#tw: proshipping mention

[rhys-ravenfeather]

"This person is acting WEIRD!"

Okay, but...

Is what they are doing hurting anyone in any way?

If yes, alright then, by all means, tell them to stop.

If no, then leave them be.

[buni-gutz]

i remember seeing a screenshot from twitter of an anti saying its about protecting fictional kids and that they don't care about real ones

well here's an anti telling someone to look at ACTUAL CSEM instead of writing fanfiction

[crimson-rain-smoked-flower]

I’m not trying to attack you, but do you know that proshipper means someone who supports and romanticizes pedophilia, incest, and abuse? Your reblog on that post seems to read that you think antis just hate on people for having ships they don’t like. But it’s completely different than that. Just looking on the proshipper side of Tumblr and the internet and you can see people happily shipping children and adults and making nsfw content of such things.

i appreciate that you're not being outright hostile, but i have to say, that on its own put you above basically every anti i've interacted with.

i understand where antis are coming from, i really do. there are a lot of things on the internet that make me deeply uncomfortable, including the minor/adult ships that you mention. i don't want to anything to do with those kinds of ships and i would be happiest if i never saw them again. which is why i'm proship.

nine times out of ten, if i see that kind of ship brought up on my dash, it's because i was following an anti without realizing it, and they brought it up unprompted and untagged, to talk about how bad it is that they exist. they are the ones putting that kind of content in front of my face and making it harder to avoid.

the thing about people who ship those ships is that they're generally very aware that not everyone wants to see that kind of content, and so they tag it. they make sideblogs to talk about it. they don't go out of their way to shove it in people's faces. that means i, and everyone else who doesn't like it, can avoid it.

what antis want is for it to not exist at all. they want the tags to be purged and blocked, and for anyone who uses those tags to have their accounts deleted. and sure, that might get rid of some of it, but do you know what would happen to the rest? it would stop being tagged. people who don't want to see it wouldn't have the tools to avoid it. this isn't just a hypothetical, that's what's happened any time a fan space has tried to do that.

that's not even getting into the rabbit hole of what should be banned and what shouldn't. obviously any content that depicts real children or real life abuse shouldn't exist and shouldn't be allowed to be posted, but basically any platform that people use already enforces those policies, and there's not much of a slippery slope to go down there. if it involves real living breathing people being abused, it's bad. end of discussion.

but the same can't be said for fiction. ask ten antis for a specific list of all the content that should be banned, and you'll get ten different answers. what about kink? what about roleplay? what about horror and murder and anything that involves fictional characters being graphically tortured? what about people using art to process terrible things that have happened to them? what about art that uses dark themes as a horror element? if you just want to ban anything questionable to anyone, that's the line of thinking that gets any mention of lgbt existence banned. and again, this isn't just a hypothetical, this has happened before, and that's generally where it leads.

i know, from personal experience, that antis do, in fact, send harassment to people just for shipping things they don't like. i've gotten accused of absolutely vile shit for shipping two fictional characters who were both consenting adults. i've seen ship wars turn into moral battlegrounds, over ships that an average person wouldn't bat an eye at.

the thing about "romanticization" is a whole other can of worms. the anti logic goes like this: if someone sees something (even if it's very obviously fictional) in a positive light enough times, they will start thinking it's okay in real life, and go on to hurt real people. the problem with that is that it's just. blatantly untrue.

if it were true every horror movie fan would be a serial killer, every person that studies dark media would be an unhinged psychopath, and everyone who is into ddlg would be a pedophile. but they're not. they just aren't. people have directed movies just as fucked up as the darkest shit on ao3, and are still capable of being normal human beings who know right from wrong in real life.

even if someone is that impressionable, scrubbing away the existence of every piece of questionable content isn't going to solve their problem, because they're still going to be vulnerable to con men, scams, and cultists. the only thing that would actually materially help someone like that is developing their own morals and critical thinking.

children are also more impressionable, and there's a lot of content that's not suitable for them, but that doesn't mean that content shouldn't exist. it just means that they should stick to spaces designed for them (which most social media sites, tumblr included, are not) or, if they're old enough to be responsible for their experience online, they, or a trusted adult in their lives, should block and filter out things that they aren't comfortable with.

which is what everyone on the internet should be doing. it's what i do, and it's made the internet a much more pleasant place to be. and it's why i sometimes worry for antis mental health, especially teenagers, because they're being told it's right and moral to seek out content that makes them uncomfortable and to engage with the people making it. and that's just. really bad. it's not good for the creators that they're harassing obviously, but it's also really bad for them! it's not healthy to seek out things that make you feel bad, and it's a terrible internet safety lesson to teach minors that it's okay for them to seek out and engage with people making adult content.

individual harassment and crusading is never going to succeed at removing dark content from the internet. it just isn't. at best you might get a small percentage of people who create that content to stop sharing it, at worst you're just going to make people stop tagging it, and either way, you're exposing yourself to things that make you feel bad, when you don't have to.

if you want to materially change the type of content you see, you can. the block button is your friend, use it liberally. same with content filtering and tag blocking.

[kiwisandpearls]

“This fiction could be used to groom minors!”

I hate to break this to you but literally any type of fiction can be used to groom minors. Even “unproblematic” fiction.

[skumhuu]

Proshipper = you're against censorship and harassment over fiction & curate your experience on the internet to have a healthy distance from things that make you uncomfortable

Antishipper = you're okay and even encourage harassment towards "freaks" and "weirdos" society deems acceptable to hurt

[tinkaqueer]

I feel sorry for antis being so paranoid all the time lmao

Like for example whenever they write a fanfic including siblings it's like there's an unwritten rule that they must insist over and over in the tags that 'this is NOT A SHIP' and 'NOT A SHIPFIC THAT WOULD BE WEIRD EW' and it's not even remotely smutty or romantic in premise to begin with.

Like dude I wasn't walking up to your fic looking for incest and I wasn't thinking there was gonna be incest but now that you've brought it to my attention I'm going to look at you funny. Just imagine if I came over and brought delicious homemade burgers but before you even unwrap a single one I keep clarifying 'there is absolutely NO BEAR MEAT in these burgers I promise I would never cook that'. Like you wouldn't be the least bit suspicious once you heard that?

[sparkling-pink-lemonade]

Saw a post of an anti saying that they are leaving AO3, as they are too uncomfortable to post their fics there now. The reason? They found out one of their long time readers was a proshipper, despite their fics having proship dni. And how "that includes silent readers too, I don't want you all looking at my content."

My brother in christ, you are posting on the fiction freedom site. The proshipping site. Dnis aren't god damn restraining orders. They are one tool in helping you display your boundaries. It's still on you to enforce your boundaries. You post something publicly, you forfeit your ability to regulate who can view your work. If you're obsessive enough, you can regulate who actually interacts with your work by stalking each person in the kudos list, comments, or bookmarks and then blocking snyone you don't like, but you do not get a say on who may silently read your posts. Not unless you private your work and only show it to specific people.

And if you don’t want proshippers to interact, get off the profic site.

[proshipconfessions]

This has been said before, but I won’t be shy about saying it again. (Tw for mention of death threats and anti bullshit)

I’m getting kinda tired of proshippers repeatedly reposting screenshots of antis’ vicious and violent threats to us and making some shallow, matter-of-fact comebacks to them that the antis will never listen to anyways.

I don’t wanna be seeing constant reminders of how much antis hate me and want me dead or “converted” when I’m just trying to go through the proship tags. Especially not from OTHER PROSHIPPERS. We should have each other’s backs…

I even see people neglect to trigger tag these posts, or choose to tag them as “proship positivity” just because they slapped an affirmation below some anti’s Pinterest caption about victim blaming a minor for writing icky fanfiction.

I know it’s easy to do, and makes you feel affirmed, and fun in some way. But we need to be mindful when we do shit like this— and we need to take breaks from constantly engaging with Anti shit.

———

[sc0moftheanimatiomindustry]

it’s been a while since I’ve used this account (hey @seasa1ttrio do you still remember me?)

anyway the reason I’m making this post is very simple:

Kyle Carrozza, the creator of Mighty Magiswords, has been arrested for the possession of child sexual abuse material

Kyle’s inner circle (that includes Jane Amber and Tony Goldmark) absolutely knew about him being a creep. There were multiple other survivors, including Ang Vondra, about which the lovely Jane and Tony said this

Jane was so hellbent on stalking, harassing, abusing and slandering Ang Vondra for many years, even helped blacklisting Ang from the animation industry along with Kyle and Tony Goldmark. Though of course, they’re all back paddling now!

with the exception of Jane

Reminder, these people harassed someone because they were coping from their abuse with cartoons on a private account. These people have absolutely no shame and no heart

they knew Kyle was a predator. They chose to ignore it because it was easier to make life of a disabled abuse survivor a living hell

Ang’s disability has now progressed to the point that a miracle would be needed to cure them. Years of being unable to afford their basic needs has led to a worsening of their health, all because a white creep decided blacklisting Ang from the animation industry, likely the only place Ang actually could work at with their disability, and boot lickers helping him, was more important!

These people aren’t sorry. They just pretend they are. Other people are still going on about how coping with art on a private account is just as bad as a sexual abuser in the animation industry, who got away with it for years

On top of this this implicates a significant part of the animation industry as having actively covered up for a pedophile, and not just that, but doing it by framing a CSA survivor over their cope art. That would mean that they took advantage of the moral panic over art

People are currently suffering through in order to enable a predator. And they did it by abusing a survivor. Using a desire to protect fictional characters. We warned about this scenario happening, were ignored, and it happened.

[5typesoftrash]

if you are pro-censorship, you are not my ally. Not in feminism, not in queerness, not in anti-racism. Bad actors aren't going to just censor the things you don't like; they won't stop. Sure, they'll sweep over the explicit incest and pedophilia, but then, just like the fancop teenagers have, they will start stretching those definitions to include everything that they dislike. Calling queer people pedophiles is a textbook example of queer oppression; you don't think conservatives are gonna use that as an excuse to burn books about trans joy and wlw/mlm experiences? Because they will.

If you are pro-censorship, you are not my ally.

[rhys-ravenfeather]

*Disclaimer: When I made this, I was thinking about people who act like siblings can't/shouldn't like one another and have positive relationships, but this also applies to proshippers, as well as people who think it's okay to ship adopted/foster/step-siblings together because 'they're not blood-related'.

[damagedcoda6669]

Opinions on proshipping?

hmmmm.. i have no idea.. /sarc /nm /lh I SWEAR IM NOT MAD IM JUST JOSHIN' ur fine dw dw

proshippers r fucking gross though. not a huge fan of p☹dophilia or inc☹st, especially considering ive been a victim of both of those things many times. however, i do think proship discourse is reductive, harmful, and kinda just.. blown out of proportion? i honestly dont know the ins and outs of it becuz im turning 20 next month and i dont give a shit abt short term unnuanced internet drama. but abusive/toxic dynamics r not proshipping, selfcest (although a weird fucking name) isnt proshipping. i think the word has lost all meaning at this point

[anti-anti-vents]

All this discourse has me remembering things

Like, how as a young kid, before I had the words for it, I was writing HELLA darkfic. Like at 10-12 years old, I was writing the most fucked up shit I could think of. Stuff antis would consider “pedophilic”, such as (real example, trigger warning) a world in which young girls were raised in isolation, given numbers instead of names, sold to adult men as soon as they hit puberty, and losing value with each year they gained, ABS eventually being killed at 17 if they’d not yet been bought.

Yeah, it’s really not any wonder that I ended up destroying all of these writings, never sharing or completing any of them. At 10 years old, long before I was aware of this debate, I was already ashamed of myself for exploring these topics and thoughts in the only way I knew how. Possibly the only healthy option for me at the time. I feel so bad for kids like me who are growing up on the internet, seeing confirmation of their fears that people will see them as a bad person for creating that type of fiction. For even entertaining those ideas in your head. I hope they turn out okay and reclaim some creative liberty for themselves.

And honestly? I may need to nourish that ashamed little kid inside me too. I haven’t written in years; I lost all motivation some time in 2020. And when I think back on everything I’ve ever written, when I think of those dark fics, I hate to admit it, but they’re the only thing I truly ever wrote for myself and myself only, without showing anybody else. And that’s important I think. I want to rediscover my creative process, and uncover all the little things about myself I’ve been pushing down for years.

Art is healing and art is discovery. Antis can stay mad that we’re doing these things through obscene means. It only encourages me more. And I hope to do the same for others.

[frownyalfred]

Can I get clarification on your pro shipping post? The example you gave was a 20 year old with a 40 year old, and that's "problematic" (not really), but not really what I think of when I hear "pro shipping". Usually it's the shipping of minor/adult or incestuous relationships that I see getting defended. Does being against fictional works/ships that depict pedophilic or incestuous relationships as normal/romantic count as puritanism to you? Do you see the ship of Bruce Wayne/Damian Wayne as a personal preference with no moral implications?

I think there's a huge difference between being personally against something, and wanting to shame others or ban others from reading or writing something. The Puritanism comes from wanting to limit and ostracize others who don't share your beliefs. It comes from believing that your perspective is the only morally right one.

I think there will always be people who want to write or read about ships like that, yeah -- incest, pseudo-incest, everything in between. By moral implications, do you mean for the person interested in the ship? Or do you mean for others? Because I see that concern a lot on here -- this idea that somehow, by wanting to read/write about something, people are either 1) harming others by spreading this morally wrong ship or 2) harming themselves by normalizing the ship, and therefore making it more likely that they'll pursue similar relationships in their real lives.

We don't have much evidence for either of those claims. People have been clutching their pearls and wringing their hands over "morally wrong" books for ages -- and yet, Game of Thrones is still available in every bookstore. Am I a bad or woefully misguided person for having read Lolita in high school? Is a 16 year old reading a Bruce/Damian fic likely to turn around, shrug, and say "guess fucking my Dad is okay now"? Did an entire generation of fans shipping Wincest somehow have lasting, moral effects? I really don't think so. Not at the scale anti-shippers online seem to think, at least.

I think we need to separate how we moralize people from the content that they consume. And acknowledge that shaming and excluding people for wanting to read something doesn't exactly do much to prevent "moral implications." There's also a huge difference between reading a book, and endorsing the ideas/events inside of it. Same things with fics.

Anti-shipping is very appealing to people because it purports to protect people from harm. Until you look a little closer, and you realize that that protection comes at the expense of free expression, creative license, and agency to choose what we personally do and do not consume. And that that protection isn't really airtight out of your anti-shipping discord or tumblr community.

I think the best we can do is let people write and read what they want -- whatever they want, with limited warnings/etc like ao3 employs -- and ensure that those pieces of content are tagged, warned, and displayed accurately. We need to understand that the only control we have is over ourselves, and what we choose personally to consume or not consume.

I don't generally read those fics you mentioned, but I'm not saying they should be banned from ao3. Just because I might possibly think they're wrong or gross doesn't mean I think the person who wrote them is wrong or gross, either. The more we go down that moral slip and slide, like I said in my previous post, the worse off we will all become.

[flagsandtags]

proshippers when i wont justify shipping literal incest and pedophilia just bc theyre traumatized and tell them to stop interacting with me:

[xx-slug-xx]

//tw- mentions of pedophilia, csem, csa, and lolicon

Guys, please please please don’t use the term CSEM to refer to fictional pornographic drawings that involve fictional characters who are depicted as minors

I can’t believe I have to say this, but I’ve seen too many people, just in the past 24 hours, use the term to describe porn that someone drew

Holy shit, lolicon and the like is not CSEM, CSAM, or CP just because a hypothetical and fictional minor is involved in the art. Those terms are specifically used when talking about real sexual abuse cases involving real-world minors.

Fiction cannot be CSEM because it doesn’t involve the direct sexual exploitation and abuse of a real minor! The creation of these pieces of media do not involve the direct harm of a real minor!

Just say “lolicon” or “fictional porn involving fictional minors”. Just use something, ANYTHING, that isn’t used to specifically identify real life abuse materials! Please just don’t use a term that has this much seriousness attached to it as a means of labeling fictional content that you don’t like, even if it triggers you!

You being uncomfortable doesn’t justify the misuse of a term that is used to directly describe abuse, and it makes real victims of CSEM feel like shit when you label some random anime girl as a “victim” right next to them. Because, get this, when you label something fictional as CSEM, CSAM, or CP, you are inherently insinuating that there is a victim involved in the creation of this media, which is inherently untrue with fiction. STOP DOING THIS!!!