I actually have and will again bite and claw over someone demanding that a community use different words for their issues cause they, outsiders to that community, don’t like it. And that’s exactly why I’m biting and clawing over the push to change the meaning of the term proship!
Say we cedé the term proship. We let antis have this one, fine, proship now means problematic ship I guess. Now we need a new term for who we once called proshippers. The term we once used for “person who thinks fiction isn’t something anyone should be harassed for and understands that someone’s taste in fiction is not necessarily an indication of real life desires” now means “person who ships something contentious or something that might disturb or upset others.” So we do yhat. We coin a new term.
What the fuck do you think antis are going to do?
If you guessed “rewrite the definition of that word too and convince everyone out of the loop that it means what they decided it means,” congrats, you’re exactly right!
And this cycle will keep going. And going. And going. And going. Because it’s a pointless exercise to begin with.
If we just roll over and let antis decide what proship means, we will lose the word and start playing a game designed so that we never win and the unattainable grand prize is a word for ourselves that we get to define without having it stripped from us.
So yeah. If you use the term proship to mean problematic ship but you’re clearly an ex anti fresh out of anti spaces, I’ll give you a break and just explain that it does not mean that. But if you dig your damn heels in the sand about the meaning of proship, that tells me you want antis to define the terms of the discourse and that you don’t care what consequences that has for proshippers. Which, what exactly do you think I’m going to extrapolate from that?
Upon discovering the proship hill, I have decided that it is in fact one that I’m willing to die on.
