conflict is bad. misunderstanding is bad. miscommunication is bad. the basic tenets of storytelling – introducing conflict and then resolving it – are bad. any portrayal of two people in a relationship that is anything less than aggressively healthy and perfectly happy are bad. imperfect or unhealthy people are not allowed to be in relationships in fake made up stories, especially not with someone who might be at least marginally healthier than they are, because that creates an abuser/victim dynamic. which is bad.
are you sure that ship isn’t pedophilia? i know they’re both adults, but are you really, really SURE??? have you double checked? is one person older than the other? worse yet, is one member of the ship “child coded” (i.e. having canonically consumed candy or maybe a slurpee)?
you’re a bad person. the FBI are on their way to take you to Wanting The Wrong Fictional People To Kiss Jail.
TFW when satire nails it so well it takes you a moment to realise it’s satire…
Now imagine if instead of saying “I don’t understand why you make these stories, but you do you” and fucking off to look at stories they do like, that character instead says “your stories are ugly and unwanted, no decent person should tolerate you making them” and rallies the others to ban the creation of these kind of stories, shame the creator out of town, and declare anyone who would want such a story to be nasty and gross.
If you put a single crab into a bucket, it will climb out and escape from becoming someone’s dinner.
If you put a whole bunch of crabs in a bucket, however, the crabs in the bottom of the bucket will pull the crabs at the top of the bucket back down if they try to escape. Instead of allowing some or all of the crabs to survive, the group of crabs will ensure that every single one of them ends up on a plate.
This same phenomenon is seen in human communities, where it has become known – appropriately – as crab bucket mentality. From the outside, these crab bucket communities might look like support groups, or places to get feedback and advice. But in reality, they are black holes – these are communities where people go to tear each other down, and to actively be torn down in return. Instead of lifting each other up, these communities burrow further and further into their buckets, until everyone is too bitter and broken to ever climb out.
And you might be part of a crab bucket community without even knowing it.
Some online communities are obvious crab-buckets. The so-called “incel” community might be the most obvious example; these are angry young men who tell each other over and over again that they are worthless, unattractive, and that they will never be loved. Lonely teenagers enter the incel community to talk about how frustrated and insecure they are after dealing with romantic rejection, and they quickly find themselves pushed toward hopelessness, violent misogyny and suicidal fantasies. Likewise, the “pro-anorexia” and “thinspo” communities are crab buckets, where members encourage each other to adapt more and more extreme disordered eating, and often invite other members to make cruel comments about their bodies and food journals. Insecure young women (and some men) go to these communities because they want to like their bodies more, and end up weighed down with self-hatred.
But not every crab bucket is obvious.
Although there are lots of wonderful and supportive spaces online for LGBTQ+ people, the internet is also littered with LGBTQ+ crab buckets – especially for trans people. Some trans communities are almost entirely dedicated to discouraging and criticizing other trans people for not “passing”; these communities will pore over each others’ pictures, pointing out lingering masculine or feminine features, comparing each other to “a man in a dress”, or outright convincing each other that there is no point in transitioning, as they have no hope of ever “passing”. Anxious trans or questioning people join these groups to navigate a very difficult time in their lives, only to have their own insecurities magnified and distorted.
Communities and feedback circles for writers and artists can also be crab buckets. Again, while there are wonderful and supportive spaces available, there are also toxic black holes out there, masquerading as genuine communities. I’ve belonged to writers’ groups where every single piece of writing was viciously torn to shreds, no matter how promising it might have seemed, and there were constant discussions about how ‘pointless’ it was to try to get published. Members were so insecure about not “making it” that they frantically tried to crush the hopes and dreams of anyone who might be competition. Instead of producing better writing, these kinds of groups eventually produce no writing at all.
Activist communities are often crab buckets. On the surface, people join activism communities to lift each other up and feel less alone in their cause; in reality, however, many activist communities have underlying cultures of suspicion, gossip, and hostility. Members gleefully comb through each other’s posts and content carefully, constantly looking for any small mistake or out-of-context comment that will allow them to declare that someone is “trash” or “cancelled”. People join these causes to fight back against their own feelings of powerlessness, and often report developing anxiety, depression and panic attacks as a result.
The list of crab bucket communities goes on. Any kind of group can become a crab bucket group under the right conditions; just because a community is created by and for a marginalized identity, it doesn’t mean that that community is actually safe for that identity. As humans, we like to band together in groups to accomplish large goals and feel less alone… but sometimes, we turn those groups into echo chambers for our own toxic ideas, and try to drag as many people as we can down into our buckets of despair with us.
If you’re in a group that you suspect might be getting a little crabby, it’s probably time to leave. Turning a whole group around by yourself is an enormous and thankless task, and it’s not one that I’d wish on anybody. Once a group of people have formed a collective identity around proving why they’re all worthless or fat or problematic, it’s hard to turn that ship around, and any attempts to do it might be met with hostility. It’s okay to give up on toxic communities, and look for healthy ones that build you up instead of tearing you down.
@mikkeneko I would say I’m glad that the anti ao3 trolling attempt backfired except I’m pretty sure it didn’t
I’ve been watching the escalation of this shit since sometime in the summer and it’s really concerning how easy it is for them to get people talking now
Once upon a time it would have been so laughable to say some of this stuff, no one would even take time to rebutt it
I’m concerned the point IS to keep it top of mind, make people think it’s reasonable to question ao3’s existence
Every time you whack one of these moles they come back with something else, because they are playing straight from the alt right handbook of engagement
an underage person on tumblr, emphatically: IT’S BAD AND WRONG FOR ADULTS TO WRITE SEXUAL CONTENT ABOUT TEENAGERS OR STORIES WHERE DARK THINGS HAPPEN IN ROMANTIC/SEXUAL CONTEXTS OR FICS WHERE THE CHARACTERS ARE ENEMIES IN CANON BECAUSE THINK OF THE CHILDREN, IF YOU DO YOU’RE A PAEDOPHILE WHO CONDONES ABUSE me, in an imploring whisper: you are literally underage. if all adults were fully committed to the same reductive, simplistic morality you’re using to demonise narrative concepts outside your current emotional framework, you would be banned from this conversation entirely, because you are underage. the idea that only those aged between 14-17 can write romantic or sexual content about characters in that age bracket (because it would be Wrong and paedophilic for anyone older to do so) means you’re effectively arguing that teens aren’t old enough to have any true sexual agency. as you’ve likewise decided that writing about a sexual act is morally equivalent to committing that act, by your own logic, you aren’t old enough or adult enough or sexually mature enough to be writing about sexual anything in the first place – in which case, nobody should be allowed to write such stories. I absolutely want you to be able to set boundaries around your sexual experiences and to engage safely with your developing sexual identity on your own terms while still remaining informed, but you also need to acknowledge that sexual development is part of becoming an adult, not an exciting new facet of childhood; and as such, venturing publicly into this arena via fandom, ficwriting or other narrative/public avenues means you are going to encounter adults. if you are not ready to take this step, that’s fine! go always at your own pace! but please, for the sake of everyone, learn to tell the difference between your immediate personal comfort levels with particular adult concepts and actual moral or criminal transgressions made by adults. your discomfort with a particular concept is valid without the concept itself being Wrong.
First of all: wow, I’m so sorry!? That’s incredibly fucked up. Hang in there, anon. If there’s anything that would help you out don’t hesitate to mention.
Second: im so fascinated!? By this choice…??? Entitled is right.
I’d be curious to know: are they telling you to block them based on your relative ages? Or are all of the antis attacking you with this demand 21 and younger? Because I can see that fitting a certain ‘adults (that is: anyone older than me) have to look out for my safety even if they’ve never met me’ attitude that I find lines up with the increase in ‘trust authorities to protect you’ culture shift that followed 9/11 in the US.
Either way: isn’t it interesting how antis are insisting you are dangerous to them, and yet trusting you to block them instead of try to harm them if they put themselves in contact with you?
It’s almost like they know you’re not actually dangerous to them and this is all performative outrage and playing at activism.
Wild.
[image ID: anonymous says:
I’m the DMMD thread person who said the very controversial statement that kids shouldn’t be playing DMMD since it’s meant for adults. That really rustled their jimmies. I’ve honestly not looked at their profiles, just reported the really offensive ones and muted the others. But everyone demands I block them, and from friends who been curious, apparently there is an anti culture precedent of refusing to block people they consider bad because they think that means they lose.
End ID] (emphasis mine)
Blocking people who ship things they hate means they lose?
Well that’s the most 4chan thing I’ve ever heard.
I’ve said before that I think anti-shipper circles have learned their argument style by watching people from the alt-right argue on YouTube comments and twitter chains, b/c their ‘argument’ method is an extremely effective trolling and harassment style. This seems to reinforce it.
Bless you for your maturity in dealing with them.
The reason why this precedent exists is because internet bullies need a way to declare victory when people ignore them. Here is the thing: Bullies need a rise out of their target in order to get their satisfaction from bullying, proof that they have hurt their target. If the immediate response to a bully is block and ignore then the bully has usually put effort into their bullying and gotten nothing out of it – objectively, at best, they can hope that they hurt their target, but they will never get the actual satisfaction of knowing they did.
So they have redefined blocking people is a sign of deficiency – cowardice, moral inferiority, and most importantly trying to equate it to admitting defeat. This way they can still get their violence thrill when someone ignores them. They know they won, they know they hurt their target, because they have defined blocking to be irrefutable proof of such.
But it only works if they believe it. They have to convince themselves, not their target. Which is why people go in other’s inbox and demand that they be blocked. They have built up their world view so that they are unable to block or it is actively admitting that they are cowards, morally deficient, and are and always were wrong.
And, unfortunately, because anti culture is based on bullying and abuse they have managed to convinced a lot of younger people that this is the case, so now lots of people are unable to block people because it makes them feel that they are cowards and morally deficient.
This is yet another way in which anti culture actively harms minors. It has rendered many minors incapable of using the tools that allow them to protect themselves in online spaces.
This is an incredible analysis! Thank you.
Unfortunately it is not just analysis. I know a girl who is being stalked and harassed by a man on social media but she refuses to block him because “blocking is cowardly”.
I figured out all this by talking to her, trying to address her concerns about blocking people, and trying to convince her it is ok to block this guy. This has been going on for 4 months and still she refuses because people have drilled it into her head so much that blocking people makes her a bad person. I finally got her to turn off anon asks though, so progress is being made.
I’m really glad you went to that effort. You’re a good friend. Unfortunately, I know it’s not just theory to think over … it’s seriously screwing up a lot of lives. That’s why I think it’s so important to understand the mindsets of the people doing it, so you can see it in yourself and others before you hurt yourself or anyone else, and before you get tangled up with people who are spouting that rhetoric before you meet them.
Also: thinking back to when I was younger, blocking was considered the ‘cowardly’ thing to do even before antis were shitting things up in a particular way. On LJ, on FB, on MySpace … only assholes blocked people, at least in the geeky spaces I hung out in. Which makes me think that maybe the Geek Social Fallacies also play a part in this? ‘If you exclude people you’re a dick.’ ‘You’re a coward who won’t confront people. You just avoid them.’ Which of course, feeds into an environment where even people who don’t buy into anti-shipper rhetoric are set up to be afraid of blocking people, lest they be seen as the ‘real’ problem for failing to negotiate a ceasefire and excluding other nerds from their nerd experience.
It’s all just conveniently feeding into a space where abusers have full time access to victims and denying that access makes the victim equally abusive. 😦 I hate it.
I hope your friend ends up okay.
Blocking is not cowardly. Blocking is taking control of your time and attention, and refusing to give energy to the people who want you to waste it on them.
If you are entertained by antis, you are under no obligation to block them – if they don’t want to read your words, they can block you. If someone is bothering you, feel free to block them – your time and attention are limited; don’t waste them on people who only detract from the enjoyment you get out of life.
(Originally posted this as a reply, but I’m copying it into a reblog for safekeeping and expanding on it slightly.)
This is making me wonder if we need to revive another Old Internet term: signal-to-noise ratio. Blocking mindless hate and copypasta’d harassment is usually less about threat than about nuisance. Removing useless, irrelevant, foul-smelling garbage from your local slice of internet so you can spend your finite time and attention on the stuff you’re actually there for. This was less true on platforms like LJ that made it easier to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio. But on Tumblr and Twitter, with high posting volume, feeds clogged with reblogs/retweets, sitewide tags instead of moderated communities as the only common spaces, and extremely limited filtering capabilities, blocking becomes a vital tool for junk control. In some ways it’s a replacement for basic mod functions like “clean up the mess if a troll starts shouting insults, baiting participants into flamewars, or otherwise interrupting useful conversations to draw dongs all over everything.” Or spam/off-topic control–my blocklist is mostly bots and blogs that post stuff I’m not interested in to a tag I’m browsing.
Related: I suspect the motivation for content-less harassment comments like “tl;dr”/“bad post op”/etc isn’t just signaling allegiance or demoralizing the OP, it’s also shitting up the signal-to-noise ratio of the post notes and inviting your followers to join in. It’s why long substantive posts are more likely to get the Tumblr-hate equivalent of a dong scrawled in sharpie–the *existence* of signal in the “enemy” camp is what’s being targeted, and trolls don’t fight signal with counter-signal. They fight it with noise.
Noise attacks are some real shit right now, too. Information bombardment is one of the cornerstones of information distortion (which was literally how 4chan and Russia drop-kicked Trump into office.)
Of course 4channers would say that blocking is cowardly – they depend on the unchecked ability to generate noise.
I encourage blocking those who maliciously generate noise.
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode 84, “Purity Culture.”
FK: You asked, we answered.
ELM: [laughs] Oh, man. We just had a 15 minute debate about whether we should call it “purity culture.” If you’re familiar with that term, hopefully it gives you an indication about how fraught this topic is and how fraught the term is, I think, too.
FK: Yeah. If you’ve never heard the term, then congratulations and buckle up. But before we get there, I think we shouldn’t even get into it yet. I think we should start off because we’ve got a couple letters in the letter box and I think we should answer them before we dive into anything.
Thank Mr. Will James for the article he wrote on Toxic Shipping, Antis, and the Voltron fandom. It is wonderful to see adults in places of power and with voices speak about how terrible certain parts of our fandom are.
I’m gunna quote a few of my favorite things. (bold is my emphasis)
“This kind of performative outrage enables anti-shippers to harass others by providing a moral shield for their attacks. Antis justify sending death threats to fellow fans and creators because they claim people who support “bad” ships promote those broadly objectionable things. Therefore, antis claim they are simply trying to protect their community from creating, engaging, and spreading inappropriate content (regardless if the content is actually inappropriate).”
and
“Though the majority of Voltron fans who ship Klance aren’t antis, the majority of antis gravitate to Klance. Antis in the Voltron fandom began adopting the language of the social justice movement on Tumblr to justify their dislike for Sheith and other “shaladin” ships (Shiro/Paladin), and vehemently argue creators shouldn’t write or draw it. “Sheith is problematic, and you shouldn’t support it” replaces the simpler “this squicks me” from LiveJournal. The term “fan wank” is replaced with the more loaded term “fandom discourse.” As Tumblr user owl-song defined the term: “don’t call it wank, I am wanking about Very Serious Issues, you guys!”
In almost all cases, the reason a pairing is problematic is usually contrived – antis claim anyone who likes Sheith is supporting pedophilia (even though Shiro and Keith are both over 18), and incest (even though the characters are not related – a fact the show staff have repeatedly said).”
and
“Antis will also try to reach outside of the fandom to poison other people to the ship, which is ultimately what drove me to write this article. I saw a tweet saying “I hope the Dragon Prince fandom doesn’t become Voltron 2.0.” I expected them to discuss the rampant death threats to fans and voice actors on Voltron, and how they were concerned the new Netflix animated show might suffer the same fate. Instead, they followed up with, “Voltron fandom is really toxic, there are all these people who like this pedo content…” This is a common anti-strategy – the goal is to convince people who don’t have fandom context to think a pairing (or the people that support it) is harmful. This effectively gives the antis proxy fighters on Twitter and Tumblr – users who don’t watch the show but will write call-out posts when they see people ship the target pairing.”
It is so good to finally have news sites calling out this bullshit for what it is—bullshit.
Do NOT harm yourself. That doesn’t help, and asking you to do so doesn’t help.
Instead? Tell your parents. Tell your family, tell your friends, your teachers, your employers, EVERYONE you know and interact with, that you support and even romanticize abusive content. Tell them that you think it’s harmless.
Well?
We’re waiting.
I do tell a lot of people. My mom, for example. She’s a writer too and she knows that I enjoy writing dark stories. I said people were mad at me on the internet over a ship and she immediately guessed which (very problematic) ship it was and was shocked that people had told me to die over something so ridiculous. I recently told my therapist that I write and enjoy darkfic sometimes, specifically mentioning the sort of sexual content they involve. His first impulse was to worry that I might feel guilty about my harmless interest. I told my previous therapist that I get off to violent fictional media and she said it was fine because she knew I’d never hurt a fly in real life. I’ve told my coworkers about the sort of movies I like (horror) and they didn’t care at all. Turns out people who work at libraries know how fiction works. My childhood best friend has known I’m a sadist for as long as I can remember and it never seemed to bother her. I still have a reputation as a very polite and helpful person, and my friends feel comfortable telling me secrets and asking for advice.
You know what always shocks people? When I tell them about the hate I’ve recieved online for my ships. My mom regularly says she’s proud of me for standing up for myself and others online, and my therapist considers it a very positive act. I don’t tell EVERYONE I interact with about my problematic ships (hi I’d like a number 1 combo with cheese also I think Thor and Loki should kiss), but I don’t hide it at all. The worst I’ve ever gotten is people being mildly surprised that someone as silly and positive as me loves horror.
Tell your family, tell your friends, your teachers, your employers, EVERYONE you know and interact with
“and that’s all 300 pairs of fictional characters I want to kiss each other. any questions?”
“ma’am this is a wal-mart”
Told my mom I wanted to rip open kylo rens abdominal cavity and she just shrugged so op idk what you’re expecting to happen here
“Hey young people, i want you to initiate sexually explicit conversations with lots of grown ups you barely know”
Ships aren’t food, they’re not exercise, they’re not even a nonfiction book or a classic novel. A steady diet of LGBT+ ships with no age or power gap won’t make you emotionally or mentally any healthier. It won’t teach you about how actual relationships work and it won’t prevent you from getting into an unhealthy relationship.
Unhealthy ships won’t ruin you. They won’t corrupt you, they won’t destroy your understanding of actual healthy relationships or erode your morality.
Your fictional diet isn’t your actual diet. There’s no organic vegan gluten-free ship that will fix a single goddamn thing.
Relax. Enjoy yourself. Read whatever fiction fascinates you, tantalizes you, engages you. The content doesn’t matter much for your health, but the joy it brings you might.
they won’t destroy your understanding of actual healthy relationships Yet, I can’t help but worry when I overhear young girls/women saying “I hope I find my Christian Grey one day!”
counterpoint: if anybody had actually taught them what a healthy relationship should and shouldn’t look like, they wouldn’t be saying that in the first place
if 50 shades didn’t exist they’d still have unhealthy ideas of romance.
(now, granted: an international best seller that depicts abuse while INSISTING, in and out of canon, that it’s not abuse, is bad. but it’s still neither the cause nor the solution to our problems.)
yes, exactly, thank you for saying this. i admit, i was in on the anti-twilight craze when that was a thing. i’ve realized now, though, reflecting on it all, it was pretty silly.
i think the problem is we want to believe that there’s an enemy to fight and defeat when it comes to social issues. it’s easier to say “twilight/50 shades/whatever teenage romance novel gets popular next is making girls think abuse is okay!!” rather than confront the idea our society just has super fucked up ideas about relationships in general.
those books are products of our society, not the cause of its problems. now, i absolutely do think that we should have dialogues about WHY the relationships featured in those books are unhealthy, but just insisting they’re the problem and banning people from reading them doesn’t actually solve anything.
i’d much rather blame an abuser for abusing someone and the societal norms that allow it to happen than blame a kid for reading a book for their own abuse.
those books are products of our society, not the cause of its problems. now, i absolutely do think that we should have dialogues about WHY the relationships featured in those books are unhealthy, but just insisting they’re the problem and banning people from reading them doesn’t actually solve anything.
i'll apple your turnover 