freedom-of-fanfic:

hey, anon. I’m sorry to hear about this – it’s an unpleasant experience to see a bunch of people who you thought agreed with you irt fictional content behaving this way. the option to specifically report harm to fictional minors might just be a way to separate real cp reports from reports of objectionable fictional content, but its existence certainly does seem to embolden harassers who feel this is tumblr’s way of condoning their behavior & worldview.

I don’t know if this is going to help, but it is something that I think is important to remember: a lot of people are a little bit ‘anti’. that is: most people don’t hold to the extreme ends of anti-censorship, of ‘ship and let ship’ and ‘it’s okay to portray really upsetting, illegal things in fiction’. most people put limits on what they consider acceptable.

this is what militant fandom antis have long banked on. knowing that many people are not going to be okay with fiction portrayals* of csa, or power imbalances, or incest, or domestic abuse, or kinky sex, they portray everything they don’t like as falling into these categories, whether it is or not. outsiders/semi-outsiders tend to fall for it, and fandom policers are strengthened by it.

all this is to say: i have my doubts that so many people are militant, ready-to-call-everything-pedophilia fandom anti-shippers as it might appear right now, and I hope that gives you a little bit of hope.

(*specifically, a lot of people would object to ‘positive’ portrayals of these kinds of things, or minors accessing kinky adult content. but almost anything can be interpreted as a ‘positive’ portrayal of something unpalatable if you try hard and believe in yourself, and it’s nigh-impossible to force minors to not click on or view 18+ material if they choose to, no matter how much you label & and warn for it.)

below is some stuff I wrote about this previously, which I wanted to give its own post (more or less):

as fandom has (1) gone increasingly mainstream/diluted into mainstream spaces and (2) increasingly conflated shipping & activism*, the old ruling principle of ‘live and let live’ that transformative fandom once operated under has fallen increasingly to the wayside.

(*conflating shipping & activism is a subtype of conflating fiction and reality/’fiction affects reality’.)

‘ship and let ship’ (SALS) and ‘your kink is not my kink (and that’s okay)’ (YKINMKATO, ‘kinktomato’) are not ‘I endorse everything under the sun both irl and in fiction’: they are guidelines to respecting other fansthat have different values, coping mechanisms, feelings, worldviews, traumas, life experiences, identities, orientations, fantasies, etc, and acknowledging that this makes it impossible to judge their life choices.

this widespread cohesive attitude is what really made transformative fandom a radically unusual space in the 2000′s:not the existence of kinky shit by and for non-straightcismale audiences, but the lack of judgement of things that we knew we could not judge. and this had its own problems and blind spots (racism being (a hUGE) one of them) – it was far from perfect – but it was comparatively friendly when we consider current fandom environs.

these respect guidelines are not widely known/followed anymore due to a variety of circumstances. one of them is that it’s very common for the average, uncritical stance towards ‘weird’ things to be ‘that’s gross and I wish it didn’t exist’/’I don’t think it should exist’.

for example, that (in)famous gifset of Josh Keaton saying ‘first of all, learn the definition of pedophilia’? what was not giffed was what he followed it up with [paraphrased]: ‘there’s people who ship shiro and keith as student/teacher and stuff and that’s not okay. that’s gross.’(this is why I don’t find his apology when he bowed out of public shipping wank to be a change in his position on shipping.) even while JKeat did not approve the ‘anti’ definition of pedophilia, he also did not approve of kinky shipping from the start.

I believe this to be the average non-fandom-member’s feelings on all fictional content (though in the main, only authoritarian groups try to police the existence of fictional content they find objectionable).

dilution of fandom into mainstream spaces & increased ease of access to transformative fandom means that many people have joined fandom without becoming acquainted with SALS or YKINMKATO as rules for respectful interaction. Instead they carry this casual ‘ship/create whatever you want – except the gross shit’ attitude with them into fandom. and if they don’t quickly figure out how to curate their fandom experience, viral sharing social media will  bring the casual newcomer a host of ‘gross shit’ they don’t want to see.

If such a person is inclined to be an authoritarian – that is, to demand that everyone live by their definition of what’s gross and what isn’t – they will probably become an enthusiastic militant anti-shipper, policing ‘bad ships’ with vigor. If not, their fandom etiquette ‘alignment’ is much more uncertain.

between this average ‘all kinks but my kinks are weird’ feeling & the successful pushback against SALS/YKINMKATO by militant fandom antis: people who believe that fictional ships/fanworks should be morally pure/good/healthy and insult, denigrate, or discourage ships/fans of ships they see as ‘bad’ don’t always identify themselves as ‘antis’, ‘anti-[ship]’, or ‘anti-pedophilia/incest/abuse’.

in fact, it’s become increasingly common for people who believe this to NOT identify as ‘antis’ because the ‘anti’ label is associated with harassment and abuse**.

here’s my point:

at this strange, sort of postmodern transformative fandom juncture (Oct 2018), the labels people use to identify their opinion on fandom etiquette mean less and less. We’re all so polarized that if a person wishes to throw their weight around with a small army of followers, harassing and dogpiling on people they disagree with, they could do it in the name of nearly anything and find some success.

the ‘anti-pedophilia/incest/abuse’ community remains the most popular place from which cyberbullies take positions of power and direct intrafandom attacks … but it is not the only place that harbors cyberbullies, and it never was the only place harboring cyberbullies.

abusers are abusers are abusers, and again: they will use anything – shipping, anti-shipping, or anything else – to abuse people.

and: the more polarized fandom is, the easier it is for serial abusers and predators to find a place where if they say the right things, they can do whatever they want and get away with it.

(**even the most virulent fandom policers often do not perceive their own intimidation tactics as abusive. they may see their actions as justified because they’ve deemed their target(s) as acceptable targets/subhuman, or they may justify them as a necessary evil for the good of all. alternatively, they may simply be so un-self-aware that they literally don’t know they’re harassing people.)