What is an anti? I had always heard that anti meant someone who was against pedophilic and incest ships
An anti is someone in fandom who harasses, threatens, and cyberbullies other fans because of what characters they like, what pairings they ship and what content they write/read.
They claim to be against “pedophillic ships” but their definition of pedophilia is…completely and utterly out of whack. Things antis have literally called “pedophilic” or in support of “pedophilia” include:
Relationships involving two adults
Relationships between teenagers that fall under Romeo and Juliet laws (a 16 year old dating an 18 year old, for example, or even a 17 year old dating an 18 year old)
Relationships involving any age difference whatsoever (an 18 year old and a 20 year old? pedophilia. a 40 year old and a 60 year old? pedophilia.)
Relationships involving people with a height difference (because short people are “child coded”)
Relationships involving neurodivergent and mentally ill people (iirc this was specifically targeted towards autistic people because antis think they’re “child like” which makes them literally children to antis)
Teaching sex ed to kids in school.
CSA survivors writing about their abuse in any capacity.
CSA survivors saying they don’t like their abuse being compared to fanfic about cartoon characters.
CSA survivors saying they don’t want to get involved with fandom discourse
and etc etc etc, the list goes on, and the point is that when antis say they’re against pedophilia very rarely are they talking about actual pedophilia. They’ve misused the word from hell and back in order to shut down anyone who disagrees with them (actual CSA survivors included) to the point where people on this site have alarm fatigue from the sheer amount of false pedophilia accusations these people have made. Their definition of “incest” is also just as incorrect—they consider characters who have been friends since childhood to be “siblings”, they’ve also called ships between adult characters incestuous because one adult is older than the other.
Antis have also
Made constant death threats and sent suicide baiting messages to both minors and CSA survivors
Told both survivors and minors they deserved to be abused/raped/killed
Accused CSA survivors of being pedophiles, pedophile apologists, or just as bad as their abusers
Accused minors of being pedophiles and pedophile apologists for drawing, writing, or shipping minor characters who are their age or older
Flooded people’s submit boxes with everything from pictures of dead animals to torture to actual child porn
Harbored actual abusers (there’s literally a rapist in the anti-reylo community right now who they refuse to do anything about and this is not the only situation like this that has happened - several antis have been outed as actual predators and the anti community protected them every time while anti antis were the ones trying to get attention to the situation)
Used racist, ableist, transphobic, and other slurs against shippers.
Attempted to dox multiple bloggers
Harassed a woman on twitter who had nothing to do with fandom because her username was ‘klance’ (her actual name is K. Lance) to the point she had to contact the police
Threatened to kill show staff members and their families
Frequently ignore callout posts for actual predators and child abusers while giving thousands of notes to posts calling people out for their ships
Denied the identities of other fans to try and make their own arguments look legit (frequently call queer fans cishet, fans of color white, frequently accuse abuse survivors who disagree with them of lying about their abuse, etc)
and I could literally go on all day.
Antis are not about being against “pedophilic ships”, they’re about using the false accusation of pedophilia to harass people who read/write/ship/enjoy things they don’t like and the people who they target are frequently abuse survivors and minors and other marginalized people.
Their behavior doesn’t make fandom (or at-risk people in fandom) safer and multiple abuse survivors (myself included) have spoken out about how antis have made fandom unsafe for us to be in and how triggering their behavior in pursuit of attacking “pedophilic ships” (which, again, are rarely actually pedophilic) is to us. Absolutely nothing antis have done is in pursuit of actually improving fandom and they frequently refuse to do or support anything that people could do to make fandom a safer experience (antis frequently refuse to use tumblr’s filtering system or any blacklist extension, they shit on the proper tagging of fics/fanart/other posts which is a system that exists to help people protect themselves, and multiple fans have stated that they’re now afraid to properly tag their posts because antis use those tags to harass people—something that actively harms fans because if posts aren’t properly tagged then people get hurt by being exposed to content they don’t want to see).
The thing is that media criticism is good, it’s helpful, it’s beneficial to everyone—-this is a sentiment that most anti antis agree with—-and people are allowed to have content and ships they don’t like but what antis do is not media criticism but personal attacks towards people for the media they create and consume that go so far over the line to the point of being criminal, and what antis do is not simply being against certain content but expecting all of fandom and everyone in the world to only consume content that antis tell them is okay (and meanwhile antis are incredibly hypocritical and frequently consume the very same kind of content that they harass others for enjoying—-see: there are antis who ship pairings like Hannigram and watch shows like Devilman Crybaby, while they harass other people who enjoy other content with the same or even milder themes).
Basically TLDR - Antis paint themselves to be the good guys going on a just crusade against abuse and “abusive ships” but they’re the abusive element in fandom and have harmed countless people with their rhetoric and behavior.
Before you believe a word they say, actually look into some anti anti blogs and get the other side of the story because anti’s side of things is a total distortion of reality and the truth. Try: @anti-anti-survivor, @theassholeantiarchive, @leproblematique, @antipurity for starters.
Signal boost this!
For anyone who is “discourse neutral” and encounters misconceptions among your friends about this, here’s a very good post to reblog as a PSA.
Additionally:
Not everyone is involved with the discourse and that’s OK, but this particular movement is dangerous and cultlike. The misconception that they’re just media critics or “SJWs” is similar to the misconception that Scientology is just a religion. It gives them cover to abuse and harm people. Raising awareness makes this harder.
Not everyone who identifies themselves as an “anti” (or as a scientologist or member of any other cult group) is directly in on the abuse. Some are just naïve to the fact that their innocent presence in the group is covering for it. The abusers are very glad to use this cover, however.
All of the bullet points in the post correspond to situations and events I have actually observed, read receipts from, etc. They are not exaggerations. I did not collaborate with @nonbinarypastels on this post and yet the incidents they’re referring to are all familiar to me.
This is an important post to share, particularly if your blog has a lot of younger people following it.
