do you know how many times i’ve talked to people on discord in ship-specific servers who admit that they don’t ship [x] ship on tumblr because everyone’s so against it? it doesn’t even matter if the fanpol are in the minority. they make their voices LOUD, and so they become the most prevalent and the most toxic group in the fandom. i can literally name two fandoms right now - though i won’t, for drama’s sake - where the antis run all the big events. where they are essentially in charge of the content that gets shared to the wider fandom.
it’s really weird, too, how the “aesthetic” side of fandom (e.g. graphic editors & giffers) tend to be antis more than fanfic writers. is it because ff writers value a good story over performative morality? is it because edit/gif makers have the most popular blogs and the most followers? or maybe that’s just my imagination?
i’ve been approached by a few people for gif requests because the “popular” gifmakers won’t do it; i’ve seen gifmakers include a request to not tag a gifset as the ship (even though that doesn’t affect them at all...the post doesn’t belong solely to you anymore once it goes on someone else’s blog), and these voices end up setting a stage for the more vocal and aggressive antis (the actual fanpol) to exclude other people from fandom.
tl;dr: why?