@mikkeneko ’s addition is wonderfully astute, as usual.
this post has had more than one addition from anti-shippers with various objections, and I’d like to make a few additions to address some things not clearly laid out above.
First of all: ‘anti’ is short for ‘anti-shipper’.
anti-shippers called themselves ‘antis’ before anyone else did.
before anti-shippers nicknamed themselves ‘antis’, fandom generally referred to people who shit-stirred over fictional ships they didn’t like as 'rabid shippers’ (b/c they usually loved a different, rival ship) or 'fandom police’ and called the shit-stirring 'fandom wank’.
Secondly: fandom anti-shippers focus most of their energy on policing FICTIONAL CONTENT - fanworks and fanwork creators in particular - by 'whatever means necessary’.
Anti-shippers contend that fanworks that depict harmful and/or illegal-irl content harm people, especially minors, in fandom by 'teaching them’ that harmful/illegal things are 'okay’ IRL (expressed as 'fiction affects reality’.) My primary issue with this argument: it contends that people who consume certain types of fiction make themselves susceptible to predators - and thus abuse they suffer is their own fault.
Anti-shippers believe this potential and indirect harm justifies violence towards fan creators - usually in the form of online harassment, death threats, noise mobs/spam, report spam, smear campaigns, and more.
Corallary to above: fandom anti-shipper definitions of 'harmful’ fictional content are extremely expansive and, apart from some room for mlm / wlw fiction, nearly indistinguishable from American right wing puritan definitions of 'harmful’.
To this end, fandom anti-shippers refer to any ship/ship dynamic they dislike as 'pedophilia’, 'incest’, or 'abuse’, regardless of accuracy, and modify the definitions of these loaded words at their convenience.
They also frequently smear anyone who argues with them as a 'pedophile’. (raise your hand if being called a pedophile over and over again for arguing that nobody deserves to be sent death threats for their fictional content makes you throw up in your mouth a little every time!)
Finally: fandom anti-shippers constantly dismiss and steamroll input from non-Western (particularly non-American) fans regarding anything they dislike in fandom, even if the creators/content aren’t Western/American.
The most egregious example of this is the redefinition of 'fujoshi’ - a reclaimed slur against Japanese women meaning 'a woman ruined for marriage [because she likes/creates BL content].’ Japanese BL (boy’s love, i.e. mlm) fans reclaimed this attack against them and call themselves 'fu/joshi/jin/danshi’, but English-speaking fandom anti-shippers started claiming “'fujoshi’ means 'a woman who’s gross b/c she 'fetishizes mlm’” - and they speak directly over any Japanese or Eastern Asian fan who tries to correct them.
other examples include: getting into arguments with fans over what constitutes statutory rape when the age of consent is different in different cultures*, claiming that first cousins getting married is 'incest’ even when the source culture has no issue with first cousins getting married, or arguing that various traditional romance practices unfamiliar to American/Western cultures are 'gross’ and therefore harmful/abusive.
*there’s nuanced arguments to be made about what’s the appropriate age of consent, etc, but let’s be real: we Americans are hardly in a position to judge or police other nations.
In conclusion: Besides the contentions I make in the OP about how anti-shipping culture is shaped by a very American crucible of thought, the imperialist behavior of anti-shippers:
the 'our moral standards are the Only REAL Moral Standards’ thing, and
the 'we know your own words better than you’ thing,
simply clinch the matter.
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