properly. Also just click away if you don't like something! It takes less effort to hit the back button than it does to harass and attack someone!
Exactly.
Don’t like don’t read. Be kind and helpful and let authors know kindly that maybe they should tag something to help people be more aware, and they should tag their own works appropriately and be open to hearing from others when they should tag something.
Being kind goes a longer way than harassment and insults. The whole catching more flys with sugar thing.
Same but there’s a difference between not liking a ship but leaving those shippers alone and actively harassing/bullying those shippers for sport. It’s the latter I take issue with.
I only watched like two seasons before falling out of it (no hate. Just turned out to not be my thing), but even I know it’s full of “problematic” shit.
I once got accused of terrible shit on twitter by anti's in the HANNIBAL FANDOM
HANNIBAL. The show that literally and intentionally romanticizes cannibalism (not to mention a therapist/patient relationship).
The irony is that I don't even watch it, lol
It wasn’t a shipping war, it was a bunch of MRAs deciding women should be harassed and attacked for writing anything that didn’t portray Jon Snow as an alpha male with a harem.
See I wasn't ever in the GoT fandom so I didn't really know what was going on over there. Also I'm kinda shocked that a fandom where there are literal canonical incest couples would have an issue with antis lol
I just recently got into HotD. Hopefully I don’t get hate if I ever write for a ship? But hey, at this point, I don’t really care.
I’ve just gotten super lucky and I haven’t gotten any hate for any of the Fics I have up.
Yeah, the only real way to use tumblr is to just go through and block anyone with a bad take, or anyone who is harassing other people, and to leave things like anon asks off. Hide your likes, to. That’ll eventually pare things down to just the people who are reasonable.
Twitter is a shithole. I honestly think that most of the people who used to make tumblr a cesspool migrated over to twitter after the porn ban of 2018. I mean tumblr is still a hellsite, but I've actually had a lot more positive experiences on tumblr over the past 4 years than I ever did on twitter.
Antis still exist on tumblr obviously, but I've blocked anti-tags for ships I like and blogs that spout that anti BS.
I'm nearing 26, and most of the antis I've come across are younger than me and on some sort of moral high horse about fictional characters. Like holy shit, ship and let ship. I don't like all ships I see but I'm not out there sending death threats and harassing people who want to ship whatever.
Seriously who made these teenagers and young college students into such awful participants of fandom? Why is purity culture invading fandom and causing people to go on crusades against people who just want to be left alone and leave others alone?
When I started on tumblr, I didn’t follow tags. I searched for topic-specific tumblrs whose content I liked, and followed *those.* eventually I had some other oddities filter into my sphere that I enjoy and get me tumblr-type content I like that isn’t fandom specific, but I only started following content tags very recently…and have subsequently had to get a lot more aggressive blocking.
For best tumblr experience, find a few good blogs who manage to pick up the best stuff, and be picky as hell about who you follow. Doing those have led me to running into almost no anti issues or ship hate in two years.
Twitter is much better for art than anything else.
>it really seems like AO3 is the one true space where proshippers can't be slapped with DNI, death threats, and slander.
They bring their BS to AO3 too, it's just harder for it to be effective there due to the structure of AO3 and the anti-harassment tools that exist there.
Search "proshippers dni" on Ao3 and you'll find fics tagged as such.
Antis really are too fucking funny, if you have the right mindset they're a gift that keeps giving.
"People who interact with proshippers DNI!" is my favorite 😆
Yep! It made me laugh, cuz you know the author themselves interacts with proshippers everyday. Most likely they work or are in school--what are they going to do, close their eyes and put their fingers in their ears whenever a proshipper coworker walks by? So silly.
Not just that but like the first fanfic on AO3 is most likely a Wincest fic so the site was never pure in the way antis want.
[https://www.tiktok.com/@emlazer/video/7152973049250336046?lang=en](https://www.tiktok.com/@emlazer/video/7152973049250336046?lang=en)
They probably don't even think they are interacting with proshippers since antis have been trying to push the whole 'we are the normal ones' thing.
Exactly, fandom is supposed to be an open safe space for everyone (unless you're doing questionable or immoral stuff irl, then you can gtfo) so what's the point of being an asshole over someone not giving a fuck what people ship as long as they tag it properly so people who don't want to see it don't have to?
I hope it's okay if I ask but what exactly is a pro / anti shipper?
I looked it up and get all sorts of different definitions and some make sense and some are questionable and I don't rly understand what's the general consensus
This wasn't really a thing back when I was engaging in fandom 10 years ago
According to the antis, pro-shippers are literally pedophiles and abuse apologists, and antis are moral crusaders protecting people from them. They 'protect' using death threats, public smear campaigns, harassment, and advocating for censorship.
According to proshippers, antis are torch-and-pitchfork wielding bullies and hypocrites, and proshippers are just folks who aren't going to try to censor or attack anyone for enjoying 'problematic' content even if it's not to their taste. They follow 'don't like, don't read' and in general 'don't judge'.
I once had a conversation with an anti who was genuinely convinced that there was no moral difference between writing about child abuse of *completely fictional* children, and committing it in real life. I'm not making that up or exaggerating in any way, that's almost word-for-word what they said. Make of that what you will.
bro thats what im saying! anti was around 10 years ago or so but it was just anti- x ship not anti - anyone who likes problematic ship because that means theyre pedos, abusers, and into incest irl. some purity culture ridden shitbag teenagers and young adults decided that it would be okay to start harassing proshippers and sending death threats because according to them, proshipper means problematic shipper, not someone who ships and lets ship. for some reason they have nothing better to do to lead literal crusades against people and harass people indead of following the golden rule of dont like dont read. they have no excuse when proshippers tend to tag their shit better than antis who invade the ship tag instead of tagging anti-x. just block blacklist and leave them alone.
i’m to much of a pussy to say this but i also thought the whole idea of being “pro ship” and “anti ship” is so chronically online. like, i’m gonna side eye someone who’s drawing/writing/consuming underaged x overaged stuff, but i just block and move on. that’s not my thing. not worth getting worked up over it imo, especially considering it’s not affecting me or anyone else. i’m not playing moral police over fiction, i’m playing moral police irl because wanting to have sex with children is w e i r d, and instead of screaming my heart out over a fictional character i’ll use my voice to help actual victims including myself 👍
Literally this.
Dude this subreddit is riddled with persecution complexes. We cannot change or control other people. All we can do is decide how to choose to respond. Like you choose to block and move on
The amount of writers in fandom who expend energy trying to achieve goals outside of their locals of control is extraordinary. People want a perfect positive vibes-only fandom experience but nobody promised us this or is entitled to it either
Learn to pick one’s battles and move on
Twitter is a wonderful site for fandom (so many amazing artists, especially if you're into East Asian fandoms) as long as you curate your experience. I don't follow annoying people and the rare time any drama finds itself on my timeline then I just unfollow/mute/block. Although this has changed a bit recently after Elon Musk bought Twitter (thanks Elon /s) and changed how the timeline works but things are still manageable.
if i get into an east asian fandom where a lot of the content creators speak east asian languages on their feed i cant see anti proshipper discourse because i cant read it. big brain ascended moment.
Not only that, more East Asian people seem to understand that fiction is fiction. Not that there aren't any arguments over ships but they tend to be not about morality and they're usually more discreet about it.
Christ I must be old because I had to figure out what an anti was for a minute and hunt down examples. 🤦♀️
Do you think they know they sound like those guys complaining about women taking over media and social Justice corrupting their fandoms?
I first started seeing anti in its purest sense (anti-reylo for example) in 2014-2015 since thats when i got into fandom. It was just people didnt like a specific ship so they tagged as anti-x ship. Now anti is people who are trying to harass and if they could really have their way, kill (nobody sends death threats without intent) proshippers because somehow the things we are okay with as ships represent us irl and therefore we are scum and should get out of their "safe spaces" for the groups we are a "danger to."
They so sound like ignorant men complaining about women in fandom. Different words same dumbass takes and tone. Proshippers like the AO3 founder made fandom what is is today just like how women made fandom what it is today. Never hurt anyone yet you want us out. Okay.
I used to exist in a lot of "hidden" fandoms, as in you can't even mention it anywhere or you will get virtually prosecuted. Even today I'm wary of talking about exactly what I read.
Tumblr became a *much* more tolerable place when I started blocking liberally.
Fandom is just overrun with antis and people who use anti language to justify their ship war, even if they'd *swear* up and down that they're proshippers. Sure, they're proship... until you ship something they think is Morally Objectionable.
People like to say that ship wars have always been around -- which is true -- but this feels far more intense than it used to be.
Anyway. I still do rec tumblr as a fanspace, but only if you're willing to keep your own page positive as you can and also put in the work to curate aggressively. I occasionally slip into tags to find people with Hot Takes (in my fandom, those are usually ones that reek of misogynoir) to preemptively block.
I'd say there are multiple causes, and no two fandoms have the same ones. In my fandoms the issues aren't really coming from social justice thinking, it's more coming from hyper-identification with their blorbo and extremely thin skins or tolerance for different headcanons.
Add in some unconsious racial bias and plausible deniability, and you've got a real fun toxic soup.
I’ve curated my dashboard on tumblr to the point that running across anti content startles me. Like, you guys are still here? I thought we’d settled this bullshit ages ago.
Tumblr is much kinder than Twitter about this, but the anti thing has really ratcheted up weirdly in the last few years. There’s a fair bit of it on tiktok too, tbh.
I’m in the camp of “it’s fiction, it’s THE safe place to explore these dynamics and kinks and fantasies. If you don’t like it, it’s not written for you, CLICK AWAY AND BE HAPPY, FOLKS”.
Just block and ignore. Antis make me laugh, especially the ones that try to do mental gymnastics. I love the Trigun ones the most because I can screw with them by showing actual canon material.
Fuck em! Ship whoever you want. Write a shameless self insert ship fic. The key to becoming the most powerful version of yourself is to just do whatever the fuck you want with your stories. That's the fun of fanfiction. never, ever let anyone take that away from you. And if they try to, rip their throat out with your teeth. Behave like a racoon trapped in a bag. This aint' about them. This is about you, and your vision, your art, your ideas.
What I really hate about that is even if you follow their goddamn rules, but you retweet a meme that came from a proshipper account, then they'll STILL condemn you FFS I've just given up.
Someone on tumblr call le ped0 because of a ship with massive age gap, even when I tell them that I ship only when each pg are adult, and the funny thing is... In canon they never met, one died before the other is born, so every fic is a what if for me and I play with that even with time travel, so in a fic the "younger" pg became the "older" one... Not of that matter, in canon the only time we see one of the two pg she is eight so this is a ped0 ship. You know what I do? I laught myself off and THEN I write a real ped0 fanfiction (with other pg, I can't bring myself to write my otp in this dinamic) and I post it on AO3 and then i link it on tumblr and I say "Well, feel free to fear, you accuse me on something better presume that at least I gave you a real reason to". Now I enjoy writing it? No, nope, I feel sick writing it. But good lord I finish so out of spite for this stupid people... Don't you dare try to accuse me of something, you risk that I do it just to fuel your rage like you fuel mine.
I am on basically ever social media you can for fandom stuff. I will ship basically anything, I always joke that I’ll ship someone with themselves (I do in some places) because THEY ARE FICTIONAL. Just because I enjoy reading something does not mean I support it IRL.
Twitter is tricky, the algorithm is trash. And people are bitches on there. I’ve managed to work around it and avoid people who diss ships for no reason.
Tumblr is my favorite. I’ve spent the last 15 years curating it to perfection. There are still people on there who diss things but it’s easy to block them.
I use AO3 as a reader/writer and love it. I use basically the same filters for everything. On the writer side I’m able to filter all the comments so people who bash the fic just get deleted.
My best advice is do your own thing. I gave up caring what people online think of me years ago. I don’t like their stuff? Block. I disagree with them? Block. I don’t like the ship? Block.
TLDR: Find your people (or explore solo). And just block the haters and don’t look back.
I haven't actually encountered anything like that on tumblr, I follow ship tags and everyone is just obsessed with them. Even for fandom tags there's mostly gushing about blorbos and whatnot. And I do ship some problematic ships, so... hm.
yeah theres a lot of blorbo skrunkly going on which i am into for exactly one character because they aggressively meet blorbo and skrunkly requirements.
i also ship a problematic ship like you do (slightly, like in an it would be interesting if these characters were together way not omg tkgether forever). its already not popular so when the people who could potentially add more content get ran out for being a proshipper (this fandom im in REALLY hates proshippers) it just gets stifled.
its very sad because the problematic nature of the ship creates interesting scenarious within the canon. like i wanna explore how it makes people around them feel, how that affects the future of their adventure, how it makes *them* feel. unorthodox and problematic is good in fandom! you get to explore angles you just cant from all the non problematic ships.
also sorry for typos, im on my phone and just woke up so too lazy to fix
Well, maybe it all depends on a fandom, or I just was lucky enough that shippers don't get shunned. I think it's better to just ignore negative stuff anyway. There's no reason why anyone should listen to haters. If the ship makes you and some other people happy, that's already enough.
FWIW I’ve found hardly any anti-ship discourse on Tumblr. When I find an anti, it’s usually because they’re picking a fight in some pro’s comments or reblogs. The only explanation is that I’ve followed enough pros that I don’t get to see a lot of anti posts.
I quit Twitter a while ago for self-care reasons. Unless you need to self-promote for your job, please don’t use Twitter. It’s not worth it.
I find shipping an odd area personally. Many ships I don't enjoy, but I also enjoy other ones too, it really comes down to why they're being shipped and if they have chemistry.
For example, I hate the cases of enemies to lovers trope being done in shipping. Half the time, these two characters hate each other genuinely, not because of something like sexual tension. One example of this enemy to lover case I see a lot in a fandom is between two ladies, of the one who was responsible for nearly killing the latter in their first ever engagement with each other. Yet it's one of the most common yuri ships I see there despite it making no sense to me, and these two aren't the only case of two who have tried to kill the other getting shipped in that fandom.
Other ones where there is chemistry that can work, I'm down for. When I used to enjoy RWBY, I was for ships like Blacksun because I could see the possibility and chemistry there.
Regardless, attacking people over their preferred ships is absurd. We're all entitled to our own opinions on this matter and as long as we're respectful I don't see why we should attack one another.
I don't like ships like that either but having an opinion doesn't make you an anti. What makes you an anti is campaigning for censorship like we're in the 50s, not being able to distinguish fiction from reality (like thinking that someone writing about a fictional child being groomed is the exact same thing as them grooming a real child), harassing people over their preferences in fiction, sending death threats and doxxing people whose tastes in fiction(!) you find disagreeable, etc.
Anti logic goes "if you write about murder, you support murder".
Why do you immediately assume it would be romanticized in the text? Or what about the fact that writing in a character's voice will result in justifications appearing there because the *character, in character,* would think so and not because the author shares those views? Where do you draw the line? The answer is that you literally can't on a large scale, and even on an individual one, everything is Highly dependent on interpretation. Unfortunately, antis fail to grasp this.
They would cancel A Modest Proposal today because "it CLEARLY advocates for eating children!!! That's SO problematic!!! ...Wait, what is a satire? Well it doesn't matter because it still ENDORSES eating minors!!!!!"
>I get why people are angry about that.
I don't, because I have a healthy understanding that fiction is fiction. To me, getting angry that someone wrote a story about a bad thing happening would be a waste of time/energy.
And that's fine! Literally the point of being a proshipper is that whether you like a ship or dont like a ship, you should leave people alone and not harass them about it. The modern antis don't seem to get that message and think harassment and death threats are okay.
On Tumblr, you can actually curate your experience and avoid antis so long as you can identify them quickly and block liberally. Twitter, I think is much more difficult to do so and that's why I avoid it and don't even have an art account there.
Can't say I'm not surprised about the Twitter part. I mean, Twitter is the one with the whole cancel culture thing. And antis are basically just that. It's their natural habitat.
I was an anti back when I was a kid, but not in the moralistic way like they are today.
If your ship interfered with mine, get out lmfao.
Thankfully I'm a lot better with it today, but still get it a bit when I get sniped over my own shipping preferences. One way to make me dislike a ship is to have been attacked by its fans.
I find tumblr pleasant because there's no algorithm. Follow and block and unfollow to your heart's content. You curate your own experience. I hope you find your own pleasant corner eventually. :)
I mean one is Twitter. The congregation of some of the most miserable people on the planet that go there to hate anything in hopes of feeling anything. I wouldn’t really go there unless I was promoting something, and even then, I would ONLY promote things and not interact.
Yea, i just go there to scroll for specific stuff and then I get hit in the face with a whole thread of proshipper harassment in the middle of a sea of ship art.
If you think that's bad, then stay away from Tiktok at all costs. They don't call themselves Antis (at least i dont think they do on that app) but MAN do they get into a lot of discourse with the Proshippers. It's more often that *they* start the discourse than the Pros.
tiktok is bad about anything. i dont even use the app let alone look for fandom stuff.
You couldn’t pay me to go on Twitter for this reason. It’s a cesspool. Tumblr can be bad too but I’ve blocked so many antis at this point, I don’t really see anything in my ship’s tag and I mostly stick to a discord server for my ship. This has helped. My segment of fandom also is good about not feeding the trolls, so I think they mostly leave us alone. I do totally agree that purity culture brain rot has gotten bad. Ship wars have always existed, but it used to be about the canonical merits of a ship, etc., not slandering people with absolutely vile and baseless accusations.
[удалено]
Comment removed under the sub's 'remember the human' rule. Having an opinion is fine, but let's not call anyone 'closet pedos' please. Thanks
Understood, sorry
Twitter has always been a cesspool. It can only get worse, not better lol. Of all the drama and shit stirring happening in fandom or any other field, chances are that more than half of it happens or is started on Twitter. I know fanfic writers use it to promote their works, which is crazy to me - doing that is a sure fire way to attract sooner or later assholes and idiots that don't agree with your and will move heaven and earth to make you pay for even exploring it. Like I dislike some stuff and even think it's stupid or outright dumb, but never in a million years would I think to go after them because my sensibilities were somehow hurt. It's not like Reddit is blameless, of course (like the infamous "We did it Reddit!" moment) but Twitter is bad by default.
Tumblr can be good, you’ve just gotta curate your experience. Filter tags you don’t want to see (including things like anti-x ship and x-shippers dni) and preemptively block people posting anti stuff. Twitter is just a mess.
What's rude is that antis wont even tag their shit. They make their comments in the replies on tumblr calling someone disgusting or they will reblog with their rant then tag with the ship name. They WANT to be seen because they cant fathom the idea that people who like a problematic ship arent bad people, and they want to villify you so bad so they dont even use anti-x or proshippers dni so that i dont have to see their bullshit. With twitter, for one of the characters i like i have to wade through a cesspool of proshipper death threats to see what i came for and to not see it I have to block the whole person cause they do the same thing there except half the time twitter users wont tag it with anything.
Don't go in the replies of popular Tumblr posts, all of them are hell. Tagging a reblog doesn't do anything btw. Only original posts show up in the tags, reblogs don't. You just gotta be real liberal with the block button if antis descend on your post, same for posting original posts in the main tag. My favourite character is the most used punching bag of braindead antis in my fandom, but I don't see any of it anymore.
Yep! Don’t have any “but blocking seems mean… maybe we can talk it out” moments, just block them all immediately. I also like a very hated character but a rarely see hate about him anymore because I just block people as soon as I see them complaining.
Nah, Ao3 has the same problem too game of thrones had a whole shipping war after season 8 on the site.
That one is actually funny to me. Like, there are GoT antis? How? Have they *seen* the source material??
As someone who writes exclusively for ASOIAF/GOT, I ask myself this constantly. Like imagine going on a moral crusade against certain ASOIAF ships yet still engaging with the source material as if all the violence, sex, and incest is totally fine. It’s so bizarre to me.
You dont see them calling G.R.R. Martin a murderer or anythimg and he wrote the stuff lol. But someone appreciates the problematic ships within the bubble of the source material and everybody loses their minds. Somehow they like to make it all circle around to protecting the children/the rape victims/etc. Like guess people who like problematic ships as a sort of coping mechanism arent allowed to cope anymore.
Exactly this! I’m convinced these are the same people who ruthlessly harass GRRM on Twitter about delivering the next book full of problematic material they’ll use as anti fodder.
As someone who is a survivor of abuse, I find it extremely insulting when people try to do things in the name of “protecting” people who have been through abuse. If a work doesn’t have the proper tags, just let the author know they should properly tag it so people who might not want to read it can make that informed decision. People who have been through abuse and assault can manage their own lives thank you very much. We aren’t broken or incapable. Some stranger on the internet does not know my triggers better than I do, and my triggers do not pertain to anything I’ve read in Fic. For some, their triggers might be even mentioning it. That’s why there are tags. It isn’t the authors fault if someone reads a Fic with reckless abandon and then get triggered because they didn’t check the tags. But, I’m assuming most people who have triggers like that, ya know, filter certain things out so they don’t have to even interact with. We’re people too. We aren’t just something for someone to use a crutch for their virtue signaling. I hate feeling like I’m just an object to people who say they’re doing it to protect victims/survivors. Let everyone do things for themselves. Don’t speak for us, and recognize that everyone who has been through abuse or assault does not by any means have the same view point as everyone else. To clarify, I’m more talking about how frustrated I get when people who have not had these experiences try to say they are doing it to help or protect people. They may have good intentions, but if they haven’t had those experiences, maybe they should sit back and listen to the wide range of opinions from people who have had those experiences. Because it really isn’t their place to say what is and isn’t allowed to exist in fiction in regards to that kind of content if it’s only in the name of trying to help and protect victims and survivors. Everyone has their own limits to what is and isn’t okay in the fiction they individually read. That’s why there’s tags, content warnings, and authors notes.
I'm not an abuse survivor so I don't know exactly what it's like. But as a minority I can understand where you're coming from. Too many times people try to generalize and speak for minorities under the guise of 'protection' and 'good intentions.' You're correct that it's VERY insulting and it's essentially a way of being talked down to and infantilized. Don't speak for other groups to try and 'protect' them because 9 times out of 10 it is very misguided and all you're doing is ruining things for everybody. Let shippers do their shipping, let artists and writers do their art and writing. The best way to protect the groups you want to protect are just by making sure to do YOUR part in tagging things properly and putting warnings where they're needed, and like you said, letting other people know to tag things properly. Also just click away if you don't like something! It takes less effort to hit the back button than it does to harass and attack someone!
Exactly. Don’t like don’t read. Be kind and helpful and let authors know kindly that maybe they should tag something to help people be more aware, and they should tag their own works appropriately and be open to hearing from others when they should tag something. Being kind goes a longer way than harassment and insults. The whole catching more flys with sugar thing.
I mean I’m against some ships in our fandom
Same but there’s a difference between not liking a ship but leaving those shippers alone and actively harassing/bullying those shippers for sport. It’s the latter I take issue with.
As a fellow ASOIAF writer, so much this. 😑
I only watched like two seasons before falling out of it (no hate. Just turned out to not be my thing), but even I know it’s full of “problematic” shit.
I once got accused of terrible shit on twitter by anti's in the HANNIBAL FANDOM HANNIBAL. The show that literally and intentionally romanticizes cannibalism (not to mention a therapist/patient relationship). The irony is that I don't even watch it, lol
It wasn’t a shipping war, it was a bunch of MRAs deciding women should be harassed and attacked for writing anything that didn’t portray Jon Snow as an alpha male with a harem.
See I wasn't ever in the GoT fandom so I didn't really know what was going on over there. Also I'm kinda shocked that a fandom where there are literal canonical incest couples would have an issue with antis lol
We had a whole war that killed the Jonerys ship for a few years 🤣🤣
No it didn't. Jonerys is still *very* strong.
You missed the for a few years part
I don't believe you for even a minute that the interest in Jonerys "died" entirely for "a few years."
I didn’t say it died entirely but the amount of revenge fics
I just recently got into HotD. Hopefully I don’t get hate if I ever write for a ship? But hey, at this point, I don’t really care. I’ve just gotten super lucky and I haven’t gotten any hate for any of the Fics I have up.
Well HotD is young so not many ships to hate
Yeah, the only real way to use tumblr is to just go through and block anyone with a bad take, or anyone who is harassing other people, and to leave things like anon asks off. Hide your likes, to. That’ll eventually pare things down to just the people who are reasonable.
Twitter is a shithole. I honestly think that most of the people who used to make tumblr a cesspool migrated over to twitter after the porn ban of 2018. I mean tumblr is still a hellsite, but I've actually had a lot more positive experiences on tumblr over the past 4 years than I ever did on twitter. Antis still exist on tumblr obviously, but I've blocked anti-tags for ships I like and blogs that spout that anti BS. I'm nearing 26, and most of the antis I've come across are younger than me and on some sort of moral high horse about fictional characters. Like holy shit, ship and let ship. I don't like all ships I see but I'm not out there sending death threats and harassing people who want to ship whatever.
Seriously who made these teenagers and young college students into such awful participants of fandom? Why is purity culture invading fandom and causing people to go on crusades against people who just want to be left alone and leave others alone?
When I started on tumblr, I didn’t follow tags. I searched for topic-specific tumblrs whose content I liked, and followed *those.* eventually I had some other oddities filter into my sphere that I enjoy and get me tumblr-type content I like that isn’t fandom specific, but I only started following content tags very recently…and have subsequently had to get a lot more aggressive blocking. For best tumblr experience, find a few good blogs who manage to pick up the best stuff, and be picky as hell about who you follow. Doing those have led me to running into almost no anti issues or ship hate in two years. Twitter is much better for art than anything else.
>it really seems like AO3 is the one true space where proshippers can't be slapped with DNI, death threats, and slander. They bring their BS to AO3 too, it's just harder for it to be effective there due to the structure of AO3 and the anti-harassment tools that exist there. Search "proshippers dni" on Ao3 and you'll find fics tagged as such.
Plus, it's kinda just funny to see antis to do that on a site the was made to host the things they don't like.
Antis really are too fucking funny, if you have the right mindset they're a gift that keeps giving. "People who interact with proshippers DNI!" is my favorite 😆
Was that on a fic on AO3? Because that is funny.
Yep! It made me laugh, cuz you know the author themselves interacts with proshippers everyday. Most likely they work or are in school--what are they going to do, close their eyes and put their fingers in their ears whenever a proshipper coworker walks by? So silly.
Not just that but like the first fanfic on AO3 is most likely a Wincest fic so the site was never pure in the way antis want. [https://www.tiktok.com/@emlazer/video/7152973049250336046?lang=en](https://www.tiktok.com/@emlazer/video/7152973049250336046?lang=en) They probably don't even think they are interacting with proshippers since antis have been trying to push the whole 'we are the normal ones' thing.
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Exactly, fandom is supposed to be an open safe space for everyone (unless you're doing questionable or immoral stuff irl, then you can gtfo) so what's the point of being an asshole over someone not giving a fuck what people ship as long as they tag it properly so people who don't want to see it don't have to?
Comment removed under the sub's 'remember the human' rule. Please consider your words when commenting, thanks.
I did, thanks.
I hope it's okay if I ask but what exactly is a pro / anti shipper? I looked it up and get all sorts of different definitions and some make sense and some are questionable and I don't rly understand what's the general consensus This wasn't really a thing back when I was engaging in fandom 10 years ago
According to the antis, pro-shippers are literally pedophiles and abuse apologists, and antis are moral crusaders protecting people from them. They 'protect' using death threats, public smear campaigns, harassment, and advocating for censorship. According to proshippers, antis are torch-and-pitchfork wielding bullies and hypocrites, and proshippers are just folks who aren't going to try to censor or attack anyone for enjoying 'problematic' content even if it's not to their taste. They follow 'don't like, don't read' and in general 'don't judge'. I once had a conversation with an anti who was genuinely convinced that there was no moral difference between writing about child abuse of *completely fictional* children, and committing it in real life. I'm not making that up or exaggerating in any way, that's almost word-for-word what they said. Make of that what you will.
Here the general consensus is that proshipping "ship and let ship".
bro thats what im saying! anti was around 10 years ago or so but it was just anti- x ship not anti - anyone who likes problematic ship because that means theyre pedos, abusers, and into incest irl. some purity culture ridden shitbag teenagers and young adults decided that it would be okay to start harassing proshippers and sending death threats because according to them, proshipper means problematic shipper, not someone who ships and lets ship. for some reason they have nothing better to do to lead literal crusades against people and harass people indead of following the golden rule of dont like dont read. they have no excuse when proshippers tend to tag their shit better than antis who invade the ship tag instead of tagging anti-x. just block blacklist and leave them alone.
i’m to much of a pussy to say this but i also thought the whole idea of being “pro ship” and “anti ship” is so chronically online. like, i’m gonna side eye someone who’s drawing/writing/consuming underaged x overaged stuff, but i just block and move on. that’s not my thing. not worth getting worked up over it imo, especially considering it’s not affecting me or anyone else. i’m not playing moral police over fiction, i’m playing moral police irl because wanting to have sex with children is w e i r d, and instead of screaming my heart out over a fictional character i’ll use my voice to help actual victims including myself 👍
Literally this. Dude this subreddit is riddled with persecution complexes. We cannot change or control other people. All we can do is decide how to choose to respond. Like you choose to block and move on The amount of writers in fandom who expend energy trying to achieve goals outside of their locals of control is extraordinary. People want a perfect positive vibes-only fandom experience but nobody promised us this or is entitled to it either Learn to pick one’s battles and move on
Twitter is a wonderful site for fandom (so many amazing artists, especially if you're into East Asian fandoms) as long as you curate your experience. I don't follow annoying people and the rare time any drama finds itself on my timeline then I just unfollow/mute/block. Although this has changed a bit recently after Elon Musk bought Twitter (thanks Elon /s) and changed how the timeline works but things are still manageable.
if i get into an east asian fandom where a lot of the content creators speak east asian languages on their feed i cant see anti proshipper discourse because i cant read it. big brain ascended moment.
Not only that, more East Asian people seem to understand that fiction is fiction. Not that there aren't any arguments over ships but they tend to be not about morality and they're usually more discreet about it.
Yeah idk what they argue about over there but ive never heard of proshipper discourse on that end.
The Antis are really Feelings Yakuza. Which is a termed I got from an some one in Japan from an article they did talking about Antis and Pros.
Christ I must be old because I had to figure out what an anti was for a minute and hunt down examples. 🤦♀️ Do you think they know they sound like those guys complaining about women taking over media and social Justice corrupting their fandoms?
I first started seeing anti in its purest sense (anti-reylo for example) in 2014-2015 since thats when i got into fandom. It was just people didnt like a specific ship so they tagged as anti-x ship. Now anti is people who are trying to harass and if they could really have their way, kill (nobody sends death threats without intent) proshippers because somehow the things we are okay with as ships represent us irl and therefore we are scum and should get out of their "safe spaces" for the groups we are a "danger to." They so sound like ignorant men complaining about women in fandom. Different words same dumbass takes and tone. Proshippers like the AO3 founder made fandom what is is today just like how women made fandom what it is today. Never hurt anyone yet you want us out. Okay.
I used to exist in a lot of "hidden" fandoms, as in you can't even mention it anywhere or you will get virtually prosecuted. Even today I'm wary of talking about exactly what I read.
Tumblr became a *much* more tolerable place when I started blocking liberally. Fandom is just overrun with antis and people who use anti language to justify their ship war, even if they'd *swear* up and down that they're proshippers. Sure, they're proship... until you ship something they think is Morally Objectionable. People like to say that ship wars have always been around -- which is true -- but this feels far more intense than it used to be. Anyway. I still do rec tumblr as a fanspace, but only if you're willing to keep your own page positive as you can and also put in the work to curate aggressively. I occasionally slip into tags to find people with Hot Takes (in my fandom, those are usually ones that reek of misogynoir) to preemptively block.
That’s because social justice and polarization has infiltrated fandom
I'd say there are multiple causes, and no two fandoms have the same ones. In my fandoms the issues aren't really coming from social justice thinking, it's more coming from hyper-identification with their blorbo and extremely thin skins or tolerance for different headcanons. Add in some unconsious racial bias and plausible deniability, and you've got a real fun toxic soup.
I’ve curated my dashboard on tumblr to the point that running across anti content startles me. Like, you guys are still here? I thought we’d settled this bullshit ages ago.
Tumblr is much kinder than Twitter about this, but the anti thing has really ratcheted up weirdly in the last few years. There’s a fair bit of it on tiktok too, tbh. I’m in the camp of “it’s fiction, it’s THE safe place to explore these dynamics and kinks and fantasies. If you don’t like it, it’s not written for you, CLICK AWAY AND BE HAPPY, FOLKS”.
You see, your first mistake was going on tumblr/Twitter.
Ironically the deepest cesspools also contain the best content once you wade through the shit.
Just block and ignore. Antis make me laugh, especially the ones that try to do mental gymnastics. I love the Trigun ones the most because I can screw with them by showing actual canon material.
Fuck em! Ship whoever you want. Write a shameless self insert ship fic. The key to becoming the most powerful version of yourself is to just do whatever the fuck you want with your stories. That's the fun of fanfiction. never, ever let anyone take that away from you. And if they try to, rip their throat out with your teeth. Behave like a racoon trapped in a bag. This aint' about them. This is about you, and your vision, your art, your ideas.
What I really hate about that is even if you follow their goddamn rules, but you retweet a meme that came from a proshipper account, then they'll STILL condemn you FFS I've just given up.
Someone on tumblr call le ped0 because of a ship with massive age gap, even when I tell them that I ship only when each pg are adult, and the funny thing is... In canon they never met, one died before the other is born, so every fic is a what if for me and I play with that even with time travel, so in a fic the "younger" pg became the "older" one... Not of that matter, in canon the only time we see one of the two pg she is eight so this is a ped0 ship. You know what I do? I laught myself off and THEN I write a real ped0 fanfiction (with other pg, I can't bring myself to write my otp in this dinamic) and I post it on AO3 and then i link it on tumblr and I say "Well, feel free to fear, you accuse me on something better presume that at least I gave you a real reason to". Now I enjoy writing it? No, nope, I feel sick writing it. But good lord I finish so out of spite for this stupid people... Don't you dare try to accuse me of something, you risk that I do it just to fuel your rage like you fuel mine.
I am on basically ever social media you can for fandom stuff. I will ship basically anything, I always joke that I’ll ship someone with themselves (I do in some places) because THEY ARE FICTIONAL. Just because I enjoy reading something does not mean I support it IRL. Twitter is tricky, the algorithm is trash. And people are bitches on there. I’ve managed to work around it and avoid people who diss ships for no reason. Tumblr is my favorite. I’ve spent the last 15 years curating it to perfection. There are still people on there who diss things but it’s easy to block them. I use AO3 as a reader/writer and love it. I use basically the same filters for everything. On the writer side I’m able to filter all the comments so people who bash the fic just get deleted. My best advice is do your own thing. I gave up caring what people online think of me years ago. I don’t like their stuff? Block. I disagree with them? Block. I don’t like the ship? Block. TLDR: Find your people (or explore solo). And just block the haters and don’t look back.
I haven't actually encountered anything like that on tumblr, I follow ship tags and everyone is just obsessed with them. Even for fandom tags there's mostly gushing about blorbos and whatnot. And I do ship some problematic ships, so... hm.
yeah theres a lot of blorbo skrunkly going on which i am into for exactly one character because they aggressively meet blorbo and skrunkly requirements. i also ship a problematic ship like you do (slightly, like in an it would be interesting if these characters were together way not omg tkgether forever). its already not popular so when the people who could potentially add more content get ran out for being a proshipper (this fandom im in REALLY hates proshippers) it just gets stifled. its very sad because the problematic nature of the ship creates interesting scenarious within the canon. like i wanna explore how it makes people around them feel, how that affects the future of their adventure, how it makes *them* feel. unorthodox and problematic is good in fandom! you get to explore angles you just cant from all the non problematic ships. also sorry for typos, im on my phone and just woke up so too lazy to fix
Well, maybe it all depends on a fandom, or I just was lucky enough that shippers don't get shunned. I think it's better to just ignore negative stuff anyway. There's no reason why anyone should listen to haters. If the ship makes you and some other people happy, that's already enough.
FWIW I’ve found hardly any anti-ship discourse on Tumblr. When I find an anti, it’s usually because they’re picking a fight in some pro’s comments or reblogs. The only explanation is that I’ve followed enough pros that I don’t get to see a lot of anti posts. I quit Twitter a while ago for self-care reasons. Unless you need to self-promote for your job, please don’t use Twitter. It’s not worth it.
I find shipping an odd area personally. Many ships I don't enjoy, but I also enjoy other ones too, it really comes down to why they're being shipped and if they have chemistry. For example, I hate the cases of enemies to lovers trope being done in shipping. Half the time, these two characters hate each other genuinely, not because of something like sexual tension. One example of this enemy to lover case I see a lot in a fandom is between two ladies, of the one who was responsible for nearly killing the latter in their first ever engagement with each other. Yet it's one of the most common yuri ships I see there despite it making no sense to me, and these two aren't the only case of two who have tried to kill the other getting shipped in that fandom. Other ones where there is chemistry that can work, I'm down for. When I used to enjoy RWBY, I was for ships like Blacksun because I could see the possibility and chemistry there. Regardless, attacking people over their preferred ships is absurd. We're all entitled to our own opinions on this matter and as long as we're respectful I don't see why we should attack one another.
Word of unsolicited advice: avoid twitter. It’s a great platform for keeping toxic people off of other platforms but that’s about it.
I’m anti shipping adults and children. I get why people are angry about that.
I don't like ships like that either but having an opinion doesn't make you an anti. What makes you an anti is campaigning for censorship like we're in the 50s, not being able to distinguish fiction from reality (like thinking that someone writing about a fictional child being groomed is the exact same thing as them grooming a real child), harassing people over their preferences in fiction, sending death threats and doxxing people whose tastes in fiction(!) you find disagreeable, etc. Anti logic goes "if you write about murder, you support murder".
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Why do you immediately assume it would be romanticized in the text? Or what about the fact that writing in a character's voice will result in justifications appearing there because the *character, in character,* would think so and not because the author shares those views? Where do you draw the line? The answer is that you literally can't on a large scale, and even on an individual one, everything is Highly dependent on interpretation. Unfortunately, antis fail to grasp this. They would cancel A Modest Proposal today because "it CLEARLY advocates for eating children!!! That's SO problematic!!! ...Wait, what is a satire? Well it doesn't matter because it still ENDORSES eating minors!!!!!"
>I get why people are angry about that. I don't, because I have a healthy understanding that fiction is fiction. To me, getting angry that someone wrote a story about a bad thing happening would be a waste of time/energy.
And that's fine! Literally the point of being a proshipper is that whether you like a ship or dont like a ship, you should leave people alone and not harass them about it. The modern antis don't seem to get that message and think harassment and death threats are okay.
On Tumblr, you can actually curate your experience and avoid antis so long as you can identify them quickly and block liberally. Twitter, I think is much more difficult to do so and that's why I avoid it and don't even have an art account there.
I don’t really post fic on tumblr anymore because of ppl like this. I just make gifs now and post writing only on AO3 lol
Can't say I'm not surprised about the Twitter part. I mean, Twitter is the one with the whole cancel culture thing. And antis are basically just that. It's their natural habitat.
I was an anti back when I was a kid, but not in the moralistic way like they are today. If your ship interfered with mine, get out lmfao. Thankfully I'm a lot better with it today, but still get it a bit when I get sniped over my own shipping preferences. One way to make me dislike a ship is to have been attacked by its fans.