The intimacy of creating a new language with your lover; an exchange of love through words that are meant to be understood only between you two. A love that is hidden between lines, but speaks volumes.
You may feel like you have peaked at 20, perhaps 30. You have and you haven’t. You are not a mountain. You are the whole goddamned mountain range—a series of unanticipated and majestic peaks born of below the surface tectonic shifts, spontaneous eruptions, and the imprint of external events.
People seem to have forgotten that "proship" was the Fandom norm for the longest time.
Only, it wasn't called proship. It was called ship and let ship. Or minding your own buisness.
If someone had a ship you didn't like or thought was gross, you would avoid them. If they drew art or wrote stories you didn't agree with or like, you would ignore them.
There were tags like smut, whump, and angst to tell people about things they might not want to read. And then dead dove: do not eat for taboo subjects and especially gritty fic.
Then people started to ignore that. Younger fans started to bully people because they disagreed with shipping certain characters. Whether it be because it "wasn't canon", they thought it was gross, or they just didn't like it.
These people began calling themselves "anti-ship"
Pro-ship became a label to show that someone was against anti-ship.
Eventually, the anti-ship movement began to die down. So do you know what they did? They started accusing people. Of being pedophiles, groomers, rape supporters, and more. All because they wrote or drew things that these people didn't like.
They began claiming that THEY were the Fandom norm, and that these "proshippers" were the bad people. They started claiming that proship stood for "problematic shipping"
Due to this, the term "pro-ship" is often misconstrued as to what it means. Many people don't even KNOW what it means.
It means "anti-censorship".
It means that we support someone's right to produce art, no matter how gross, no matter how taboo, no matter how "problematic"
Because it's not hurting anyone.
If it's something you don't want to see? Block the person. Block the tag. Say in your bio that you don't like it. That's what they're FOR!
This was discussed in earlier days of fandom.
"I wonder why people would read a story in a genre they don't care for, then take the time to let the writer know that sure enough, they didn't care for it. That would be like me going to a restaurant, ordering a slice of cherry pie, then asking that the chef be brought out so I can say "I don't like cherry pie, and I didn't like yours either." To continue this analogy into its usual fannish outcome, the chef would say "Well gee, lady, why did you order it?" And I'd say, "Are you questioning my right to order cherry pie?"
-Unknown 2002
Except now, it would be like the person who didn't like the cherry pie and ordered it anyways then demanded that no restaurant serve cherry pie because it was poison. Not only is it a ridiculous request, it's blatantly untrue.
Every single one of the usual anti arguments is just them trying to put a moral veneer over a ship war in an effort to prove that your ship is bad and gross and problematic, therefore their ship is good and pure and correct.
I think we should all start calling anti nonsense what it is: a ship war with some new paint on it.
"Pro-shippers DNI" reads to me like "I believe people who think it's okay that cherry pie exists in the universe even though I don't want to eat cherry pie sully me by liking or reblogging my content. How dare they!"
*crouches to go into stealth*
the cracking of my knees alerts the guards, I am immediately killed
