Just One More Thing

Proship has never meant anything except a combination of three ideas:

Ship and let ship (your ships don't harm me and vice-versa) and YKINMK (your kink is not my kink, and that's okay; my kink stories don't harm you and vice-versa)

Harassment over fiction is not acceptable

Censorship of fiction is not acceptable either

“Pro” means we’re in favor of shipping; proship literally means we’re in favor of shipping! Can we please get back to this definition.

Anyone who tells you anything different is looking for trouble.

Incorrect. We had shippers and then people started calling themselves "anti-shippers", and pro-ship and anti-anti arose to mean "not an anti-shipper". That's all it's ever meant. It means not being an anti-shipper. Anti-shippers are trying to redefine it as meaning "problematic shipper" in order to try to gain rhetorical high ground by trying to give the impression that anyone who's not an anti-shipper is specifically writing underage rape porn and selling it to child abusers or something, but that has never been the case.

Some proshippers write about underage ships. Some write about gay ships. Some write the kind of generic romance that you'll find in an average romcom, with one character being the other's boss. Some write ships that not even the most obsessive puritan antis could find a firm moral reason to object to. Some, like me, don't write about sex at all and tend not to write about romantic relationships very much either, but firmly hold the stance that others should be allowed to write those things if they want.

Do you despise underage sex scenes? Does the very concept of them make you throw up in your mouth a little? Me too! I find them fucking disgusting! You know what I do about it?

We had shippers and gen fans and antis. Anti this ship, or anti that ship. And then somewhere things changed - I know it from Voltron but who knows, maybe someone else got there first - but ship wars went from being “your ship sucks” to “your ship involves someone two years younger so the age difference means it’s pedophilia”. “One character said the other is like a brother to him so your ship is incest.” Or my favorite from my old fandom, “that character is possessing someone so your ship is necrophilia AND noncon”.

It always involved rewriting definitions so that there was a reason the anti’s ship was pure and the ship they hated was morally wrong.

I remember years of adult antis showing younger fans what they considered “bad” material so the kids could report it. Adults deliberately showing kids explicit art or fic to encourage kids to search it out and try and get it deleted. I can go grab receipts, it’s not hard because it happened so much.

Anti antis became a part of the ecosystem to push back on harassment campaigns and doxxing and all the other toxic nonsense that came from the ship wars. Proshippers were the group that said “I won’t stand for censorship” and usually tried not to get into the fighting the way anti antis did.

It never stood for problematic.

enchanted tea kettle dragons