#but fuck meee im so tired of self-assigned proshippers wilfully acting like they've never heard of proshippers harassing people like cmon

[arthurreblogs]

An interesting read - there’s definitely some things I’d disagree with or add nuance to if discussing this with another anglophone but it seems close enough to be a decent guide for those in Japan at least. Shame that the people who spoke with them about it seem to have painted a strawman for them, but it sounds like they had a rough fucking time and I hope that’s stopped for them at least.

I do oppose the idea that “proship DNI” is a flag that someone “is an anti” - both proship and “anti” (in this context) have complicated usage that I wouldn’t expect someone in a different shipping culture to have to figure out mind - there’s plenty of people who find the sorts of ships/shippers that typically reside in “proship” territory exclusively to be personally upsetting for their own reasons, and would just rather avoid the community at large as a result. I know that’s where I fall into this - I’m not exactly a stranger to other people labelling me as an anti and projecting a lot of presumed characteristics as a result. Typically though, the kind of person you really have to worry about is the type that actively labels themselves an “anti” of anything - when you make something you oppose into an identity you tend to be the type that treats it like a hobby, rather than a necessary evil of navigating your own comfort and safety online.

It’s a shame that it’s not understood in the same way as personal responsibility for avoiding content you don’t like is in this article - there’s a minor difference in that it’s a boundary rather than a warning, but it’s not so much a signal to “other antis” to get a pass as it is a genuine request for people who call themselves “proship” to respect that we don’t want to interact with them. 

Ironically for all those ranting about “antis” and how controlling they are in the notes, I’ve had “Feelings Yakuza” experiences of my own from self-assigned proshippers who take my DNIs as an invitation to harass me to change my mind - e.g. to presume things about where I draw the line and harass me for that; to write lengthy messages about the ships I’m clearly not comfortable with as if to make me go ‘ah that isn’t bad actually’; and to compare ships that I happen to like to those wherein an adult is shipped with a child. With no regard for any reasons aside from “puritanical” posturing that I might be uncomfortable with such a thing (like, say, they remind me of personal experiences that are distressing to think about; or they’re the sort of thing most people would find upsetting as a baseline lol). Or you know. Straight up ‘kys’ style messages. There have been plenty of the same messages I see proshippers claim antis love to send in my inbox - because, of course, there’s no “side” of this nonsense that is exempt from harassing other people. 

It’s fully understandable that this article’s writer doesn’t know that - and they are completely right about A’s actions being unacceptable harassment and that expecting non-english speakers to grasp the nuances of what is already a really complicated fandom dynamic for english speakers to grasp is racist and xenophobic to all hell.

Unfortunately... from the edit at the end, I can feel “staunch proship” fingerprints all over this person’s impression of what “not being proship” means - it seems they have been fed exclusively strawmen of the type of people who avoid proship types. It’s also there in what they were told about how this “came about” - certainly the labels are very new, but the idea that opposition has only recently sprung up from “sensitive teenagers” is, to put it bluntly, a complete lie that someone’s fed to this person. Presumably to delegitimise the concern - because if too many adults were examining this and finding issue, over an extended period, then it’d be harder to wave it away as immaturity or with derogatory labels like “puriteen” (as if it is strange or pathetic for a teenager to be squicked out or concerned when witnessing an adult ship a person their age with said adults age). Having been a distinctly “unsensitive” teenager and knowing the close calls I had as a result, it’s horrifying how often concerns of minors are dismissed simply because of their age. And how often acknowledging that has people come out of the woodwork to ask- no, usually tell you that if you consider the impact that fiction can and does have on people (affecting people being the point of fiction - if you disagree you must be very bored and emotionally disconnected from your fandoms i suppose) then you must in turn support harassment, misinformation, and all these myriad  exaggerated “wrongs”. And so on to being harassed by the “proship but anti harassment” crowd. 

It strikes me as rather opportunistic how people have jumped on this article to waffle about those same strawmen or claim this gives them legitimacy when the whole point of the article is that shippers from other cultures don’t and shouldn't be expected to have the first clue of what these dynamics are actually like! Their difficulty understanding the term ‘proship’ is just as applicable to the narrow view they’ve been fed about wider opposition to it - whether from self-appointed “antis”, people trying to avoid shit they don’t like who proshippers call antis, etc etc, or people who also don’t understand the term ‘proship’ but make the mistake of going “wait, aren’t they 14 and 28? That’s a bit weird” in the wrong spaces. Not sure what I expected though, lol. 

TL;DR Anglophones acting like this person’s observations/understanding of one “side”’s extremes isn’t applicable to the other (a “side” it seems they had minimal contact or input for) probably needs to take a hot-steaming minute to climb down off their high horse.

I have never read a more excellent article