#profict

[gravediggerscol]

how it feels to enter a regular comment section as a proshipper

[docterrrolal]

gonna start puttin this on my posts temporarily.... ill make a better one asp!! probably. may b.

[nebulo-philiac]

I find it incredibly hilarious that there's so much ship discourse in the gravity falls fandom regarding more controversial ships with people arguing shit like "alex hirsch would hate you" meanwhile-

He does not give 2 shits about any shipping discourse, like these are literally his responses to getting asked questions like this, please stop dragging him into this

[autistichalsin]

In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?

Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.

More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.

But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.

A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.

Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.

So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.

Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.

It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.

There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”

A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.

It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.

And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.

Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.

Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.

So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.

Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.

So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.

And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.

And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.

And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.

Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.

Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).

It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.

[enemywasp]

"You're putting your sick fantasies onto fictional characters!!"

Oh!! Oh no! I was putting FANTASIES... onto FICTIONAL characters!?! Why did no one tell me!?

[r4wnz]

"Proship will desensitize you to-"

You tell people to kill themselves—adults and children alike—without thinking anything of it.

Anti-ship rhetoric has desensitized you to child exploitation, harassment, and suicide.

Stop worrying about imaginary, hypothetical problems and confront your own disconnect from empathy.

[myfandomrealitea]

Actually one of my favorite things is when proshippers are bullied out of specific fandom spaces and then you get to watch that fandom cave in on itself and burn to death or become this sad little cesspit of the same 15 people regurgitating the same repetitive, bland content while scream-crying about how their fandom is dying or how their content gets 0 engagement.

Like buddy. You harassed the seasoning out of the soup. Now you just have water. Enjoy.

[fight-nights-at-freddys]

i’m sorry but this is so shitty. i get not wanting to see nsfw of your characters, and i totally respect any creator setting boundaries and asking people not to send them that stuff. HOWEVER, you have to accept that once you make your characters public, people are going to treat them in ways you don’t personally like.

making a COPYRIGHT FORM so people go on a witch hunt, just so you can copyright strike them (falsely, mind you. fanfic and fanart fall under transformative works) is such a gross thing to do.

it doesn’t matter if the characters were based off your childhood, or personal experiences. it doesn’t matter how tightly you want to guard them and keep them safe and pure. the only solutions are setting boundaries between you and your fanbase, removing the characters from public eye and stop making content for them publicly, or learn to ignore it.

going all anne rice over people sexualizing a character is not the way to go though.

[sugarloom]

When you discover a new amazing artist on tumblr but their bio says “proshitters DNI”

[abductophobia]

incest ships..

like if you agree

[entirely-strange]

them: im such a freak!! im a weirdo lmao

their bio: proshippers dni and kys youre pedos. if you think kink belongs at pride im gonna bash your head in with a rock.

[ihhfhonao3]

heyyyyyy girlies just a reminder that ao3 is by proshitters, for proshitters and your puritanical anti rhetoric isn’t welcome there byeeeeeee ship and let ship forever 🫶

(This is from the official AO3 TOS update btw)

[asses-to-ashes]

The proship label says nothing about what content a person consumes.

Proship means you have a "ship and let ship" mentality. The "pro" in proship doesn't stand for "problematic."

"Proship means you ship adult x minor." No it doesn't. Proship means you won't harass or belittle someone who does. Proshippers don't assume the moral values of another person based on fanfiction.

There are Proshippers who are uncomfortable with age gap ships, there are Proshippers who are uncomfortable with shipcest, etc. There isn't a human being on the planet who isn't squicked out by some topics and Proshippers aren't a monolith.

[autistichalsin]

Periodic rent-lowering-gunshots:

Fiction is not reality.

You can enjoy things in fiction that would be awful in the real world. Like playing a murderhobo in a game! In the real world, being or supporting a murderer-thief would be pretty damn awful, while in the game it's just good fun. Same with anything else you choose to do with the pixels on the screen, like kinks that don't affect anyone real, so they're okay in fiction, but would be pretty damn bad in real life.

No one else is responsible for your online experience. They are required not to harass you, but they are not and never will be obligated to not post about ships, kinks, or tropes you dislike just to avoid you seeing them. It's up to you to blacklist words or phrases, block tags, or even block users as needed to avoid seeing content that upsets you.

No one can force you to read anything against your consent. Any content you don't like seeing can be instantly avoided by closing out of the offending post/fic.

You are not owed an online experience free of discomfort.

Nothing that happens in your imagination can ever make you a bad person. Words you write or read about fictional characters will never make you a bad person.

The claim that media consumption influences real-life behavior is intellectually dishonest and serves only to excuse the behavior of real offenders.

Fiction is a safe way to explore horrifying or confusing concepts. Therapists agree that fiction, even (or especially) about taboo topics is a good coping mechanism, especially, but not exclusively, for trauma survivors. Fiction is to adults what play therapy is to children. This doesn't stop being true if the work in question is of a sexual nature.

Sex isn't an inherently worse or better motivation than anything else. A work written to create feelings of arousal isn't dirty, shameful, or in any way less pure than works written to entertain, provoke moral questions, or for other reasons. And worth noting is that multiple purposes can exist in the same story, especially fanfiction.

You aren't entitled to an explanation for why someone reads, writes, or otherwise enjoys certain works, kinks, tropes, ships, etc.

[enemywasp]

"Oh her design is so cute! I'd really like her if she wasn't such a freak!" FOOLS. COWARDS. I LIKE HER BECAUSE SHE'S A FREAK.

That's a selfshiping, cringe, fanfic writing monster fucker right there. The representation we deserve.