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Wading into the waters of pro and anti ship

Or, holy fuck people need to go outside

(me included maybe)

But yes. If you don’t know what pro/anti ship is, congratulations. You’re about to find out about some of the most stupid drama in fandom and as a bonus, you’ll know who to block because they’ll be super insufferable! Content warning, there’s mentions of CSA, SA, death and generally heavy stuff so as always, if you don’t want to even see those mentioned, don’t read!

Definitions

The two main terms when it comes to the current fandom wars are proship and antiship.

Proship is a label that boils down to “I think you can depict dark things in fiction without supporting those things happening in real life”

Proship is a pejorative label commonly found on DNI lists1, indicating that the person to whom the DNI list belongs is against those icky proshitters who literally want to harm real life children!

Proship is a label that means whatever someone wants it to mean in order to wield it as a cudgel to win in whatever fandom wank is going down on {twitter,tumblr,tiktok}.

Conversely, antiship is a label for people who think that depicting bad things is the same as endorsing them, rehashing 00s conservative bitching about violent video games but now it’s Woke And Cool.

Wattpad-reading, tofu-eating tumblrati

The contemporary internet is vastly different to that of 5 years ago, and even more so to that of 10+ years ago. In the place of a flourishing ecosystem of forums and personal sites and wikis and frankly, much more than just the 5 websites that dominate the contemporary web2. As part of the great consolidation into the 5 website web, puritanical fuckwits who just want us to think of the chiiiildren managed to gain much more influence over what actually exists on the web. The internet must be bubblewrapped, and in what feels like a psyop, “antis” take up the work of the puritans and try and act like morality police with a progressive paintjob.

Spend any amount of time on tumblr while having a fandom opinion that could be considered problematique~ and you can draw the ire of the antiship angels who are ontologically good. The range of opinions goes all the way from milquetoast ones like “shipping Byleth Fire Emblem with any of the students is bad because there’s a power imbalance there” all the way to “Lolita should be banned and every copy destroyed because it depicts CSA!!”3. Occassionally there’s also callout posts for Ao34 because it hosts despicable content, though I’m yet to figure out if said content is depictions of dark things or something actually harmful like hate speech. Naturally, WattPad, where you can report authors for not dropping a new chapter fast enough is better. Or something.

Binaries

Anyone trying to tell you the world is neatly split into good and bad is trying to either recruit you into a cult or sell you something. Furthermore, trying to pretend like reality is very simple to understand is also probably trying to do one of the above.

Reality is, of course, not simple – nor can you easily split the good from the bad. People are not inherently good or bad either, good and bad are things we do5 not things we are. But what is doing? What is we? What do you mean by are? One can do good by trying to avoid harming others, by respecting the humanity of other people, and by trying to do better when we falter. Thinking that you can be good blinds you to the flaws we all have. Having flaws is not bad! It’s not immoral by any means – what is immoral is pretending they’re not there and refusing to try and work around and past them because you’re “already” good.

Now I promise this ties back into the pro/anti ship bs. Essentially, the mentality of the anti is that they are good by virtue of liking the right media and shunning those who like the wrong media, because liking something in a fantasy world means you like that same thing in real life and because media influences reality very strongly you are thus causing tangible harm merely through the act of considering a fantasy as compelling as a fantasy. If you read this post you’ll know how I feel about this black and white thinking, but in short, it bad.

The wet noodle of protest art

The question does arise though, does media actually influence reality? As I alluded to earlier, there has already been a moral panic about just that very question not too far in the past: do violent video games beget school shootings? In the wake of Columbine, much focus was put onto the pair of perpetrators playing those gosh darned violent video games like Doom and Quake. Parents of the perpetrators’ victims sued various video game companies and were unsurprisingly unsuccessful – the suit was dismissed. Logically, if video games did directly cause violence, other countries with popular violent video games and movies would also have problems with school shootings. But they don’t. There is obviously much more in between a particular piece of media and real life negative behaviours and harm.

Another example of the complicated relationship between media and reality can be found in the protest art of the Vietnam War. This period in time saw many films and songs and books created about the horrors of war, and the need to end the useless PTSD factory of the US’ Vietnam involvement. If the link between media and reality was so strong, the US would’ve been out of there well before 1970. The US formally stopped supporting the war in 1973. There’s a lot of scholarship on this particular instance, but I wouldn’t think it would be controversial to say the anti-war media created was part of the broader protest movement, rather than spurring on the protest movement in of itself.

Generally, the way to change things is to get out and fight for change, not tweet or post or write about it. Snooty academics can provide ideas on how to prosecute that fight but people have to make the stand and actually fight. I made a video about this. I stand by it.

Das Ende

Also, wie kann man Herze und Geiste ändern? Mit bedrükende Regeln für die Kunst oder mit activen Widerspruch gegen schlechte Ideen?

Yes my grammar is bad, but for the non-germans: How can you change hearts and minds6? With oppressive rules for art or with active protest against bad ideas?

In essence, does censorship work7? No. Clearly not. Else there wouldn’t be queer people in [insert oppressive country here] nor Nazis in the former East Germany. Furthermore, someone consuming a particular piece of media does not reflect some deeper desire to enact it in real life – I’m an avid Edeleth shipper but I don’t want to fuck any of my teachers, actually.

People who get caught up in the pro/anti ship fuckery are deeply unserious people who don’t actually do useful things in the real world, else they’d wake up to the reality that consumption is not morality nor do bad thoughts a bad person make.

  1. Okay but like can we talk about how absurd a “do not interact” list is? At best it’s a list used for moral grandstanding about bad things you’re against™️ and at worst it’s giving random people on the internet the power to bully you more effectively. There is no world in which someone malicious will see something they are or identify with in a DNI list and actually not interact with the person as a result. I’d say it’s emblematic of childrens’ naivete but I’ve seen whole ass adults with DNI lists… ↩︎

  2. If anyone even still knows that the web is, like, called a web because it’s like a spider web, with connections between sites and stuff. The jury’s still out on whether people realise that there’s more than just the tiktok app and google dot com in Google Chrome™️ ↩︎

  3. I really really want people to look at themselves in a mirror and ask if it’s an author’s fault for people romanticising CSA when the author’s depiction was not intended to be as such, nor is romanticisation the only reading one could take of their story. Depicting what it looks like when an adult abuses their position of power over a child can show victims that they’re not alone, that what they’re experiencing isn’t right or good, but they have the words and template to understand what’s going on and try and get out or get help. ↩︎

  4. I sometimes come across things that are untagged and thus not filtered out but contain nasty shit I don’t want to read. You know what I do? I don’t fucking open the thing I don’t want to read. ↩︎

  5. I’m paraphrasing a line from (I shit you not) the Ms. Marvel comics. It goes hard though, let’s be real. Also, The Marvels (2023) is nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be 😜 ↩︎

  6. Honestly I don’t know if this is a turn of phrase in German, but translating directly is funny and I do it all the time with idioms from Romanian into English and people get what I mean so fuck it we ball. ↩︎

  7. I do want to note that it can be tricky to balance things right, because hate speech can definitely harm people. But just hiding away a piece of media can generate a bit of a Streissand effect. What works better is being taught the tools to have a critical eye towards media and understand things better rather than being spoonfed the “correct” ideas ↩︎

https://blog.arachnid.pink/posts/pro-max-ultra-hd/ riley