What's an anti-anti? Or an anti for that matter

Oh my friend I am so sorry to introduce you to the shitpile that is antishipping discourse

Anti is short for "antishipper", which is someone who believes certain types of ships are immoral and nobody should ship them or engage with media about them. Exactly what types of ships that includes varies (because morality will always be vague at best and you can't meaningfully categorise anything into "always good" and "always bad"), but people usually take issue with incest, ships involving one or more minors, age gaps, etc.

I consider myself a proshipper/"anti-anti" purely because I think this kind of discourse is extremely inane and potentially harmful.

Antis tend to say "problematic" ships "normalise" harmful dynamics in real life, ignoring that exploring these ideas in fiction is a safe way of engaging with darker topics and sometimes people do so to process personal trauma. Personally I've found that reading fanfiction about dark topics made me wayy more emotionally prepared to handle discussion of them in real life.

And, as I said, it's nearly impossible to draw a solid line between what should be allowed and what shouldn't be allowed. Age of consent is an arbitrary number that's chosen because legally you need a strict number if you're going to enforce the law, but a person 1 year older and 1 year younger than the age of consent aren't actually that much different. Plus the law varies from country to country, but antis tend to choose the US age of 18 because the US dominates the internet. Age-gaps between two non-minor characters get even more blurry!! And let's not forget that a ship between two men is way more likely to be flagged as pedophilia than a ship between a man and a woman. Imo if you can't make a concrete rule about it there's no point in making a rule at all.

Plus it's fiction, and not even mainstream fiction, so it's hardly gonna cause any significant shift in real life culture. These ships get criticised to hell and back in fan spaces and people get properly harassed over it, but there are plenty of professional writers portraying these things in well known media and don't get much flack for it at all - because it's way easier to tear down a fan, your equal, than a creator. It seems to me that the problem isn't really "normalising" these behaviours, because if that was the case mainstream media would be a much bigger contributor than fandom

For some reason, toxic/abusive ships are less commonly criticised despite being objectively harmful to the characters involved, and incest is the one people hate the most despite it being (imo) the one least likely to cause actual harm to the characters. Also depictions of rape and sexual abuse are usually considered off limits but you rarely get the same criticism of, say, depictions of murder. The sexual aspect of the topic seems more important than the actual harm.

AND THEN there's the fact that antis generally only argue against the ships that make them personally feel uncomfortable. Different people have different boundaries for what they consider too far, and I lose my shit every time I see antis shipping something I know other antis claim is the devil. And often the whole thing gets coopted by someone who doesn't like people shipping characters A and B because they ship B and C. ("You can't ship these unrelated characters because they're sibling-coded which makes the ship basically incest" is something I've seen a truly bonkers amount of times)

So yeah. That's the whole mess. Like I said I dont really care about whether or not antis follow me? I'm proship purely because I don't think this is a conversation that needs to be had at all. Like who cares But, go wild, romanticise the hell out of the most repulsive things!! It's nobody else's business but yours. But if I see a mutual who followed me first reblogging "any proshippers who follow me should explode and die teehee ^-^" ONE MORE TIME I might actually explode