I think what’s happening is that they tell themselves that the show isn’t “glorifying” or “romanticizing” it, whether or not that’s true; meanwhile they believe any fanfiction of the same topics is automatically supporting those themes irl.
I feel like you can see some of this happening with HotD, where antis ARE turning on it more, because its pretty hard to argue that the incest isn’t being romanticized to hell and back.
I wish I could tell you the logic behind it, anon, but I don’t understand it myself.
But it very much does seem to be the case that antis love dark, gruesome, problematic fiction, and then want to hold the fandom to be light and fluffy and unproblematic.
I suspect that if you asked any anti, they would say its because the canon isn’t “glorifying” whatever dark material it has, but they somehow just know that the icky fans are “getting off to it”.
shippers don’t become oppressed when some people in fandom find their creations and favorite genres of content to be icky. shippers become oppressed when people constantly harass them, regularly send them death threats, spread dangerous misinformation about them, force them to out themselves, draw or write porn of them, send them illegal imagery or triggering material, exclude them from their communities, heavily damage their mental health, and lead them to suicide or attempted suicide just for existing.
you have blacklisting. you have chrome extensions. you have all these tools out there that are available to help you dodge the things you don’t like. you can filter out tags and words and within an instant, all those posts you don’t take a liking to are completely gone. you can very easily avoid the content that makes you uncomfortable. i can’t very easily avoid the people constantly encouraging me to kill myself, threatening to dox me, and telling me that i’m either faking my trauma to look oppressed or that i deserved to get raped multiple times as a kid just for being anti-censorship.
yeah well here’s a cool idea: start creating and start reblogging. leave nice comments to your favorite creators. send them prompts. start interacting with others. sounds wild, right? start it today. keep these fandoms alive.
I appreciate the optismism of “build it and they will come” but i think the true frustration behind “fandoms are dying” is a multi layered problem that making more content will not fix because:
a) puritanism, bullying, purging of content, and antis are on the rise. especially of nsfw art.
“But i don’t want nsfw art” you say. “I only want pure, good art/fic thats full of happy puppies and kitties”. tough tits. you cant nurture creativity in a fandom thats constantly gatekeeping. thats how you get “dead fandoms”.
b) giant corporations are co opting fandoms in an attempt to make [even more] money. this feeds back into point a (of course disney doesn’t want queer/adult content, they’re advertisers/investors would disapprove) and therefore antis feel more empowered to bully and harrass.
c) the circle of social media platforms in which it is “safe” to post your nsfw content has basically zeroed down to twitter. even patreon will ban your art if its the wrong fictional ship [i know, it’s happened to me]. maybe there’s more leeway for writing like ao3 or tumblr, but we all know this site died after the nsfw purge and is making it even harder to get exposure after the latest round of banned hashtags and everybody from sfw artists to gif and graphic editors suffer from no audience and a lack of engagement [remember what i said about gatekeeping killing creativity?]
Now lets say you DO post your nsfw slash art on twitter. Its basically the wild west. Anybody can find you, attack you, bully/harrass you and, again, because of points b + c these harassers all think they have a right to do so.
SO. “Make more content for your fandom” is a nice sentiment except there’s nowhere to post, no one to like it, and everybody is so goddamned scared of death threats and being cancelled they either don’t make the content to begin with or people don’t reblog/share because “what if the creator is secretly a bad person and i didnt know it and now other people think im a bad person”.
Fandoms are dead because the water is toxic. Dropping more stuff into the water won’t help. You gotta clean up the water first if you want creativity to thrive.
