#uino

I'm at the same time ecstatic and bitter and angry. Mostly at people who were saying "uh, I'm an adult, I don't care about stupid anti/proship fandom wank :/", as if it was not a part of a bigger trend. As "cringe" as anyone can find identifying themself with something called "proship", these were the people on your fucking side from the start.

I remember people being called pedophiles, doxxed, bullied and attacked online and offline, losing their fucking jobs, being intimidated, stalked, blackmailed, being sent actual child abuse material and gore all for the sin of shipping a stupid fictional ship - if that! Sometimes it wasn't even about a ship but about liking the wrong character or something else equally totally fucking benign. The vast majority of these people were queer, otherwise marginalized, often survivors of sexual abuse, which they were pushed into admitting with a promise that a survivor is allowed to depict this or that, only to be re-victimized when the anti crowd got more material to use against them.

I remember people who I'd thought would be reasonable about it getting on a high horse and talking about

how cringe caring about fandom is -> they were in the fandom too

how you can just log off :/ -> you don't need steam or itch games! you can just play board games you make yourself, you know?

how juvenile it is to care about shipping when the true issue is sex workers having actual problems -> as if these two issues weren't intrinsically connected, and as if the exact same arguments and rhetoric used against one weren't used against the other. and yes, obviously the people whose livelihood and safety are threatened should be the most immediate priority, so advocate and support them, especially locally and where your voice has the most power. but doing so is not in any way equivalent to calling the other matter a non-issue.

how oh my god, why do you want literal children to be okay with disgusting porn -> literally legitimatizing the anti crowd! giving tacit agreement to call people pedophiles for not wanting to be called pedophiles for playing with dolls the wrong way!

I remember when suddenly shipping ships that were always shipped and always absolutely not everyone's cup of tea became suspicious. I remember checking tags to find gore and suicide baiting. I remember stopping posting about a lot of fandom stuff I enjoyed because I was suicidal already and didn't need being made a target, and since I'm queer being doxxed and outed and being accused of pedophilia was all the more legitimately dangerous for me. (Can someone please explain to me like I'm five how it's deserving of mockery as if it were a made-up problem?) And I know of people in the same boat, losing their communities and friends and distancing and isolating themselves because suddenly no one was safe and even the blandest "support" given to the "wrong" ship in a dm with a friend could be screenshotted by this friend and used for an absolutely devastating callout.

I don't blame anyone for choosing to shut the fuck up during that time. But I can't forget the people who knew better and who called all of this "cringe fandom infighting" and "both sides are embarrassing", and "I have taxes to pay and don't have time to care about it", and "there are bigger issues in the world lol why do you care about fandom".

Shockingly, fandom is a part of the world. It has the exact same issues the wider society has. It's sometimes marginally better (or worse) at one or another issue depending on which part one frequents - as with the "real", offline spaces, really.

Many people allowed what was going on. Pretended it was not a big deal, while the "proship"/"profiction" crowd warned about this being a trend, talked about how this is exactly the rhetoric real-life conservative organizations use to push their anti sex work, anti queer, puritanical etc, agenda. No one said the world would be saved by fucking fandom shipping, but again, shockingly, there's a difference between giving a tacit permission to purity-driven attacks instead of sticking up for people who desperately tried to educate, regardless of how "cringe" they were for wanting to write their non-con kink fic in peace.

I don't care if an individual self-described "proship" person was good or bad or said something stupid. I saw a variety of things I vehemently disagreed with - but there was always pushback to it, too. One of these things is blaming minors in fandom specifically for anti sentiments - it's a harmful, reductive, factually untrue take that never helped anyone and only muddled the waters. And there were more. Similarly, I don't care if someone personally called themselves an "anti" just because they didn't ship any gross ships but they never bullied anyone honest!! The crux of the matter is: if you strip these "philosophies" to their bare essentials, only one of them advocates for facts, science, education, actual child protection and sexual freedom, and only one of them is choke-full of radfem rhetoric.

And I'm not myself a fan of this nomenclature. I despaired when people started using "proship", aware that it's going to cause confusion down the line and that what we already had in fandom - SALS, YKINMKATO, DLDR, tagging, warnings - was the default and we should stick to it, treating the "anti" and purity sentiments as a foreign, invading element. But it happened, we got there, it's done.

Again - I saw people losing their actual jobs because of stupid fandom shipping, I saw teenagers driven to suicide, and I saw people hand-waving it and acting as if taking a stance against it is cringe and embarrassing. So congrats to you for keeping your non-cringe adult job, now that you're forced to engage with the exact same rhetoric and arguments anyway, and now that "just logging off" sounds like an absurd advice to you personally because you want to play, read, watch and share what you want on the internet without a conservative purity brigade having a say in it.

Or you could, you know. Ignore all of that and not worry about it. After all, what's stopping you? It's just the internet. People have actual bigger problems. Aren't you an adult with a job to care about?

"But it's different-"

No, it's not. You don't HAVE to use youtube. You don't HAVE to have spotify. You don't HAVE to play games on steam. Plenty of people don't. Alternatively, you don't HAVE to have access to age-restricted or banned content on any of these platforms if you don't want to verify your age. Someone succeeded in exactly what the "anti" crowd advocated for, but in an area affecting you personally.

"But people's livelihood's threatened-"

Yes, Yes it is. It's always been by this rhetoric and this agenda, no matter the space they wriggled themselves into.

If at any point you made fun of people complaining about "antis" in fandom and trying to push back against them, and you told them to get a fucking job or implied how immature caring for this is: I beg you. I fucking beg you. Next time just don't. You don't have to take part in this discussion. You can keep on ignoring it. You can criticize any "proship" person's dumb take and or hypocrisy. You can, and please do, absolutely focus on supporting sex workers specifically.

But when asked and deciding to answer, or when just wanting to talk about it after all, just admit you're on the side of people you actually agree with instead of being coy about it or both-siding it to your own detriment.