lightning-flight:

cw: incest mention

Honest question: At what point did the whole proship discourse start? When did it even become a problem? Because we remember back in 2011 when everyone and their grandma were into Thorki, and practically no one in the MCU fandom batted an eye.

Meanwhile now it’s like “It’s fine that I like characters who torture, manipulate, abuse and kill others. It says NOTHING about me as a person. Meanwhile you deserve to burn in hell for shipping Thorki, you INCEST LOVING RAPIST SCUM!!!!”

And it’s just??????????

We have family members who are victims of incest and somehow, us thinking that Thorki or Elladan/Elrohir or Data/Lore should kiss hasn’t made us start fetishizing their trauma or think it was good that it happened, despite what antis seem to think. It’s almost as if most people can separate the fiction they consume from the reality they exist in.

Yes, even fictives.

According to fanlore the discourse started about 5-7 years ago, which tracks with my memory of the situation.

I’m just gonna reblog a chunk of that article, cause I think it’s probably the best source.

All of this nonsense is like REALLY recent.

One of the earliest uses of “anti-anti” comes from a 2015 Dreamwidth fail_fandomanon post, calling them “anti-anti-shippers.[1] The post also shows that the term "anti-shipper” was being used at that time as well. By 2016, anti-anti-shipper had been shortened to anti-anti, possibly due to Tumblr blogs using “anti-anti” in their usernames, which was considerably shorter than anti-anti-shipper.

According to anons on fail_fandomanon from 2016, the anti-anti and anti-shipper movements were gaining noticeable traction on Tumblr. The discussion and use of anti-shipper and anti-anti on Dreamwidth may have also helped spread the usage of these terms to those who may not have heard it otherwise.[4] At this time, the term pro-shipper didn’t seem to be used, at least in these discussions.

By 2017, pro-shipper was a term being used on Tumblr, as evident in surveys using the term. The prevalence of pro-shipper, as well as the larger spread of anti-anti and anti-shipper, may be in part due to an immense ship war on Tumblr during 2017.

During that year the Voltron: Legendary Defender fandom was in the midst of a ship war that was heavy on pros-shipper and anti-shipper terms and ideologies (see Voltron Controveries and Discourse Demographics Survey (Voltron)). 2017 was also the year that the Undertale needle hoax was started (see Hoaxes about Anti-Shipper Violence), which was not only spread through places like Tumblr and Twitter, but Reddit as well. The Voltron fandom itself also had a similar hoax, but the exact year that the hoax was started is unclear as information about it is more sparse than Undertale’s anti-shipper hoax.

However, due to the ship war that had been going on in 2017 Voltron fandom, it’s not unfounded that the hoax may have started between 2017-2018, when the fandom discourse was at its peak.