#the fact that so many antis keep on twisting the word proship so many times to the point where its widely misinterpreted and ppl

[meejijis]

"Why are all SK fans proshippers" Silence fetus

[entomjinx-reblogs]

"Proshipper" is a Homonym

TL;DR for those of you who don't want to read: Both sides of this argument believe that the word "proshipper" means something entirely different, and it's because of the censorship push by people rehashing purity culture who don't understand that fiction doesn't become real life. --- Because I partake in fandom culture, I see anti vs proshipper discourse all the time. We all know it's there, and one of the biggest causes for that discourse is the fact that the term "proshipper" has evolved into a homonym.

A homonym is a word that has the same spelling and usually sounds same, but can be used to mean entirely different things when placed in a different context. A quick and easy example of this is the word "bark" which can refer to tree bark, or the sound a dog makes. Another is "watch," which can be used to tell the time or to tell someone to look at something.

Proshipper, is now one of these words.

Anyone who's ever done a deep dive into fandom culture knows that "proshipper" originally meant that someone was okay with shipping characters from the source material. The prefix "pro" means "for" or "forward," like in the word "progress" (to go forwards). There was then those who were against shipping characters from the source material, who called themselves "anti-shippers," later shorted to "antis." "Anti" means against or oposite of. It's fairly easy to keep track of, but I'm breaking down the prefixes of the words for a reason.

As fandom's began to explode in popularity, it was less easy to control what people could be exposed to, and what they wouldn't be. This angered certain people, and while I could get into every detail of how the rhetoric of "if you write/draw/read about [xyz] in fiction then you're immoral in real life," is nothing more than an expansion of purity culture censorship and is a rehashing of "if you see gay people, you'll become gay," I won't.

The point is, when people began to get angry at the existance of things they didn't personally enjoy, they began to call those things problematic. Just like in most foot-in-the-door cases, they started with anything including abuse, incest, pedophilia and other trauma---which is often use as a coping mechanism, but again not the time---in order to catch a wider audience, and then they began adding other things they disliked under the umbrella of "problematic" and "immoral." When the realization that much of fandom participated in shipping, it was broaded from genres and stories as a whole into shipping itself.

When this happened, they took the popular term "proshipper," and said that the prefix was short for "problematic." They then use this to group even the most innocent of shippers into the same category as those who wrote gore, incest, murder, ect. They then twisted this to say that every proshipper supported all of those things happening in real life.

I would like to now point out the definiton of fiction as taken from Oxford dictionary:

literature in the form of prose that describes imaginary events and people.

something that is invented or untrue.

Fiction is often used to explore people's real life trauma, but even in cases when it isn't, that doesn't mean that people whouldn't write about it in untrue instances that have no way to harm real life people. Many "immoral" things are often used to show that someone is a villain, or has survived something terrible, but it can be used for so many other things as well. And that, is the point of it being fiction. It's not real, so it can be use to explore any number of things for any number of reasons without harming real people.

However, that has not stopped a mass amount of antis claiming that those who create anything they disagree with is "immoral," hence the rise of the belief that "proshipping" means "problematic shipping." Now, what any given anti believes is problematic is unique to the individual, but like in all cases of censorship, if an inch is given, a mile will be taken.

Now because of the change in language, one might think that this is a case of a change in semantics, but that's untrue. While there is always going to be a time period where a word whose meaning is changing is used in both ways, it's typically not this consistent. Take the word "cute," for example. It was originally a shorteningof the word "acute," and was written with an apostrophe to replace the a. It meant "sharp or quick witted," but in the 1830s, it took on the meaning we know it to have today. A better example of this could be any piece of modern slang. Take your pick.

"Proshipper," on the other hand, is used by antis to mean "problematic shipping," and by most proproshippers to mean "for shipping/shipping is okay." Some proshippers do use it the same way antis do as a warning of the content that is on their page. Irregardless, the equal use of both meanings marks the word's change into a homonym.

As you have no doubt seen from the sheer amount of discourse that is always present, this leads to many instances of confusion. It also gets many innocent people harassed by antis who believe they have the moral high ground, as if their actions are not harming real people, unlike the things that they are against, which only affect fiction.