Having had a LOT of time offline to think and reexamine my personal views on things while on the road without a set home for so long, and considering the current situation, I figure it's a good time to share something I want to say to the fandom and the public in general that has been eating on my mind awhile, if you'll allow me. Long rambling ahead about fandom and shipcourse and harassment. Mind the tw's in tags.
I noticed as I get a bit older, in a lot of fandoms I'm in, especially this one, there is very strong anti-vs-proship war going on. Antiship and proship means different things according to who you ask, hence why I identify as neuship. Had proshippers in fandoms tell me I'm proship, had antis insist I am antiship. My stance is anti-censorship, anti-harassment, anti-glorification of harm, pro-media literacy. Make of that what you will. I know some of you are 'proship dni' or 'antiship dni'. Feel free to have boundaries, that is 100% fine. But I learned something in the couple years i've spent online:
Don't be like me when I was 16 and accuse people of something serious just because 'antiship' adults told you to. And it you do, apologize like I did.
Don't be like a certain person in this fandom who recently left and accuse people of being Nazis and pedophiles and predators- without evidence. With evidence, absolutely spread awareness of dangerous behaviour someone is currently doing.
Don't harass people over things they already apologized for. You are not obligated to forgive anyone, though.
No one owes you interaction, not even your best friend.
Never, ever, tell someone to harm themselves. Even if they are Nirmal.
But I want to say something else: drawings or jokes someone made are not always evidence of them being a bad person. Can they be an indication of a serious problem? Absolutely. But it has to be taken in context. People will make content about say, CSA, for many reasons. Sure, they could absolutely be a pedophile. My brother who SA-ed me consumed much of that kind of content. Or they could be using it to process trauma. It's just hard to know for sure. And whether you decide to be around those people is up to you. I personally avoid them due to trauma. But they don't deserve to be ostracized and accused falsely without proof. I write content that involves a lot of character death. Does that make me a serial killer?
Mind you, I'm not saying fictional work exists in a vacumm and doesn't cause harm. It absolutely can, especially racist biases and glorification of harm. I don't support glorifying any of it. You can actually learn a lot about a person from what they create and put out into the world. Criticism is essential to media literacy and we are all directly responsible for the messages and content we put into the world. But there is a way to discuss works without accusing the author directly of endorsing harm. They might not even be aware in some cases. Many writers like myself welcome criticism and questions.
Feel free to ask anything about a work, feel free to hate it and think it is harmful, it's the Internet, after all. But just don't harass. To describe what harassment is, it's:
It's mentioning people on posts based on hearsay accusations. That what I did once. It's wrong.
It's death threats and doxxing. Both of which happened to friends of mine. It's wrong.
It's sending repeated messages or comments. Saw a friend do this, it's wrong.
It's block evasion. Had this done to me and saw it so many times. It's wrong.
It's calling people names publically. See it all the time here. It's wrong.
It's saying: 'this person is evil because (insert work created here). ' Saw that happen to many friends of mine. It's wrong.
It's gorespamming. That's what was done to me once. It's wrong.
It's public ostracization based on double standards in public servers. It's wrong.
I'm sorry, I know this isn't what some of you want to hear. But you have to hear it eventually.
