#TooAfraidToAsk

So, there’s one thing that I see a lot in fandom spaces now that I’ve tried to understand multiple times but I still don’t, and that is the term “pro-shipper” vs. “anti-shipper.”

I don’t get it because I thought at first that it meant you were against all ships in general. Then I found out that “anti-shipper” is someone who’s against anything unhealthy/dark/just generally creepy & gross, like incest, underage, non-consensual, whatever. Which I can get behind because I don’t like any of those things. But then I also learned that “pro-shipper” is someone who doesn’t care what others ship, which is also true for me. Like, I don’t have to personally support something to feel that it should exist. I mean, I’m never in a million years going to touch an incestuous or underage pairing, and I wouldn’t ever read a fic that involves explicit rape or torture or anything like that. And in some occasional instances, I do think it probably reflects the writer/shipper’s morality- like, I can’t imagine anyone writing smut for an underage ship without getting something out of it (I’m not talking about teenagers fooling around, I mean if someone writes like, a teenager or younger with an adult and it’s presented in a positive way), so in SOME cases I feel like it could be the writer exercising a fantasy and that’s obviously bad if they’re fantasizing about actual people who are underage… And also I think there are plenty of villain/hero shipping fics that often involve dark things where the author maybe writes that because that kind of dynamic has been normalized to them and they believe it’s okay in a real life relationship (although that would make them a victim in my eyes, and I wouldn’t blame them for writing that)…

But, I dunno. There’s also the fact that a lot of people who write things like this do so in order to work through their own trauma, and since it’s pretty insensitive and awful to ask someone to prove their trauma in order to justify them writing a certain pairing, I’m not going to say these things SHOULDN’T be written…

I’m just confused lately because I’ve seen a lot of “PRO-SHIPPERS DO NOT EVEN THINK OF INTERACTING!!!” on tumblr lately, and I don’t know if that applies to me or not since like I said, I would never, ever actually read any of these fics that anti-shippers apparently hate, but I also would never tell anyone to take down their fics, or harass anyone over it, or report anyone for writing that (because I think it’s important to remember, since this is fiction, it’s not breaking any laws- I think only if you wrote RPF would it get close to that realm, and RPF happens to be another kind of fic that I deeply hate so I’m not going to concern myself with it much anyway), so I don’t know what this means. I think maybe “pro-shipper” has now become shorthand for “person who ships underage/incest/non-con,” otherwise I don’t get the hate and the desire not to interact with a person who doesn’t ship that, but also doesn’t care in general what others ship. I really don’t know. Fandom is so much more confusing nowadays than it used to be. (This is also one reason why I don’t like labels very much at all. Ultimately I’m probably not going to identify myself with either of these terms because it’s completely irrelevant to my experience of the world. I’m not going to die on any of these hills, I’m just going to seek out the type of fics I want to read on the occasions that I do want to read fic, and ignore everything else that I’m it looking for.)

TLDR: #TooAfraidToAsk What does “pro-shipper” mean????