this post is gonna talk about pro-shippers btw
So, i dont get why pro-shippers are bad? but i also dont get why they do it at the same time, so i would like to hear from both sides as to why they should do what they do, and/or why the other side is bad
i want to be educated and i will do my own research, but i want peoples opinions
thx! (please be RESPECTFUL to everyone responding)
Proship is the default stance fandom used to have--we didn't need a label because you were either normal or an asshole, and what we define as proship now used to be considered normal.
Essentially you abide by the principles of SALS ("ship and let ship") and YKINMKATO ("Your Kink Is Not My Kink And That's Okay" or "kinktomato").
Basically "we all ship what we like and stay in our own lanes and have nothing to do with the ships or kinks that distress us"
People who didn't abide by this were the ones involved in ship wars and were by and large regarded as raging assholes by everybody else.
Quite frankly if you look at the roots of anti behavior and how often they decry a ship that turns out to be the "rival" of their OTP, it becomes blatantly clear the anti movement is basically what happens when you mix ship wars with radfem and puritanical christian ideology.
Yes, I said radfem. There is a lot of anti-kink, anti-sex, anti-porn rhetoric in the anti movement, both things that are well known as things radfems (especially SWERFs) spout. Quite honestly they often literally word for word use the same arguments. You also see echoes of this in how they decry mlm ships as evil and corrupt and immoral while praising wlw ships that tick all the same boxes and wholesome and good.
I also brought up puritanical Christian thought--there is a heavy emphasis on "sin". They don't call it that but the concept is the same--if you have Impure Thoughts you'll be an Impure Person and Impure People are Evil. Also you must protect the children from the corrupting influence of Impure People. Again, they pretty much word for word make the argument Christian fundies do about thoughtcrime and sin.
They also seem to have a weird obsession with making everything about incest and/or pedophilia even when the work in question is entirely innocent.
When an anti sees something they don't like, the go-to response is telling people to kill themselves or threatening them.
When a proshipper sees something they don't like the go-to response is block the shit out of it to never see it again, then go on with their day.
At the end of the day if you're an anti, you want to eradicate everything that makes you even mildly uncomfortable without having to do any work to curate your experiences and you want to frame things that make you uncomfortable as immoral.
If you're proship, you just wanna be allowed to ship your silly little ships in peace and avoid the ships that make you uncomfortable.
A huge chunk of proshippers don't even ship anything problematic, or at least nothing majorly so. Lots are only into totally wholesome ships--they just don't think defaulting to death threats (and now terrorism) is the right response to seeing shit that upsets 'em.
Most of us are just Fandom Old And Tired and want the fighting to stop, people to learn how to filter and block stuff they don't want (I'd have killed for half the abilities we now have to curate what we see back when I was young and getting in fandom for the first time--and kids today don't even use 'em!!! Why!!!), and for children to stop seeking out 18+ content if they're just gonna scream at the creator when they find it.
I'll also mention that the abovementioned "you want to eradicate everything that makes you even mildly uncomfortable without having to do any work to curate your experiences and you want to frame things that make you uncomfortable as immoral" mindframe is also very conservative Christian -- there's this idea in Evangelical Fundie Christianity that if you "allow" sin to exist around you, then you are guilty-by-association, and God will blame you for not purifying your environment, etc. etc. This is why fundies don't abide by "Don't like abortions? don't have one" or "Don't like gay marriage? Don't get gay married." In a fundie world, it's their literal God-given mission in life to purify everything around them and make sure sin doesn't EXIST.
The weird anti tendency to hate-follow tags, go looking for anyone who does shipping wrong, and send them aggressive, violent threats of eradication are VERY fundie in nature -- "warriors of purity," etc.
Anyway. It sucks, so.
Also, adding on because I was asked why it's terrible to be uncomfortable with people writing fiction about things you personally consider immoral.
The answer is: It's not terrible to feel uncomfortable with something someone else writes about, regardless of what that something is and for any reason. What is terrible is telling other people they can't write fiction about it because you're uncomfortable.
The main basis of anti wank is that no one can do anything to fake people in a fictional story that is morally reprehensible to do to real people... But the flaw there is that... Fake people are not real people. They cannot be harmed by what someone writes about them, and writing fiction about a thing is not at all the same as doing (or wanting to do, or wanting someone else to do, or even in any way supporting doing) the thing in real life.
If you're uncomfortable with what is being written about fake people, then just don't read it. There are PLENTY of things that make me uncomfortable to read! But I don't get to say to anyone else "you can't write about X happening to fake people in a fictional story because I don't like it."
But that is the basis of anti dogma wank, and it reaches far beyond just shipping, it just tries to use the worst things it can think of, the things that guarantee a knee-jerk reaction, to get their foot in the door. They want people to have that knee-jerk reaction, in the hopes that people will hop aboard without thinking critically about the actual argument being had, which is the question of how morally pure and censored fiction has to be to be acceptable to them. The answer, for them, is "absolutely" and this, to them, justifies bringing harm to real actual people.
And the answer, for everyone else, is that fiction doesn't have to be morally pure to exist, because being morally pure isn't the point of fiction. Being morally pure is the point of religious texts.
