#salt posts

i think this is a shift that happened around when ‘anti’ vs ‘anti anti’/’proship’ discourse started gaining traction, at least as far as i can tell. because it used to be that ‘anti shipname’ was simply used to denote negative opinions about a ship (or character) and to keep those posts separate from the main tags so fans of the ship or whatever wouldn’t have to see them--i have fairly extensive anti tags, but for me being like ‘anti reylo’ or ‘anti swanqueen’ doesn’t mean i think anyone who ships those things are bad people--i just really hate the ships and sometimes wanna talk about why on my blog without like, crapping on the ship’s front porch or whatever.

‘antis’ has become synonymous with ‘bullies’ lately, though (if you want an example, just scroll back on my blog to posts from two days ago to see the kind of dogpiling and harassment those parts of fandom actively engage in and encourage), and so i think a lot of people who don’t want to be associated with people like that have started using salt tags as a way to categorize their anti posts and still keep them separate from main tags without being labeled as ‘antis’. ‘critical’ tags serve a similar function.

then there’s also a matter of degree. for example, i’ll use the tag ‘anti kataang’ because i genuinely dislike that ship on a number of levels, but i prefer to use the tag ‘aang salt’ when talking about things i criticize wrt his arc in the show because i don’t actually hate or dislike aang, but i do dislike the way a lot of his character arc was handled in book 3 and want to talk about that without people assuming i hate him. (i mean a lot of them will anyway, just bc i ship zutara, but there’s not much i can do about that so.)