#i usually don't post a lot of discourse but this particular bullshit always makes me chuckle

[drinking-with-cupid]

It's always funny when I see an anti say proshippers are just pedophiles because,, my guy,,, I don't even like kids in a platonic way, what the fuck do you want from me 💀

[mallowstep]

<you aren't obligated to post this anyways but i do request you don't if it sends as an off anon ask Somehow because idk if it would cause Discourse and i don't super. want that>

honestly hard agree w your tags on the queerhollyleaf post. like. i'm not necessarily proship! i'm not necessarily anti! i personally think it's a topic that can't be narrowed down to yes or no and uhhh a lot of the fandom just doesn't seem to understand that. it's like you (the general you) see one word and the part of your brain that controls complex thought goes dark

okay! i tried to write an answer by myself earlier and it wasn't working so now we're both going to do it. everyone say hi mari. mari says hi everyone. for those of u who don't follow us on main: we = matthew-and-mari, i = matthew, and "m: ..." = mari. not that that's TERRIBLY significant, but so you know.

also for context, my tags were:

✨✨✨unless it’s not proship in the sense that I refuse to label ‘being a reasonable person’but that might just be mexd

sorry that copied kinda weird.

okay so anyway.

we're going to only be discussing fannish media because that's the main focus of this blog. other topics can be forwarded to @fencesandfrogs yadda yadda yadda. we're all here for the fic, aren't we?

m: i do not write fanfiction i am here solely for making sure matthew doesn't go off topic again

right. anyway.

we definitely feel that the conversation can fixate so much on this false axis it can even become harmful. we firmly believe many antis are only antis because of social pressure and a lack of understanding of the proship opinion. we also don't feel the proship position is really wrong. "do not harass people, and tag work responsibly," is our position and it is the proship position, as we understand matters.

that said, there's so much misinformation about what it means to be proship that (a) i don't feel super comfortable identifying as proship (influenced by bad actors as well) and (b) saying you're proship activates this hard wall in a lot of people's minds. we saw people's opinions change while they were following us, but as soon as we explicitly said we weren't an anti, those people unfollowed us. they're within their rights to do so, ofc, and we don't follow up with them, because that would be stalking and weird, but the point is, it's like a magic word.

i don't run this blog to change people's minds. ship discourse has ALWAYS been toxic, as long as we've been on the internet. before it was the modern incarnation of pro/anti-ship, it was voltron bullshit (for us --- not being able to partake in fandom because of the toxicity is actually why we stepped away from fandom for several years), and before that, it was something else. nonsense internet discourse isn't new.

but this is a particular flavour of nonsense that we are frustrated by. five-or-so years ago, our opinion was the default, neutral position. people understood that you tagged content appropriately, that you didn't put nsfw of work aimed at children in the main tags, and that was it. you didn't tag nsfw for mlp as mlp, and you put a content warning up, and that was that. yes there's nuance here, we're not going into all of it.

m: matthew's wrists WILL regret it also we said most of this in the post about abusive rare pairs

so we feel like we shouldn't have to label that.

also, not labelling ourselves means people can't assume our positions. for example, when i'm not trying to be problematic to either (a) piss someone off/out of spite/etc or (b) explore themes, i usually choose to write out problematic content. the example i like to use is that if i want to write moth/misty, then in that fic, misty was never moth's mentor. i might not say/explain it, but it's true. because apprentice/mentor makes me really uncomfortable. so they just never have that relationship.

uh. mari is reminding me that antis usually don't support writing shit out and ALSO that's not even an opinion.

right.

what we mean is, people have a lot of Ideas about what it is to be proship. we don't see ourselves as proship to begin with (see: our opinion is the opinion the average person on the street would have, trust us, we've asked), and we don't want people to make assumptions about our opinions based on that.

at the end of the day, we don't like using pro/anti ship as terms. for clarity, we will use them, but we prefer to think of the average fandom member as a reasonable person, and call antis puritans.

because that's what they are.

we want to restate that our opinions on published media are a lot more complicated and nuanced (and we also think that's another thing this discourse often misses: fanworks and published media are not the same), just because it feels disingenuous to NOT make a point of that. we don't really care if someone is writing fanfic smut that glorifies abuse: we do care if a book is published that glorifies abuse.

anyway.

we're going to leave it there, but basically, yeah. pro/anti discourse is a really ugly flavour of internet nonsense discourse that not only do we have no desire to be in, but fundamentally do not understand.

m: no this is true. regularly we will see something and not understand how someone could hold that belief/opinion/etc. like, matthew finds these posts and we look at them and can't make sense of them. neither of us can remember an example, but yeah.

so, yeah. we feel you hard.

<3