#and I'm pretty miffed someone tried to paint it that way

[taibhsearachd]

Man, like I said, I don’t have the energy to have a fight about any of this, but the idea of “if you don’t like this person or the thing they do, shun them from YOUR SPECIFIC CORNER OF FANDOM” is ~Dangerous Anti Rhetoric~ is just wild to me.

Like... shunning is what we do with terfs, just to give one example. We don’t harass them - I don’t encourage harassment of anyone, no matter how repugnant their views. We don’t engage them, because they can’t be trusted to engage in good faith and just by engaging you give them an opportunity to push their views to bystanders. You just... ignore them. You install Shinigami Eyes so you can ID them on sight and avoid. You inform your friends when they reblog or promote something made by a person with morally repugnant views. None of that is abusive or anything like the methods antis use with someone who does or creates something they find offensive.

Shunning is the most humane and justifiable method we have of social control within fandom, when we can’t control what other people post, create, or endorse. It’s not an attempt to drive people out of fandom entirely - which, again, would typically require outright harassment, a thing I do not and will never encourage - it’s just drawing a line at what is and is not acceptable, and refusing to interact with people who cross that line. That’s a normal, healthy way of approaching fandom especially, when people you disagree with will inevitably continue to exist and occasionally come in contact with you. It’s also fundamentally not what antis do at all, because their entire goal is the eradication of things they find morally repugnant.