As per your issue, the thing is: you can’t. You can’t convince them. Fandom wank would have already ended if antis were open to read sources, understand laws, understand nuance, understand the “mind yo business”, follow the “live and let live” rule etc. You’ll see discourse blogs go on infinite hiatus or downright step down from the wankery not because they have been ‘defeated’ but because they are exhausted of repeating the same thing over and over again.
Antis don’t listen.
Which is why the point for you is not to make sure antis can’t talk shit about you, the point is for you to build confidence and security so that you may roll your eyes at antis because you know you’re not doing anything harmful, you know yourself, you know the law of your country, and you know that fiction affects reality in every way but how antis say it does. Haters gonna hate, you can’t change this.
Be sure of yourself, and when you’re tired rest, and when you feel alone look around in your community, and believe in yourself.
But most of all, be true to yourself. It’s not about antis not attacking you, it’s about you being bulletproof.
I knew that monsters were far more gentle and more desirable than the monsters living inside ‘nice people.’ Accepting that you are a monster gives you the leeway to not behave like one. When you deny being a monster, you behave like one.
Guillermo del Toro on why he loves monsters. (via lampfaced)
“this ship/work of fiction could hypothetically hurt someone” is not an argument.
We don’t prohibit alcohol just because some people can hurt themselves/other people with it. People who can drink responsibly aren’t at fault for people who can’t.
You either believe in people to be personally responsible for themselves or you believe in a dystopia where all fiction is subject to censorship due to any possible cultural impact.
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.
“that’s such a dangerous/wrong/bad thing to write!”
wow, so unique, you sound like you just flew in from 1785.
“they can’t communicate, its SO UNHEALTHY.”
no, they’re having conflict and
IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE UNHEALTHY. NO ONE THINKS ITS REAL. EVERY SIXTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL READING IT KNOWS IT, STOP POLICING AUTHORS AND YOUNG WOMEN BECUASE YOU ONLY WANT THEM CONSUMING WHAT YOU CONSIDER TO BE MORALLY PURE MATERIAL.
yeah it’s really tough bc y’know, i do want to be there for abuse survivors but then there’s other survivors who will split my ass in two if i dare say “this blog is a safe zone for abuse survivors” where they’ll be like “you’re throwing the survivors who like billy under the bus” even though i said i’m willing to listen
To some extent, fictional characters are always a bit like getting a basic shape that is the same for everybody, but with lots of blank spaces in between to fill in. A bit like this here:
Thing is, every person is different.
We come from different cultures. We’re american, brazilian, german, polish….we’re from all over the world.
We’re at different stages of our lives. We are students, housewives, doctors, accountants, secretaries, cashiers…we live at home with our parents, we are parents, we’re single, married, we have kids, we don’t have kids, we’re straight or queer. Some of us are traumatized, some of us are not.
Some of us like pineapple on pizza. Some don’t.
And we bring ALL of that to the table: who we are, what we’ve experienced, what we know and what we don’t, what need to grow and learn. And it’s DIFFERENT for each and every one of us.
So once we start filling in those blanks? Even thought the base is the SAME for everybody, we still end up with completely DIFFERENT pictures:
And each and every one of these versions is true and valid….FOR THE PERSON WHO CREATED IT. Because it relates to THEIR experience, which is personal and subjective.
Sometimes we find common ground. Sometimes someone elses’ painting will echo our own experience, and we’ll be able to connect with them through that.
And sometimes we’ll just look at a picture and go “meh” or “ugh!”, AND THAT IS OK TOO.
So what this boils down to is this:
Some people are in a place where they draw strength from being angry at their abuser. And allowing yourself to be angry is something that some people absolutely need to do in order to process and heal from their abuse.
Other people are in a place where they need to move on to a more positive way of doing things and explore the concept of redemption and the idea of either receiving or granting forgivenness, which can be a healing experience too.
So yeah….fandom needs BOTH versions of Billy presented here.
The one that focuses on him as an abuser, the evil dragon that needs to be slain, as well as the one that focuses on him as the victim of abuse, the cursed princess who needs to be rescued.
Both have their purpose, both are needed.
Now…..all we need to learn is to respect each other and acknowledge that both versions of Billy are valid and that they can co-exist peacefully. They fill different niches, side by side.
I-want-my-IWTV 