Alright, so here's a perspective from someone hated by all sides of shipping discourse: someone who ships bakudeku, but frankly thinks their canon relationship is various shades of abusive and toxic (although scheduled for positive development, and slowly moving there) My thoughts? In a nutshell, both antis and abuse apologism hooked Bakudeku shippers almost have made together a perfect coordinated effort to ban and villainize fictionally discussing abuse and use fanwork to discuss abuse. They essentially aid one another. Antis? Bad for obvious reasons. The movement mostly targets the most vulnerable people it can: people who are prone to being influenced by them, and especially people who use fictional discussions about abuse to cope. Bakudeku fandom? Honestly... I ship a lot of relationships with shades of toxicity and abuse (as someone who was abused and thinks it’s important to talk about for full disclosure), but never before have I been so embarrassed to be tangentially related to a shipping category. Thing is, a lot of shippers in bakudeku fandom have qualities that makes it hard to mesh with them: 1.  They are absolutely willing to deride abuse victims by devaluing peer abuse in order to defend their ship. 2. 95% of them are willing to throw people who ship darker bakudeku under the bus as 'the bad ones' while acting pious for excusing abuse So, what is set up is a PERFECT storm of people refusing to talk about abuse. If you acknowledge it's abuse, you don't discuss Bakugou and Deku's relationship because it's ugly and we don't look directly at such ugly things! But, if you ship it, you argue, ah actually.... 'actually, it's the healthiest relationship, and anyone who ships it in a negative way is an anti'. So, the anti movement has been used to shutdown discussions of abuse TWOFOLD. 1. Antis use abuse discussions to say 'good you acknowledged its abuse and we all know abuse is disgusting so we're not going to talk about it' 2. Abuse apologists use it to say 'ah, you're talking about abuse, you must be an abuser yourself. An abusive anti.' You know what this means? Both movements use it to shut down meaningful discussions on abuse. You could say both movements adjacently are coordinated to shut down abuse together. And they both share one common trait: 'talking about abuse, writing about abuse? That means you're bad, YOU'RE an abuser' Honestly. I think it's truly insidious. Because these statements are thrown around by both groups with the knowledge that yes, the people they're throwing these statements against (often abuse victims who use fiction to write about experiences) are sensitive to being BAD. This is about bakudeku, because bakudeku is a perfect storm, but it's happened recently with a lot of other ships I've shipped too. I'm really not sure if there is a way to actively satisfactorily combat it, but it's a Major issue for me. Truly, I don't fit in with either side in this campaign. It's amazing to see two sides mess with each other with absolutely no regard, every time, for the fallout and the way they are literally cooperating with each other to degrade discussions about abuse because, yes, the people involved... aren't going to consider themselves abuse apologists. But a lot of them KNOW they are making unrealistic claims about the relationship between Bakugou and Deku 'just to hurt antis'. What they impact most of all is discussions by survivors. That being said, I understand wanting to use AUs or alternate scenarios to explore characters. Or saying 'what if'. Using fiction to explore concepts like that is natural. But I think if you look at the relationship featured and say 'yeah there is nothing wrong with THAT’...  somewhere along the line someone or something has failed. There are certainly people who have to come to grips with what abuse looks like. Not everyone who doesn't recognize this is a Bad Person. But we have entered a culture where people don't want to recognize abuse because they see it as 'something that gets in the way' or ‘something that fucks someone up just by thinking about it’. and that's. so dangerous. please think more critically.