The Birds Love Your Ships

Dont’ Like, Don’t Read

or DL; DR

You are responsible for curating your own online experience.

If something upsets you, makes you angry or queasy or triggers you, stop reading/looking at it. Avoid things that might make you feel that way.

Learn to use the Sort and Filter function on AO3, especially the Exclude tools.

On social media, block and mute accounts / tags / words when necessary.

If you hated something, you don’t need to tell that to the creator or start pointing fingers at them publicly.

The Back button is free. Use it.

Addendum:

Yes, for this to work, creators need to tag their works accordingly, so that people know what sort of content they are about to engage with and can nope out if necessary.

I will probably make another PSA about the importance of proper tagging later.

Ship And Let Ship

or SALS

You are allowed to ship whatever you want.

Everyone else is also allowed to ship whatever they want.

You are entitled to dislike or even hate a ship. If you want to do this online, in public, don’t use the ship tags for hate posts.

If you see someone posting about a ship they like and you don’t, there is no need for you to start arguing with them in their replies / comments / QRTs / reblogs. Don’t throw your hate in their face.

Do not harass fan creators or fans for shipping something you disapprove.

All of this also applies to liking / disliking an individual character.

Addendum:

”I agree with this, except when…”

No, then you are NOT agreeing with this.

Let me make this VERY clear. There are NO exceptions. None.

You don’t EVER harass real people over pixels.

If you disagree with this, kindly block and move on.

Your Kink Is Not My Kink

or YKINMK / YKINMKATO

The longer version is ”Your Kink Is Not My Kink And That’s Okay”.

People have different tastes. Not everything is for everybody.

Even if you don’t like a specific kink, other people are still allowed to use it in their creations.

You are entitled to dislike kinky content and think that it’s ”weird”.

Don’t kink shame or judge people based on their kinks.

This goes both ways: your kink is not someone else’s kink, so don’t push it onto those who are not into it.

Be Kind

or Don’t Be An Asshole

Focus on the things you like instead of the things you hate.

Create and unite instead of destroying and dividing.

Don’t harass real people over fictional things.

Stop stirring up petty drama just to get some attention on social media.

Stop trying to ”win”. Fandom is not a competition.

There are 3 seats, and 5 candidates (including her) so she has an actual chance to get elected. If you’ve contributed $10 in the past year and have eligibility to vote in this election, it is essential that you do so. Please check your e-mail for the ballot and vote for everyone except Tiffany in whichever order you prefer based on their stances.

Important context including how essential it is to vote this time if you want to support Ao3s current policies

Chinese fandoms on Weibo are up in arms against this candidate warning about her intention to bring Ao3 in line with the Chinese censored fanfic sites

We all know the "jokes" about how old bronies either came out as queer or became fascists - except they're not really jokes, and a lot of the queer ones admit to having been in the pipeline before they came out (some in a way that implies they never totally got out of said pipeline and don't understand the gravity of it),

GamerGate was an entire right-wing reactionary movement that was - and this is not hyperbole - partially responsible for turning fascism into a "legitimate" position by the American Overton window, composed entirely of people who feared losing their fan spaces,

We've had terfs right here on tumblr dot com BRAGGING about how useful fandom is as a recruiting space,

TJLC was a big pipeline for acephobia on this hellsite in particular, when people argued that headcanoning Sherlock as ace was inherently homophobic because it was denying a TOTALLY GONNA BE CANON (while the creators were promising that it wasn't going to be canon) gay pairing, and puritanical, and just HAVING that headcanon was saying that people COULDN'T ship Johnlock, all in the interest of a "fake" sexuality and "pretending to be oppressed" and oh whoops there you went,

We see people who all but center their fandom activity and identities around figuring out which people in predominantly queer fandom spaces are SECRETLY PEDOPHILES AND GROOMERS, acting consciously or otherwise under the assumption that predominantly queer fandom spaces are just massively infested with them in a way that other spaces are not for SOME reason, who twist the definition of "pedophilia" in these spaces until it covers shipping a 17-year old fictional character with an 18-year old fictional character, or a 30-year old with a 45-year old, or including an autistic character in a ship, and drawing two 17-year old characters kissing constitutes "child porn", and who unironically say we should bring back the Hays Code and Censorship Is Good Actually And Our Problem Is We Don't Do It Enough and this often becomes a pipeline to "sex ed is child abuse; people shouldn't even know what sex is until they turn 18; you need my consent to wear certain outfits in public if I see them as sexually charged, and Pride SHOULD be an assimilationist sideshow for our corporate overlords family-friendly party with no sadness or anger or ESPECIALLY acknowledgement of sex allowed",

We've seen otherwise progressive people defend literal hate symbols in fanart when pushback against the above brand of reactionaries gets corrupted into zero-nuance "it's us vs. them so anything they don't like is Good",

Even outside of those examples some of the most vicious, unapologetic, blatant queerphobic abuse I've seen in recent years hasn't come from right-wingers but from LGBT+ people, dressing their deep, violent, seething hatred for queer people who aren't exactly like them in a thin veneer of progressive language, who have become so convinced that they're the main character of the fucking universe that they think writing or enjoying a queer story that doesn't resonate with them is more queerphobic than sending a queer person who writes or enjoys such a story countless rape and death threats and denying their identity,

We've seen these examples again and again and again, and we keep seeing it again and again and again, so I am once again on my knees BEGGING people to recognize that this is not Something That Happens To Other, BAD People, or Something That Happens To People In BAD Fandoms, or Something That Happens To People On The OTHER Side Of Perennial Drama; this is something that CAN happen to you.

These things are the result of the fact that fandom is, by nature, a place of heightened emotion and if you don't know what to look out for that is very exploitable; you need to know the methods people use to do this, simply Being In The Right Fandoms or Liking The Right Ships is not enough.

Antis do not deserve harassment either

No one does

They could be like, denim jackets with dead doves and roses embroidered on them.

I’m thinking the back has something like this and rose vines/flowers/feathers running down the arms.

Willinore because their dynamic is so tragic and codependent—yet somehow they work together perfectly. I wish there were more content for them romantically (or for The Monstrumologist in general). I have a couple OCs whom I selfship with and the dynamic is similar.

feel free to reblog, have fun with it!

1) what is your favorite “problematic” ship?

2) what is your favorite “problematic” polyship (ot3, ot4, so on)?

3) are your ships usually more “problematic” or “unproblematic”?

4) a ship you think is fairly healthy and unproblematic but the fandom has decided to hate?

5) a ship you like but can’t find content for because it’s a fanpol fave?

6) what kind of “problematic” ships you like?

7) what kind of “problematic” tropes you like to put your ships through?

8) a character you think did nothing wrong but fandom demonizes?

9) a character that did a lot of things wrong in canon that you think fandom woobifies?

10) what is your favorite “problematic” fandom?

11) is there a fandom that ever made you think “how are there antis in this fandom, why are they even into this”?

12) have you ever had to leave a fandom because of all the antis in it?

13) are you a villains fan?

14) favorite “unproblematic” ship?

fandom is a hobby, not a form of activism

adult women aren’t inherently creepy for being in fandom and having hobbies apart from raising babies and doing taxes

the vast majority of people pushing back against the worrying trend of instigating harassment over fictional characters and relationships aren’t incest supporters or pedophiles, actually

liking a m/f ship doesn’t make someone a dirty heterosexual invading your space

preferring gay ships doesn’t make you ‘’woke’’ and good

no one owes you a disclaimer that they are a good person who recognizes that their favorite fictional villain’s actions are evil and that they don’t condone those actions irl

liking a fictional villain is in no way comparable to advocating abuse/murder/genocide/etc and you’re a fucking idiot if you believe that

just because a woman is attracted to a fictional villain doesn’t mean she’s promoting toxic relationships or going to end up in a toxic relationship. assuming women can’t tell fiction and reality apart stinks of internalized misogyny 

some rando’s a/b/o fanfics have none of the level of influence that popular tv shows and movies spreading propaganda have

no one owes you a detailed description of their traumas and mental health problems

abusive relationships are not the same as enemies to lovers ships

y’all need to chill the fuck out over people, relationships, actions and events that don’t actually exist and learn how to enjoy and discuss them like normal people

fandom is a hobby, not a form of activism

you can’t tell someone’s irl gender, sexuality, or values from what they read, write, and ship

it’s very, very American. While there are certainly antis who aren’t American, many of them are.

I have a lot of theories as to why this is, but a lot of them are covered in this post: anti-shipping as the cool new trend (while it’s mostly about the age bracket of anti-shippers as of June 2017 (this time last year), it’s an americentric post talking almost entirely about US phenomena).

tl;dr version? anti-shipping is:

the natural result of growing up both LGBT+/queer and marinated in American-flavored Puritan Christianity/purity culture 

with a side order of valuing safety over freedom 

b/c you’ve always had freedom of information 

but you’ve never known a sense of security 

thanks to lifelong internet access 

paired with post-9/11 paranoia.

add a dash of radical feminism/exclusionist thinking

never being taught how to think critically, and

zero education on sex of any kind, and

someone* added these tags to their reblog of this post, which, uh: this is literally the basic, standard fandom anti-shipper position on ships.

 Whether you call yourself an ‘anti’ or not, this is precisely what a fandom anti does: ‘throw down’ if they think someone’s ships are ‘abusive’, ‘pedophilia’, or ‘incest’ (generally with widely expanded definitions, hence the scare quotes).

it’s a pretty solid example of how this works, though:

tag op is 21: too young to remember a world before 9/11 happened or remember a world without internet access

tag op’s strong feelings about fictional ships suggests they flatten fiction and reality to equal levels of potential danger: classic black & white thinking structure that is strongly encouraged by American Protestant Christianity

tag op didn’t read this post with self-awareness and/or application of critical thought, much less click the link that the tl;dr list references

tag op feels justified in limiting other people’s freedom to use fictional ships to explore certain social/romantic/sexual dynamics, threatening to throw down over it.

this is because those social/romantic/sexual dynamics are not safe or healthy in real life.

even though ships are fictional, the safety of censorship is more important than freedom of expression or thought.

the concern is always about ships/sex fantasies: never violence/fantasies about harming others. this is the combined effect of purity culture and radical feminism in a society that glorifies and normalizes violence.

tag op will fight you for bad ships, because it is okay to fantasize about fighting people but not okay to fantasize about unhealthy fictional relationships

Anyway. 

I have a lot of sympathy for antis because I think their lives often set them up to favor censorship and abhor education-as-inoculation, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re being jerks to fellow fans on the basis of assuming things about the core of their person because of what they ship.

fandom policing of this sort is assumptive, presumptive, and deeply damaging, both to the victims of anti-shipper cyberbullying and the anti-shippers themselves, who are encouraged in this abusive cycle hellhole behavior by emotional manipulation and coercion.

(I want to end this with a joke about how American this is, but assholes are everywhere tbh. Americans are just especially susceptible to the thinking patterns established by fandom antis at this precise moment in history because of the factors listed above.)

The overt, performative denunciation of Bad Content has become the “shibboleth” for modern fandom, as managed by the increasing influence of antis. Why is that every time one of these posts come around people so inescapably feel the need to add “but of course I don’t condone the pedo stuff” to their reblogs? Do they have reason to assume that pedophiles are so universal and normative that any reasonable person would assume they were, unless they explicitly state otherwise? Of course not – it’s a passcode. A performance of cultural acceptability.

And as the anti movement is hugely American, that means that the passcodes and rituals are also firmly based in American culture. Why all the focus on who is and isn’t eighteen? That’s the age of legal adulthood in America. There’s no magical transition in America where you go to bed on the eve of your 18th birthday an infant and wake up the next day magically transformed into an adult, any more than this same metamorphosis occurs at 16 in the UK, or at 20 in Japan. Concepts like the age of adulthood are entirely arbitrary and culturally defined – but the only acceptable metric, among antis, is the American one.

All the other Unacceptables are equally foggy as soon as you step outside the USA boundaries. Are relationships between adopted siblings considered incest? What about non-blood related people raised in the same creche? Childhood friends? Step-siblings? Classmates? Second or twice-removed cousins? Ancestors or descendants? Different cultures don’t all answer these things the same ways (nor is there any reason that they should,) and that murkiness provides plenty of foothold to launch an attack from, when someone else is shipping in a way that Just Doesn’t Seem Right to you.

To give an example of the ‘widely expanded definitions’ that @freedom-of-fanfic mentions, I have seen antis decry a ship as ‘pedophilia’ where both characters were over the most rigid U.S. age of consent (it actually varies by state), but one character was a few years older than the other.

(I have actually seen this ‘logic’ applied to more than one ship, and also real people? The latter was particularly horrifying, because the relationship I remember being decried as ‘pedophilic’ was one where the younger of the two people was in their thirties.)

“Do you like murder mysteries?”

“Yeah why?”

“Well then you must condone and accept murder because you read about it and the author must be a murderer because they wrote about it.”

“But that’s stupid!”

“Exactly.”

The concept that these fantasies are being adamantly backslashed against because the thing being written about is a taboo (usually sex related) subject that would be wrong morally in real life is rooted in the American Christian ideology that thought is a precursor to action and that fantasy equals reality. And fundementalist christian beliefs run rampant in the US, pushed even in schools where we are required to pledge allegiance to the flag while saying ‘one nation “under god”’ and mind you, that bit wasnt added until like… the 50s maybe?

And so there’s been this extreme push from christians in america thinking theyre being persecuted if they cant dip their religion into every aspect of the country, which just doesnt work. To give you an idea, in america they keep trying to make legislation that’s anti lgbtqia+ specifically to cater to the christians. Ergo, they said Christian businesses can discriminate against lgbtqia+ people because it’s against their religion and then got furious when the church of Satan, a recognized religion here, said ok fine well our religion let’s us discriminate against you.

So ita become this push for fundementalist American Christians to feed their rhetoric into as many aspects of life as they can and fandom is a really good place to do it because fandom is often comprised of influencable teenagers.

Ao they push their ideologies that morality is black and white. If you enjoy something it must be Pure or it makes you bad. The mere act of thinking about a taboo sexual subject must mean you are a terrible awful person.

Which just isn’t true.

In other words, the mere act of thinking about and enjoying a sexual fantasy must then mean you would approve of or commit that same fantasy in real life, which just isn’t true!

Case in point: murder mystery. If you consume media or enjoy books about murder it means you must approve of it, right? Of course not. It’s a fantasy. Sherlock Holmes isn’t real. Moriarty isn’t real. And even if you wrote about a real murderer doing something, if it’s something they never did it’s still fantasy. Still fake even if plausible. (Now mind you I don’t think it’s fair to write about real people because real people have the autonomy to say no, whicch is why you have that disclaimer in books that says these characters are not meant to be real people because if they were youd have to get their approval to publish it. But fictional people can’t consent, and dont need consent, because they don’t have brains and aren’t real. No matter how realistically written Naruto is as a person in this fic, he is still a fictional being. His personality only goes so far as tour imagination and that’s it.)

So the real thing that antis are doing is pushing an agenda based entirely on an American-Christian ideology of black and white moral judgement, but only in regards to sex. And this is what’s so dangerous. They use the excuse of protecting the children, but what are they protecting them from? If a story is properly tagged then that’s amazing and ita up to each of us to cater our own experiences on the internet. If a child is too young to cater their experience and not click on a fix that could potentially harm them ita up to their guardian to keep them safe, it’s not up to the writer to make sure little baby timmy never gets within 50 feet of their work.

Hell, I could go into a library, a public space, walk over to the adult novel section as a kid and take out a raunchy bodice ripper book and ita the responsibility of my guardians to prevent me from reading it. Not the author.

This american christian ideology also creates a definitive backlash towards homosexuality in written form being seen as a taboo and bad subject, and does what’s said above. It also pushes heavily against afab people writing and pushing them out of fandom spaces because the majority of fandom writers tends to be afab. People will praise Stephen King and his books can be downright vile in content but a fanfiction writer writing about a sexual subject you feel uncomfortable about means they ought to be “cancelled” because you’re uncomfortable? Regardless of the warnings? It just makes no sense.

So I ask you antis, do you like murder mysteries? You must condone murder. Do you like horror movies? You must enjoy terrifying and traumatizing people. Do you like the musical heathers? You must condone rape and murder….. right?