So as most of you know, I have a more personal connection to anti-shipping than most: for about two years, I was arguably the nastiest and most vicious anti in my fandom, so much so that I gained a certain level of infamy for it.
Starting to ship Reylo was a wakeup call the likes of which I’d never encountered before — not only did it cause me to examine my own past behavior and confront the extremely difficult revelation that I’d been the villain all along, but it also made me think about anti-shipping as a whole, and the things I wish I had understood when I was knee-deep in that mindset.
Things like:
1. People’s enjoyment of things that hurt you is not blithe mockery of your pain. It is not a personal slight. You are allowed to be hurt by something. You are not allowed to belittle, degrade, and shame others for interacting with it. You are not that important, and your pain is not a weapon.
2. The moment you commit yourself to a movement devoted to hatred, you have ceded the moral high ground. You have gone to the Dark Side. You are not fighting the good fight. You are an emotional terrorist actively attempting to break people down for disagreeing with you.
3. You also cede the right to be a victim. No one deserves to be suicide baited or doxxed, and neither do you. However, by aligning yourself with hatred, by actively harming others and laughing about it, you forfeit your right to be upset and morally outraged when you receive hate, when others comment in disagreement with your posts, when you are cast as a villain. You are not being bullied. You are receiving back just a taste of the pain you have caused others.
4. You. Are. Miserable. You really are. Happy, fulfilled people don’t marinate themselves in hatred. They don’t drink acid and spit it at others. You’re so desperate to avoid looking at yourself and so afraid of what you’ll see there that you’re directing all of that hatred outwards. You found a group of people who like something that makes you angry, and it’s so easy to attack them, to hurt them because you’ve convinced yourself that they’re “bad” somehow and they deserve it. But it’s not about them. It’s about you. It’s about all those dark things you hear at night. It’s the fear that you’re worthless. And it’s the high you get, the ego boost every time someone cheers you on for attacking the “bad” shippers. It’s the feeling that you’re so smart, you’re so popular, you’re so loved and you’re so, so right for everything you’re doing.
But those people aren’t there for you at night. They won’t be there when your world falls apart. All that’s left is you, and your misery, and the desperate need to make someone else hurt for it because you can’t handle it.
5. And most importantly: you’re wrong. You are wrong. Your thought process is wrong. Your behavior is wrong. Everything that you are doing as you torture and harm others and convince yourself that you’re morally justified IS. WRONG.
One day you’re going to realize that, and you’ll choke on it.
And if you did that a thousand times, it still wouldn’t be equal to all of the harm you caused.
And you can distract and deflect and justify all you want. In the end, all of those people who cheered you on will be gone. Your popularity will be gone. And all you’ll have is yourself, and every ounce of misery and self-hatred you tried and failed to run from, that you drilled into others, and the realization that even though you thought you were the hero of your fandom, in reality, you were the monster you were trying so hard to protect everyone from.
I-want-my-IWTV 