#and handling my own medical appts and insurance stuff and governmental stuff and even getting myself declared financially independent

[thingswhatareawesome]

just now?? this is absolutely not a new thing. years ago when in the voltron fandom at the beginning of the show--so like 2016, around 7years ago? those of us into the sheith ship often described our own real life relationships, in terms of how many years apart we were, and our own ages vs our partner’s. and we were given such fucking shit about it. at a time when those known as antis were just getting a foothold as a concept (and those of us targeted told people that they needed to police fandoms and stop it, otherwise it was going to become entrenched and spread--and lo and behold it did).

so no this isn’t new, antis were making attacks about real life just as much as fiction from the very beginning, this whole time. trust me i know.

while i admit that i'm a little glad to see people starting to take anti's and their conservative bullshit a bit more seriously it is incredibly frustrating to see people being.... surprised? that antis would start trying to dictate what counts as a 'problematic'/predatory/grooming relationship in real life in ways that are incredibly harmful and ableist and queerphobic like

we've been telling y'all this is where they were headed for years now, you don't get to surprised pikachu face about it just because they've moved on to harassing people over their real life relationships as well as the fictional shipping ones when y'all were the ones going 'i'm above this debate and everyone involved in it is a fucking idiot'

we told you to take this seriously, we told you this would happen, and here we are. the antis have been sending us death threats, doxxing people and engaging in endless harassment campaigns for decades - over increasingly queerphobic, racist and ableist ideas of what is a 'problematic' ship - and it's been fucking ignored because it was just 'stupid fanwank'

and now we have people saying shit with their whole chest like

'if you knew your partner as a minor you're both predators getting off to the memory of them as a kid' - which comes from 'aging up characters to write about them having sex is bad'

'finding an autistic person attractive is predatory because people with autism are basically children mentally' - which comes from 'characters can be ""minor coded"" because of disability, behaviour and even height'

'even if you're both adults having an age gap over 2 years (or some other arbitrary number) means the older person is grooming the younger person' - which comes from similar age-gap 'discourse'

'african american people being in a relationship with white people & non-black POC is predatory because white people/non-black POC don't have the same depth of experience and mental maturity as black people (yes this is one i have actually seen someone say, not a straw man, tiktok is a wild place - i've also heard of similar musings about trans people being in relationships with cis folk but i can't recall a specific instance)' - which stems from the idea that all relationships must be equal in every way lest there be a power imbalance, because all power imbalances are inherently abusive

i have yet to stumble across a single accusation of 'problematic' real life arguments that doesn't have a deep root in anti-ship rhetoric and discourse. it's just now it's escaped the containment of fiction and people are getting harassed or judged over real life relationships as well.