The difference between nonshippers and antis

Meta
Title:	the difference between nonshippers and antis
Creator:	opalkissedfaerie
Date(s):	June 28, 2018
Medium:	online
Fandom:	pan-fandom, Voltron
Topic:
External Links:	original post, archive link
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the difference between nonshippers and antis is a 2018 Tumblr post by opalkissedfaerie.

Original Post

nonshippers: yeah [ship name] just isn’t my cup of tea. i don’t mind if others ship it, i might even understand why they find it appealing. sometimes it makes me uncomfortable to see it, but i’ve got my blacklist all set up, or i can easily scroll past it

antis: your ship is disgusting, you’re disgusting for even thinking about shipping it, you don’t even deserve to exist. change your ways or the wrath of god will strike down upon you, you disgusting piece of shit. why? because i’m right and you’re wrong, here are ten thousand reasons why this ship is— *literally goes out of their way to find posts regarding the ship in order to stand on a soapbox about why that ship is Wrong™*

Tags on the original post included "#voltron discourse," "#fandom discourse," and "can go for any fandom really."

Responses

One Tumblr user reblogged opalkissedfaerie's original posted and added:

But what if we are saying an adult x child or sibbling ships are disgusting? I don’t personally think we should harm anyone over it but those ships are really gross and the shoppers don’t know just how harmful the ships are.

opalkissedfaerie reblogged and responded:

this is a post about voltron, so i’ll be using a lot of voltron characters to reply

by all means, you may see a ship as disgusting. i am not going to say “oh you can’t see this ship as wrong.” i am not going to force you to ship something, or to be comfortable with a ship. you may feel any way about a certain ship. this is geared toward those who use those feelings in order to hurt others who don’t see those ships in those ways, or people who have a very clear distinction between fiction and reality

there is still a distinct difference between a nonshipper and an anti. an anti will go out of their way to harass those who ship the ship. nonshippers don’t ship something because of their own reasons, but do not go out of their way to harass others

we don’t know why people ship something. we can’t assume that. even if we don’t like a certain ship because of certain aspects (i can think of a few that i’m terribly uncomfortable with due to my own reasons), that doesn’t mean that someone else can’t like it. there is a line drawn between fiction and reality, and that line does not usually bleed over into reality. when it does, it’s an entirely different matter, not usually one brought on by shipping in fandoms

there’s a post about that, though it seems i can’t find it at the current moment. the main problem with this kind of logic (the “fiction=reality” logic and thus we must bring down fiction) is that it lessens the severity of the real problem. bottom line of that post i mentioned was this: abusers will find any reason at all in order to enact upon their own twisted desires and thus “rationalize” it, and that usually does not have to do with shipping. even if it does just so happen that the person is a shipper of a “troublesome” ship, it’s a very, very, very small percentage of shippers

i’ll use two examples with the two you gave

the child x adult ship. i’ve seen many roleplayers who portray (or even headcanon) certain characters as adults. for example, pidge from voltron. before her canon age came out, there were roleplayers who portrayed and headcanoned her as an older person. just really short. i can think of one pidge roleplayer in specific who had chosen to represent pidge as an 18-year-old due to her height/stature/etc being so close to the mun’s. reason i bring this up is, through roleplays, you may accidentally start shipping something you normally wouldn’t have. certain scenarios that wouldn’t happen in canon. “aged up” or “aged down” ships become common due to an ever-changing canon source, alternate universes, crossovers, etc

adding onto this, people have been in a riot in the voltron fandom for a long time due to a teenager x adult ship. both consenting adults with an age gap. keith, according to a paladin handbook that wasn’t even canon and yet was accepted as such, was written down to be 18 years old. shiro, according to the information from that same book, was 25. many have been arguing and claiming that as pedophilia and even if it was with Lance, a character who is said to be 17 by that book, it would still not be considered as such. the term, then, would be overused and diluted in its meaning. see this post here about alarm fatigue regarding pedophilia

biggest note on this: the shippers who ship these pairings do NOT use these ages and agree alongside the creators of the show that these ages are not canon. yet antis continue to harass others for it, claiming the paladin handbook as law when lauren montgomery and joaquin dos santos both stated that they didn’t know about the contents of the book. they had no part in its creation and thus did not contribute to it in any way

now for the sibling ships. one of the biggest arguments i’ve seen has to do with pairs that aren’t even canon sibling relationships. sheith from voltron is a major one, though recently confirmed that they are not, in fact, brothers. for the longest times, antis used the argument of “broganes” against others who shipped sheith. they claimed that because of keith’s line of “you’re like a brother to me,” that meant that they were brothers and ONLY brothers. anyone headcanoning different was automatically wrong and therefore must reform themselves. this isn’t even taking into account of alternate universes where a sibling relationship would be impossible or not at all portrayed in that fashion. crack ships, even

i understand that ships can be harmful, just as anyone else can. any ship can be harmful for any reason. even the most pure of ships, even the most supportive of ships, can be harmful depending on the characters involved. example: this one character has the same exact personality as what my abuser portrayed to everyone around them, seeing this ship triggers those horrible memories. or even this character has the same interests as my abuser, or my abuser cosplayed this character, or my abuser identified with this character, or my abuser very heavily shipped this ship or roleplayed this character, etc etc etc. you see where i’m going with this?

any relationship, regardless of circumstance, can be harmful. that’s what blacklists are for, as well as the block feature

in the case of sheith, which was what the original post was about, many shippers are csa survivors or abuse (sometimes incestual) survivors. (i am included in those people, though not of the incestual variety.) people who have gone through trauma are wrongly accused for the same thing that they survived. often times, the anti won’t even listen to a word the shipper says, claiming that their word is law and thus all should bow to it

to sum up, a nonshipper can understand why some may ship a certain pairing and understand it’s not any of their business to force themselves upon someone else’s fictional world. it’s easy to tailor one’s own dash experience to better suit their needs and desires, blocking and blacklisting when they need to in order to accomplish that

there is still a definite line between nonshippers and antis

theassholeantiarchive reblogged opalkissedfaerie's addition and added:

This might be the best meta about shipping and anti vs non shipper debate.

We don’t care if you don’t like the ship, that is completely fine. Just don’t go out of your way to harass us. Blacklist and focus on things you do like and if someone isn’t tagging correctly then ask them to tag properly.

Don’t make a post making fun of a 150k reylo fanfic and link it so your followers can leave nasty comments for the author to read. Don’t make a Reylo Drag Hour to take posts, scream the username and tell people to make fun of and harass someone over their ship meta. Being nasty for the sake of being nasty isn’t criticism its just being a douchebag

Don’t spam the ship tags screaming different characters hate you for shipping something.

Don’t tell shippers they are School Shooters over a fucking fictional character they like.

Don’t block evade shippers who don’t want to be called racial slurs because they are POC and ship a white couple.

Don’t Stalk Shippers who have changed their names multiple times to keep antis out of their anons.

Don’t send genital mutilation to a 13 year old over the Voltron ship Sheith (or any ship.)

Don’t call survivors abuse apologists and pedophiles because they ship a ship that really isn’t that problematic and doesn’t fit a definition of abuse, incest or pedophilia.

Don’t harass survivors to reveal their history of trauma and abuse to get permission from you, some random asshole online, to cope ship.

You know what, don’t fucking harass people at all. Boom that’s it.

Further Reading

• AO3 Content Discussion (2016)
• Purity Culture in Fandom