Note: Since it be unclear (and I apologize for that) the incident that starts at 21:27 involves proshippers. Of course, MOST pro-shippers are nothing like these folks, but due to their vocal harassment and the way they belittle and talk to people they painted a very toxic brush that reminded me of exactly why I don't view either side as actually "anti-harassment." The toxic people on sides will weaponize whatever they can to make someone the enemy and that creates a place where no one can feel safe. It is sad and unfortunate because the community deserves much better. Especially those who are just trying to have a good time. Don't harass people guys. Don't spread fake rumors. Don't be the thing you hate.
I really wish this had made the video and wasn’t in comments. I agree with everything you said and trust that I come for people being racist regardless of what they ship but as I’ve said before “I wouldn’t be in the Please Stop Sending Me Death Threats Club if people didn’t keep send me death threats.”
@Erwin Lii Imagine watching a thoughtfull video on how unproductive, harmful to BIPOC women and plain ridiculous it is to utilize important social issues to win ship wars and then going into the comment section to bait a ship war. Stop acting like this is about anything other than you not liking a ship.
@Erwin Lii "Think about when the creators made fun of zutara! (:" Yes, you are most obviously trying to reasonably explain your personal taste and perspective and you are most certainly not here to rile people up into shipping arguments. /s
"For me, purity culture is dangerous because it never actually helps victims." Thank you for putting what I've been trying to put into words for years since all of this started.
This the real why I hated leftist or liberals who desparately sanitized the media especially the lgbtq, they want them to portray them as sexless, perfect angels, it's annoying
"I'm not in fandom to talk to teenagers" This!!! I love 18+ discord servers, not because i want to talk about nsfw stuff 24/7, but because I also wouldn't want to hang out with a bunch of teens in real life.
what kind of questions do you mean? I think the honor system has to be good enough, same as the 'i am over 18' buttons a lot of websites have. if someone under 18 sneaks in they then can't complain about seeing 18+ stuff.
I think this does get tricky depending on the fandom, though. If you’re entering a fandom where the property is targeted towards kids and teenagers then chances are you’re going to run into them. For example Avatar, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Steven Universe, and a plethora of popular properties are targeted towards a younger audience. I actually think it’s okay to keep that in mind, but if they’re targeted for kids then chances are they’re also for everyone to enjoy as well. Not to mention these properties were also created by adults, so there is also that.
ok my last comment, the zuka and zutara thing. the descendants fandom is so guilty of the treated the darker skin woc badly compared to the rest of the characters. people will find every excuse not to ship uma (the black girl) and the white heartthrob of the movie, harry, together but have no problem shipping him with men and white girls he barely interacted with.
Omg so felt on how characters of colors are always excluded from being shipped in favor of white or queer ships that make no sense and don’t even get me started on ACTUAL queer and queer coded who get excluded from being shipped at all but the fandoms will ship characters who are straight or coded straight.
@dew drop speaking as a black woman , my take is less that ppl ship white characters outta overt racism and more than creators give the lion's share of character development to white characters and ppl ship them because of that. It's basically the same issue, but a different root source. At the end of the day, there's not a single aspect of American culture specifically that racism hasn't tainted since 1619 and that includes fandom spaces. I'm glad that fandom has conversations but it's the online equivalent to shaming your neighbor for eating beef when the oil companies pollute more than all the cattle farms combined. Fandom can and does shift more quickly that society as a whole: you'll notice a shift in how m/m characters are written now versus 20 yrs ago, and that even for shit that is cringe now, it was still ahead of everything in mass media. As in, fic had more than one queer pairing, a thing that didn’t happen on a mainstream show before Glee (granted, there were shows like The L Word and Queer As Folk, but those were behind an HBO paywall) I guess what I'm saying is people need to take the pressure to where it'll actually do good: the studios and the execs who give the go-ahead. Not fans, and not VAs with their own opinions they spew for clout. Say what one will about the Voltron fandom, but that tacked-on wedding based on outside pressure from fans after that SDCC event is something many of us olds never thought we'd see on a kid show. Was it bad? Yes. Was it satisfying? Absolutely not. But it sent the message that ppl were tired of being baited and if it played a part in She-Ra getting the ending it did, that's a net win. There's too many fans to go after to make a dent in discouraging them from shipping white characters (and frankly, us BIPOC are there in those ships too, getting even more harrassment as Princess pointed out in her tweets!), but we can absolutely tag studios on bad blunders like the Voltron fiasco.
@@KariIzumi1 you said this so eloquently i’m in love with your comment. this hit every target and some more i didn’t realize we’re even targets you are amazing.
There's also the fact that the series itself promoted the hell out of the lighter skinned villain in the next movie (doing multiple remixes and solo versions) despite Uma being, umm, a better villain in every way lmao. Also the fact that the only main roles black women got in that movie was as Angry Black Villains :/
If I see a ship I don't like or content I'm uncomfortable with I take it upon myself to do the correct measures to avoid it. I don't see what harassing people does. It does more harm than good.
This problem of purity culture isn't restricted to fandom. I once had a difficult conversation with an editor about a story we were developing. They took exception to my inclusion of child sex abuse in the narrative (none of it depicted on screen, but it informed the backstory and motivation of the lead character) and thought it was outside my place to talk about these things. That what I was engaging in was morally objectionable and I was 'using' other people's lived experiences. I had to explain to them I was relating my own lived experience as a csa survivor, directly, and the story as a whole was a way of channeling the experience through fiction, but because I didn't fit their preconceptions of a 'survivor' it never occured to them to approach it from that lens. They thankfully apologized, but its still something which has made me uncomfortable trying to talk about my experiences knowing it can get that reaction even in professional spaces.
This is the kind of behavior I've seen a lot lately. People saying you can't create content that even mentions certain lived experiences, despite having good reason to believe you've done your homework on the matter, and basically requiring that you disclose highly personal information about how you relate to your content before you're left in peace. In fandom spaces, that translates to bullies (usually antis but not exclusively) pestering people to disclose their traumas before they're taken even remotely seriously when defending themselves from personal attacks.
The idea that people need to be abused, for literally any reason. Is just directly wishing harm upon others. Like imagine hearing "yes Im an abuse victim" and feeling relived, because that was a requierment they had to fill for you.
Even if it is someone else's experience, as long as you're doing your research and handling the subject with proper respect and gravitas, I don't see the problem. Not to mention it's your own experience, in our limited life, we have no chance to experience many of the things others experience(yes, many of them are things we'd never want to experience, but my point stands). If we as writers or content creators started avoiding all 'other people's lived experience', then there would be no creative endeavours. At least, not good ones. Besides, if we never explore the experience of others because they're traumatic and uncomfortable, we'd never be able to properly understand them. And the sympathy and sidestepping we show to seem 'caring' would only be a shallow gesture. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, as we don't like to feel discomfort, but we can't start barricading others willing to explore.
"i felt like i had to perform to be loved in real life so there were pieces of myself i had to smother and push down" brb i'm bout to go cry cause i felt this so hard. fandoms on the internet really were (and are still) the only places were i could be myself which is why i hate it to much when people cause stupid shipping drama (also racism) within the space.
1:15:45 So SICK of "protecting the children" being used as an excuse to vilify EVERYTHING while at the same time ignoring _actual_ problems facing children. It is disgusting.
that was a huge draw of the satanic panic. You want to believe that the only people who'd harm children are these suuuuuper evil satanic Outsiders who can easily be ousted from the community. Not their immediate family members. i recommend the Behind the Bastards episodes on it, they go into detail on how people realizing Child Abuse is a Thing quickly turned into 'we must find the witches'
@@kaiyodei Not quite the same. That's more an issue of wanting to dwell on issues facing fictional people - even if they're the same as ones real people are actually dealing with - as you can focus just on what's in your own little playhouse; you don't _have_ to think about real people, but you can still argue "real issue bad" and feel better about yourself. It's related, it's still immature and bad, but not quite the same.
The saddest commonality of every fandom I have dipped a toe in Dx I'm trans and white, not terribly picky about a lot of things, but it upsets me that POC get harassed literally everywhere and very often over the fakest of shit Ie: characters that aren't real and will never suffer when people do fanart of them... :C
I used to be so invested in this and then I started going outside more and I realized that there are more important things than fictional characters kissing and f**king. Looking back at it with my head clear it seems so ridiculous that people have been chased off the internet and had their lives ruined over what fictional characters they like to see in the relationship. As well as the countless young people who grow up in an online environment where they have to feel shame and walk on eggshells for fear of being called out.
Same lol goes to show how trivial and stupid all of it is when you got bigger things to deal with that’ll actually impact your life, was a refreshing wake up call, i’m a lot less involved in any fandom space since
It makes a lot of sense tho. I get cutting your writing teeth on romance and or smut using other people's characters. Yet at some point you gotta grow up and USE YOUR OWN. Since people are gonna get pissed off at how somebody else does their character(s). This is because the scene was overall never allowed to grow up and or some fans have a valid reason to not have something romanticized or sexualized. Since I been in the fanfic/fanart scenes some people get vile, do to much and know zero chill. Not everybody's smashing, this one character is the fanfic "hoe" or these characters are gay because they talked to each other. Some people wanna watch the show not others pint-up fantasies.
I mean so much of it is based around a “think of the children” mentality, but the kids are some of the most rabid consumers of the smutty dirty wild shit
the funniest byproduct of this shit is having legit trauma from being harassed across the internet for YEARS and then trying to explain to your therapist it's bc you shipped two characters from a webcomic who were sort of clones sort of related by virtue of timetravelling slime
@kirakira i see others state drawing childXadult porn and looking at it is not a good way to deal with trauma. i wonder if the same can be said for racist attacks. ":hey cheer up and watch Song of the South if you can" "here look at some old racist drawings"
I think it's so interesting the way that teens on screen are so often not only portrayed by adult actors, but kind of written like young adults? I mean, they're sometimes immature, but they're immature the way a 20 year old is immature - kind of self absorbed and drama obsessed but still like, able to talk to the opposite sex or deal with interpersonal issues without intense awkwardness, foot shuffling, eye contact-avoiding, weirdness that I remember in my teens. And there is a very good reason for that - watching teenagers act like teenagers isn't ... very interesting. They're awkward and sarcastic and weird, and that's just kind what that stage of life is. So to make the stories interesting to watch/read, they're kind of aged up in behavior, if not literally. I actually think there are important discussions to be had about how this affects the way we, as a cullture, think about teenagers and their maturity level, when so much of our media portrays them with young adult actors acting like young adults. But then I see these witch hunts, where adults are watching adult actors acting like adults, engaging with them like adults, kind of thinking about them as adults, and then romanticizing them, and suddenly those people are "pedophiles," and it's like... idk, guys. Seems extreme to me.
I've noticed that too! Back when I still bothered to watch Riverdale, I kept thinking that having the characters be in college (at LEAST) instead of high school would've made way more sense for who those characters were. What teenager tries to solve their problems by hopping up on a stripper pole? What teenager owns and runs their own bar? The show still would've been a mess, but you get my point.
It's a weird thing. It's sort of hard to remember your high school years even when you've recently left it behind. I think there are people for whom high school was so hard they'd rather forget it and start to integrate into adult life. It's also kind of embarrassing and hard to remember how immature you were at that time. It's very hard to recreate. If more teen movies were accurate they'd have many scenes of teenagers waiting for stuff to happen or waiting for someone to drive over to them.
Right. I think of Avatar the last Airbender: The main characters are 12-17 years old, and while they do act age appropriate oftentimes - they‘re actually in realy mature and responsible places in their lifes: They travel all by themselfes to escape war threads (or for adult status like honor), they fight with enourmous power and fighting techniques and doing so many quests to end a war. Like in the end Aang would just be 13 years old but strong enough to fight a skilled adult firebender at highest power, to help end a war and flip the way an entire country is lead. Effectively the all are adults.
@@Alina_Schmidt the sad thing to me, is in Avatar, the characters tend to be a tiny bit closer to "historically accurate" to cultural notions that a 15 year old king could rule an entire nation or that 14 year old women could raise kids because you had to have as many children as fast as possible to make up for dreadful mortality rates. D: ATLA characters still manage some insanely complex situations in ways I'm not sure a group of kids could manage either, but compared to shows like Riverdale it's strange that it feels a bit more "realistic" in spite of elemental magic and flying bisons xD
I also understand why this is done because whenever I read a book where teenagers act like teenagers, there are large parts where I want to scream at the characters for being idiots.
If they had made Finn's character the main character and centralized the really interesting and important idea that maybe every human being in stormtrooper armor isn't disposable, those movies might have been good. What a great idea that they did nothing with. They even bring it up again in the last movie only to again do nothing with it.
I know! I was so excited for that angle of humanizing the stormtroopers behind those monolithic masks, that's the kind of story I would have loved to see in the new trilogy from the beginning. It stinks of wasted potential :(
I stopped watching because they kept pushing his character further away from any sort of big role (in my perception) and he was LEGIT my fave character from the start :( it's really sad how much potential was wasted
You know, it's funny because I have been watching a lot of videos on Christian fundamentalism, so when I hear "purity culture" I think a lot about the mindset from the Evangelical church that people (ESPECIALLY WOMEN) need to "save themselves" for marriage, and to do otherwise is an affront to God. And I find it very similar with this kind of mindset in fandom. If you had sex with your high school boyfriend, you are a chewed-up piece of gum who no self-respecting man wants to marry. If you ship Zutara, you are a racist, a sexist, imperialist, and pro-abuse.
Also, sometimes the ignoring of context- like sure that person who’s a freshman is dating a junior *kinda sus maybe?* But actually the freshman got held back a year and the junior is younger than most his classmates so what people made seem like a sus teenage gap is actually more like 1 year they’re just in different life circumstances. (Totally made up example there, but I think it gives off what I mean? It’s like broad generalizations and ignorance of time, circumstances, etc. and it’ll get out of hand fast with people immediately jumping from zero to pedo in light speed).
Yes totally. It's more of a MENTAL purity, since.the vast majority of material is writing or art where literally no one is being touched or having NSFW things done to them... xC our minds are chewing gum that will never be unchewed?
Yeah one lesser talked about aspects about this discourse is there’s this gross implication that of you ship two characters you automatically want them to have sex which is kind of ironic that it’s an “Anti” position because that implies that their mind goes these places. In a strange way, it kind of mirrors how real life purity culture sexualizes minors ,but in a different sense
I think it's okay to ship minors and minors if it's not sexual. I've read of minors harassing minors before irl, and it grossed me out. It's not pedophilic, but it can be problematic
As someone that was both involved in fandom and was groomed as a child, I really have a hard time with conversations about grooming in fandom. As a teenager, I found myself leaning towards and reading a lot of "problematic" and nonconseual ships. I haven't introspected on why that was too hard; maybe it had nothing to do with my history of abuse and I just liked the dark, angst as a teenager, or maybe something about exploring such a personal topic through fiction--which is relatively safe--was comforting. I honestly don't know. Obviously not every survivor will feel the same way about it. For many people, these are triggering topics that should be avoided. I guess my problem comes from people speaking for me, or fellow survivors speaking as though their experience is the only one. While fiction about topics such as grooming have the potential to be harmful to someone for whom grooming or abuse is a trigger, I personally don't think shutting down conversation or calling people who choose to write about those things problematic helps anyone. I don't think writing about the topic normalizes it either. As long as everything is sufficiently tagged and/or warned for, survivors can make their own informed choice about rather or not to engage with a ship or topic.
exactly! ppl treat fiction as something rigid that is the same for everyone. the thing about consuming stories is that everyone will perceive it different. what is triggering and disgusting to some can be amusing to others with same backgrounds
I’m also a survivor and like fanfics like this and I’m not entirely sure why that is. But during the worst of it those kinds of works helped. I think for me it was kind of like taking back control over what had happened to me because I couldn’t do that at the time.
@@luizabianco Oh, absolutely. I 100% agree. Everyone has different reactions to difficult or triggering works, and, as I mentioned, I think thorough content warnings and tags are the best way to ensure that survivors--or even just people who don't want to engage with troubling or problematic art--can choose what media to interact with. I've never personally experienced being recommended something romantic or sweet only to discover that it's abusive or non-con , but I'm so sorry that you have; while I do enjoy dark works, I know I have to be in the correct mindset to go into something like that and missing the appropriate warnings or expecting fluff only to be greeted with something dark and abusive sounds devastating.
honestly "dark content" that resembles my trauma comforts me sometimes. when it comes to fanfic sites like ao3 most authors are considerate and tag everything properly
"Fandoms moralistic need to justify to everything they like validates peoples bad behavior" too true, cause I often see people in hyper anti spaces treat bullying as a "necessary evil" to keep the peace, where they treat your actual behavior as secondary in importance to what you like in fiction.
couldn't agree more. even IF a person is actually condoning bad behavior in their fanfic/fanart/etc. -- which is rarely the case! -- two wrongs don't make a right.
Exactly. I create content for a problematic ship, and seeing people say it's gross to other likeminded creators is one thing - like, sure, that's your opinion and I have mine. But then seeing people say stuff like "I'd beat those artists up" or "You wrote non-con, you should be r//ed yourself to know what its like"… it's crazy.
@@hana-a-cha yeah fiction is a way to explore things in a safer space. It does not mean you actually want to have this done to you/ do it to someone else. Folding Ideas covers that really well in his first video on the 50 shades movie series. Basically it can be thrilling to explore loss of control, from the safer vantage point of fiction.
Discussions about problematic ships frequently delve into the nonsensical. I remember stumbling upon posts that argued short characters were "minor coded" or that characters should only interact with people within 3 years of their age. I know that a lot of this discourse is likely created by young people, but the echo chambers and infighting cultivated by framing literally anyone who disagrees with you about something as banal as shipping as evil is tiresome People lay down arbitrary standards of appropriateness and use those standards as cudgels to beat back people they disagree with. You can't simply dislike a ship it has to be "problematic". I advocate for fandom spaces with a more ship and let ship attitude. Not because I'm against nuanced conversations about ships (i genuinely encourage everyone to think critically about the media they consume) but because I don't think people should be moralized for how they engage with fandoms in a more broad sense.
@@robertsmithfan877 Ugh. It's so ridiculous and annoying. Look, if something triggers someone and they have issues with it because of their own life experiences or they just don't like it, that's fine. If someone doesn't like something because they find it abusive I'm not going to try to convince them otherwise. It's just the weaponisation of social justice that drives me insane because like it's said in the video, some people like to use fiction to explore darker parts of themselves and it's a safe way to do it. Acting as though enjoying a ~~problematic~~`` relationship means you endorse the same behaviour in your own real life relationships is absurd. The way people do this is literally to just shut down discussion and attempt to try to "win" the argument, nothing more or less. Enemies to lovers is the best and performative little asswipes who want to tut tut me for enjoying fiction can fuck off. I've shipped Spike/Buffy since I was 15 and strangely enough it never made me want to get with a guy who'd punch me in the face or who'd previously tried to kill me, it's almost like there's no correlation and I'm able to tell fiction from reality. Who knew?
@@natf7942 yeah exactly! Fiction is a place where things can be explored more safely. I really enjoy age gab stuff, and offer "star-crossed lovers" fiction. It gives the characters a great dynamic, and naturally leads to problems they have to overcome if they want to continue the relationship. That don't mean I support relationships in real life with unhealthy power dynamics. Those relationships just don't work in real life and I'd never want to be in one.
One of the things that I have noticed with purity culture (and I know it has been talked about before) is forcing content creators to disclose their trauma or past or sexuality or whatever to fans who feel like content creators need to meet a checklist to be allowed to write/draw/participate in specific topics. Ive seen it happen with fanfic, podcast, even television shows. And while I understand the instinct to want content about a topic to be created by creators who have lived that topic, it is never right to force someone to disclose something they don't feel comfortable with. This is, of course, a complicated topic because I do feel that representation is super important and like you said in the video people can and do lie about their identities online and I dont really have a solution. But i thought it was related a bit to what you where talking about.
two fairly recent instances related to this come to mind: the cancellation of lindsay ellis (upon which in an attempt to clarify everything she had to open up about her sexual assault) and columbo (a closeted fanartist who was doxxed and outed to his very conservative family).
Not only do they force creators to rehash their trauma, if it’s not ‘acceptable’ or doesn't look like what THEY think trauma should look like, the creator gets critiqued, belittled, and made fun of. I’ve seen this in real time.
Literally exploring dark topic in fiction helped me a lot to discover myself and deal with my childhood trauma. It has even helped me with intrusive thoughts, making them less usual, people who try to chastise others over lines on paper or pixels on a screen really need to re learn how to properly be in society because there are more important things like the real people they interacting with. Thank you for making this video ❤
HELLO SATANICK FANBOY!!! As someone who got into to okegom, I did not really liked, but later that I found how victims of csa use dark media cope trauma i understand okegom/funamusea even more. Mogege :3
YES me too its helped with intrusive thoughts a lot, like i used to hate myself and feel intense shame every time i had any 'problematic' intrusive thoughts but its way easier now for me
I find it interesting how much fandom drama is women vs women. There are many men sexualizing teenage girl characters or writing age gap relationships and they don't get the hate that random women on the internet give each other for fanfiction. ETA I haven't finished this video yet and will come back to it!
Oh, don't worry, if they're gay and/or trans men, they WILL get the same level of bs women get :') The thing about the dudebro-type of men in fandom is that they hang around completely different circles, so they don't get the harassment. But they will hop in the discourse in whatever side serves their interests at the moment (they co-opt proshipper discourse to defend their hentai, but they also co-opt antishipper discourse when it comes to gay ships that disgusts them).
@@mekinot yeah as a gay trans guy i def get this. people are mad that i ship snape and harry, and all i want is some good old power dynamics ffs. let me have my problematic content thank yOU
For real. Dudes are free to enjoy all the villains they like but when women like them it makes us abuse/rape apologists and Nazi supporters. So exhausting.
I feel like a lot of that might be down to some form of internalised misogyny. Not saying that's the case in all situations, but I've definitely seen the whole "oh no, a woman who is completely comfortable expressing sexual and/or romantic things when I'm not! I must put her down to feel less insecure about expressing my own thoughts and view myself as morally superior!" thing. It's upsetting but I'm glad I've found some spaces that aren't like that in the internet.
Can't tell you how exhausting it was to be a zutara shipper AND an indigenous woman during the ATLA resurgence while all these "colonizer" hot takes started poppin up. WAY too many white kids yelling about things they don't fully understand tbh. Excellent video, btw! I'm not a pro-shipper in the slightest, ultimately I'm just a human with my own limits on what's ok and what isn't but I'm grown enough to understand that there are responsible ways to consume problematic media. So long as triggering content is tagged appropriately so that ppl like me don't have to see it, I've learned to be fine with it. It's been a hell of a lot healthier for me and my trauma, personally. Likewise, we just need spaces to discuss the concerns with these problematic elements without turning everything into some moral superiority contest.
@@MackenziiRivers I don't think she was referring to the people making the posts as colonizers. I think she means the hot takes had to do with Zuko being a colonizer.
@@MackenziiRivers I think they’re referring to Zuko being from a nation that is imperialistic and trying to bring the rest of the world under its control.
"team f them kids" lmaoooooooooo that reminds me how i be forgetting im not always on the internet. at my job one day this kid said something rude to me and i checked them so fast on it. i have no problem checking rude kids in my comment section, like you do not talk to people like that especially over having an opinion (good or bad) on a fictional character.
Children saying the dumbest things about characters with zero nuance and showing they have zero life experience really is the worst. Makes me glad the internet was totally different back in the early 2000s when I was a teen because I mostly lurked and didn't post my childish thoughts all over social media for the world to see.
It's so hard to explain the 'they're not aging' feelings. Probably even for my earliest ships that I got me into fandom and I think this was true for a lot of people... I was a teenager? I was teenager when i got into fandom shipping people who were older than me and I grew up and then didn't and that's kind of weird to wrap your head around if you've been shipping them or whatever the entire time? and someone will be like 'ur sexualising minors' and I'm like 'i forgot I thought they were still older than me i've been here since I was 12' Like I'm not writing my favs as people in their mid-twenties because I want to age them up for smutty purposes. nah. they're living out my fantasies of having a mortgage and friends who go grocery shopping with them.
That's one of the things (among many) that made me go O_o from Sarah Z's video. Out of respect to Princess, I won't nail my 95 thesis on that here but saying that people shouldn't age up characters ignores the fact that so many do it for reasons other than sex. But even apart from that...this happens in some series naturally? [Wizard series redacted] is the most famous example of this, and even then I have seen a Tumblr post of someone accusing the author of being a pedo for "imagining" the lead and his now wife banging to make three kids in the epilogue. I mean, of all the tens of dozens of legitimate grevances one can make about that series and especially the heinous views of the author herself, THATS the hill you want to die on? I posted that one to Facebook and it was the first time I'd seen liberals and the few conservatives I still had following me pre-COVID uniting in laughter at how stupid this was, because at the end of the day, that's what non-fandom ppl see: nerd wanking about fictional characters. They see you crusading to save Deku from being used by "suspect people," they'll ask why aren't you spending the time going after those who attack real children.
@@KariIzumi1 When did Sarah say that you shouldn't age up characters? I don't remember that. I remember another YTer saying that, but not Sarah (not attacking you, just genuinely curious)?
100% this. I can’t remember the last time I read a fic in my fandom that had the characters the same age as canon. They are all aged up, because the fans grew up.
This is the sanest take on proshipping I've seen from a larger content creator, and honestly as a black woman who's been in fandom since I was around 12 or 13, I always feel anxious when opening a youtube video about fandom if only because a lot of ytubers tend to fall back on shaming shippers and the parts of fandom that indulge in darker tropes (albeit unintentionally). This vid was overall very validating to listen to as a person who indulges in pretty much everything you've talked about here! Your points were very well thought out, nuanced, and I appreciate your efforts to open a dialog about purity and race in fandom.
There’s a whole holiday celebrating Esther, people dress up in costumes and have parades, people give food to the poor, they drink a lot of wine, there’s these cookies called hamantaschen which are really good
I feel like most other ytubers, when talking about these issues, don't actually think it through or have much personal history dealing with this stuff in fandom. they just see the loudest, most confident takes on twitter (which tend to be pretty anti) and just assume that those takes are probably right and mindlessly regurgitate them (especially since they often don't have much personal stake due to privilege, and don't want to look "problematic")
that thing you said about purity culture creating an environment where we feel we need to JUSTIFY behaviour MEANT as problematic by the author/creator/etc. is so true!! i never even realized that dimension of it. and the fact that purity culture is taking the enjoyment out of "evil" things in fiction - when fiction is SUPPOSED to be for exploring darker things sometimes!
It's ironic because all it does is make people twist themselves into knots justifying shitty things their favourite character does instead of just realising you can enjoy and even love characters who do shitty things? Because liking something in fiction doesn't mean you endorse the exact same actions IRL? It's so frustrating because wiping the flaws away from characters just leaves you with stanning your own perfect headcanon of what said character isn't even in reality. So you don't even like them, just some made up version that's never made a mistake in their lives and it's bizarre.
Ok, let’s take for example Killing Stalker. The author claims it’s a not supposed to be read as a romance, that it’s a depiction of abuse (yet she reposts fanart of the two men on her twitter), however teenage fans do not see it as problematic. It’s rare when problematic media is read as problematic, it’s often romanticized. How you justify that?
@stupidfucking dinosaur Maybe it’s because the author can differentiate their original canon work from fanon interpretations of Sangwoo and Yoonbum together? Also, teenagers don’t know any better? In other words, teenagers don’t know any better in the sense of the takes that they make in their early young adult lives. School teaches critical thinking, and reading comprehension, as well debate them on to look at the other side of the argument they might be against. I mean, when it comes to teenagers that get involve in fandom, some tend to get overtly passionate and obsessive. Yeah, I could just say they get ‘cringey’, but I’m not a fan of that word, and I’m tired of peeps mocking teenage girls interest by calling it cringe. Been there, done that during my teen years being obsessed with certain media. Killing Stalking, is a adult Korean comic, the dark subject matter surrounding the story is not intended for any minors. Though, minors get curious and look anyway even though they have been warn about the content that is within the story might not be something they are not prepared for or comprehend. Comprehend, in terms of what they are reading and how they navigate is gonna vary from person to person when they start developing their taste in certain media. Their really isn’t any guide for teenagers on how to navigate their interest in terms of sexuality and attraction that develop overtime, especially LGBT+ peeps. It’s also one of those reasons why sex ed. is so important as that can help a individual understand consent and boundaries. I understand in the way I write this might make teenagers seem like they don’t know any better, I’m just writing this piece within my perspective of navigating through dark media even though I didn’t comprehend them at first until I got out of high school. Which is one of the reasons why you tend to get those teens that recommended Killing Stalking to someone that just watched Yuri on Ice as there is a lack of understanding on the part the stories have very different themes going on in terms of relationship dynamic.
@@supporter6014 that's a failing in teaching people how to consume art. It's not on a creator to design their art, so no one can ever misconstrue it. It's on the one consuming the art to know the difference between reality and fiction. It's not that hard to know that fiction is fiction and that fiction should not be replicated in real life. Parents and teachers should be making sure to teach children how to actually engage with the art they consume. That's what education is about, it's why we teach the humanities. At least when it's taught by good teachers and with proper funding. But that's a different problem >.....> I enjoy plenty of power dynamic romances (age gap, wealth gab, boss subordinate, ect). Doesn't mean I've ever been like man you know what's healthy in real life, my partner have some huge power dynamic over me. That's what I want in my partner! (Been reading this stuff since 9th grade) Now I'm not saying you can't have more and less ethical portrayals of problematic things. Framing is super important in those kinds of stories. There are stuff I read that after one chapter, I'm like noooooope. But also not everything needs to illustrate why it's bad to be like this. It can be fun to consume trash.
@jayvhon calma if you ship a child and adult and think it's cute and fun and healthy you are a pedo no argument, if you think a fully grown adult banging something that looks acts and sounds like a child is hot, you are a pedo
@@DrClock-il8ij That one's iffy only due to the age of the shipper. While I was a minor, did I ship minors? Yeah, deffo. Now that I older, do I still do it? Absolutely not! I have a hard time watching anime now because most of the time the characters are in high school! XD
"the noncon fic was a way for me to read about someone having no control and enjoying that" I think you just put into words something I had buried deep in my brain, and I gotta say it feels so good to let it out and have it exist without the negative light I'd apparently unconsciously attached to it
People who claim that shipping kid characters together is pedophilic seem to always say this about gay ships specifically. It's almost like gay love is seen as inherently dirty compared to straight love...
*cough* Romeo and Juliet laws (in some US stares) that are supposed to protect people who are minors getting with minors and minors transitioning to adult hood from being persecuted for hooking up- are only there for straight people. If a gay teen and has sex with their teen partner even if they’re only 1 or 2 years apart it’s technically illegal. People really do be thinking it’s somehow more dirty or immoral
no WAIT maybe your talking about actual sfw stuff, but genuinely i see this being said about people who draw nsfw of children so maybe your should clarify this
@@nmclick Shipping =/= producing nsfw, I think we all can agree producing porn in any form is crossing a very different boundary compared to "I think X and Y would look cute together"
Totally agree with a lot you have to say in this video! As much as I do think there should be space for talking about problematic themeing/implications in shipping, I do miss the fandom idea of "squicky", of having ships that just get under your skin or make you uncomfortable and not having to justify it beyond that. Like when you were talking about the SesshomaruxRin ship, I find it incredibly squicky and when you talked about the reasons why someone might like that ship, I could follow your reasoning and understand why someone might like it, but I still find it squicky. That's not to say I'm going to condemn every shipper of that ship, it just means that I can't engage with it regardless of someones reasoning. I think fans should say they don't like or are uncomfortable with something without making an argument about who has the most "morally correct" ship.
no because I HATE when they’re like “if u ship this ur invalidating the feelings of x group” and when members of x group are like “we don’t care” they get mad at THEM. biggest example is Bakudeku and abuse survivors. majority of us do NOT give a shit, support us by donating money, make conversations about abuse more open, talk about sibling abuse and how it’s normalized. we do NOT care that u ship green Lima bean with angry orange man, hell some of US ship it. tag it and leave y’all
@@mushroomhehe370 I know right? It's barely touching the surface of actual abuse but these weirdos make it as if it was the exact same. That's more harmful than the ship itself.
i used to hate on bakudeku, but know I see it's kind of stupid. Abuse survivors have bigger things to worry about than a ship of a bully who has changed as a person x the person they bullied. I also never see anyone talk about silent voice like they do with MHA lmao.
I deeply hate the way modern fandom needs you to justify why you like something. In the MHA fandom people were praying for Dabi to be a Todoroki so that he would have been abused by Endeavor. Why? So that he'd have a tragic backstory to justify his villainy and they don't have to feel guilty about being horny for him. I don't get it. I'm not personally into Dabi because I'm allergic to that kind of edgy boy, but he's literally just an anime dude? Sometimes evil is sexy! You're allowed to think an anime boy is sexy without literally supporting burning people alive! Please just let yourself enjoy things.
It actually turned out that they were right that he was a Todoroki, ironically, but every other fan-theory related to that got shot in the foot and made him out to be an even bigger monster, albeit a tragic one, than before. A significant portion of the fandom were most displeased! If some of them weren't so obnoxious about it, I'd be laughing at the irony.
Great video Melina! I'd like to add a perspective as someone who was actually sexually abused as a child and who always eyerolls at the "protect the children" sentiments (free feel to skip if you don't want to read about this!). The thing is, that doesn't save children because it's not fiction that's hurting them, it's people who - for all kinds of reasons - abuse children. And the silence and shame surrounding sex only makes it harder for children to regonize that abuse, and to tell someone about it. What would have helped me as a child was knowing that my body was my own and that no one had a right to it. That it wasn't my fault and that I needed not to be ashamed. Knowledge on what sexual abuse can look like beyond 'old men kidnaps child' (it was a bunch of older children who did this to me). That I even had the language to tell someone. Ironically, it was non-con fanfiction that made me realize that I had been sexually abused, and that helped me work through some of my feelings surrounding it. That whole process isn't pretty - it can be dark, confusing, messy. So, you can dislike something. Have critical discussions in and about fandoms. Just please know that you're not helping children by outrage over certain fic/fanart. If you care, there's a lot you can do that actually does help.
Yes, exactly. As a teen, I was in an abusive relationship, also involving some dubcob. However, due to everyone being so hush hush about these matters around young people, I never knew it was that bad when it was happening. Only later on, about two years after breaking up, I started getting into some ships with the same dynamic. And these actually made me realise the reality of that abuse that happened to me. How wrong it was exactly. I could see the victim's reactions and complex feelings, because they still were in love, they could not hate the abuser... And I recognised myself in it. I came to understand what exactly happened and that it wasn't my fault. It was also aided by the shipping community, that, because it was controversial, was a semi-closed off society where we ended up like a suport group for each other. It really hurt when antis were making us out to be abusers ourselves just because we enjoyed that stuff in private, not tagging with show or character tags, adding warnings, etc. While p much everyone there had had been a victim of abuse in the past themselves and/or geberally had very poor mental health. Many of us just had this community to keep us going, no exaggeration. It was a dark time but I survived thanks to them. But these days, outside of p much anonymous yt comments, I can't talk about it, or else I'd be burned on the stake for being "impure".
yes! I wish these folks would watch the documentary "Incest" on RUclips cause guess what it wasn't fictional character shipping that made these people assault their family members!!
yes, this. i actually forget sometimes, that just because i dont feel very affected by it as an adult, i was in fact sexually abused as a pre-teen. the protect the children sentiments are very..paternalistic and condescending, besides being useless.
that is why "Puppy Milk" needs to exist. it's not child porn. that strawberry person created it so readers of all ages can recognize abuse when they see it
As someone who loves kids it's honestly frustrating seeing how fandom treats children in it. Like you get such a lack of nuance with people like, stripping agency and impact of their actions from them?? Kids need to learn there are consequences to their actions AND have the room to grow from being problematic and figuring out the world lol So call out their agism/sexism/racism/ablism/ect, in a way meant to explain the harm they're causing (but also don't harrass kids back) if you got the energy. If they're harassing people report them! They can't handle being on the internet? They get their account taken away for violating TOS, or blocked. Actually teach kids the power of blocking and unfollowing liberally, how to curate their online experience responsibly! Blocking/unfollowing ain't deep and your mental health will thank you for it. Over like screaming at strangers and riling yourself up all the time.
Honestly if I see a kid doing those “call out posts”about someone with a NSFW account who is minding their own business to harass them and accuse them of p- or cp without actual proof. I just report them to CPS at this point. And if I see an adult doing this addressing their kid followers or tagging children to see it. I report them to the NCMEC.
@@stal3065 I'm glad u have those boundaries! And especially glad you're enforcing them. Identifying and enforcing boundaries are very good skills to have regardless of age. :D And I think part of that is the lack of competent internet safety taught to kids and teens. It doesn't help that younger gen X and older millennials started the social media trend of posting so much information online, even about their kids before they were old enough to really consent. And the idea of internet anonymity, it all kinda eroded people's sense of safety and privacy on the internet? So people have forgotten to teach kids how to A) keep their information safe on the internet, B) know what appropriate intergenerational friendships and interactions look like [much less how to spot unhealthy ones and resources to get help], C) how to curate your own internet experience instead of relying on the good intentions of others or faulty algorithms. ^^;
The only time I get TRULY anti is seeing people write rpf about child actors with adults. I remember seeing far too much of it about the IT kids with Bill Skarsgård when the first movie came out. Anything else I'm pretty much "Just tag is so I can avoid."
@Ivoire Punk I don’t think you turning into an anti has anything to do with going against rpf as many pro shippers are against rpf. Yes, that’s a general statement, but proshippers follow under a type of mentality where fiction affects reality, but not in the way antis say fictions affects reality. Pro shippers are against rpf due to the involvement of real life people being used and portray in fictional content as it goes without their consent.
Honest question: what do y'all think of rpf about adult people in the public eye/show business under the condition that it's not brought up to the people in the rpf? I don't really see the harm in that yet and I'm curious why rpf is so hated
As a survivor of csa, I've always found the rampant accusations of p/d/ph/l/a over fictional content to be really disrespectful and disgusting. No matter how problematic a ship is, to claim that someone is a predator or supports it in real life over all that is wrong and waters down a very serious subject.
Especially when they follow all that up with accusations of faking, or saying "no real survivor would ship this" or, worse, the harassment and death threats and wishes we would be assaulted again :/
@@palemeadows You get off to the depiction and idea of CSA, even if it isn’t real, you vent your emotion and fantasy through fiction. deny it all you want, but your very being knows. god knows.
My huge beef with purity culture in fandom is that people are really stretching the meanings of terms like pxd0philia and incxst (I have seen ppl argue that aging up child characters even for sfw art is borderline pedxphilia, and that childhood friends to lovers is incxst), the tendency to raise unsubstantiated "receipts" to rip people to shreds and justify harassment, the abuse of slippery slope fallacy, and the worst? Antis pressuring others in fandom to rehash their traumas just to have the clout necessary to refute the accusations against them. It's bananas.
Yeah but I can understand sometimes when they see two character who young are ship because some artists take it too far like wow thaks I hate it! But other time I like ok but they are just give each other a hug and you are right they are stupid! Ps. I thinks they should start of as crush if the are kids because kids are to young to date.
**war flashbacks to the Shutaba discourse** Bonus points for the garbage implication that autistic people (the character Futaba isn’t technically canonically autistic ,but she’s arguably neurodivergent coded) shouldn’t be allowed to date.
@@DarkPsychoMessiah RUclips auto deletes comments that use “naughty words”. Lol op isn’t censoring cause they’re scared of the words. They’re censoring cause RUclips is.
I didn't really understand the Finn discussion before now. Now I get it. I'm a Rey stan, I love her journey, even if the 3rd film is garbage, so for me, I always saw her as front-and-center. You helped me recontextualize it and see how Finn was set up to be something more, to be the protagonist even, and that was taken away. I get it now, and yeah, it sucks. That whole trilogy really is just a mess of missed opportunities. The Prequel trilogy is a good story hidden by bad film-making and the Sequel trilogy is a lot of good ideas ruined by corporate meddling and ego.
Also the racist Star Wars fans that bullied Disney into marginalizing Kelly Marie Tran and John Boyaga. I'm convinced Star Wars is just one of those properties that should never be put to film again. Video Games, Novels, TV shows, maybe. Not film. There's too much unwieldy expectations for film and unnecessary need to please everyone, including racist neckbeards.
Apparently the original script for the third movie had Finn leading a storm trooper reveloution, which I would have loved to see. Regardless of shipping the way Finn' s storyline was dropped is so disappointing.
@@bridgetbaker7529 Like what if Jannah, the leader of the other rebel stormtroopers, instead of saying "yeah, we also rebelled" said "we rebelled because we heard you did and joined the Resistance and we were inspired by your example"? One line of dialogue would have been the difference between "Finn, you're not special, stormtroopers defect all the time" and "Finn, you're an inspirational icon". Can't even give him that. But the stormtrooper rebellion would definitely have been better.
Also Disney could have made Finn and Rey deuteragonists with similar amounts of screen time and equal narrative weight. Their character arcs were both about developing identity, and it would be really cool to see them both developing that through becoming Jedi. It also would have been a neat change to the typical Lone Hero archetype found in the original trilogies.
And by Ego I really am talking about both Abrams AND Johnson. I like The Last Jedi, but as time has gone by I've started to develop a more cynical attitude to Rian's choices. It's very clear in hindsight to see that he really was trying to push his own vision on the film more than create a coherent narrative that works well as a movie. I think a lot of the Rey and Luke stuff works, but most of Finn and Rose's story really doesn't. And there really is something deeply infuriating about the nonsense he did with Poe. Then there's Abrams, who instead of taking the story left to him by Johnson, which with its flaws did set up some good ideas, he threw it all away and made probably the worst Star Wars movie of the 9.
it's weird how the way fiction affecting reality is accepted to be complicated and nuanced when it comes to influencing good behavior (ex. liking a poc character/ lgbt+ ship etc doesn't necessarily mean you can't be racist/homophobic) but suddenly when it comes to bad behavior shipping jonsa means you are supporting incest irl
This 100% ‘A fic clearly tagged non-con that maybe a couple of thousand at most are going to read’ vs ‘A film that portrays marginalised groups in an exclusively negative light and feeds into bad stereotypes that reaches millions of people’ are not going to have the same effect. Fiction can affect reality but not in the way they portray it. Exploring dark or taboo subject matter in fiction is not the same as engaging in it in real life.
It's almost like purity tests are rigged to be impossible to pass, and are just a pretext for inflicting mental or physical abuse on people who we already don't like.
Omg I see so much hate for Thorki, which is also... Incest. I can understand that it's controversial, but some of those same antis are Loki stans who have to contort themselves into knots in order to ignore the fact that homebody tried to take over Earth and attempted to commit genocide on his own people because he's their woobie cinnamon bun angsty prince of darkness who can do no wrong. 🙄
Love what you said about weaponizing BIPOC ppl against each other. It something we as white people need to constantly be checking ourselves about and doing better on. So perfectly said.
"...both sides invested in using the experiences of harmed people to prove a point- rather than making sure those harms are not repeated. Instead of focusing on fixing existing problems, they are consumed with proving one side is creating more potential future harm." Damn. So very right about all this
The thing that bugs me the MOST is that these adult anti shippers will bully an actual minor off of a platform over the modesty of a fictional minor. They will be ruthless against actual abuse and SA survivors for shipping something toxic. They’ll talk about fiction affecting reality while they DIRECTLY contribute to the pain of real life people.
A year late and your opinion might have changed drastically but: pro-shippers do the exact same thing. It's not really an us vs them. It's a "everyone is trying to be right and they don't actually care about real issues"
@@kaiyodeiNo just no, it is not ok to bully a minor who does this kind of shipping even if it’s problematic. Yes it’s not cute but that isn’t the point, kids and teens that usually ship these kinds of couples are products of SA in particular grooming by adults, and need legit help not “earfuls” or worse being told to “kys”. This type of logic is how we create an unsafe environment for victims of abuse in particular sexual violence. The fact that some antis sit there call themselves allys and say victims deserve sympathy while flat out being dismissive is a huge problem that needs to stop. In ways you guys are causing more harm then good with this mentality, and if Antis like yourself really want to help victims you wouldn’t directly attack them the way some of you guys do as this can cause a guard to be put up faster then anything. Help them by spreading information in your fandom or social media pages and help educate about power dynamics and grooming. Again bullying a minor isn’t the answer and as a whole can be worse for a victim. I say this as a SA and grooming survivor because showing sympathy and compassion is how you can help people not hate.
Don't know if artist was a minor but I did tell this one artist to kys over a piece of nsfw art I saw. It was a stated age diff (teenage girl and older man) fetishizing "jailbait" and rape. Artist is clearly a lefty type considering most of their past art was lgbt or included POC characters. Am I wrong for thinking it's bad to make fetish content for fetishes like that?@@marissah431
idk if i can count as "poc" bc im "white passing" (all words that i discovered in twitter and have no translation to spanish) but i am born and raised latino, and holy shit how do i thank you for everything so far (im on min31) like, as someone from the 3rd world ive felt forced so many times in fandom to adjust myself into this high moral culture that the first world thinks it has and end up feeling like im some kind of savage or monkey for not being "woke enough" like, is always usa's laws that they ask you to follow, is always usa language that they force you to speak, is exhausting. i always gravitated to proship spaces bc i come here to have fun and i dont rlly see antis having any fun by tweeting stuff like "hey besties is it ok if i ship this?" or "hey @xxx you follow :/" but, like, it doesnt matter if i get in a proship space, 90% of the times white ppl are making you feel like shit.
So I'm white but I'm from Eastern Europe and I also always found it so confusing. US laws of consent (or any other US laws really) are taken as a revealed universal truth in online spaces so often and it's frustrating. And when you try to make people realize that's not the case, you're the savage. Well, I guess that's kinda just the mirror of the real world 🙄
ime, i've only been able to avoid this by making spaces where we had to explicitly point out that american sensibilities are not going to be held as univeral truth, that we combat a kind of digital american imperialism that is so prevalent online, and even then the DM inbox of every mod and myself got filled frequently with americans whining that someone said a word that's bad in the states but is casually used in australia/new zealand. it's actually exhausting to have to explain over and over that america is not the entire world, and that everyone else feels excluded and like they can't act how normal is to them in spaces where american standards are given de facto standard treatment. and then people wonder why only americans seem to be in english spaces online (and are shocked when my spaces have tons of ESL and UK/aus/nz folks, equal to or outbalancing US users). it's like, you really have to dig to find spaces that accommodate anyone else... and americans seem repulsed by those spaces, and when that happens, you realise a lot of americans haven't really self-reflected on their own 'coloniser mindset'.
I'm not saying any names (to not start discourse again in replies) but I've noticed that a lot of shippers of a certain "problematic" ship involving a queercoded villian who also identify as queer themselves come from quite homophobic countries (Russia, Poland, ect). I suppose that queercoded villian was one of the few scraps of representation they had before finding any communities. There was some drama outside of the fandom where someone (who wasn't cishet and whose native language wasn't english) started a petition to make him "come out" and they got a lot of negative feedback, from both douchebros who don't get what coding means and from antis that were blaming them for "reinforcing homophobic stereotypes". At least one news outlet covered the drama, and it blatantly misgendered the OP (on the assumption they were a "straight fangirl", despite their pronouns in bio). They ended up leaving all their ship accounts.
YOU SPEAK SO MANY TRUTHS!!! I'm so tired of this. I consider myself proship because I really don't engage with fandom. Twitter is NOT a safe space, i just reblog shit over there or talk casually. If i want to feel comfortable expressing my opinions i will do so in discord with my friends. I'm not a white passing latina, I'm neither indigenous, I'm mestiza. When she talked about La Malinche I was like YEAAAAAH! La Malinche sided with colonizers to bring down the Aztecs, we say that with our modern retrospective. For HER it was the opposite! She was sold by her family, enslaved to be treated as a commodity but with her abilities and intellect made a place for herself to FIGHT against the Aztecs, the most powerful empire who were directly oppressing her people. That's why a lot of other indigenous people sided with the Spaniards, because they brought an opportunity to fight against the equivalent of the Roman empire in mesoamérica. Going back to twitter discourse, just to twitter overall. People say "why is no one talking about this" all the time but then never say a word when it comes to something that happens in latinoamerica. What's happening in Brazil, Colombia, the new covid strain in El Peru, there are "what's happening in latinoamerica" carrds like we're some kind of monolith. Sorry if I don't care if people want to draw two fictional characters kissing. It's my only escape when I know I can't go to buy some groceries without the risk of being found in a plastic bag. Sorry for my ramble, I'm just very tired of white saviour complex and rebranded crusaders. I'm also tired of being treated like a minority when I'm in fact not one on my country and Spanish is one of the most spoken languages. Can we go back to the earlier internet days where we didn't have to expose our life story just to being told if we're justified in liking whatever we want? Fandom in spanish is so much better and so much worse. At least everyone stays in their lane. I don't interact with fandom in english to be policed by us centric mentality. Even BIPOC in the US are on thin ice. But it's the language to communicate with most other people in the world. Me lleva la verdura
If kids are following a GoT artist... Then like... They probably have already been exposed to the concept of incest... Through game of thrones bro.... Edit: I hated that about Wynona Earp too! I ended up dropping it after they focused everything on Doc... I like Doc, but i was genuinely enjoying the sort of polyamorous implications of having all 3 of then get together. And then they upend all that bc they're too damn racist. And don't forget Doc's other gf (the latina girl) who they decide is evil after exactly 0 foreshadowing to throw her out of the plot too
I know, right? You literally see Jaime and Cersei fucking in the first episode. They might have a point when it comes to other shows, but incest is a *central plot point* of game of thrones. It's hardly a child friendly show.
I remember when I predicted that Dany/Jon would happen. I thought they'd be married, which didn't happen, but it came pretty close. I remember getting a character attack on me for being pro-incest, even though I said that I thought it would happen, not that I liked the ship. And boy I wish I'd stayed in contact just for the "I told you so" moment I could have had. Not that I don't understand where they are coming from because Martin's...fascination...is kinda creepy.
I think bringing up racism (and also sexism and transphobi)a in fandom is important that even we proshippers, or people who don't care what others are into, need to acknowledge. The reason that racist imagery or drawing the confederate flag like in the incedent is bad is that depicting unquestioned racism & other bigotry in fiction is in itself an act of racism. Making two brothers kiss in a fanfic is not an act of real-life incest that harms the people involved because most people reading that won't suddenly go "oh incest is okay actually" but writing racist fiction in a racist society further enforces these ideas, and it's important to acknowledge that that is a problem.
absolutelyyy. like I'm not "pro" or "anti", i have complicated feelings but I do lean anti censorship, leave people alone over shipping, all that. with incest/age gap/generally problematic relationship fiction it's generally understood by all parties that it's a taboo fantasy they wouldn't carry out irl, but someone writing racist fiction probably genuinely believes in the racist ideologies espoused in it. and things like racism can be subtle and even unintentional in a way that incest really can't be.
I will never harass anyone who draws NSFW art for characters but I will always give a “👀” look if those characters are underage. It just makes me uncomfortable and I have every right to avoid it.
Your feelings are absolutely valid! But not attacking and harassing creators is the right way :) we curate our online experience as much as we can and we can definitely 👀 people in our heads or in a private conversation with a friend. As long as real people don't get targeted & hurt in real life, so thank you
Exactly. That's your right. You can feel uncomfortable With certain content just don't judge people as long as no real world people or animals are harmed
@@OmarAyusoVA I’m new to this whole pro shipping and fandom conversation but as an outsider I still feel off about the claim that it’s ok to draw a child in a p*rnographic way just because no real child was harmed. Like I understand what everyone is saying about purity culture and I agree with most of it but I don’t think we can use that as a defense for CP. To me it’s very reminiscent of what MAPS talk about to justify their attraction and behavior. How much of this is fighting against purity and how much of this is just trying to justify your actions? Isn’t there room for this type of criticism in this conversation? I feel like there was a reason princessweeks didn’t explicitly mention a ship where one person was a child and the other was an adult (not in a they grew up and then started dating way). Honestly it feels weird that I’m even questioning something like being against CP of all forms because I feel guilty, like I’m being to puritanical. Shouldn’t we draw lines? Who gets to decides those lines? How do those lines effect your behavior? Why are you drawing that line? Can I judge you for that line? These are all questions that I wish we could actually discuss instead of making blanket statements of everything is good or everything is bad. We need that nuance. I am new to this discussion so I am somewhat open to talking about these things, but there are somethings like being against CP, that is like a core belief of mine so I’m not even sure what I would get out of these discussions anyway (other than a headache).
@@remytherat2929 1. CP is not a term. CSAM/CSEM is the term. Pornography and abuse shouldn't be mixed in together, for a lot of reasons. 2. No breathing living person was harmed - case closed. People have very skewed meaning of what qualifies as a "child" in art, because drawn people don't have real ages, and most importantly - they can't be harmed or exploited. The point of CSAM being illegal is not whether or not it's "gross", but because it is *direct harm*.
I know this comment is old asf but i want your take on this. I saw this piece of nsfw art that included a stated age difference (teenage girl x older man) and stated rape of said girl. But that same artist had made other lgbt and poc inclusive (nsfw) art in the past, so it caught me off guard for them to make something so problematic. I told the artist to k.y.s. and called them a weirdo. is that justified? apologies if these seems incoherent to read. @@kerstinschwarz5222
As some one outside of ship culture, it's really weird to think of someone putting any meaning or expectation around smutty fanfic. It seems to me like someone watching the porn parody of "the pirates of the Caribbean" and complaining that Elizabeth swan isn't acting in character when she and jack Sparrow get down.
I felt that conclusion on a personal level. I've never had anyone to talk to about this stuff and the way I feel about my own sexuality when I'm SOOO religious and I developed SOOO early. Fanfiction has been a way for me to explore safely. And the way people treat certain things as dirty and horrible and awful just made me feel worse about myself. It was only when I went to college and got more comfortable with myself that I realized I shouldn't feel bad for the stuff I like in fandom. Also, I love that you bring race into the conversation because I'm super white and living in an area where race isn't really talked about in terms of real life stuff much less online stuff. It's great to hear a POC talk about this stuff because it really makes me think and try to be better myself.
Saying Zutara is inappropriate because Zuko is a colonizer feels weird because it is basically another way of saying interracial relationships are wrong… like it’s a literal one-to-one comparison to white and black people dating in the early 1900s, just one or two generations after slavery was abolished… when you put it in the context of our world, I think these people would understand how misguided they are… the fact that someone argued to a mixed race woman that Zutara was wrong because of that is so incredibly ironic
I'm a zutara shipper but what I caught from all of these is just interracial relationships are okay as long as the other one didn't contribute their partner's people suffering but idk anymore
Forming intimate relationships outside of your race actually helps foster understanding between the groups and contributes to reducing inequality. This anti-Zutara argument isn't actually anti-Colonialism, it's anti-integration. Whether it's intentional or not, they're actually spreading white supremacist talking points
Having Katara date a man whose family was responsible for a genocide among her people (the fire nation killed all the southern water tribes water benders) is fcking weird like sorry??? Zuko changed for the better of course but it’s still weird to ship her colonizer with and indigenous women like John smith and Pocahontas just cause John smith was one of the good ones doesn’t make them dating any less weird😭
@@hey4506 It "works" because their world and ours are different and should be treated as such. Like nothing of the tribes are innocent victims. They all overall exploit the Avatar when they pop up. The Fire Nation just wanted the smoke and had to power at that moment to back it up. In other times it was normally the Earth Nation being "The Bad Guys". SO by "our" standards reinforces what Emma said months ago. If men and women can CHOOSE whom to love why is it a problem? Let the narritive play out. What's good for them might not be good for any of us. It's why I personally dislike shipping because I want to see how the creators do it. Since normally fanship are self-inserts of one, both or more characters in the relationship. Like they're dating themselves.
"can we stop using that term to just mean any age gap?" *thank you.* i've seen people use that word to describe ships between two adult characters with a height difference jfc. also i ship jonsa and finnrey. zutara is my sister's #1 otp, probably just for "i'll save you from the pirates" lol. thank you for the candid conclusion. as a pro-shipper (and coincidentally, a fellow anti-reylo), i have to say, i was pleasantly surprised by this video. i'm very much a ship and let ship person, but that doesn't mean idon't have my own notps, or that i don't vent about certain types of shippers on my own blog. the thing is, shipping isn't activism and nothing that happens in fiction ever holds the same weight as anything that happens in real life. i'm sick of seeing people say shit like "don't ship minors", as if real, actual children and not like...voltron characters are being abused. i find that a lot of anti-shippers tend to view shipping as a kind of "fandom politics", and i've been in fandoms where i was assumed to be straight and or "not care about representation" just because i didn't ship the dominant same-gender pairing. there's this idea that if they ship it hard enough, it will become canon, and it is therefore your *responsibility* to ship the most diverse and/or most likely to become canon, pairing. people forget that ships like reylo and korrasami (that were seen as "giving fans what they wanted" by breaking away from the originally planned love story, love them or hate them) are the *exception*, not the rule. i don't care what people ship because fiction and reality's influence on each other is not 1:1, but if i see a trend of bigotry among certain fandoms for certain sips, that's going to jump out.
All of this. Its all a fucking mess. And I really appreciate your emphasis on nuance. Like I feel so many within the pro-ship look at too many things uncritically but the anti-ship thinks because they learn a word like grooming that they understand everything. It's all such a mess and exhausting, and why I'm so afraid of fandom spaces.
I'm pro-ship but I've mostly pulled away from that sphere for exactly that reason. There was precious little nuance on Tumblr to begin with, and it all evaporated once it carried over to Twitter. I still remember the one "anti-anti" (as pro-shippers were called back in '18) who got cancelled after Voltron S6 for saying something along the lines of ppl were falling in the same traps of assuming the ship was canon and ppl had started acting like assholes about it. I remember it being very worded a bit anti-ish myself, but seeing who the poster was, I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Very few others did. And this after years and years and YEARS of standing up for a ship they really did not like, which I never would have guess in their posts because....well, normal people don't think ppl should be killed over any kind of ships. I also remember the accusations against Pillowfort pulling a bait-and-swutch over the banning of a loli artist for rules not yet ironed out. By their own admission, it was wrong and they reinstated the account with a few refund and did as much to make it up as anyone could expect. But the damage was done and the Pro-ship crowd are now throwing their weight behind Fanexus, which is its own drama and bullshit. As bad as the incident was, it was *one time* and the PF owners pull anti harrassment at the forefront of it's TOS. The current rules on child-presentimg art are there mostly due to its payment processor because literally every last one of them have stipulations on that, and I've seen one of the BNF artists throwing a shit fit over that. I am just....so overall all of it. Just don't dox and harrass people 🤷♀️ doesn't matter what side.is doing the harrassing and lying, ya basic.
I think victims of grooming which often include antis know what these words mean And before you cry about it, that doesn’t mean proshippers weren’t ever groomed. But it’s disingenuous to assume these are random people that have never been abused
@@whoknows9085 I wasn't talking about victims of abuse and I wasn't referring to all antis just like I wasn't referring to all proshippers. But to the point I was making, there is a clear difference in learning a word and understanding a word. In my comment, I was using grooming as an example. I've seen cases not just in shipping discourse but also in relationship discourse in general of grooming being thrown out too broadly. For example, a 35 year old being accused of grooming a 25 year old (yes, adults can be groomed too) with the only evidence of grooming being used is that an age difference exists. Yes, a significant age gap can be a sign of grooming even for adult relationships, but that alone is not evidence of grooming (unless referring to a minor then it is 100% grooming). Someone who understands the word grooming would also look for signs of isolation and abuse before throwing an accusation of grooming out there. That said, if there is a case of grooming, proshippers should do a better job at more critically examining their ships just like antis should critically think if a particular ship is actually a case of grooming or not before throwing the accusation out there. The lack of critical thinking on both sides is what I was referring to in my comment, not antis lying about being abused.
@@DrMike18 I understand the lack of nuance in pretty much every internet discussion but a lot of these accusations on grooming are based on something that include the age gap, even when it’s flat out lies Like with the recent poly celebrity news and how the guy was grooming 30+ yr olds. People who didn’t like him would at least make up something like “he’s in his midlife crisis, he’s been doing this” or “he’s their boss and it’s unhealthy”. So unless I know the specific thing you are referring to, it’s kinda hard to pinpoint. You still associated “not knowing the words they used” specifically to antis when this is something everyone does on the internet
@@whoknows9085 Fair enough. It is problematic to paint with such a broad brush. I was speaking more from personal experience with the two camps, and how antis seem to have a bigger issue not using those words properly to express their distaste or valid issues with a particular ship. That said, I would say that proshippers have the opposite problems. Proshippers tend to know and understand those words, HOWEVER, proshippers won't acknowledge when their particular ship is guilty of things like grooming or romanticizing p*dop*ilia because that means unpacking why they're into that ship which might make them feel like a bad person or acknowledge that they got some issues that they need to resolve so they try to ignore and pretend like its not a problem. And, of course, both camps can also be guilty of doing the opposite. I can only speak on the trends that I'm noticing and the differences between the two camps.
I was a bit afraid of this video after all that twitter drama you mentioned, but I basically agree with everything you said. I love that you bring the much needed nuance to this discussion, because a lot of the problems you mention about the proshipping community are exactly the reason why I don't want to be labeled as "proshipper" despite engaging with parts of that ~Discourse~. Certain circles of proshippers are just... really, really bad, and that incident with the confederate flag was the first to bring out the worst parts of these people. Racism in fandom is always brought up as a gotcha in wider discussions about pro/anti shipping, but never ACTUALLY addressed. Fandom lately has been a hellscape, and that really saddens me. Mind you, it is true that a lot of radfem rhetoric can be found in anti circles (and that a lot of their arguments stem from these places), but I've also seen this in proshippers. Because, at the end of the day, there's something deeply personal that permeates these discussions. Liking a ship, or being disgusted by it, often comes from a personal place, from our own experiences (a lot of them painful and difficult to discuss), and no matter how many social justice or even academic terms you throw in, those feelings won't disappear. So, because these discussions are fueled by extremely personal feelings, people get extra defensive about their ships... and ultimately, this means that there can be a lot of different people on both sides who coat their actions in pretty words while still being pieces of shit to others. I've seen so many awful things from both sides. I've seen people driven to suicide over harassment, artists abandoning all social media platforms, people being doxxed and losing their jobs, adults hiding in proshipper discourse to engage in actual grooming or sexualization of real minors, spread of real csem... And in all of this, it's always BIPOC and queer folks (SPECIALLY trans folks) who are the most affected by harassment. But you can't bring this up without it becoming an Us vs Them issue, when that's not the point. TL;DR: Thank you for bringing nuance to this discussion and making a thoughtful video on this issue that doesn't mock fandom people. Edit: Also, that Reylo section brought back all the FinnRey & FinnPoe feelings I had buried after TROS. The endless disappointment I feel with this franchise...
Thank you so much for talking about non-con. As someone who has experienced childhood sexual abuse, the shame imposed on women for indulging in exploring that kind of stuff in a safe way has at times stunted my healing bc SA survivors are dealing with enough unearned guilt, shame and feeling faulty already. I mean young girls and women feel this stuff anyways and for all sorts of reasons, but they aren’t ‘protecting’ people the way they think
As a victim of emotional and mental abuse, thank you. Thank you so much for that, it feels awful seeing others be demonized for trying to use fiction to work out what they experienced. Especially when there is multiple mental health care workers who encourage this as a healthy coping mechanism. It's sad seeing how much fandom has changed in the past 10 years. I remember being 14 and wondering into these spaces an being excited to talk about all these issues without argument. Fandom is basically now just people yelling over nothing and influencing harm over fiction...
very well said. i dont think i personally saw many anti shippers until i got into voltron and was called a pedophile by now ex friends for shipping sheith. at the time it was so viscerally upsetting and now several years later ive seen that accusation levied at myself and others for shipping the wrong thing the wrong way so many times that it feels like the word has lost all gravity. i appreciate your push for nuance bc it doesn't feel like people are really having discussions anymore (especially on twitter) only arguments and it's a shame. i also appreciated hearing your ship thoughts. it's a very good point that fictional characters will always be ageless as we continue to grow. i remember seeing someone on anitwt go "i quit having a crush on this teen anime character once i turned 18 so other adults have no excuse" and it made me kinda sad. i have ships and characters i still like from when i was 14 and im 29 now and i dont feel like that makes me a bad or dangerous person. the separation between fiction and reality was pretty easy for me to understand bc as an ace person, theres a lot i like to fantasize about that i dont actually enjoy doing irl. extending that to certain kinks and fictional relationship dynamics made a lot of sense to me. much as i like proship as a good shorthand for letting new acquaintances know what my general feelings torwards fictional content are, there are a lot of issues w the wider community (if u can call it such) that make me too embarrassed to claim it anymore, like the awful confederate flag "anti censorship" mess my thoughts are all over the place so i hope this comment makes sense. i know ill be thinking about this video and revisiting it often im sure
I hear you, I can relate. I believe that people need to be more realistic and consider that fiction doesnt define our realities that hard. Many people also cope through "problematic" fiction, i do too. I have been told so many times that my coping mechanisms are icky or dangerous or that my trauma is invalid-- with no proof, despite therapists reccommending vent art and fiction as coping mechanisms. People on both sides have gone so far down the rabbit hole. Not only have I seen antis invalidating peoples experiences and s--baiting and doxxing, ive seen immense ableism, racism, and even s--baiting on the proship side. I felt unsafe on the "proship" side despite me holding the "real lives matter more than fictional characters" beliefs
We should be allowed to remember our early ships and fictional crushes with fondness, not with a "yikes". As a wee teen I discovered shipping thanks to Beyblade, and Kai x Rei was my first OTP. Now I'm in my thirties, and even though I've not cared about the ship or Beyblade for over a decade, it's still fun to sometimes revisit the art and AMVs I used to be so into. It's not like our feelings towards our OTPs change much as we age - I don't suddenly turn into a creep that lusts after kids just because I'm old and they never aged. Instead it makes me remember myself at the age when the ship meant a lot to me, and was a way to discover things about myself and comfort myself. I wasn't even very sexual at that age, so I'm unable to see Kai x Rei as a sexual ship. What attracted me to the ship was the camaraderie, the fun childish fandom, and the dramatic fanfics, and that's what I still see in it today.
lol I'm a klance shipper and I've been accused of being a pedophile before. Honestly, i personally don't like sheith due to the age gap and how young Keith was when he met Shiro but i respect other people's preferences about fictional characters. Like yeah, there is an argument to be made that if they were real, Shiro could have been grooming Keith but I personally like the hc that Keith had a crush on Shiro. And as a gay man i would also like to add that that's the reality of many of us. I think almost any queer person can relate to the idea of calling a crush or even a partner a brother or sister because we either don't know how to articulate our feelings towards them or are trying to cover them up. I love the best friends to lovers trope because I can personally relate to it and it's a way for me to explore my sexuality and a coming of age story i never got to have. I'm getting a little off track here but my point is, I respect Sheith shippers but I've seen so much hate for it and the moral superiority complex that some people have over these ships makes me super uncomfortable. Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion but I've seen people say shit like: "Shaladin and Shaladin apologists don't interact" as if we're talking about actual r*pe apologists or something. Y'all are so demonized and for what 😭 anyway i hope you have a good experience moving forward in the fandom (assuming you're even still active) and i hope everyone can just calm down and let people live
Fellow ace just dropping by to say YES thank you. Ever since I was young I consumed nsfw fandom content including problematic pairings/situations but never ever did it cross into my attitudes about real life relationships. I feel like there's also a lack of nuance about what shipping actually means. When I'm consuming content of an incest ship for example, I don't actually want the characters to be in a romantic or sexual relationship. It's just thought provoking/interesting/hot (if the work is good), and in that moment sometimes I'm horny, I'm only human lol. So I neither condone those relationships irl or want it to be canon/headcanon it. So what am I in the eyes of antis? I'd assume that if I'm simply consuming or creating such content, to them I'm just a criminal. To me, I'm an aroace who just likes to explore different relationships through fiction and the work of good artists. Maybe it's because I'm aroace that I don't have any moral alarm bells going off when I see most fan content, since I don't even want "normal" relationships in my personal life haha The convo about whether such fan works should be public (even when properly tagged and such) is much more nuanced and important imo and I'm glad to have it. But straight up calling anyone on one side of the fandom a pedo is reductive. I'm tired of telling people that they're wrong about me but them ignoring that and telling me I'm something horrible that I'm not. I've had to explain too many times about being ace and aro to people who don't fucking care when I'm telling them there's nuance to the human existence and not everyone wants sex or romance. Similarly I'm not explaining that I'm not a pedo to someone who won't listen
I love that you talked about your own reasons for reading noncon stuff. It really REALLY resonated with my reasons. Being raised conservative Christian really fucked me up wrt sexuality
yo, as someone who _was_ 16 when bnha/mha came out, who shipped tododeku and hated bakugo because i'd been through a lot of what he'd done to deku, I feel that! i'm 21 now and don't worry guys, I've grown up alongside bakugo and I _don't_ think horikoshi is a sucky writer anymore, like I cannot _believe_ horikoshi actually pulled off that redemption arc. like, i'm still hella attached to tododeku, still read it when I have the time, but now I have a job, almost have a degree, but i'm also a bitch for bakudeku. smh, I _live_ for childhood friends, so I always knew I was going to be in trouble if horikoshi pulled off an actual redemption arc- which I thought was impossible and i'd never agree with anything he tried to pull. we grow, my dudes, just keep yourself to yourself and stick up for people getting bullied. exclude people who are racist or homophobic, but don't harass or send hate to them. you're not always going to agree with what you used to.
As someone who used to identify as proship, i saw some of the dumbest stuff from both sides of anti and proship. It's not even about ships and how problematic they are, i think we should go wild with what sounds interesting to us IN FICTION. But some proship people think their label excuse them and they still go and harass people over ships. And antis we know what they are doing. In the end i'm just a potato shipping stuff for fun after a work day. We should not make fandom that serious, as long as you respect real people i have no problem with you. Because that's all that matters Have fun with your fiction even if it's weird asf
Like, unless it's pro-racism/homophobia/other obviously bad thing like that, or (loli/shota which is way diffrent from proshipping), I don't see the point of threats and harassment. It's like saying if someone was into violence in media, they are a murderer.
I am not a fan of banning anything but I support trigger warnings. I used fanfic to process some messed up crap that happened starting at age 12. We are all dealing with different things but if you never engage, talk about, or think about something that you need to process because you are “too young to deal with it” then you aren’t being helped, you are being repressed. Also, if we don’t give people the space to have discussions on topics, how will people learn to think critically and look at issues from multiple sides. No ship should be off limits but anyone should have the right to express why they like it or why it squicks them out. Also, as a white woman, hearing BIPOC people talk about how their lens affects how they see aspects of fandom is one of the gunner ways to learn about and examine my own racial blind spots.
I think the most exhausting thing is that I don't come to fandom spaces to have debate. I come as an escape from a turbulent real world. So I straight up don't have the energy to try to explain my perspectives to people when they come for me for x thing they didn't like. I'm very much of the mindset of block and move on. I wish more people, if they weren't genuinely interested in having a conversation, wouldn't start one.
"Cortes should be the slur" I agree! I hate the demonization of women in this context, but I do have an inner conflict with that since my last name is Cortes fgeigfeil
i feel like there do need to be nuances mainly because of the egregious claims people keep making on human character based on cartoons, i mean i saw someone say that if you ok with katara x aang you’re “enabling grooming” because “aang groomed katara” takes like that made me realize 9/10 it’s really just people using buzz words to make others look evil and them as above the heard over such simple things as two characters being in a relationship
Like wat. He's younger and so shit at flirting and communicating romantically it's almost a miracle they got in a relationship in time for the final. Can they just say they don't like it and block tags and people and be done with it...
@@plumenommershpadoinkle7575 I reckon they mean how Aang forced a kiss on Katara in Ember Island Players and was uncomfortably pushy about his feelings. Though I'm with you, the groomer blamers don't seem to know what the term actually means.
@@lottakiljunen8751 ya i agree that was fucked up of him but the show presented it as a teachable moment where katara immediately called him out on it, i rly appreciated them including that bc it showed we’re all capable of messing up & doing bad whether we think we’re the “good guys” or not & we have to make conscious decisions to not be an ass all the time lol
yay somebody else who ships zutara for the same reasons i do! it is surprisingly rare to find someone else who understand that teen girls don't like to date prepubescent boys 😅
@@cremesiccle and he's the only one who went with her to bring justice to her mother's killer AND is one of the ONLY fire nation characters to join the avatar's side and fight against the firelord?? like he can't just stop being the prince what do you want him to do i mean really he should've been with the cute earth kingdom girl imho but hey what can you do
I can't call myself pro/antiship because I don't really respect either side that much, as you said both sides have been guilty of harassment and generally shitty behavior. However, my stance is generally ship and let ship, even if I do avoid people who are a little too into certain kinds of ships. I despise the idea that "preferring a character dynamic" = "your actual real life morals". Or even the idea that consuming or making content about a pairing means you think they'd even make a good couple. I've read a lot of "ship" fics that have made me sick to my stomach, on PURPOSE, because I like dark shit. Fiction should not be equated to reality so flippantly.
I wonder how the conversation went from "Tag these certain tropes that can be triggering to some people" to "How DARE you even like these tropes to begin with!" ?
My philosophy on this whole bugaboo boils down to: "Nothing should be off-limits in fiction, but in that same vein, nothing should be free from criticism." Responsible tagging and an eye for nuance is a must. There are ways of portraying The Badwrong Things Whomst We Dislike that are purposeful and hold merit, and then there are people who use "artistic freedom!!!" as a cudgel to deflect any and all constructive critique applied to their work. Do what you want while recognizing that other people might not want to see it, make sure that everybody knows what they're getting into, and just... Chill out, guys. Fandom is supposed to be fun. Expression is supposed to be for the sake of enjoyment or catharsis. If the majority of your life depends on picking fights with The Badwrong People Whomst We Dislike, no matter which "side" you happen to be on, then consider trying a hobby like crocheting or baking.
Even crocheting and especially baking has it's people mad at people "going about it wrong" I get the baking side since somebody is expected to eat that. But yeah I agree people should be free to create yet man being in these scenes growing up you see some people need limiters because you tell them to go and they *GO*
the thing with this issue that bothered me was that we consistently go after our fellow fans by default instead of engaging in the choices that the writers and producers made. the vast majority of the time I see people talking shit about peers instead of the actual contents and implications of the show that brought people in the same space. great vid
So much of the shipping wars I've seen on the internet has been straight up bullying. It's an excuse to gang up on people, police the preferences of others or take a popular creator down a notch. People get doxxed, shunned, harassed and straight up accused of crimes over shipping, it boggles my mind why anyone would want to turn their fandom into a war zone like that over shipping of all things, but all of them will at some point. When I got into internet culture in the late 90s, shipping was definitely there, but it was all about comfort and escapism, nobody looked at an of it critically, it was just a way to explore and enjoy romance and sexuality outside of real life. I kind of wish things were still like this. Now there's a layer of anxiety over all of it, you've gotta ship the right thing for the right reasons or you are a Bad Person
It's like people just learned how to read subtext from high school lit class, and also decided that you can psychoanalyze people through their taste in fiction. Like in baby's first lit class, they learned that characters can be fake people and also represent things in society in real life. So they read things like Zutara as a person developing a relationship with their oppressor, instead of the very complex relationship they actually had in the show. Couple that with fandom purity and this weird desire to psychoanalyze people through their fandom shit, you get people who are like "how can people like unless they are ". Maybe some people don't see the characters as allegories and just think they are cute together? Like from my experience, most big ships are almost always a simple formula of (how attractive the characters look) * (amount of screen time they have together). That's it. The rest of that mess is more the creator's fault than the fans for failing to represent things in a healthy way, or to give PoC screentime or to not pander to racists. Idk, I don't ship anything. I just think it's weird to draw up a list of brain sins for someone from a one-word portmanteau of their romance headcanons for fake people.
I'm not even a pro-shipper but as a creative writer who often weaves in my own trauma (often in vent writings) into my creations, antis hurt wayyyyyy more than they help.
the anti-shipping mentality definitely took hold on tumblr in 2015/2016. the amount of times i had to see people saying kylo “basically raped rey” and thus the ship was abusive was far too much. and like you, i don’t even ship reylo. don’t even care about either character, i’m black and gay, i wanted stormpilot + jedi finn. however, i also remember very clearly reylos trying to demonize finn, saying he violated rey’s consent or whatever, in order to justify why they didn’t ship finnrey. there are more examples, but overall it was very weird because it was the first i’d seen people use this heavy language to justify why “x” was wrong. it wasn’t enough to just not like something, you had to start a personal crusade on why “x” fans NEEDED to be harassed and erased from the fandom. and as we know, the situation just devolved from there.
Granny moment etc, I remember the shipping wars in the pre-social media era. They were brutal though I think the discourse tended to lean on canon relevance at the time (with exceptions like incest issues). People who enjoyed non-canon ships were the ones demonized. It was a weird time in hindsight.
The anti shipping community was around for way longer Also didn’t the creators verbally describe that scene as non consensual traumatic action from Kylo?
@@Quirderph I don’t even watch Star Wars and I knew that because that’s what all the interviews with these guys and the actors would talk about at the time. OP I don’t think you meant anything malicious through this, but this is how we get people shouting at those who compare the villains to Nazi figures because it’s “too political”. Meanwhile every Star Wars filmmaker (or whoever works on set) would tell you that’s the point, because they are based on them.
Comparing antis with satanic panic feels hilarious and terrifying at the same time. For real, I've been in random spaces for almost 20 years, I never saw this level of harassment and fandom cops 😢
Hi, I wanted to put out my theory for how anti-x-ship became simply "anti-shipper" or "anti". I was using tumblr for literal years, where most of the fandom scene was in, but because of the Great Tumblr Purge due to the nsfw ban, people moved to Twitter. So, two factors at play here: one, is that there's a character limit, so writing "anti-x-ship" is not economical in terms of tweets, and two, time passed and people move fandoms. Whatever people used to justify being anti-x-ship is reflective of their political beliefs, so obviously, it gets carried over to other fandoms and ships. Eventually, I think, that gave rise to just the generic term "anti". I remember even on Tumblr, for example something like Gravity Falls had fans in similar series like Steven Universe, Over the Garden Wall, Star vs the Forces of Evil, etc. So if they were an anti for one ship, they were usually an anti for other similar ships in the other franchises-but in Tumblr, they could tag all that. On Twitter, they can't. I do think that the platform itself has way more to do with all this than most people think. Because of the character limit of tweets, it's extremely difficult to introduce nuance to the conversation, and I do think the way Twitter is structured (a constant feed of tweets ranging from different topics, engagement based, etc) almost actively prevents people from sitting down and thinking or writing critically.
I 100% agree the Tumblr Purge was THE WORSE things that happened to internet honestly. Since some of those people should have stayed on Tumblr. SInce Twitter by design lacks nuance you have to be blunt, stupidly blunt. Like here on YT you can basically write an essay in the comments and if YT bots don't like it *poof* even if it has all that nuance and good faith.
literally been thinking about this on twitter. it's like all you need is the funniest/sassiest/most cutting one-liner to just 'win' a conjured up argument.
Fandoms are super interesting, because they are made up of all different ages and genders. And they all contribute to this 'toxic' culture. You would think someone who is in their 20s would know better, but thats not always the case.
People in their 20s are still people. They're just as prone to going too far, or lashing out when they're hurt or afraid. There's a lot of pressure to be the bigger person because you're an adult, but it's not always easy, especially if someone has managed to hit your exact triggers. I try to be aware of where younger people in fandom are coming from when the drama comes up, but just from my admittedly limited perspective, I don't see much of the same in reverse.
@@keltzy beside being peoples, being in your 20s is still so young. Our frontal lobe only finish closing when we're 25, which is already halfway through this decade of our life. I am not yet 20 but from what I've seen and heard from peoples in their 20s since I was a kid, it's imo still a prime time for learning and experimenting, which means you are bound to mess up. We really shouldn't put so much pressure onto peoples solely because they are of legal age, being 18+ doesn't mean you are a sea of wisdom and control, far from it. And yes, they are definitely still peoples. I do think tho that, as the elder peoples in a ruler-less group, they have more responsibilities than the running 13 y.o, but it doesn't mean they have to babysit them either. Aah regardless, I just wished peoples had a more nuanced view of things and stop seeing only black and white :((
I literally saw someone say that tall people shouldn't date short people because of the power imbalance and how it "looks" like an adult dating a child. As a woman who's 5' 1", that would certainly limit my options hah. I can only hope that one was a troll post and not a sincerely held belief.
Heh. I am a woman that is 4'10", my husband is 6'2". Does it look kind of weird when we walk together? Sure, but that's life. Doesn't stop us from loving each other. Been together for twenty years by now. :) I can present you to my two of my brothers. The tallest of them is 5'6". :P I am sad to say that it probably wasn't a troll. Too many people think really weird things about us shorties.
I'm surprised you didn't bring up Sleepy Hollow again and how Ichabbie was the biggest ship, but the writers sidelined their black female main character for a white woman that they wanted people to ship Ichabod with instead and then killed Abbie off to prop up the white male lead as another example. Cause I will never forget and never forgive.
As a 35 year old bisexual woman the "protect the children!" discourse terrifies me. Don't ppl see how this is used all the time to try to harm LGBT children and teenagers, taking away their acess to content and community cause anything LGBT is seeing as inherently sexual? Also, if responsible adults don't talk to teens abt stuff like sex education, the only ppl who'll talk to them abt sex will be groomers and conservatives who'll make them hate themselves. As a bisexual activist who wants teens to have an easier adolescence than I did, I'm always anxious that this sort of purity discourse will get imported from the US to Brazil (it's already happening, I've seen at least one artist be horribly harassed) and make me be attacked as some sort of pervert for trying to give ppl who are younger than me the tools to protect themselves from perverts.
I was deeply into a few fandoms in high school and the beginning of college (first decade of the 2000s, basically), then kinda drifted away as other responsibilities like having a job and an apartment and stuff took precedent. Once I became financially stable and had more free time, I decided to get a Tumblr (LJ no longer being a thing) and try to get back into fandom... and promptly noped right the fuck back out. I definitely understand that teens tend to be hyperbolic and very black-and-white in their thinking, but I don't *think* we were this bad back in the day? I certainly don't recall people sending death threats to voice actors who express tepid support for the "wrong" ship. (Hell, the idea of asking voice actors about their opinions on ships *at all* is a massive WTF for me. Why do people care what the VAs think? They're just doing their jobs!)
It happened before (I remember Vic Whatever, an USA Voice Actor, saying he thought the character he was voicing was The Straightest and that being used as a "gotcha" in the stupidest ship war I have seen in my life) but now the boundaries are blurred to the point where people harass creators and get mad at them for not confirming their views.
@@drawingsticks5333 I’ll never understand why funimation thought it was a good idea to have Vic, a man that is at the very least uncomfortable with homosexuality if not outright homophobic, voice arguably the gayest character in the anime Free!. Then again, that entire anime dub was just “no homo”-ing everything. So maybe it fits.
This video is so good! I relate so much to what you say in the conclusion. We grow up with so much shame forced down our throats, it sucks that even in fandom spaces that are supposed to be an escape it keeps getting passed around
Me : catradora are so cute together "so you support abuse, genocide, Hitler ? *me being an abuse survivor myself* :what? no ??" I just think the Jock & Catgirl are really cute together '-' "whatever abuse apologist"
I feel like "but what about the children!" has never been a productive way to look at anything. Obviously we are influenced by the media we consume to a degree, but there are so many ways in which children (girls especially) are taught that harmful and sexually inappropriate things are okay by actual real life ~society~. Focusing on the potential consequences of a piece of fiction or artwork seems redundant when they're getting that messaging via the world around them anyway. Is someone going to stay in an abusive relationship because they saw it glamourised in a trashy bodice ripper, romance novel? I mean I guess, but it's more likely to be because the real world told them it was okay. 🤷♀️
☝️☝️☝️☝️ that one I was here 15 years ago for the moral panics surrounding the _Twilight_ books. I ain't gonna defend those book because...no, but the whole "damage to women and girls" was so overblown. Even the staunchest fans noped outta the series after that imprinting on a *newborn baby*.
I quote-retweeted your video on Twitter and commented on it briefly there, but I want to leave a longer comment that I don't have to divide up into batches of 280 characters lol, so this may be a bit repetitive to what you already read. This is a great video, and I appreciate you making it! Racism in fandom spaces really does need to be talked about more, so thank you for discussing it. Like I said on Twitter, my only criticism is I wish this covered a bit more about antishippers because they ARE very vile and I wish more people were aware of what they've done. The things claimed at 29:12-29:31 HAVE happened, they are not rumors or unproven. Antishippers have harassed people terribly, use radfem rhetoric, etc. I've seen it, and I'll link some receipts to these things at the bottom of this comment if anyone is curious. That said, obviously you and your friend those tweets were directed towards did *not* participate in that behavior, and I'm sorry that person jumped on you for something you didn't do or didn't even know about. I think that person was speaking generally, and speaking of actions that others have done in fandom and they got heated because sometimes it feels like no one is listening or taking it seriously. But they shouldn't have taken their frustrations out on you, especially in the manner that many of those comments did, and I'm sorry they spoke to you that way. My one criticism aside, I know this is a long video and you discuss A LOT of important topics, so I understand that you can't go over every little thing in detail in one video. And this IS a really long, detailed video haha, I can't imagine how much time and effort this took to make. I appreciate you going over examples of anti-shipping (throwing around accusatory words, etc) where you did in the sections about specific ships . And I also appreciate you focusing on the greater issue of racism in fandom spaces because that *definitely* needs to be talked about more. I've only just gotten started with making RUclips videos myself and this inspired me to talk about this issue of racism in fandom too in the future if I get into the habit of making videos more often. So thank you again! And here are some links for those curious... Antishippers using radfem rhetoric: twitter.com/dionysiaca/status/1193263490540150784 Links to google docs of examples of antishippers harassing people: twitter.com/lizcourserants/status/1374652873187995651 twitter.com/lizcourserants/status/1232958379632582656
Some proshippers are awful harassers and need to be shut down (especially since being pro ship is supposed to be anti harrassment), but I feel so unsafe interacting with anyone in fandom now, especially on Tumblr and Twitter, due to the insane purity culture rhetoric. It ruined several shows for me, as well as a VA after finding out they were pretty with the anti-shipping rhetoric (they voice-acted in a lot of my favorite shows). I liked that you called out the fact that a lot of them make survivors disclose their trauma, which is not okay. I know a lot of people out of the Fandom loop end up unintentionally promoting purity culture since they don't stop to think about what it actually means a lot of the time. The takes "Fiction affects reality" and "What you like in fiction doesn't determine your morality" are things that can and should coexist, and I wish more people realized it.
FWIW, I feel like "Fiction doesn't equal reality" was shorthand for the fact that not all writing reaches people in equal volumes and that even the most well known of fanfics may reach 100k people at most. Compare that with shows like _13 Reasons Why_ , that get seen by tens of millions. There's also the fact that media is very much the products of the time period they were made in. There likely wouldn't be a mass killing of sharks if someone made _Jaws_ today because people in general are more educated on shark behavior. A movie like _Birth of a Nation_ would never get made today, current political landscape notwithstanding, because most people have at least a topical understanding that racism is wrong. That being said, there's definitely a number of us pro-shippers would upon going to Twitter could really do with touching some damn grass. In particular, the dudebro Loli fans who take anyone saying "I don't like Loli" as a challenge to spam their mentions with porn, which is rude regardless. And then there are the pro-shippers who are really only pro-their ship and act like assholes in fandom where their ship is the majority. I don't even like using the label anymore because of this shit. Bottom line: curate your space, block and mute as needed and just let people live. 😔
Always be transparent with your tags and trigger warnings, people! I'm glad she mentioned that at the end because the best way to protect others is to inform them about the things they may potentially consume
I have a big problem with this weird phenomena of thinking children aren't smart, can't form their own cogent, logical opinions on things, and can't talk about things that might be difficult (I apologize for that mess of a sentence). When I was a kid Nickelodeon gave us our own nightly news program hosted by Linda Ellerbee that talked about the real shit (The Gulf War was going on at the time, plus every other goddamn thing) of the day! And it wasn't candy coated bullshit either. PLUS after the story was delivered there was a panel of young teens who gave their opinions on what was going on! I mean, back then there was this real feeling amongst us kids that we had an inherent value and our minds were our own. Now...I don't know. It feels like we try to hide kids from everything; and I get my generation has lived through one trauma after another but...damn. I'm NOT advocating for showing kids pictures of war crimes and every horrible thing under the sun, but Jesus Christ ask for their fucking opinion once in a while and ACTUALLY listen to what they have to say and just have a damn conversation. Okay, my venting is over. Thank you for attending this TED Talk.
I ship Reylo, I joined the fandom specifically because of Reylo, but I was pretty much blacklisted by a lot of other Reylos at the start because I was vocally supportive of Finn and John. Being black myself, I could see the anti-blackness and outright racism coloring Reylo tweets and the fandom, and even though I like Reylo, I wasn’t for it. I kept calling out the fact that many of them were trying to turn an AAVE joke into something insidious, and oh boy, they did not like that. Fortunately, the outright racists that most people tend to pull screenshots of have pretty much been pushed out of the fandom. I’ve personally run multiple threads specifically to call these racists out, and have helped identify the ConservaReylos who were threatening John or ridiculing his story. UNFORTUNATELY, this relatively small group of Reylos are used as the standard for the fandom as a whole. ShitReylosSay, a huge twitter that targets and harasses innocent people, started out and justify their actions with a handful of screenshots from people we already dislike. Every time a black Reylo, like me, would voice our opinions, we’d be called freaks or color, or accused of faking our blackness.
If it makes you feel better, the team at Bad Robot is very much aware of that ShitReylosSay account and for all that everyone working on the movies dislike Reylos, they view them as an even bigger shit heel for threatening children and telling people to off themselves 👍
Note: Since it be unclear (and I apologize for that) the incident that starts at 21:27 involves proshippers. Of course, MOST pro-shippers are nothing like these folks, but due to their vocal harassment and the way they belittle and talk to people they painted a very toxic brush that reminded me of exactly why I don't view either side as actually "anti-harassment." The toxic people on sides will weaponize whatever they can to make someone the enemy and that creates a place where no one can feel safe. It is sad and unfortunate because the community deserves much better.
Especially those who are just trying to have a good time.
Don't harass people guys. Don't spread fake rumors. Don't be the thing you hate.
Btw, Mai did get married to Zuko, but apparently they got divorced
I really wish this had made the video and wasn’t in comments. I agree with everything you said and trust that I come for people being racist regardless of what they ship but as I’ve said before “I wouldn’t be in the Please Stop Sending Me Death Threats Club if people didn’t keep send me death threats.”
@@RainWhitehart that one
@Erwin Lii Imagine watching a thoughtfull video on how unproductive, harmful to BIPOC women and plain ridiculous it is to utilize important social issues to win ship wars and then going into the comment section to bait a ship war. Stop acting like this is about anything other than you not liking a ship.
@Erwin Lii "Think about when the creators made fun of zutara! (:"
Yes, you are most obviously trying to reasonably explain your personal taste and perspective and you are most certainly not here to rile people up into shipping arguments. /s
"For me, purity culture is dangerous because it never actually helps victims." Thank you for putting what I've been trying to put into words for years since all of this started.
its literally just people weaponising any big bad they can to invalidate other people opinions
This the real why I hated leftist or liberals who desparately sanitized the media especially the lgbtq, they want them to portray them as sexless, perfect angels, it's annoying
"I'm not in fandom to talk to teenagers" This!!! I love 18+ discord servers, not because i want to talk about nsfw stuff 24/7, but because I also wouldn't want to hang out with a bunch of teens in real life.
Do they id you to make sure?
@@lilygirllisa not the ones i'm in, and tbh I would not be comfortable sending some random online person my ID.
@@vanilloia7479 no not the full id but I think you can tell if someone is 18+ or not with some questions
what kind of questions do you mean? I think the honor system has to be good enough, same as the 'i am over 18' buttons a lot of websites have. if someone under 18 sneaks in they then can't complain about seeing 18+ stuff.
I think this does get tricky depending on the fandom, though.
If you’re entering a fandom where the property is targeted towards kids and teenagers then chances are you’re going to run into them. For example Avatar, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Steven Universe, and a plethora of popular properties are targeted towards a younger audience.
I actually think it’s okay to keep that in mind, but if they’re targeted for kids then chances are they’re also for everyone to enjoy as well.
Not to mention these properties were also created by adults, so there is also that.
ok my last comment, the zuka and zutara thing. the descendants fandom is so guilty of the treated the darker skin woc badly compared to the rest of the characters. people will find every excuse not to ship uma (the black girl) and the white heartthrob of the movie, harry, together but have no problem shipping him with men and white girls he barely interacted with.
Omg so felt on how characters of colors are always excluded from being shipped in favor of white or queer ships that make no sense and don’t even get me started on ACTUAL queer and queer coded who get excluded from being shipped at all but the fandoms will ship characters who are straight or coded straight.
idk much about who I'd like uma with but they definitely gave her the SHORT *SHORT* end of the stick
@dew drop speaking as a black woman , my take is less that ppl ship white characters outta overt racism and more than creators give the lion's share of character development to white characters and ppl ship them because of that. It's basically the same issue, but a different root source.
At the end of the day, there's not a single aspect of American culture specifically that racism hasn't tainted since 1619 and that includes fandom spaces. I'm glad that fandom has conversations but it's the online equivalent to shaming your neighbor for eating beef when the oil companies pollute more than all the cattle farms combined.
Fandom can and does shift more quickly that society as a whole: you'll notice a shift in how m/m characters are written now versus 20 yrs ago, and that even for shit that is cringe now, it was still ahead of everything in mass media. As in, fic had more than one queer pairing, a thing that didn’t happen on a mainstream show before Glee (granted, there were shows like The L Word and Queer As Folk, but those were behind an HBO paywall)
I guess what I'm saying is people need to take the pressure to where it'll actually do good: the studios and the execs who give the go-ahead. Not fans, and not VAs with their own opinions they spew for clout. Say what one will about the Voltron fandom, but that tacked-on wedding based on outside pressure from fans after that SDCC event is something many of us olds never thought we'd see on a kid show. Was it bad? Yes. Was it satisfying? Absolutely not. But it sent the message that ppl were tired of being baited and if it played a part in She-Ra getting the ending it did, that's a net win.
There's too many fans to go after to make a dent in discouraging them from shipping white characters (and frankly, us BIPOC are there in those ships too, getting even more harrassment as Princess pointed out in her tweets!), but we can absolutely tag studios on bad blunders like the Voltron fiasco.
@@KariIzumi1 you said this so eloquently i’m in love with your comment. this hit every target and some more i didn’t realize we’re even targets you are amazing.
There's also the fact that the series itself promoted the hell out of the lighter skinned villain in the next movie (doing multiple remixes and solo versions) despite Uma being, umm, a better villain in every way lmao.
Also the fact that the only main roles black women got in that movie was as Angry Black Villains :/
If I see a ship I don't like or content I'm uncomfortable with I take it upon myself to do the correct measures to avoid it. I don't see what harassing people does. It does more harm than good.
Dobby X Draco Malfoy
this will hold up forever
This problem of purity culture isn't restricted to fandom. I once had a difficult conversation with an editor about a story we were developing. They took exception to my inclusion of child sex abuse in the narrative (none of it depicted on screen, but it informed the backstory and motivation of the lead character) and thought it was outside my place to talk about these things. That what I was engaging in was morally objectionable and I was 'using' other people's lived experiences. I had to explain to them I was relating my own lived experience as a csa survivor, directly, and the story as a whole was a way of channeling the experience through fiction, but because I didn't fit their preconceptions of a 'survivor' it never occured to them to approach it from that lens.
They thankfully apologized, but its still something which has made me uncomfortable trying to talk about my experiences knowing it can get that reaction even in professional spaces.
I'm so sorry you had to reveal such personal information, especially in a professional setting! That's upsetting.
This is the kind of behavior I've seen a lot lately. People saying you can't create content that even mentions certain lived experiences, despite having good reason to believe you've done your homework on the matter, and basically requiring that you disclose highly personal information about how you relate to your content before you're left in peace. In fandom spaces, that translates to bullies (usually antis but not exclusively) pestering people to disclose their traumas before they're taken even remotely seriously when defending themselves from personal attacks.
The idea that people need to be abused, for literally any reason. Is just directly wishing harm upon others. Like imagine hearing "yes Im an abuse victim" and feeling relived, because that was a requierment they had to fill for you.
Even if it is someone else's experience, as long as you're doing your research and handling the subject with proper respect and gravitas, I don't see the problem. Not to mention it's your own experience, in our limited life, we have no chance to experience many of the things others experience(yes, many of them are things we'd never want to experience, but my point stands). If we as writers or content creators started avoiding all 'other people's lived experience', then there would be no creative endeavours. At least, not good ones.
Besides, if we never explore the experience of others because they're traumatic and uncomfortable, we'd never be able to properly understand them. And the sympathy and sidestepping we show to seem 'caring' would only be a shallow gesture. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, as we don't like to feel discomfort, but we can't start barricading others willing to explore.
"i felt like i had to perform to be loved in real life so there were pieces of myself i had to smother and push down" brb i'm bout to go cry cause i felt this so hard. fandoms on the internet really were (and are still) the only places were i could be myself which is why i hate it to much when people cause stupid shipping drama (also racism) within the space.
Yep, same here.
Agreed.
1:15:45 So SICK of "protecting the children" being used as an excuse to vilify EVERYTHING while at the same time ignoring _actual_ problems facing children. It is disgusting.
that was a huge draw of the satanic panic. You want to believe that the only people who'd harm children are these suuuuuper evil satanic Outsiders who can easily be ousted from the community. Not their immediate family members. i recommend the Behind the Bastards episodes on it, they go into detail on how people realizing Child Abuse is a Thing quickly turned into 'we must find the witches'
ikr
"won't someone think of the children" quoth every serial child rapist Catholic priest
like how people care more about House Elves than they care about the slavery that still exists world wide?
@@kaiyodei Not quite the same. That's more an issue of wanting to dwell on issues facing fictional people - even if they're the same as ones real people are actually dealing with - as you can focus just on what's in your own little playhouse; you don't _have_ to think about real people, but you can still argue "real issue bad" and feel better about yourself. It's related, it's still immature and bad, but not quite the same.
"Fandom Culture ends up being a hive mind of whiteness"
Quote of the century.
If this isn’t the truest thing I’ve heard
The saddest commonality of every fandom I have dipped a toe in Dx I'm trans and white, not terribly picky about a lot of things, but it upsets me that POC get harassed literally everywhere and very often over the fakest of shit Ie: characters that aren't real and will never suffer when people do fanart of them... :C
Fr!!!
Fr. I love Black stans/nerds/anime fans!
Pretty much.
I used to be so invested in this and then I started going outside more and I realized that there are more important things than fictional characters kissing and f**king. Looking back at it with my head clear it seems so ridiculous that people have been chased off the internet and had their lives ruined over what fictional characters they like to see in the relationship. As well as the countless young people who grow up in an online environment where they have to feel shame and walk on eggshells for fear of being called out.
lmao you literally touched grass, great for you tbh
Same lol goes to show how trivial and stupid all of it is when you got bigger things to deal with that’ll actually impact your life, was a refreshing wake up call, i’m a lot less involved in any fandom space since
It makes a lot of sense tho. I get cutting your writing teeth on romance and or smut using other people's characters. Yet at some point you gotta grow up and USE YOUR OWN. Since people are gonna get pissed off at how somebody else does their character(s). This is because the scene was overall never allowed to grow up and or some fans have a valid reason to not have something romanticized or sexualized. Since I been in the fanfic/fanart scenes some people get vile, do to much and know zero chill. Not everybody's smashing, this one character is the fanfic "hoe" or these characters are gay because they talked to each other. Some people wanna watch the show not others pint-up fantasies.
but you do know people will loose their mind at, like "anti gnome discorse" right?
I mean so much of it is based around a “think of the children” mentality, but the kids are some of the most rabid consumers of the smutty dirty wild shit
the funniest byproduct of this shit is having legit trauma from being harassed across the internet for YEARS and then trying to explain to your therapist it's bc you shipped two characters from a webcomic who were sort of clones sort of related by virtue of timetravelling slime
Traumatizing flashbacks of homestuck shipping wars. Hell.
i wonder what a therapist would say to "they are being mean to me because I draw Bart Simpson X Otto porn"
Homestuck??
@kirakira i see others state drawing childXadult porn and looking at it is not a good way to deal with trauma.
i wonder if the same can be said for racist attacks. ":hey cheer up and watch Song of the South if you can" "here look at some old racist drawings"
Which homestuck ship is this 😭 omg
I think it's so interesting the way that teens on screen are so often not only portrayed by adult actors, but kind of written like young adults? I mean, they're sometimes immature, but they're immature the way a 20 year old is immature - kind of self absorbed and drama obsessed but still like, able to talk to the opposite sex or deal with interpersonal issues without intense awkwardness, foot shuffling, eye contact-avoiding, weirdness that I remember in my teens. And there is a very good reason for that - watching teenagers act like teenagers isn't ... very interesting. They're awkward and sarcastic and weird, and that's just kind what that stage of life is. So to make the stories interesting to watch/read, they're kind of aged up in behavior, if not literally.
I actually think there are important discussions to be had about how this affects the way we, as a cullture, think about teenagers and their maturity level, when so much of our media portrays them with young adult actors acting like young adults.
But then I see these witch hunts, where adults are watching adult actors acting like adults, engaging with them like adults, kind of thinking about them as adults, and then romanticizing them, and suddenly those people are "pedophiles," and it's like... idk, guys. Seems extreme to me.
I've noticed that too! Back when I still bothered to watch Riverdale, I kept thinking that having the characters be in college (at LEAST) instead of high school would've made way more sense for who those characters were. What teenager tries to solve their problems by hopping up on a stripper pole? What teenager owns and runs their own bar? The show still would've been a mess, but you get my point.
It's a weird thing. It's sort of hard to remember your high school years even when you've recently left it behind. I think there are people for whom high school was so hard they'd rather forget it and start to integrate into adult life. It's also kind of embarrassing and hard to remember how immature you were at that time. It's very hard to recreate. If more teen movies were accurate they'd have many scenes of teenagers waiting for stuff to happen or waiting for someone to drive over to them.
Right. I think of Avatar the last Airbender: The main characters are 12-17 years old, and while they do act age appropriate oftentimes - they‘re actually in realy mature and responsible places in their lifes: They travel all by themselfes to escape war threads (or for adult status like honor), they fight with enourmous power and fighting techniques and doing so many quests to end a war. Like in the end Aang would just be 13 years old but strong enough to fight a skilled adult firebender at highest power, to help end a war and flip the way an entire country is lead. Effectively the all are adults.
@@Alina_Schmidt the sad thing to me, is in Avatar, the characters tend to be a tiny bit closer to "historically accurate" to cultural notions that a 15 year old king could rule an entire nation or that 14 year old women could raise kids because you had to have as many children as fast as possible to make up for dreadful mortality rates. D:
ATLA characters still manage some insanely complex situations in ways I'm not sure a group of kids could manage either, but compared to shows like Riverdale it's strange that it feels a bit more "realistic" in spite of elemental magic and flying bisons xD
I also understand why this is done because whenever I read a book where teenagers act like teenagers, there are large parts where I want to scream at the characters for being idiots.
If they had made Finn's character the main character and centralized the really interesting and important idea that maybe every human being in stormtrooper armor isn't disposable, those movies might have been good. What a great idea that they did nothing with. They even bring it up again in the last movie only to again do nothing with it.
That's what's missing, I thought they were gonna do that 😭
In that sense, could have been worse. Could have been Kurt Vimmer directing.
I know! I was so excited for that angle of humanizing the stormtroopers behind those monolithic masks, that's the kind of story I would have loved to see in the new trilogy from the beginning. It stinks of wasted potential :(
At first i thought you were talking about adventure time, then i realized
I stopped watching because they kept pushing his character further away from any sort of big role (in my perception) and he was LEGIT my fave character from the start :( it's really sad how much potential was wasted
You know, it's funny because I have been watching a lot of videos on Christian fundamentalism, so when I hear "purity culture" I think a lot about the mindset from the Evangelical church that people (ESPECIALLY WOMEN) need to "save themselves" for marriage, and to do otherwise is an affront to God. And I find it very similar with this kind of mindset in fandom. If you had sex with your high school boyfriend, you are a chewed-up piece of gum who no self-respecting man wants to marry. If you ship Zutara, you are a racist, a sexist, imperialist, and pro-abuse.
Also, sometimes the ignoring of context- like sure that person who’s a freshman is dating a junior *kinda sus maybe?*
But actually the freshman got held back a year and the junior is younger than most his classmates so what people made seem like a sus teenage gap is actually more like 1 year they’re just in different life circumstances.
(Totally made up example there, but I think it gives off what I mean? It’s like broad generalizations and ignorance of time, circumstances, etc. and it’ll get out of hand fast with people immediately jumping from zero to pedo in light speed).
Yes totally. It's more of a MENTAL purity, since.the vast majority of material is writing or art where literally no one is being touched or having NSFW things done to them... xC our minds are chewing gum that will never be unchewed?
God, THANK you. Absolutely right.
This is exactly what I thought thr video was to be about: how biblical patriarchy affects fandom.
for an especially fun time, combine the two by consuming nsfw fandom content as a repressed christian teen
"How is it pedophilic to ship two people who ARE THE SAME AGE?"
FINALLY! Yes, this!
Yeah one lesser talked about aspects about this discourse is there’s this gross implication that of you ship two characters you automatically want them to have sex which is kind of ironic that it’s an “Anti” position because that implies that their mind goes these places. In a strange way, it kind of mirrors how real life purity culture sexualizes minors ,but in a different sense
I've found it's always been about not letting the fat neckbeard enjoy things. Even if they enjoy the same things.
I think it's okay to ship minors and minors if it's not sexual. I've read of minors harassing minors before irl, and it grossed me out. It's not pedophilic, but it can be problematic
@@chockitkat3776 Agreed.
It is a little weird when people in their 30s want two kids to bang tbf
As someone that was both involved in fandom and was groomed as a child, I really have a hard time with conversations about grooming in fandom. As a teenager, I found myself leaning towards and reading a lot of "problematic" and nonconseual ships. I haven't introspected on why that was too hard; maybe it had nothing to do with my history of abuse and I just liked the dark, angst as a teenager, or maybe something about exploring such a personal topic through fiction--which is relatively safe--was comforting. I honestly don't know. Obviously not every survivor will feel the same way about it. For many people, these are triggering topics that should be avoided.
I guess my problem comes from people speaking for me, or fellow survivors speaking as though their experience is the only one. While fiction about topics such as grooming have the potential to be harmful to someone for whom grooming or abuse is a trigger, I personally don't think shutting down conversation or calling people who choose to write about those things problematic helps anyone. I don't think writing about the topic normalizes it either. As long as everything is sufficiently tagged and/or warned for, survivors can make their own informed choice about rather or not to engage with a ship or topic.
exactly! ppl treat fiction as something rigid that is the same for everyone. the thing about consuming stories is that everyone will perceive it different. what is triggering and disgusting to some can be amusing to others with same backgrounds
I’m also a survivor and like fanfics like this and I’m not entirely sure why that is. But during the worst of it those kinds of works helped. I think for me it was kind of like taking back control over what had happened to me because I couldn’t do that at the time.
@@luizabianco Oh, absolutely. I 100% agree. Everyone has different reactions to difficult or triggering works, and, as I mentioned, I think thorough content warnings and tags are the best way to ensure that survivors--or even just people who don't want to engage with troubling or problematic art--can choose what media to interact with. I've never personally experienced being recommended something romantic or sweet only to discover that it's abusive or non-con , but I'm so sorry that you have; while I do enjoy dark works, I know I have to be in the correct mindset to go into something like that and missing the appropriate warnings or expecting fluff only to be greeted with something dark and abusive sounds devastating.
and it helped you heal right?
honestly "dark content" that resembles my trauma comforts me sometimes. when it comes to fanfic sites like ao3 most authors are considerate and tag everything properly
"Fandoms moralistic need to justify to everything they like validates peoples bad behavior" too true, cause I often see people in hyper anti spaces treat bullying as a "necessary evil" to keep the peace, where they treat your actual behavior as secondary in importance to what you like in fiction.
Yup.
thats tea actually
couldn't agree more. even IF a person is actually condoning bad behavior in their fanfic/fanart/etc. -- which is rarely the case! -- two wrongs don't make a right.
Exactly. I create content for a problematic ship, and seeing people say it's gross to other likeminded creators is one thing - like, sure, that's your opinion and I have mine. But then seeing people say stuff like "I'd beat those artists up" or "You wrote non-con, you should be r//ed yourself to know what its like"… it's crazy.
@@hana-a-cha yeah fiction is a way to explore things in a safer space. It does not mean you actually want to have this done to you/ do it to someone else.
Folding Ideas covers that really well in his first video on the 50 shades movie series.
Basically it can be thrilling to explore loss of control, from the safer vantage point of fiction.
Discussions about problematic ships frequently delve into the nonsensical. I remember stumbling upon posts that argued short characters were "minor coded" or that characters should only interact with people within 3 years of their age. I know that a lot of this discourse is likely created by young people, but the echo chambers and infighting cultivated by framing literally anyone who disagrees with you about something as banal as shipping as evil is tiresome
People lay down arbitrary standards of appropriateness and use those standards as cudgels to beat back people they disagree with. You can't simply dislike a ship it has to be "problematic". I advocate for fandom spaces with a more ship and let ship attitude. Not because I'm against nuanced conversations about ships (i genuinely encourage everyone to think critically about the media they consume) but because I don't think people should be moralized for how they engage with fandoms in a more broad sense.
They're so incredibly boring, back in my day we shipped our Enemies to Lovers without worrying about such silly things.
@@natf7942 I KNOW I LOVE ENEMIES TO LOVERS but ive been called an abuse apoligist💀
@@robertsmithfan877 Ugh. It's so ridiculous and annoying. Look, if something triggers someone and they have issues with it because of their own life experiences or they just don't like it, that's fine. If someone doesn't like something because they find it abusive I'm not going to try to convince them otherwise. It's just the weaponisation of social justice that drives me insane because like it's said in the video, some people like to use fiction to explore darker parts of themselves and it's a safe way to do it. Acting as though enjoying a ~~problematic~~`` relationship means you endorse the same behaviour in your own real life relationships is absurd.
The way people do this is literally to just shut down discussion and attempt to try to "win" the argument, nothing more or less. Enemies to lovers is the best and performative little asswipes who want to tut tut me for enjoying fiction can fuck off. I've shipped Spike/Buffy since I was 15 and strangely enough it never made me want to get with a guy who'd punch me in the face or who'd previously tried to kill me, it's almost like there's no correlation and I'm able to tell fiction from reality. Who knew?
@Books vs Movies THANK YOU. LIKE LITERALLY THANK YOU
@@natf7942 yeah exactly! Fiction is a place where things can be explored more safely.
I really enjoy age gab stuff, and offer "star-crossed lovers" fiction.
It gives the characters a great dynamic, and naturally leads to problems they have to overcome if they want to continue the relationship.
That don't mean I support relationships in real life with unhealthy power dynamics. Those relationships just don't work in real life and I'd never want to be in one.
One of the things that I have noticed with purity culture (and I know it has been talked about before) is forcing content creators to disclose their trauma or past or sexuality or whatever to fans who feel like content creators need to meet a checklist to be allowed to write/draw/participate in specific topics. Ive seen it happen with fanfic, podcast, even television shows. And while I understand the instinct to want content about a topic to be created by creators who have lived that topic, it is never right to force someone to disclose something they don't feel comfortable with.
This is, of course, a complicated topic because I do feel that representation is super important and like you said in the video people can and do lie about their identities online and I dont really have a solution. But i thought it was related a bit to what you where talking about.
+1
For some people, it's unsafe to disclose this info and to demand it from them is insane
two fairly recent instances related to this come to mind: the cancellation of lindsay ellis (upon which in an attempt to clarify everything she had to open up about her sexual assault) and columbo (a closeted fanartist who was doxxed and outed to his very conservative family).
Not only do they force creators to rehash their trauma, if it’s not ‘acceptable’ or doesn't look like what THEY think trauma should look like, the creator gets critiqued, belittled, and made fun of. I’ve seen this in real time.
Literally exploring dark topic in fiction helped me a lot to discover myself and deal with my childhood trauma.
It has even helped me with intrusive thoughts, making them less usual, people who try to chastise others over lines on paper or pixels on a screen really need to re learn how to properly be in society because there are more important things like the real people they interacting with.
Thank you for making this video ❤
HELLO SATANICK FANBOY!!!
As someone who got into to okegom, I did not really liked, but later that I found how victims of csa use dark media cope trauma i understand okegom/funamusea even more.
Mogege :3
YES me too its helped with intrusive thoughts a lot, like i used to hate myself and feel intense shame every time i had any 'problematic' intrusive thoughts but its way easier now for me
_"If you started watching MHA at 16 when it began you're 21 now. That was 5 years ago."_
I NEED THIS VIOLENCE TO STOP!
I find it interesting how much fandom drama is women vs women. There are many men sexualizing teenage girl characters or writing age gap relationships and they don't get the hate that random women on the internet give each other for fanfiction. ETA I haven't finished this video yet and will come back to it!
Exactly
Oh, don't worry, if they're gay and/or trans men, they WILL get the same level of bs women get :') The thing about the dudebro-type of men in fandom is that they hang around completely different circles, so they don't get the harassment. But they will hop in the discourse in whatever side serves their interests at the moment (they co-opt proshipper discourse to defend their hentai, but they also co-opt antishipper discourse when it comes to gay ships that disgusts them).
@@mekinot yeah as a gay trans guy i def get this. people are mad that i ship snape and harry, and all i want is some good old power dynamics ffs. let me have my problematic content thank yOU
For real. Dudes are free to enjoy all the villains they like but when women like them it makes us abuse/rape apologists and Nazi supporters. So exhausting.
I feel like a lot of that might be down to some form of internalised misogyny.
Not saying that's the case in all situations, but I've definitely seen the whole "oh no, a woman who is completely comfortable expressing sexual and/or romantic things when I'm not! I must put her down to feel less insecure about expressing my own thoughts and view myself as morally superior!" thing.
It's upsetting but I'm glad I've found some spaces that aren't like that in the internet.
Can't tell you how exhausting it was to be a zutara shipper AND an indigenous woman during the ATLA resurgence while all these "colonizer" hot takes started poppin up. WAY too many white kids yelling about things they don't fully understand tbh.
Excellent video, btw! I'm not a pro-shipper in the slightest, ultimately I'm just a human with my own limits on what's ok and what isn't but I'm grown enough to understand that there are responsible ways to consume problematic media. So long as triggering content is tagged appropriately so that ppl like me don't have to see it, I've learned to be fine with it. It's been a hell of a lot healthier for me and my trauma, personally. Likewise, we just need spaces to discuss the concerns with these problematic elements without turning everything into some moral superiority contest.
you cant call them colonizers.... its a bit racist tbh as not all white people are colonizers
@@MackenziiRivers
I don't think she was referring to the people making the posts as colonizers. I think she means the hot takes had to do with Zuko being a colonizer.
@@MackenziiRivers freudian slip lmao
@@MackenziiRivers I think they’re referring to Zuko being from a nation that is imperialistic and trying to bring the rest of the world under its control.
@@MackenziiRivers hoping your NOT another random internet kid trying to explain what colonizers are to me...
"team f them kids" lmaoooooooooo that reminds me how i be forgetting im not always on the internet. at my job one day this kid said something rude to me and i checked them so fast on it. i have no problem checking rude kids in my comment section, like you do not talk to people like that especially over having an opinion (good or bad) on a fictional character.
i love how much ur all over this comment section askldfjasl;kdfjalk ur one of my fav creators so seeing u in this makes me happy ^^
Children saying the dumbest things about characters with zero nuance and showing they have zero life experience really is the worst. Makes me glad the internet was totally different back in the early 2000s when I was a teen because I mostly lurked and didn't post my childish thoughts all over social media for the world to see.
It's so hard to explain the 'they're not aging' feelings. Probably even for my earliest ships that I got me into fandom and I think this was true for a lot of people... I was a teenager? I was teenager when i got into fandom shipping people who were older than me and I grew up and then didn't and that's kind of weird to wrap your head around if you've been shipping them or whatever the entire time? and someone will be like 'ur sexualising minors' and I'm like 'i forgot I thought they were still older than me i've been here since I was 12' Like I'm not writing my favs as people in their mid-twenties because I want to age them up for smutty purposes. nah. they're living out my fantasies of having a mortgage and friends who go grocery shopping with them.
That's one of the things (among many) that made me go O_o from Sarah Z's video. Out of respect to Princess, I won't nail my 95 thesis on that here but saying that people shouldn't age up characters ignores the fact that so many do it for reasons other than sex. But even apart from that...this happens in some series naturally? [Wizard series redacted] is the most famous example of this, and even then I have seen a Tumblr post of someone accusing the author of being a pedo for "imagining" the lead and his now wife banging to make three kids in the epilogue. I mean, of all the tens of dozens of legitimate grevances one can make about that series and especially the heinous views of the author herself, THATS the hill you want to die on?
I posted that one to Facebook and it was the first time I'd seen liberals and the few conservatives I still had following me pre-COVID uniting in laughter at how stupid this was, because at the end of the day, that's what non-fandom ppl see: nerd wanking about fictional characters. They see you crusading to save Deku from being used by "suspect people," they'll ask why aren't you spending the time going after those who attack real children.
@@KariIzumi1 did we all grow up Lutheran?!😂🤦🏻♀️
LMAO I’m more considering converting to Judaism, I’m just a history nerd, lol
@@KariIzumi1 When did Sarah say that you shouldn't age up characters? I don't remember that. I remember another YTer saying that, but not Sarah (not attacking you, just genuinely curious)?
100% this. I can’t remember the last time I read a fic in my fandom that had the characters the same age as canon. They are all aged up, because the fans grew up.
This is the sanest take on proshipping I've seen from a larger content creator, and honestly as a black woman who's been in fandom since I was around 12 or 13, I always feel anxious when opening a youtube video about fandom if only because a lot of ytubers tend to fall back on shaming shippers and the parts of fandom that indulge in darker tropes (albeit unintentionally). This vid was overall very validating to listen to as a person who indulges in pretty much everything you've talked about here!
Your points were very well thought out, nuanced, and I appreciate your efforts to open a dialog about purity and race in fandom.
There’s a whole holiday celebrating Esther, people dress up in costumes and have parades, people give food to the poor, they drink a lot of wine, there’s these cookies called hamantaschen which are really good
I feel like most other ytubers, when talking about these issues, don't actually think it through or have much personal history dealing with this stuff in fandom. they just see the loudest, most confident takes on twitter (which tend to be pretty anti) and just assume that those takes are probably right and mindlessly regurgitate them (especially since they often don't have much personal stake due to privilege, and don't want to look "problematic")
"Who CHEATED on her! With a ghost!" As someone who's never seen the vampire diaries this had me rolling. 🤣🤣🤣
SAME HAHA
that thing you said about purity culture creating an environment where we feel we need to JUSTIFY behaviour MEANT as problematic by the author/creator/etc. is so true!! i never even realized that dimension of it. and the fact that purity culture is taking the enjoyment out of "evil" things in fiction - when fiction is SUPPOSED to be for exploring darker things sometimes!
It's ironic because all it does is make people twist themselves into knots justifying shitty things their favourite character does instead of just realising you can enjoy and even love characters who do shitty things? Because liking something in fiction doesn't mean you endorse the exact same actions IRL? It's so frustrating because wiping the flaws away from characters just leaves you with stanning your own perfect headcanon of what said character isn't even in reality. So you don't even like them, just some made up version that's never made a mistake in their lives and it's bizarre.
Ok, let’s take for example Killing Stalker. The author claims it’s a not supposed to be read as a romance, that it’s a depiction of abuse (yet she reposts fanart of the two men on her twitter), however teenage fans do not see it as problematic. It’s rare when problematic media is read as problematic, it’s often romanticized. How you justify that?
@stupidfucking dinosaur Maybe it’s because the author can differentiate their original canon work from fanon interpretations of Sangwoo and Yoonbum together? Also, teenagers don’t know any better?
In other words, teenagers don’t know any better in the sense of the takes that they make in their early young adult lives. School teaches critical thinking, and reading comprehension, as well debate them on to look at the other side of the argument they might be against. I mean, when it comes to teenagers that get involve in fandom, some tend to get overtly passionate and obsessive. Yeah, I could just say they get ‘cringey’, but I’m not a fan of that word, and I’m tired of peeps mocking teenage girls interest by calling it cringe. Been there, done that during my teen years being obsessed with certain media.
Killing Stalking, is a adult Korean comic, the dark subject matter surrounding the story is not intended for any minors. Though, minors get curious and look anyway even though they have been warn about the content that is within the story might not be something they are not prepared for or comprehend. Comprehend, in terms of what they are reading and how they navigate is gonna vary from person to person when they start developing their taste in certain media. Their really isn’t any guide for teenagers on how to navigate their interest in terms of sexuality and attraction that develop overtime, especially LGBT+ peeps. It’s also one of those reasons why sex ed. is so important as that can help a individual understand consent and boundaries. I understand in the way I write this might make teenagers seem like they don’t know any better, I’m just writing this piece within my perspective of navigating through dark media even though I didn’t comprehend them at first until I got out of high school. Which is one of the reasons why you tend to get those teens that recommended Killing Stalking to someone that just watched Yuri on Ice as there is a lack of understanding on the part the stories have very different themes going on in terms of relationship dynamic.
@@natf7942 YESSSSS FACTS
@@supporter6014 that's a failing in teaching people how to consume art.
It's not on a creator to design their art, so no one can ever misconstrue it. It's on the one consuming the art to know the difference between reality and fiction.
It's not that hard to know that fiction is fiction and that fiction should not be replicated in real life.
Parents and teachers should be making sure to teach children how to actually engage with the art they consume. That's what education is about, it's why we teach the humanities. At least when it's taught by good teachers and with proper funding. But that's a different problem >.....>
I enjoy plenty of power dynamic romances (age gap, wealth gab, boss subordinate, ect). Doesn't mean I've ever been like man you know what's healthy in real life, my partner have some huge power dynamic over me. That's what I want in my partner! (Been reading this stuff since 9th grade)
Now I'm not saying you can't have more and less ethical portrayals of problematic things. Framing is super important in those kinds of stories. There are stuff I read that after one chapter, I'm like noooooope.
But also not everything needs to illustrate why it's bad to be like this. It can be fun to consume trash.
My view towards shipping is very basic:
1. Don't ship real people
2. Have fun
3. Don't ruin anyone else's fun
preach
Also don't accuse people of pedophilia, send death threats, harrass, incite violence or tell someone to seppuku themselves over a drawing
@jayvhon calma if you ship a child and adult and think it's cute and fun and healthy you are a pedo no argument, if you think a fully grown adult banging something that looks acts and sounds like a child is hot, you are a pedo
And don't ship minors 💀
@@DrClock-il8ij That one's iffy only due to the age of the shipper. While I was a minor, did I ship minors? Yeah, deffo. Now that I older, do I still do it? Absolutely not! I have a hard time watching anime now because most of the time the characters are in high school! XD
"the noncon fic was a way for me to read about someone having no control and enjoying that" I think you just put into words something I had buried deep in my brain, and I gotta say it feels so good to let it out and have it exist without the negative light I'd apparently unconsciously attached to it
People who claim that shipping kid characters together is pedophilic seem to always say this about gay ships specifically. It's almost like gay love is seen as inherently dirty compared to straight love...
*cough* Romeo and Juliet laws (in some US stares) that are supposed to protect people who are minors getting with minors and minors transitioning to adult hood from being persecuted for hooking up- are only there for straight people.
If a gay teen and has sex with their teen partner even if they’re only 1 or 2 years apart it’s technically illegal. People really do be thinking it’s somehow more dirty or immoral
REAL AND TRU AND YOU SHOULD SAY IT
this
no WAIT maybe your talking about actual sfw stuff, but genuinely i see this being said about people who draw nsfw of children so maybe your should clarify this
@@nmclick Shipping =/= producing nsfw, I think we all can agree producing porn in any form is crossing a very different boundary compared to "I think X and Y would look cute together"
Totally agree with a lot you have to say in this video! As much as I do think there should be space for talking about problematic themeing/implications in shipping, I do miss the fandom idea of "squicky", of having ships that just get under your skin or make you uncomfortable and not having to justify it beyond that. Like when you were talking about the SesshomaruxRin ship, I find it incredibly squicky and when you talked about the reasons why someone might like that ship, I could follow your reasoning and understand why someone might like it, but I still find it squicky. That's not to say I'm going to condemn every shipper of that ship, it just means that I can't engage with it regardless of someones reasoning. I think fans should say they don't like or are uncomfortable with something without making an argument about who has the most "morally correct" ship.
no because I HATE when they’re like “if u ship this ur invalidating the feelings of x group” and when members of x group are like “we don’t care” they get mad at THEM. biggest example is Bakudeku and abuse survivors. majority of us do NOT give a shit, support us by donating money, make conversations about abuse more open, talk about sibling abuse and how it’s normalized. we do NOT care that u ship green Lima bean with angry orange man, hell some of US ship it. tag it and leave y’all
as far as "toxic ships" go bkdk isn't even that bad
@@mushroomhehe370 I know right? It's barely touching the surface of actual abuse but these weirdos make it as if it was the exact same. That's more harmful than the ship itself.
Preach!!
i used to hate on bakudeku, but know I see it's kind of stupid. Abuse survivors have bigger things to worry about than a ship of a bully who has changed as a person x the person they bullied. I also never see anyone talk about silent voice like they do with MHA lmao.
I deeply hate the way modern fandom needs you to justify why you like something. In the MHA fandom people were praying for Dabi to be a Todoroki so that he would have been abused by Endeavor. Why? So that he'd have a tragic backstory to justify his villainy and they don't have to feel guilty about being horny for him. I don't get it. I'm not personally into Dabi because I'm allergic to that kind of edgy boy, but he's literally just an anime dude? Sometimes evil is sexy! You're allowed to think an anime boy is sexy without literally supporting burning people alive! Please just let yourself enjoy things.
It actually turned out that they were right that he was a Todoroki, ironically, but every other fan-theory related to that got shot in the foot and made him out to be an even bigger monster, albeit a tragic one, than before. A significant portion of the fandom were most displeased! If some of them weren't so obnoxious about it, I'd be laughing at the irony.
Great video Melina! I'd like to add a perspective as someone who was actually sexually abused as a child and who always eyerolls at the "protect the children" sentiments (free feel to skip if you don't want to read about this!). The thing is, that doesn't save children because it's not fiction that's hurting them, it's people who - for all kinds of reasons - abuse children. And the silence and shame surrounding sex only makes it harder for children to regonize that abuse, and to tell someone about it. What would have helped me as a child was knowing that my body was my own and that no one had a right to it. That it wasn't my fault and that I needed not to be ashamed. Knowledge on what sexual abuse can look like beyond 'old men kidnaps child' (it was a bunch of older children who did this to me). That I even had the language to tell someone. Ironically, it was non-con fanfiction that made me realize that I had been sexually abused, and that helped me work through some of my feelings surrounding it. That whole process isn't pretty - it can be dark, confusing, messy. So, you can dislike something. Have critical discussions in and about fandoms. Just please know that you're not helping children by outrage over certain fic/fanart. If you care, there's a lot you can do that actually does help.
Yes, exactly. As a teen, I was in an abusive relationship, also involving some dubcob. However, due to everyone being so hush hush about these matters around young people, I never knew it was that bad when it was happening. Only later on, about two years after breaking up, I started getting into some ships with the same dynamic. And these actually made me realise the reality of that abuse that happened to me. How wrong it was exactly. I could see the victim's reactions and complex feelings, because they still were in love, they could not hate the abuser... And I recognised myself in it. I came to understand what exactly happened and that it wasn't my fault. It was also aided by the shipping community, that, because it was controversial, was a semi-closed off society where we ended up like a suport group for each other. It really hurt when antis were making us out to be abusers ourselves just because we enjoyed that stuff in private, not tagging with show or character tags, adding warnings, etc. While p much everyone there had had been a victim of abuse in the past themselves and/or geberally had very poor mental health. Many of us just had this community to keep us going, no exaggeration. It was a dark time but I survived thanks to them. But these days, outside of p much anonymous yt comments, I can't talk about it, or else I'd be burned on the stake for being "impure".
yes! I wish these folks would watch the documentary "Incest" on RUclips cause guess what it wasn't fictional character shipping that made these people assault their family members!!
yes, this. i actually forget sometimes, that just because i dont feel very affected by it as an adult, i was in fact sexually abused as a pre-teen. the protect the children sentiments are very..paternalistic and condescending, besides being useless.
but don't people get off on these age gap stories?
that is why "Puppy Milk" needs to exist. it's not child porn. that strawberry person created it so readers of all ages can recognize abuse when they see it
As someone who loves kids it's honestly frustrating seeing how fandom treats children in it. Like you get such a lack of nuance with people like, stripping agency and impact of their actions from them?? Kids need to learn there are consequences to their actions AND have the room to grow from being problematic and figuring out the world lol So call out their agism/sexism/racism/ablism/ect, in a way meant to explain the harm they're causing (but also don't harrass kids back) if you got the energy. If they're harassing people report them! They can't handle being on the internet? They get their account taken away for violating TOS, or blocked. Actually teach kids the power of blocking and unfollowing liberally, how to curate their online experience responsibly! Blocking/unfollowing ain't deep and your mental health will thank you for it. Over like screaming at strangers and riling yourself up all the time.
Honestly if I see a kid doing those “call out posts”about someone with a NSFW account who is minding their own business to harass them and accuse them of p- or cp without actual proof. I just report them to CPS at this point. And if I see an adult doing this addressing their kid followers or tagging children to see it. I report them to the NCMEC.
As a teen, I personally block tags and block 18+ accounts. I don't get why it's hard for people my age to not interact with NSFW or adult accounts.
@@stal3065 I'm glad u have those boundaries! And especially glad you're enforcing them. Identifying and enforcing boundaries are very good skills to have regardless of age. :D
And I think part of that is the lack of competent internet safety taught to kids and teens. It doesn't help that younger gen X and older millennials started the social media trend of posting so much information online, even about their kids before they were old enough to really consent. And the idea of internet anonymity, it all kinda eroded people's sense of safety and privacy on the internet? So people have forgotten to teach kids how to A) keep their information safe on the internet, B) know what appropriate intergenerational friendships and interactions look like [much less how to spot unhealthy ones and resources to get help], C) how to curate your own internet experience instead of relying on the good intentions of others or faulty algorithms. ^^;
@@katelynbun7320
Thanks for responding! I agree with you, there's a lot of info spread and internet safety is just jumboed. Anyways, thanks! :D
im glad we're being honest that the only reason ppl ship zutara is bc aang looks like caillou and zuko is the fun bad boy
*me, shipping Zuko and Katara with myself*
But Aang is still adorable. 😅
you're not wrong but oof did it still hurt to read this about my boy aang 😭
I mean, not really, but this was still a funny comment!
"Caillou" 😭😭😭 did you lie tho
The only time I get TRULY anti is seeing people write rpf about child actors with adults. I remember seeing far too much of it about the IT kids with Bill Skarsgård when the first movie came out. Anything else I'm pretty much "Just tag is so I can avoid."
@Ivoire Punk I don’t think you turning into an anti has anything to do with going against rpf as many pro shippers are against rpf. Yes, that’s a general statement, but proshippers follow under a type of mentality where fiction affects reality, but not in the way antis say fictions affects reality. Pro shippers are against rpf due to the involvement of real life people being used and portray in fictional content as it goes without their consent.
my first reaction was W H A T and then I pessimistically realized that no matter how depraved, people are gonna write about it 🤦
@@stormfischerr Exactly how I felt the first time I saw the tags 🤮
@Francis Yeah it is unfortunately real and very creepy.
Honest question: what do y'all think of rpf about adult people in the public eye/show business under the condition that it's not brought up to the people in the rpf? I don't really see the harm in that yet and I'm curious why rpf is so hated
As a survivor of csa, I've always found the rampant accusations of p/d/ph/l/a over fictional content to be really disrespectful and disgusting. No matter how problematic a ship is, to claim that someone is a predator or supports it in real life over all that is wrong and waters down a very serious subject.
Especially when they follow all that up with accusations of faking, or saying "no real survivor would ship this" or, worse, the harassment and death threats and wishes we would be assaulted again :/
Sorry for leaving three comments but the conclusion was very important and I thank you for that
if ur shipping a child and a adult together, even if fictional, you are subject to be accused of being a sicko
@@A_meliaago outside. they have no rights
@@palemeadows You get off to the depiction and idea of CSA, even if it isn’t real, you vent your emotion and fantasy through fiction. deny it all you want, but your very being knows. god knows.
My huge beef with purity culture in fandom is that people are really stretching the meanings of terms like pxd0philia and incxst (I have seen ppl argue that aging up child characters even for sfw art is borderline pedxphilia, and that childhood friends to lovers is incxst), the tendency to raise unsubstantiated "receipts" to rip people to shreds and justify harassment, the abuse of slippery slope fallacy, and the worst? Antis pressuring others in fandom to rehash their traumas just to have the clout necessary to refute the accusations against them. It's bananas.
Yeah but I can understand sometimes when they see two character who young are ship because some artists take it too far like wow thaks I hate it! But other time I like ok but they are just give each other a hug and you are right they are stupid! Ps. I thinks they should start of as crush if the are kids because kids are to young to date.
Teenage to adult? No prob
Bellow puberty age to adult? Suspicious
That's how I see it
**war flashbacks to the Shutaba discourse**
Bonus points for the garbage implication that autistic people (the character Futaba isn’t technically canonically autistic ,but she’s arguably neurodivergent coded) shouldn’t be allowed to date.
No need to censor yourself on the Internet
@@DarkPsychoMessiah RUclips auto deletes comments that use “naughty words”. Lol op isn’t censoring cause they’re scared of the words. They’re censoring cause RUclips is.
I didn't really understand the Finn discussion before now. Now I get it. I'm a Rey stan, I love her journey, even if the 3rd film is garbage, so for me, I always saw her as front-and-center. You helped me recontextualize it and see how Finn was set up to be something more, to be the protagonist even, and that was taken away. I get it now, and yeah, it sucks. That whole trilogy really is just a mess of missed opportunities. The Prequel trilogy is a good story hidden by bad film-making and the Sequel trilogy is a lot of good ideas ruined by corporate meddling and ego.
Also the racist Star Wars fans that bullied Disney into marginalizing Kelly Marie Tran and John Boyaga. I'm convinced Star Wars is just one of those properties that should never be put to film again. Video Games, Novels, TV shows, maybe. Not film. There's too much unwieldy expectations for film and unnecessary need to please everyone, including racist neckbeards.
Apparently the original script for the third movie had Finn leading a storm trooper reveloution, which I would have loved to see. Regardless of shipping the way Finn' s storyline was dropped is so disappointing.
@@bridgetbaker7529 Like what if Jannah, the leader of the other rebel stormtroopers, instead of saying "yeah, we also rebelled" said "we rebelled because we heard you did and joined the Resistance and we were inspired by your example"? One line of dialogue would have been the difference between "Finn, you're not special, stormtroopers defect all the time" and "Finn, you're an inspirational icon". Can't even give him that.
But the stormtrooper rebellion would definitely have been better.
Also Disney could have made Finn and Rey deuteragonists with similar amounts of screen time and equal narrative weight. Their character arcs were both about developing identity, and it would be really cool to see them both developing that through becoming Jedi. It also would have been a neat change to the typical Lone Hero archetype found in the original trilogies.
And by Ego I really am talking about both Abrams AND Johnson. I like The Last Jedi, but as time has gone by I've started to develop a more cynical attitude to Rian's choices. It's very clear in hindsight to see that he really was trying to push his own vision on the film more than create a coherent narrative that works well as a movie. I think a lot of the Rey and Luke stuff works, but most of Finn and Rose's story really doesn't. And there really is something deeply infuriating about the nonsense he did with Poe. Then there's Abrams, who instead of taking the story left to him by Johnson, which with its flaws did set up some good ideas, he threw it all away and made probably the worst Star Wars movie of the 9.
it's weird how the way fiction affecting reality is accepted to be complicated and nuanced when it comes to influencing good behavior (ex. liking a poc character/ lgbt+ ship etc doesn't necessarily mean you can't be racist/homophobic) but suddenly when it comes to bad behavior shipping jonsa means you are supporting incest irl
yo holy shit that take has been rattling around in the back of my mind and you just put it out there in amazing wording
This 100%
‘A fic clearly tagged non-con that maybe a couple of thousand at most are going to read’ vs ‘A film that portrays marginalised groups in an exclusively negative light and feeds into bad stereotypes that reaches millions of people’ are not going to have the same effect.
Fiction can affect reality but not in the way they portray it.
Exploring dark or taboo subject matter in fiction is not the same as engaging in it in real life.
It's almost like purity tests are rigged to be impossible to pass, and are just a pretext for inflicting mental or physical abuse on people who we already don't like.
Omg I see so much hate for Thorki, which is also... Incest. I can understand that it's controversial, but some of those same antis are Loki stans who have to contort themselves into knots in order to ignore the fact that homebody tried to take over Earth and attempted to commit genocide on his own people because he's their woobie cinnamon bun angsty prince of darkness who can do no wrong. 🙄
@@lileewinks
There’s a difference between engaging with dark concepts vs putting them under a good light
Love what you said about weaponizing BIPOC ppl against each other. It something we as white people need to constantly be checking ourselves about and doing better on. So perfectly said.
"...both sides invested in using the experiences of harmed people to prove a point- rather than making sure those harms are not repeated. Instead of focusing on fixing existing problems, they are consumed with proving one side is creating more potential future harm."
Damn. So very right about all this
The thing that bugs me the MOST is that these adult anti shippers will bully an actual minor off of a platform over the modesty of a fictional minor. They will be ruthless against actual abuse and SA survivors for shipping something toxic. They’ll talk about fiction affecting reality while they DIRECTLY contribute to the pain of real life people.
A year late and your opinion might have changed drastically but: pro-shippers do the exact same thing. It's not really an us vs them. It's a "everyone is trying to be right and they don't actually care about real issues"
@@gloop7458 I didn’t say anything about pro-shippers, I think a lot of them are toxic too, that was my opinion back then too
if a minor says it's cute to ship an adult character with a younger teen. they should get an earful. that is not cute.
@@kaiyodeiNo just no, it is not ok to bully a minor who does this kind of shipping even if it’s problematic. Yes it’s not cute but that isn’t the point, kids and teens that usually ship these kinds of couples are products of SA in particular grooming by adults, and need legit help not “earfuls” or worse being told to “kys”. This type of logic is how we create an unsafe environment for victims of abuse in particular sexual violence. The fact that some antis sit there call themselves allys and say victims deserve sympathy while flat out being dismissive is a huge problem that needs to stop. In ways you guys are causing more harm then good with this mentality, and if Antis like yourself really want to help victims you wouldn’t directly attack them the way some of you guys do as this can cause a guard to be put up faster then anything. Help them by spreading information in your fandom or social media pages and help educate about power dynamics and grooming. Again bullying a minor isn’t the answer and as a whole can be worse for a victim. I say this as a SA and grooming survivor because showing sympathy and compassion is how you can help people not hate.
Don't know if artist was a minor but I did tell this one artist to kys over a piece of nsfw art I saw. It was a stated age diff (teenage girl and older man) fetishizing "jailbait" and rape. Artist is clearly a lefty type considering most of their past art was lgbt or included POC characters. Am I wrong for thinking it's bad to make fetish content for fetishes like that?@@marissah431
idk if i can count as "poc" bc im "white passing" (all words that i discovered in twitter and have no translation to spanish) but i am born and raised latino, and holy shit how do i thank you for everything so far (im on min31) like, as someone from the 3rd world ive felt forced so many times in fandom to adjust myself into this high moral culture that the first world thinks it has and end up feeling like im some kind of savage or monkey for not being "woke enough"
like, is always usa's laws that they ask you to follow, is always usa language that they force you to speak, is exhausting. i always gravitated to proship spaces bc i come here to have fun and i dont rlly see antis having any fun by tweeting stuff like "hey besties is it ok if i ship this?" or "hey @xxx you follow :/" but, like, it doesnt matter if i get in a proship space, 90% of the times white ppl are making you feel like shit.
same with me
So I'm white but I'm from Eastern Europe and I also always found it so confusing. US laws of consent (or any other US laws really) are taken as a revealed universal truth in online spaces so often and it's frustrating. And when you try to make people realize that's not the case, you're the savage. Well, I guess that's kinda just the mirror of the real world 🙄
ime, i've only been able to avoid this by making spaces where we had to explicitly point out that american sensibilities are not going to be held as univeral truth, that we combat a kind of digital american imperialism that is so prevalent online, and even then the DM inbox of every mod and myself got filled frequently with americans whining that someone said a word that's bad in the states but is casually used in australia/new zealand. it's actually exhausting to have to explain over and over that america is not the entire world, and that everyone else feels excluded and like they can't act how normal is to them in spaces where american standards are given de facto standard treatment. and then people wonder why only americans seem to be in english spaces online (and are shocked when my spaces have tons of ESL and UK/aus/nz folks, equal to or outbalancing US users).
it's like, you really have to dig to find spaces that accommodate anyone else... and americans seem repulsed by those spaces, and when that happens, you realise a lot of americans haven't really self-reflected on their own 'coloniser mindset'.
I'm not saying any names (to not start discourse again in replies) but I've noticed that a lot of shippers of a certain "problematic" ship involving a queercoded villian who also identify as queer themselves come from quite homophobic countries (Russia, Poland, ect). I suppose that queercoded villian was one of the few scraps of representation they had before finding any communities.
There was some drama outside of the fandom where someone (who wasn't cishet and whose native language wasn't english) started a petition to make him "come out" and they got a lot of negative feedback, from both douchebros who don't get what coding means and from antis that were blaming them for "reinforcing homophobic stereotypes". At least one news outlet covered the drama, and it blatantly misgendered the OP (on the assumption they were a "straight fangirl", despite their pronouns in bio). They ended up leaving all their ship accounts.
YOU SPEAK SO MANY TRUTHS!!! I'm so tired of this. I consider myself proship because I really don't engage with fandom. Twitter is NOT a safe space, i just reblog shit over there or talk casually. If i want to feel comfortable expressing my opinions i will do so in discord with my friends. I'm not a white passing latina, I'm neither indigenous, I'm mestiza. When she talked about La Malinche I was like YEAAAAAH! La Malinche sided with colonizers to bring down the Aztecs, we say that with our modern retrospective. For HER it was the opposite! She was sold by her family, enslaved to be treated as a commodity but with her abilities and intellect made a place for herself to FIGHT against the Aztecs, the most powerful empire who were directly oppressing her people. That's why a lot of other indigenous people sided with the Spaniards, because they brought an opportunity to fight against the equivalent of the Roman empire in mesoamérica.
Going back to twitter discourse, just to twitter overall. People say "why is no one talking about this" all the time but then never say a word when it comes to something that happens in latinoamerica. What's happening in Brazil, Colombia, the new covid strain in El Peru, there are "what's happening in latinoamerica" carrds like we're some kind of monolith. Sorry if I don't care if people want to draw two fictional characters kissing. It's my only escape when I know I can't go to buy some groceries without the risk of being found in a plastic bag.
Sorry for my ramble, I'm just very tired of white saviour complex and rebranded crusaders. I'm also tired of being treated like a minority when I'm in fact not one on my country and Spanish is one of the most spoken languages. Can we go back to the earlier internet days where we didn't have to expose our life story just to being told if we're justified in liking whatever we want? Fandom in spanish is so much better and so much worse. At least everyone stays in their lane. I don't interact with fandom in english to be policed by us centric mentality. Even BIPOC in the US are on thin ice. But it's the language to communicate with most other people in the world. Me lleva la verdura
If kids are following a GoT artist... Then like... They probably have already been exposed to the concept of incest... Through game of thrones bro....
Edit: I hated that about Wynona Earp too! I ended up dropping it after they focused everything on Doc... I like Doc, but i was genuinely enjoying the sort of polyamorous implications of having all 3 of then get together. And then they upend all that bc they're too damn racist.
And don't forget Doc's other gf (the latina girl) who they decide is evil after exactly 0 foreshadowing to throw her out of the plot too
I know, right? You literally see Jaime and Cersei fucking in the first episode. They might have a point when it comes to other shows, but incest is a *central plot point* of game of thrones. It's hardly a child friendly show.
I remember when I predicted that Dany/Jon would happen. I thought they'd be married, which didn't happen, but it came pretty close. I remember getting a character attack on me for being pro-incest, even though I said that I thought it would happen, not that I liked the ship. And boy I wish I'd stayed in contact just for the "I told you so" moment I could have had. Not that I don't understand where they are coming from because Martin's...fascination...is kinda creepy.
Nuance? In fandom discourse? The devil you say!
Frankly, the internet in general is a terrible place for nuanced discourse.
I think bringing up racism (and also sexism and transphobi)a in fandom is important that even we proshippers, or people who don't care what others are into, need to acknowledge. The reason that racist imagery or drawing the confederate flag like in the incedent is bad is that depicting unquestioned racism & other bigotry in fiction is in itself an act of racism. Making two brothers kiss in a fanfic is not an act of real-life incest that harms the people involved because most people reading that won't suddenly go "oh incest is okay actually" but writing racist fiction in a racist society further enforces these ideas, and it's important to acknowledge that that is a problem.
absolutelyyy. like I'm not "pro" or "anti", i have complicated feelings but I do lean anti censorship, leave people alone over shipping, all that. with incest/age gap/generally problematic relationship fiction it's generally understood by all parties that it's a taboo fantasy they wouldn't carry out irl, but someone writing racist fiction probably genuinely believes in the racist ideologies espoused in it. and things like racism can be subtle and even unintentional in a way that incest really can't be.
I will never harass anyone who draws NSFW art for characters but I will always give a “👀” look if those characters are underage. It just makes me uncomfortable and I have every right to avoid it.
Your feelings are absolutely valid! But not attacking and harassing creators is the right way :) we curate our online experience as much as we can and we can definitely 👀 people in our heads or in a private conversation with a friend. As long as real people don't get targeted & hurt in real life, so thank you
Exactly. That's your right. You can feel uncomfortable
With certain content just don't judge people as long as no real world people or animals are harmed
@@OmarAyusoVA I’m new to this whole pro shipping and fandom conversation but as an outsider I still feel off about the claim that it’s ok to draw a child in a p*rnographic way just because no real child was harmed. Like I understand what everyone is saying about purity culture and I agree with most of it but I don’t think we can use that as a defense for CP. To me it’s very reminiscent of what MAPS talk about to justify their attraction and behavior. How much of this is fighting against purity and how much of this is just trying to justify your actions? Isn’t there room for this type of criticism in this conversation? I feel like there was a reason princessweeks didn’t explicitly mention a ship where one person was a child and the other was an adult (not in a they grew up and then started dating way).
Honestly it feels weird that I’m even questioning something like being against CP of all forms because I feel guilty, like I’m being to puritanical. Shouldn’t we draw lines? Who gets to decides those lines? How do those lines effect your behavior? Why are you drawing that line? Can I judge you for that line? These are all questions that I wish we could actually discuss instead of making blanket statements of everything is good or everything is bad. We need that nuance.
I am new to this discussion so I am somewhat open to talking about these things, but there are somethings like being against CP, that is like a core belief of mine so I’m not even sure what I would get out of these discussions anyway (other than a headache).
@@remytherat2929 1. CP is not a term. CSAM/CSEM is the term. Pornography and abuse shouldn't be mixed in together, for a lot of reasons. 2. No breathing living person was harmed - case closed. People have very skewed meaning of what qualifies as a "child" in art, because drawn people don't have real ages, and most importantly - they can't be harmed or exploited. The point of CSAM being illegal is not whether or not it's "gross", but because it is *direct harm*.
I know this comment is old asf but i want your take on this. I saw this piece of nsfw art that included a stated age difference (teenage girl x older man) and stated rape of said girl. But that same artist had made other lgbt and poc inclusive (nsfw) art in the past, so it caught me off guard for them to make something so problematic. I told the artist to k.y.s. and called them a weirdo. is that justified? apologies if these seems incoherent to read. @@kerstinschwarz5222
As some one outside of ship culture, it's really weird to think of someone putting any meaning or expectation around smutty fanfic. It seems to me like someone watching the porn parody of "the pirates of the Caribbean" and complaining that Elizabeth swan isn't acting in character when she and jack Sparrow get down.
-or watching a porn parody of sponge-bob and getting mad that Sandy is a mammal and Sponges are asexual.
You are so blessed, I think that's the more rational way to look at it
(I say this as someone within ship culture who wants out haha)
@@mmelanoma it's true, every day I don't read a smutty fanfic I feel my blessings magnify. ;P
This is literally it lmao it’s so ridiculous
I felt that conclusion on a personal level. I've never had anyone to talk to about this stuff and the way I feel about my own sexuality when I'm SOOO religious and I developed SOOO early. Fanfiction has been a way for me to explore safely. And the way people treat certain things as dirty and horrible and awful just made me feel worse about myself. It was only when I went to college and got more comfortable with myself that I realized I shouldn't feel bad for the stuff I like in fandom. Also, I love that you bring race into the conversation because I'm super white and living in an area where race isn't really talked about in terms of real life stuff much less online stuff. It's great to hear a POC talk about this stuff because it really makes me think and try to be better myself.
A furry wearing a confederate bikini... those are some words I never thought I would hear together in the same sentence lol
@socially unacceptable Holy shit, ignorance is bliss indeed
@socially unacceptable F*@k Rule 34.
Saying Zutara is inappropriate because Zuko is a colonizer feels weird because it is basically another way of saying interracial relationships are wrong… like it’s a literal one-to-one comparison to white and black people dating in the early 1900s, just one or two generations after slavery was abolished… when you put it in the context of our world, I think these people would understand how misguided they are… the fact that someone argued to a mixed race woman that Zutara was wrong because of that is so incredibly ironic
I'm a zutara shipper but what I caught from all of these is just interracial relationships are okay as long as the other one didn't contribute their partner's people suffering but idk anymore
Forming intimate relationships outside of your race actually helps foster understanding between the groups and contributes to reducing inequality. This anti-Zutara argument isn't actually anti-Colonialism, it's anti-integration. Whether it's intentional or not, they're actually spreading white supremacist talking points
Having Katara date a man whose family was responsible for a genocide among her people (the fire nation killed all the southern water tribes water benders) is fcking weird like sorry??? Zuko changed for the better of course but it’s still weird to ship her colonizer with and indigenous women like John smith and Pocahontas just cause John smith was one of the good ones doesn’t make them dating any less weird😭
i didn’t even know Zutara was conservertial 😭 it’s one of my favorite ships
@@hey4506 It "works" because their world and ours are different and should be treated as such. Like nothing of the tribes are innocent victims. They all overall exploit the Avatar when they pop up. The Fire Nation just wanted the smoke and had to power at that moment to back it up. In other times it was normally the Earth Nation being "The Bad Guys". SO by "our" standards reinforces what Emma said months ago. If men and women can CHOOSE whom to love why is it a problem? Let the narritive play out. What's good for them might not be good for any of us. It's why I personally dislike shipping because I want to see how the creators do it. Since normally fanship are self-inserts of one, both or more characters in the relationship. Like they're dating themselves.
"can we stop using that term to just mean any age gap?" *thank you.* i've seen people use that word to describe ships between two adult characters with a height difference jfc. also i ship jonsa and finnrey. zutara is my sister's #1 otp, probably just for "i'll save you from the pirates" lol. thank you for the candid conclusion.
as a pro-shipper (and coincidentally, a fellow anti-reylo), i have to say, i was pleasantly surprised by this video. i'm very much a ship and let ship person, but that doesn't mean idon't have my own notps, or that i don't vent about certain types of shippers on my own blog. the thing is, shipping isn't activism and nothing that happens in fiction ever holds the same weight as anything that happens in real life. i'm sick of seeing people say shit like "don't ship minors", as if real, actual children and not like...voltron characters are being abused. i find that a lot of anti-shippers tend to view shipping as a kind of "fandom politics", and i've been in fandoms where i was assumed to be straight and or "not care about representation" just because i didn't ship the dominant same-gender pairing. there's this idea that if they ship it hard enough, it will become canon, and it is therefore your *responsibility* to ship the most diverse and/or most likely to become canon, pairing. people forget that ships like reylo and korrasami (that were seen as "giving fans what they wanted" by breaking away from the originally planned love story, love them or hate them) are the *exception*, not the rule. i don't care what people ship because fiction and reality's influence on each other is not 1:1, but if i see a trend of bigotry among certain fandoms for certain sips, that's going to jump out.
All of this. Its all a fucking mess. And I really appreciate your emphasis on nuance. Like I feel so many within the pro-ship look at too many things uncritically but the anti-ship thinks because they learn a word like grooming that they understand everything. It's all such a mess and exhausting, and why I'm so afraid of fandom spaces.
I'm pro-ship but I've mostly pulled away from that sphere for exactly that reason. There was precious little nuance on Tumblr to begin with, and it all evaporated once it carried over to Twitter.
I still remember the one "anti-anti" (as pro-shippers were called back in '18) who got cancelled after Voltron S6 for saying something along the lines of ppl were falling in the same traps of assuming the ship was canon and ppl had started acting like assholes about it. I remember it being very worded a bit anti-ish myself, but seeing who the poster was, I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Very few others did.
And this after years and years and YEARS of standing up for a ship they really did not like, which I never would have guess in their posts because....well, normal people don't think ppl should be killed over any kind of ships.
I also remember the accusations against Pillowfort pulling a bait-and-swutch over the banning of a loli artist for rules not yet ironed out. By their own admission, it was wrong and they reinstated the account with a few refund and did as much to make it up as anyone could expect. But the damage was done and the Pro-ship crowd are now throwing their weight behind Fanexus, which is its own drama and bullshit.
As bad as the incident was, it was *one time* and the PF owners pull anti harrassment at the forefront of it's TOS. The current rules on child-presentimg art are there mostly due to its payment processor because literally every last one of them have stipulations on that, and I've seen one of the BNF artists throwing a shit fit over that.
I am just....so overall all of it. Just don't dox and harrass people 🤷♀️ doesn't matter what side.is doing the harrassing and lying, ya basic.
I think victims of grooming which often include antis know what these words mean
And before you cry about it, that doesn’t mean proshippers weren’t ever groomed. But it’s disingenuous to assume these are random people that have never been abused
@@whoknows9085 I wasn't talking about victims of abuse and I wasn't referring to all antis just like I wasn't referring to all proshippers.
But to the point I was making, there is a clear difference in learning a word and understanding a word. In my comment, I was using grooming as an example. I've seen cases not just in shipping discourse but also in relationship discourse in general of grooming being thrown out too broadly.
For example, a 35 year old being accused of grooming a 25 year old (yes, adults can be groomed too) with the only evidence of grooming being used is that an age difference exists. Yes, a significant age gap can be a sign of grooming even for adult relationships, but that alone is not evidence of grooming (unless referring to a minor then it is 100% grooming). Someone who understands the word grooming would also look for signs of isolation and abuse before throwing an accusation of grooming out there.
That said, if there is a case of grooming, proshippers should do a better job at more critically examining their ships just like antis should critically think if a particular ship is actually a case of grooming or not before throwing the accusation out there. The lack of critical thinking on both sides is what I was referring to in my comment, not antis lying about being abused.
@@DrMike18
I understand the lack of nuance in pretty much every internet discussion but a lot of these accusations on grooming are based on something that include the age gap, even when it’s flat out lies
Like with the recent poly celebrity news and how the guy was grooming 30+ yr olds. People who didn’t like him would at least make up something like “he’s in his midlife crisis, he’s been doing this” or “he’s their boss and it’s unhealthy”. So unless I know the specific thing you are referring to, it’s kinda hard to pinpoint.
You still associated “not knowing the words they used” specifically to antis when this is something everyone does on the internet
@@whoknows9085 Fair enough. It is problematic to paint with such a broad brush. I was speaking more from personal experience with the two camps, and how antis seem to have a bigger issue not using those words properly to express their distaste or valid issues with a particular ship.
That said, I would say that proshippers have the opposite problems. Proshippers tend to know and understand those words, HOWEVER, proshippers won't acknowledge when their particular ship is guilty of things like grooming or romanticizing p*dop*ilia because that means unpacking why they're into that ship which might make them feel like a bad person or acknowledge that they got some issues that they need to resolve so they try to ignore and pretend like its not a problem.
And, of course, both camps can also be guilty of doing the opposite. I can only speak on the trends that I'm noticing and the differences between the two camps.
Hot take: Shipping Discourse is just Kink-At-Pride Discourse, except somehow *even more* Extremely Online.
You're right and you should say it
terfery and "think of the children (by children I mean me I'm uncomfortable)" bs are invoked in both, so yeah
Facts
Yep
Do you know the difference between things that happen in real life and nsfw Twitter fanart answer quickly
I was a bit afraid of this video after all that twitter drama you mentioned, but I basically agree with everything you said. I love that you bring the much needed nuance to this discussion, because a lot of the problems you mention about the proshipping community are exactly the reason why I don't want to be labeled as "proshipper" despite engaging with parts of that ~Discourse~. Certain circles of proshippers are just... really, really bad, and that incident with the confederate flag was the first to bring out the worst parts of these people. Racism in fandom is always brought up as a gotcha in wider discussions about pro/anti shipping, but never ACTUALLY addressed.
Fandom lately has been a hellscape, and that really saddens me. Mind you, it is true that a lot of radfem rhetoric can be found in anti circles (and that a lot of their arguments stem from these places), but I've also seen this in proshippers. Because, at the end of the day, there's something deeply personal that permeates these discussions. Liking a ship, or being disgusted by it, often comes from a personal place, from our own experiences (a lot of them painful and difficult to discuss), and no matter how many social justice or even academic terms you throw in, those feelings won't disappear. So, because these discussions are fueled by extremely personal feelings, people get extra defensive about their ships... and ultimately, this means that there can be a lot of different people on both sides who coat their actions in pretty words while still being pieces of shit to others.
I've seen so many awful things from both sides. I've seen people driven to suicide over harassment, artists abandoning all social media platforms, people being doxxed and losing their jobs, adults hiding in proshipper discourse to engage in actual grooming or sexualization of real minors, spread of real csem... And in all of this, it's always BIPOC and queer folks (SPECIALLY trans folks) who are the most affected by harassment. But you can't bring this up without it becoming an Us vs Them issue, when that's not the point.
TL;DR: Thank you for bringing nuance to this discussion and making a thoughtful video on this issue that doesn't mock fandom people.
Edit: Also, that Reylo section brought back all the FinnRey & FinnPoe feelings I had buried after TROS. The endless disappointment I feel with this franchise...
Thank you so much for talking about non-con. As someone who has experienced childhood sexual abuse, the shame imposed on women for indulging in exploring that kind of stuff in a safe way has at times stunted my healing bc SA survivors are dealing with enough unearned guilt, shame and feeling faulty already. I mean young girls and women feel this stuff anyways and for all sorts of reasons, but they aren’t ‘protecting’ people the way they think
As a victim of emotional and mental abuse, thank you. Thank you so much for that, it feels awful seeing others be demonized for trying to use fiction to work out what they experienced. Especially when there is multiple mental health care workers who encourage this as a healthy coping mechanism.
It's sad seeing how much fandom has changed in the past 10 years. I remember being 14 and wondering into these spaces an being excited to talk about all these issues without argument.
Fandom is basically now just people yelling over nothing and influencing harm over fiction...
very well said. i dont think i personally saw many anti shippers until i got into voltron and was called a pedophile by now ex friends for shipping sheith. at the time it was so viscerally upsetting and now several years later ive seen that accusation levied at myself and others for shipping the wrong thing the wrong way so many times that it feels like the word has lost all gravity.
i appreciate your push for nuance bc it doesn't feel like people are really having discussions anymore (especially on twitter) only arguments and it's a shame. i also appreciated hearing your ship thoughts. it's a very good point that fictional characters will always be ageless as we continue to grow. i remember seeing someone on anitwt go "i quit having a crush on this teen anime character once i turned 18 so other adults have no excuse" and it made me kinda sad. i have ships and characters i still like from when i was 14 and im 29 now and i dont feel like that makes me a bad or dangerous person. the separation between fiction and reality was pretty easy for me to understand bc as an ace person, theres a lot i like to fantasize about that i dont actually enjoy doing irl. extending that to certain kinks and fictional relationship dynamics made a lot of sense to me. much as i like proship as a good shorthand for letting new acquaintances know what my general feelings torwards fictional content are, there are a lot of issues w the wider community (if u can call it such) that make me too embarrassed to claim it anymore, like the awful confederate flag "anti censorship" mess
my thoughts are all over the place so i hope this comment makes sense. i know ill be thinking about this video and revisiting it often im sure
I hear you, I can relate. I believe that people need to be more realistic and consider that fiction doesnt define our realities that hard. Many people also cope through "problematic" fiction, i do too. I have been told so many times that my coping mechanisms are icky or dangerous or that my trauma is invalid-- with no proof, despite therapists reccommending vent art and fiction as coping mechanisms. People on both sides have gone so far down the rabbit hole. Not only have I seen antis invalidating peoples experiences and s--baiting and doxxing, ive seen immense ableism, racism, and even s--baiting on the proship side. I felt unsafe on the "proship" side despite me holding the "real lives matter more than fictional characters" beliefs
Yo honestly, the Voltron fandom was a whole mess 😅
We should be allowed to remember our early ships and fictional crushes with fondness, not with a "yikes". As a wee teen I discovered shipping thanks to Beyblade, and Kai x Rei was my first OTP. Now I'm in my thirties, and even though I've not cared about the ship or Beyblade for over a decade, it's still fun to sometimes revisit the art and AMVs I used to be so into. It's not like our feelings towards our OTPs change much as we age - I don't suddenly turn into a creep that lusts after kids just because I'm old and they never aged. Instead it makes me remember myself at the age when the ship meant a lot to me, and was a way to discover things about myself and comfort myself. I wasn't even very sexual at that age, so I'm unable to see Kai x Rei as a sexual ship. What attracted me to the ship was the camaraderie, the fun childish fandom, and the dramatic fanfics, and that's what I still see in it today.
lol I'm a klance shipper and I've been accused of being a pedophile before. Honestly, i personally don't like sheith due to the age gap and how young Keith was when he met Shiro but i respect other people's preferences about fictional characters. Like yeah, there is an argument to be made that if they were real, Shiro could have been grooming Keith but I personally like the hc that Keith had a crush on Shiro. And as a gay man i would also like to add that that's the reality of many of us. I think almost any queer person can relate to the idea of calling a crush or even a partner a brother or sister because we either don't know how to articulate our feelings towards them or are trying to cover them up. I love the best friends to lovers trope because I can personally relate to it and it's a way for me to explore my sexuality and a coming of age story i never got to have. I'm getting a little off track here but my point is, I respect Sheith shippers but I've seen so much hate for it and the moral superiority complex that some people have over these ships makes me super uncomfortable. Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion but I've seen people say shit like: "Shaladin and Shaladin apologists don't interact" as if we're talking about actual r*pe apologists or something. Y'all are so demonized and for what 😭 anyway i hope you have a good experience moving forward in the fandom (assuming you're even still active) and i hope everyone can just calm down and let people live
Fellow ace just dropping by to say YES thank you. Ever since I was young I consumed nsfw fandom content including problematic pairings/situations but never ever did it cross into my attitudes about real life relationships. I feel like there's also a lack of nuance about what shipping actually means. When I'm consuming content of an incest ship for example, I don't actually want the characters to be in a romantic or sexual relationship. It's just thought provoking/interesting/hot (if the work is good), and in that moment sometimes I'm horny, I'm only human lol. So I neither condone those relationships irl or want it to be canon/headcanon it. So what am I in the eyes of antis? I'd assume that if I'm simply consuming or creating such content, to them I'm just a criminal. To me, I'm an aroace who just likes to explore different relationships through fiction and the work of good artists. Maybe it's because I'm aroace that I don't have any moral alarm bells going off when I see most fan content, since I don't even want "normal" relationships in my personal life haha
The convo about whether such fan works should be public (even when properly tagged and such) is much more nuanced and important imo and I'm glad to have it. But straight up calling anyone on one side of the fandom a pedo is reductive. I'm tired of telling people that they're wrong about me but them ignoring that and telling me I'm something horrible that I'm not. I've had to explain too many times about being ace and aro to people who don't fucking care when I'm telling them there's nuance to the human existence and not everyone wants sex or romance. Similarly I'm not explaining that I'm not a pedo to someone who won't listen
I love that you talked about your own reasons for reading noncon stuff. It really REALLY resonated with my reasons. Being raised conservative Christian really fucked me up wrt sexuality
yo, as someone who _was_ 16 when bnha/mha came out, who shipped tododeku and hated bakugo because i'd been through a lot of what he'd done to deku, I feel that! i'm 21 now and don't worry guys, I've grown up alongside bakugo and I _don't_ think horikoshi is a sucky writer anymore, like I cannot _believe_ horikoshi actually pulled off that redemption arc. like, i'm still hella attached to tododeku, still read it when I have the time, but now I have a job, almost have a degree, but i'm also a bitch for bakudeku. smh, I _live_ for childhood friends, so I always knew I was going to be in trouble if horikoshi pulled off an actual redemption arc- which I thought was impossible and i'd never agree with anything he tried to pull. we grow, my dudes, just keep yourself to yourself and stick up for people getting bullied. exclude people who are racist or homophobic, but don't harass or send hate to them. you're not always going to agree with what you used to.
As someone who used to identify as proship, i saw some of the dumbest stuff from both sides of anti and proship.
It's not even about ships and how problematic they are, i think we should go wild with what sounds interesting to us IN FICTION.
But some proship people think their label excuse them and they still go and harass people over ships.
And antis we know what they are doing.
In the end i'm just a potato shipping stuff for fun after a work day. We should not make fandom that serious, as long as you respect real people i have no problem with you. Because that's all that matters
Have fun with your fiction even if it's weird asf
Like, unless it's pro-racism/homophobia/other obviously bad thing like that, or (loli/shota which is way diffrent from proshipping), I don't see the point of threats and harassment. It's like saying if someone was into violence in media, they are a murderer.
I am not a fan of banning anything but I support trigger warnings. I used fanfic to process some messed up crap that happened starting at age 12. We are all dealing with different things but if you never engage, talk about, or think about something that you need to process because you are “too young to deal with it” then you aren’t being helped, you are being repressed.
Also, if we don’t give people the space to have discussions on topics, how will people learn to think critically and look at issues from multiple sides. No ship should be off limits but anyone should have the right to express why they like it or why it squicks them out.
Also, as a white woman, hearing BIPOC people talk about how their lens affects how they see aspects of fandom is one of the gunner ways to learn about and examine my own racial blind spots.
IT'S OUT!!!!
As am I 🏳️🌈🎆
@@hotwateronwool Congrats
@@hotwateronwool hell yeah!
@@hotwateronwool congrats!!
@@hotwateronwool dope
I think the most exhausting thing is that I don't come to fandom spaces to have debate. I come as an escape from a turbulent real world. So I straight up don't have the energy to try to explain my perspectives to people when they come for me for x thing they didn't like. I'm very much of the mindset of block and move on. I wish more people, if they weren't genuinely interested in having a conversation, wouldn't start one.
"Cortes should be the slur" I agree! I hate the demonization of women in this context, but I do have an inner conflict with that since my last name is Cortes fgeigfeil
i feel like there do need to be nuances mainly because of the egregious claims people keep making on human character based on cartoons, i mean i saw someone say that if you ok with katara x aang you’re “enabling grooming” because “aang groomed katara” takes like that made me realize 9/10 it’s really just people using buzz words to make others look evil and them as above the heard over such simple things as two characters being in a relationship
"enabling grooming" bruh moment
Like wat. He's younger and so shit at flirting and communicating romantically it's almost a miracle they got in a relationship in time for the final.
Can they just say they don't like it and block tags and people and be done with it...
Im so intrigued lol how the hell did he “groom” her??? How did they arrive at that conclusion
@@plumenommershpadoinkle7575 I reckon they mean how Aang forced a kiss on Katara in Ember Island Players and was uncomfortably pushy about his feelings.
Though I'm with you, the groomer blamers don't seem to know what the term actually means.
@@lottakiljunen8751 ya i agree that was fucked up of him but the show presented it as a teachable moment where katara immediately called him out on it, i rly appreciated them including that bc it showed we’re all capable of messing up & doing bad whether we think we’re the “good guys” or not & we have to make conscious decisions to not be an ass all the time lol
Being proship and anti ship is largely an online issue
No one irl cares about that and I wish ppl knew that
yes, this! "the inability to see nuance while asking for nuance." it's such a paradoxical nightmare.
yay somebody else who ships zutara for the same reasons i do!
it is surprisingly rare to find someone else who understand that teen girls don't like to date prepubescent boys 😅
It blows my mind more people didn’t get behind zutara they would’ve been sooo cute
but hes a figurehead of the nation that slaughtered her family??? i think thats much worse than an age gap
@@cremesiccle and he's the only one who went with her to bring justice to her mother's killer AND is one of the ONLY fire nation characters to join the avatar's side and fight against the firelord?? like he can't just stop being the prince what do you want him to do
i mean really he should've been with the cute earth kingdom girl imho but hey what can you do
@@cremesiccle did u even watch the show u sound ignorant
@@cremesiccle You are LITERALLY the embodiment of the issue this entire video is addressing. Check yourself.
I can't call myself pro/antiship because I don't really respect either side that much, as you said both sides have been guilty of harassment and generally shitty behavior.
However, my stance is generally ship and let ship, even if I do avoid people who are a little too into certain kinds of ships. I despise the idea that "preferring a character dynamic" = "your actual real life morals". Or even the idea that consuming or making content about a pairing means you think they'd even make a good couple. I've read a lot of "ship" fics that have made me sick to my stomach, on PURPOSE, because I like dark shit. Fiction should not be equated to reality so flippantly.
I think both sides are lunatics lolz
I wonder how the conversation went from "Tag these certain tropes that can be triggering to some people" to "How DARE you even like these tropes to begin with!" ?
My philosophy on this whole bugaboo boils down to: "Nothing should be off-limits in fiction, but in that same vein, nothing should be free from criticism." Responsible tagging and an eye for nuance is a must. There are ways of portraying The Badwrong Things Whomst We Dislike that are purposeful and hold merit, and then there are people who use "artistic freedom!!!" as a cudgel to deflect any and all constructive critique applied to their work. Do what you want while recognizing that other people might not want to see it, make sure that everybody knows what they're getting into, and just... Chill out, guys. Fandom is supposed to be fun. Expression is supposed to be for the sake of enjoyment or catharsis. If the majority of your life depends on picking fights with The Badwrong People Whomst We Dislike, no matter which "side" you happen to be on, then consider trying a hobby like crocheting or baking.
Even crocheting and especially baking has it's people mad at people "going about it wrong" I get the baking side since somebody is expected to eat that. But yeah I agree people should be free to create yet man being in these scenes growing up you see some people need limiters because you tell them to go and they *GO*
Oh god, this!!!!
Freedom of speech but not of consequences is something people need to start spreading more
the thing with this issue that bothered me was that we consistently go after our fellow fans by default instead of engaging in the choices that the writers and producers made. the vast majority of the time I see people talking shit about peers instead of the actual contents and implications of the show that brought people in the same space. great vid
So much of the shipping wars I've seen on the internet has been straight up bullying. It's an excuse to gang up on people, police the preferences of others or take a popular creator down a notch. People get doxxed, shunned, harassed and straight up accused of crimes over shipping, it boggles my mind why anyone would want to turn their fandom into a war zone like that over shipping of all things, but all of them will at some point.
When I got into internet culture in the late 90s, shipping was definitely there, but it was all about comfort and escapism, nobody looked at an of it critically, it was just a way to explore and enjoy romance and sexuality outside of real life. I kind of wish things were still like this. Now there's a layer of anxiety over all of it, you've gotta ship the right thing for the right reasons or you are a Bad Person
It's like people just learned how to read subtext from high school lit class, and also decided that you can psychoanalyze people through their taste in fiction.
Like in baby's first lit class, they learned that characters can be fake people and also represent things in society in real life. So they read things like Zutara as a person developing a relationship with their oppressor, instead of the very complex relationship they actually had in the show.
Couple that with fandom purity and this weird desire to psychoanalyze people through their fandom shit, you get people who are like "how can people like unless they are ".
Maybe some people don't see the characters as allegories and just think they are cute together?
Like from my experience, most big ships are almost always a simple formula of (how attractive the characters look) * (amount of screen time they have together). That's it.
The rest of that mess is more the creator's fault than the fans for failing to represent things in a healthy way, or to give PoC screentime or to not pander to racists.
Idk, I don't ship anything. I just think it's weird to draw up a list of brain sins for someone from a one-word portmanteau of their romance headcanons for fake people.
The proper proship mentality is just the “ don’t like don’t watch” mentally that we used to have on youtube.
I'm not even a pro-shipper but as a creative writer who often weaves in my own trauma (often in vent writings) into my creations, antis hurt wayyyyyy more than they help.
Wanna talk bad ships? The Suez Canal has just been blocked. Again.
Again??? How does it happen so many times???
@@TheSlipperyNUwUdle Clearly, someone with great naval powers is anti Red/Mediterranean.
Speaking in public about nuanced and deeply personal issues is terrifying.
Yeah I probs cry like I always do
the anti-shipping mentality definitely took hold on tumblr in 2015/2016. the amount of times i had to see people saying kylo “basically raped rey” and thus the ship was abusive was far too much. and like you, i don’t even ship reylo. don’t even care about either character, i’m black and gay, i wanted stormpilot + jedi finn. however, i also remember very clearly reylos trying to demonize finn, saying he violated rey’s consent or whatever, in order to justify why they didn’t ship finnrey. there are more examples, but overall it was very weird because it was the first i’d seen people use this heavy language to justify why “x” was wrong. it wasn’t enough to just not like something, you had to start a personal crusade on why “x” fans NEEDED to be harassed and erased from the fandom. and as we know, the situation just devolved from there.
Yeah, it's like people forget they can just not like things. You don't need a big reason. We all have different tastes.
Granny moment etc, I remember the shipping wars in the pre-social media era. They were brutal though I think the discourse tended to lean on canon relevance at the time (with exceptions like incest issues). People who enjoyed non-canon ships were the ones demonized. It was a weird time in hindsight.
The anti shipping community was around for way longer
Also didn’t the creators verbally describe that scene as non consensual traumatic action from Kylo?
@@whoknows9085 Yes, that comparison was one which originated from the filmmakers.
@@Quirderph
I don’t even watch Star Wars and I knew that because that’s what all the interviews with these guys and the actors would talk about at the time.
OP I don’t think you meant anything malicious through this, but this is how we get people shouting at those who compare the villains to Nazi figures because it’s “too political”. Meanwhile every Star Wars filmmaker (or whoever works on set) would tell you that’s the point, because they are based on them.
Comparing antis with satanic panic feels hilarious and terrifying at the same time.
For real, I've been in random spaces for almost 20 years, I never saw this level of harassment and fandom cops 😢
Hi, I wanted to put out my theory for how anti-x-ship became simply "anti-shipper" or "anti". I was using tumblr for literal years, where most of the fandom scene was in, but because of the Great Tumblr Purge due to the nsfw ban, people moved to Twitter. So, two factors at play here: one, is that there's a character limit, so writing "anti-x-ship" is not economical in terms of tweets, and two, time passed and people move fandoms. Whatever people used to justify being anti-x-ship is reflective of their political beliefs, so obviously, it gets carried over to other fandoms and ships. Eventually, I think, that gave rise to just the generic term "anti". I remember even on Tumblr, for example something like Gravity Falls had fans in similar series like Steven Universe, Over the Garden Wall, Star vs the Forces of Evil, etc. So if they were an anti for one ship, they were usually an anti for other similar ships in the other franchises-but in Tumblr, they could tag all that. On Twitter, they can't.
I do think that the platform itself has way more to do with all this than most people think. Because of the character limit of tweets, it's extremely difficult to introduce nuance to the conversation, and I do think the way Twitter is structured (a constant feed of tweets ranging from different topics, engagement based, etc) almost actively prevents people from sitting down and thinking or writing critically.
I 100% agree the Tumblr Purge was THE WORSE things that happened to internet honestly. Since some of those people should have stayed on Tumblr. SInce Twitter by design lacks nuance you have to be blunt, stupidly blunt. Like here on YT you can basically write an essay in the comments and if YT bots don't like it *poof* even if it has all that nuance and good faith.
literally been thinking about this on twitter. it's like all you need is the funniest/sassiest/most cutting one-liner to just 'win' a conjured up argument.
Fandoms are super interesting, because they are made up of all different ages and genders. And they all contribute to this 'toxic' culture. You would think someone who is in their 20s would know better, but thats not always the case.
People in their 20s are still people. They're just as prone to going too far, or lashing out when they're hurt or afraid. There's a lot of pressure to be the bigger person because you're an adult, but it's not always easy, especially if someone has managed to hit your exact triggers. I try to be aware of where younger people in fandom are coming from when the drama comes up, but just from my admittedly limited perspective, I don't see much of the same in reverse.
@@keltzy beside being peoples, being in your 20s is still so young. Our frontal lobe only finish closing when we're 25, which is already halfway through this decade of our life. I am not yet 20 but from what I've seen and heard from peoples in their 20s since I was a kid, it's imo still a prime time for learning and experimenting, which means you are bound to mess up. We really shouldn't put so much pressure onto peoples solely because they are of legal age, being 18+ doesn't mean you are a sea of wisdom and control, far from it. And yes, they are definitely still peoples. I do think tho that, as the elder peoples in a ruler-less group, they have more responsibilities than the running 13 y.o, but it doesn't mean they have to babysit them either. Aah regardless, I just wished peoples had a more nuanced view of things and stop seeing only black and white :((
*a skeletal figure rises from the ground, pointing to the legend of ms. scribe*
it's mostly never the case xD
I literally saw someone say that tall people shouldn't date short people because of the power imbalance and how it "looks" like an adult dating a child. As a woman who's 5' 1", that would certainly limit my options hah. I can only hope that one was a troll post and not a sincerely held belief.
Heh. I am a woman that is 4'10", my husband is 6'2". Does it look kind of weird when we walk together? Sure, but that's life. Doesn't stop us from loving each other. Been together for twenty years by now. :)
I can present you to my two of my brothers. The tallest of them is 5'6". :P
I am sad to say that it probably wasn't a troll. Too many people think really weird things about us shorties.
Yeah. I've seen posts saying in all seriousness that anything bigger than 3" is problematic. Short women are just out of luck I guess.
I'm surprised you didn't bring up Sleepy Hollow again and how Ichabbie was the biggest ship, but the writers sidelined their black female main character for a white woman that they wanted people to ship Ichabod with instead and then killed Abbie off to prop up the white male lead as another example. Cause I will never forget and never forgive.
That show was such a mess by the end. I honestly hadnt thought about it in years until reading your comment.
I think she made a video or two about the whole Ichabbie mess back in the day! It was such a frustrating situation.
O_o
They killed Abbie?! What the frak?! I’m so glad I stopped watching that show because of how they treated her character. Even more so now.
As a 35 year old bisexual woman the "protect the children!" discourse terrifies me. Don't ppl see how this is used all the time to try to harm LGBT children and teenagers, taking away their acess to content and community cause anything LGBT is seeing as inherently sexual?
Also, if responsible adults don't talk to teens abt stuff like sex education, the only ppl who'll talk to them abt sex will be groomers and conservatives who'll make them hate themselves. As a bisexual activist who wants teens to have an easier adolescence than I did, I'm always anxious that this sort of purity discourse will get imported from the US to Brazil (it's already happening, I've seen at least one artist be horribly harassed) and make me be attacked as some sort of pervert for trying to give ppl who are younger than me the tools to protect themselves from perverts.
Im still not over antis calling my poc proship friends "freaks of colors"
lmaooo
@@faiali2895 it makes me laugh now because they are such dumbasses but at the time it was very upsetting lol
But it's the liberals who are the hateful racists, according to conservatives. Sure, Jan.
I’m not over proshippers calling me a monkey
@@whoknows9085 was it someone with the rainbow meat emojis? cause the hannibal proshippers are so awful for some reason lmao
I was deeply into a few fandoms in high school and the beginning of college (first decade of the 2000s, basically), then kinda drifted away as other responsibilities like having a job and an apartment and stuff took precedent. Once I became financially stable and had more free time, I decided to get a Tumblr (LJ no longer being a thing) and try to get back into fandom... and promptly noped right the fuck back out. I definitely understand that teens tend to be hyperbolic and very black-and-white in their thinking, but I don't *think* we were this bad back in the day? I certainly don't recall people sending death threats to voice actors who express tepid support for the "wrong" ship.
(Hell, the idea of asking voice actors about their opinions on ships *at all* is a massive WTF for me. Why do people care what the VAs think? They're just doing their jobs!)
It happened before (I remember Vic Whatever, an USA Voice Actor, saying he thought the character he was voicing was The Straightest and that being used as a "gotcha" in the stupidest ship war I have seen in my life) but now the boundaries are blurred to the point where people harass creators and get mad at them for not confirming their views.
@@drawingsticks5333 I’ll never understand why funimation thought it was a good idea to have Vic, a man that is at the very least uncomfortable with homosexuality if not outright homophobic, voice arguably the gayest character in the anime Free!.
Then again, that entire anime dub was just “no homo”-ing everything. So maybe it fits.
This video is so good! I relate so much to what you say in the conclusion. We grow up with so much shame forced down our throats, it sucks that even in fandom spaces that are supposed to be an escape it keeps getting passed around
I will Never forgive Disney for Not giving me FinnPo, They had more chemistry than the entire franchise
same
Me : catradora are so cute together
"so you support abuse, genocide, Hitler ?
*me being an abuse survivor myself* :what? no ??" I just think the Jock & Catgirl are really cute together '-'
"whatever abuse apologist"
Oof 😔
I feel like "but what about the children!" has never been a productive way to look at anything. Obviously we are influenced by the media we consume to a degree, but there are so many ways in which children (girls especially) are taught that harmful and sexually inappropriate things are okay by actual real life ~society~. Focusing on the potential consequences of a piece of fiction or artwork seems redundant when they're getting that messaging via the world around them anyway. Is someone going to stay in an abusive relationship because they saw it glamourised in a trashy bodice ripper, romance novel? I mean I guess, but it's more likely to be because the real world told them it was okay. 🤷♀️
☝️☝️☝️☝️ that one
I was here 15 years ago for the moral panics surrounding the _Twilight_ books. I ain't gonna defend those book because...no, but the whole "damage to women and girls" was so overblown. Even the staunchest fans noped outta the series after that imprinting on a *newborn baby*.
I quote-retweeted your video on Twitter and commented on it briefly there, but I want to leave a longer comment that I don't have to divide up into batches of 280 characters lol, so this may be a bit repetitive to what you already read.
This is a great video, and I appreciate you making it! Racism in fandom spaces really does need to be talked about more, so thank you for discussing it.
Like I said on Twitter, my only criticism is I wish this covered a bit more about antishippers because they ARE very vile and I wish more people were aware of what they've done. The things claimed at 29:12-29:31 HAVE happened, they are not rumors or unproven. Antishippers have harassed people terribly, use radfem rhetoric, etc. I've seen it, and I'll link some receipts to these things at the bottom of this comment if anyone is curious.
That said, obviously you and your friend those tweets were directed towards did *not* participate in that behavior, and I'm sorry that person jumped on you for something you didn't do or didn't even know about. I think that person was speaking generally, and speaking of actions that others have done in fandom and they got heated because sometimes it feels like no one is listening or taking it seriously. But they shouldn't have taken their frustrations out on you, especially in the manner that many of those comments did, and I'm sorry they spoke to you that way.
My one criticism aside, I know this is a long video and you discuss A LOT of important topics, so I understand that you can't go over every little thing in detail in one video. And this IS a really long, detailed video haha, I can't imagine how much time and effort this took to make. I appreciate you going over examples of anti-shipping (throwing around accusatory words, etc) where you did in the sections about specific ships . And I also appreciate you focusing on the greater issue of racism in fandom spaces because that *definitely* needs to be talked about more. I've only just gotten started with making RUclips videos myself and this inspired me to talk about this issue of racism in fandom too in the future if I get into the habit of making videos more often.
So thank you again!
And here are some links for those curious...
Antishippers using radfem rhetoric:
twitter.com/dionysiaca/status/1193263490540150784
Links to google docs of examples of antishippers harassing people:
twitter.com/lizcourserants/status/1374652873187995651
twitter.com/lizcourserants/status/1232958379632582656
Some proshippers are awful harassers and need to be shut down (especially since being pro ship is supposed to be anti harrassment), but I feel so unsafe interacting with anyone in fandom now, especially on Tumblr and Twitter, due to the insane purity culture rhetoric. It ruined several shows for me, as well as a VA after finding out they were pretty with the anti-shipping rhetoric (they voice-acted in a lot of my favorite shows).
I liked that you called out the fact that a lot of them make survivors disclose their trauma, which is not okay. I know a lot of people out of the Fandom loop end up unintentionally promoting purity culture since they don't stop to think about what it actually means a lot of the time. The takes "Fiction affects reality" and "What you like in fiction doesn't determine your morality" are things that can and should coexist, and I wish more people realized it.
FWIW, I feel like "Fiction doesn't equal reality" was shorthand for the fact that not all writing reaches people in equal volumes and that even the most well known of fanfics may reach 100k people at most. Compare that with shows like _13 Reasons Why_ , that get seen by tens of millions.
There's also the fact that media is very much the products of the time period they were made in. There likely wouldn't be a mass killing of sharks if someone made _Jaws_ today because people in general are more educated on shark behavior. A movie like _Birth of a Nation_ would never get made today, current political landscape notwithstanding, because most people have at least a topical understanding that racism is wrong.
That being said, there's definitely a number of us pro-shippers would upon going to Twitter could really do with touching some damn grass. In particular, the dudebro Loli fans who take anyone saying "I don't like Loli" as a challenge to spam their mentions with porn, which is rude regardless. And then there are the pro-shippers who are really only pro-their ship and act like assholes in fandom where their ship is the majority. I don't even like using the label anymore because of this shit.
Bottom line: curate your space, block and mute as needed and just let people live. 😔
Always be transparent with your tags and trigger warnings, people! I'm glad she mentioned that at the end because the best way to protect others is to inform them about the things they may potentially consume
I have a big problem with this weird phenomena of thinking children aren't smart, can't form their own cogent, logical opinions on things, and can't talk about things that might be difficult (I apologize for that mess of a sentence). When I was a kid Nickelodeon gave us our own nightly news program hosted by Linda Ellerbee that talked about the real shit (The Gulf War was going on at the time, plus every other goddamn thing) of the day! And it wasn't candy coated bullshit either. PLUS after the story was delivered there was a panel of young teens who gave their opinions on what was going on! I mean, back then there was this real feeling amongst us kids that we had an inherent value and our minds were our own. Now...I don't know. It feels like we try to hide kids from everything; and I get my generation has lived through one trauma after another but...damn. I'm NOT advocating for showing kids pictures of war crimes and every horrible thing under the sun, but Jesus Christ ask for their fucking opinion once in a while and ACTUALLY listen to what they have to say and just have a damn conversation. Okay, my venting is over. Thank you for attending this TED Talk.
I ship Reylo, I joined the fandom specifically because of Reylo, but I was pretty much blacklisted by a lot of other Reylos at the start because I was vocally supportive of Finn and John. Being black myself, I could see the anti-blackness and outright racism coloring Reylo tweets and the fandom, and even though I like Reylo, I wasn’t for it.
I kept calling out the fact that many of them were trying to turn an AAVE joke into something insidious, and oh boy, they did not like that.
Fortunately, the outright racists that most people tend to pull screenshots of have pretty much been pushed out of the fandom. I’ve personally run multiple threads specifically to call these racists out, and have helped identify the ConservaReylos who were threatening John or ridiculing his story.
UNFORTUNATELY, this relatively small group of Reylos are used as the standard for the fandom as a whole. ShitReylosSay, a huge twitter that targets and harasses innocent people, started out and justify their actions with a handful of screenshots from people we already dislike.
Every time a black Reylo, like me, would voice our opinions, we’d be called freaks or color, or accused of faking our blackness.
If it makes you feel better, the team at Bad Robot is very much aware of that ShitReylosSay account and for all that everyone working on the movies dislike Reylos, they view them as an even bigger shit heel for threatening children and telling people to off themselves 👍