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Genuinely, a lot of people on this site (and beyond) seem to have no idea what normalization actually means.
So let me elaborate:
If you see art of a ship that would be illegal/wrong irl, and you immediately know that it would be wrong irl, then it has not been normalized.
If something is normalized, it means that a large majority of people are doing it without a second thought, and the rest of society is okay with it. But you don’t see people publicly announcing on social media that they’re dating/marrying their sibling, or someone way too young (granted, I can’t speak for other non American societies but I do acknowledge that where it is normalized it’s a problem). You know damn well there would be (justified) backlash and therefore it is not normalized.
The disgust toward the very wrong ideas antis claim pro shippers are normalizing has not changed in any significant degree. And it will not change because of pro shippers, because people in fandom are a very small minority of the national population (US) and even more so globally (where there are more people to account for). On top of that, the large majority of pro shippers are aware that those kinds of relationships would not be okay in real life and would attempt to stop/report it if they encountered it.
What an actual normalization attempt would look like would be fundraising and petitioning to make those kinds of relationships legal. But again, this isn’t happening. People are just drawing fictional characters kissing, while again, knowing in the back of their heads that this would not be okay in reality (which is, by the way, a part of consuming media critically, but that’s a whole other beast I don’t want to get into tonight).
TLDR: All of you antis are using the term “normalization” incorrectly and what actual normalization is is not what pro shippers or anyone who ships problematic ships are doing
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