tiktok has been having a censorship debate for like two weeks now and i need people to understand that "as long as it's not illegal" is not what we mean by fandom etiquette.
there is no ethical level of censorship because when these spaces get taken down for the "immoral subjects"? you will come down with those. when ff.net got scrubbed clean it wasn't just cest fics and proship content etc etc, it was unrelated works because there is no standard of immorality. not here. we lost tens of thousands of works because of puritanical arguments and discussions about morality, and it wasn't just the ones you're debating about.
there is no ethical level of censorship and as long as these works are tagged correctly? you cannot get mad about their existence. you can disagree! you can say you personally do not engage with them, but you Cannot say "ship and let ship until it's -" because that is not how it works.
and i'm not perfect! when i first joined online fandom spaces i was very much like "if you have to change the ages then it's disgusting" "they're related" etc etc and whilst i still don't tend to engage with those themes? we cannot be censoring them either. not without losing these spaces.
it starts with you disagreeing with these things, and it ends with queer media as a whole because there is No Ethical Censorship.
this is less a discussion about fandom etiquette, and more a discussion of Having Fandom Spaces. i beggeth you, don't be part of helping what happened to ff.net happen again 😖
don't like, don't read - including "illegal" and "immoral" things. if they're tagged correctly, you can avoid them.
we also, less of a fandom note and more just a general media note, need to explore these things. yes, there are 100% times where these things get glorified. but on a general basis? we need to explore immoral things in media. we need to explore things to understand them - i'm thinking here about well-known books like the handmaid's tale getting banned because it's Important and it Explains what's going on right now. i'm thinking about morally grey characters/historical figures and how we need to be able to look at their motivations/backstory/etc not necessarily for justification, but for understanding and prevention. even in real life cases, they look at the backstory of the individual because that is how we form and improve preventative techniques and resources.
there is no ethical level of censorship and i've been there, i know it feels good to be like "this is illegal this is bad", you feel like you're doing some good in the world but you're actually causing harm unknowingly to These Spaces.
it is 2025, we do Not need proshipper discourse right now. arguably the worst time for people to be debating what's immoral to read/write about. all censorship ends up as mass censorship, and i really need yall to understand that
block the tags, exclude them from your searches, block the people posting them. do whateverrrr you have to do to curate your own fandom space but for the love of everythingggg, don't be part of the reason we lose these spaces as a whole.
