Please if you are involved in any fandom, reblog this because it is extremely important and needs to be seen.
There is SO much I could say about the shipping discourse because it is such a complex topic, but for this post I want to focus on something very specific i’ve noticed among most people claiming to be against problematic fiction/shipping. The phrase “don’t ship -x abusive ship- unless you use it to cope”.
1. The first problem with such statements is it expects people who have suffered abuse to out publicly to a bunch of strangers their history of abuse. Otherwise, how can you decide who is and isn’t using it to cope? You can’t. You can make assumptions but you cannot know another stranger’s life story. Forcing people to do this is extremely disgusting and harmful to sufferer’s because they shouldn’t have to owe anyone an explanation of their abuse.
2. What exactly equates as the level of abuse necessary to be justified in shipping for coping? Does it have to be the exact same type of abuse on the same level as such a ship? Can it be relative? Not the same abuse, etc.? It starts to get messy and involves strangers determining who’s abuse is and isn’t valid, when you have no idea what the victim personally experienced so in the end are only working off assumptions. It plays back into point 1.
3. Not every victim uses shipping to cope. Some people indulge in problematic fiction for other reasons outside if coping with trauma, but what if they were also a sufferer of trauma? Do they get to indulge in fiction for being a sufferer even if it’s not being used to cope?
4. Some people who indulge in problematic fiction use it to cope and don’t even realize it. When I was a high school student I used to read all sorts of abuse shipping fiction with no understanding of why. I had little to no awareness of my abusive situation. It was actually the fiction that not only helped me realize my situation was as such, but it also wasn’t until much later that I realized the fiction I read would at times mimic the abuse I experienced and helped me get through my situation with it’s reliability. Not everyone is fully aware of their situation and might be indulging to cope without even realizing it, and policing them because they aren’t aware because you assume they aren’t victims just harms said individuals.
5. What about people who suffered certain types of abuse but do not remember them due to situations like dissociation? What if they have indicators that something happened to them but can’t be for sure because they lack physical memories? It sort of plays back into point 4 where what if they indulge in the media because it helps them on a subconscious level and does help them cope, even without their conscious awareness but they can’t know what happened to them for sure?
6. At this point many people will understandably start listing that they are abuse victims without actually being such to get a pass to indulge in their fiction. Which is terrifying that people have to pretend to have suffered something serious just to look at or draw some art or read some fanfiction. It also starts to create problems for actual victims.
See how all these points start to messily play into each other? What if someone gets harassed for indulging in problematic fiction without being a victim, but say they are and just don’t want to out such on the internet to strangers because it’s a triggering topic for them? Then they have to suffer harassment and abuse and being told they are a supporter of the types of people who harmed them.
Or in another situation, what if someone claims to not be shipping to cope then gets harassed but in actuality they are but just don’t realize they were abused or don’t have the tools yet to recognize their situation is abusive and the fiction they indulge in is coping with that? Then you are just further harming another victim.
It goes on, but hopefully now you get the idea.
Even more repulsive, anti-shippers bring young teenagers into their movement who see these statements about how victims need to be protected and are eager to fight for a cause they think is helping the greater good. But without the proper guidance they quickly become a mob lead to believe that they are doing good by creating hate blogs dedicated to ships they don’t agree with, spamming tags and communities, harassing individual users going on about how these people are ‘scum’, ‘the worst’, ‘as bad as real life perpetrators’, allow death threats to be sent, but then at the last minute go “oh but this doesn’t apply to you if you are a survivor”.
What these adults and misled teenagers don’t realize is even with that disclaimer, what does that even really mean to them? They are still causing harm by forcing these survivors to watch and witness their witchhunting while bringing down survivors with them. It’s as if people who throw those words around are trying to use it as a disclaimer to remove blame from their actions when it does cause harm and become destructive.
Why is it that whenever victims point out the flaws in these movements centered around these ways if thinking, they are suddenly accused of being apologists or abuse supporters, or in some cases abusers themselves? Why is it that they are told that their feelings are less important if they don’t share such extreme mindsets when these people claim to care about victims? Along with that, why are those who view things in such extremes suddenly more valid in their feelings or allowed to have them while the former isn’t? It’s some weird cherry-picking of which victims are valid to them and which aren’t and it almost seems like they just want victims to justify their behaviors and right to witchunt and harass, but don’t actually care about victims as a whole. The reality is that not everyone will see this complex topic the exact same way but that doesn’t make them any less important (it’s even worse when it’s other victims enabling these behaviors).
The scary thing about this anti-shipping movement is it makes broad accusations and connects things that should not be connected to each other, such as how challenging these skewed view points that actually causes emotional damage to innocent individuals somehow makes you an apologist or supporter of actual horrific abuse, or worse, one yourself. It’s almost as if the word ‘apologist’ is now used as a silencing tactic for anyone that wants to challenge these extreme views or point out how they are being hurt by this movement.
Even if their hearts are in the right place, these topics cannot be easily broken into ‘good’ and 'bad’ categories. They are extremely intricate as explained in my first points and due to this, there is so much MORE harm being done in this policing than good, and if you choose to ignore this reality that there are so many flaws in your online movement, then you are being willfully ignorant by this point.
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