Ship Discourse Sucks

• 25 August, 2024
• Discourse

Today, I'm going to be writing about something that's affected me very deeply. Granted, I've been doing at a lot lately, and I'm hoping that's not the case forever! But... I do think it's important. It's long and it might be frustrating to some. Be warned that there are mentions of pedophilia.

There's not a lot of things I genuinely despise in my life. I can dislike or be upset by something, but there's not too much that makes me furious enough to hate it. However, there are absolutely exceptions. Something in recent years that's become a major exception is shipping discourse. If you're not terminally online, you may be wondering, "what is shipping?" Shipping is pairing two or more characters together, most commonly in a romantic pairing. Naturally, there is discourse about what is a better ship, what one is worse, etc. However, in recent years, there's been a major blow up in a subsection of it: "proship" or "anti" discourse.

When I talk about ship discourse, proship and anti discourse is what I refer to. The reason this infuriates me so much is these definitions today boil down to "pedophilia" and "normal" respectively. Their origins in these terms do not reflect these modern definitions. Rather, they've been around for decades now, with proship meaning "for shipping" and anti being the opposite. Antis would be against ships they disliked for various reasons, while proshippers believed people should ship whatever they want. However, today, both sides have gone to the extreme. Some who are proship take the phrase "ship whatever you want" incredibly literally, including pedophilic ships. Antis turned it into a moral issue, taking huge issue with it.

To make it clear: I cannot stand pedophilic content, let alone ships. When they're explored in a context that glorifies and romanticizes pedophilia, I cannot stand it. When I see this content, I block and move on. Interacting with the person who indulges in this content will not result in a productive conversation. However, I've also had instances where a rivals to lovers ship, with consenting adults, has been deemed problematic for being "abusive." Thinking a rivalry being explored under a romantic lighting would be cute and fun suddenly has a moral dilemma attached to it.

At the beginning of this year, I was going through a situation that unfortunately had me in the crossfire of shipping discourse from both sides. The summary was that a team for a fangame wanted to remove someone who personally calls themselves a proshipper from the credits and change their previous contributions due to feeling uncomfortable due to personal experiences. I initiated communication, hoping for a peaceful solution, but for multiple reasons exploded publicly. This resulted in antis calling the team leader at the time a pedophile, while proshippers said the team was harassing someone for being proship. Neither sides were true. I got so upset seeing my friends slandered and attacked, so I publicly explained what happened behind the scenes. However, this only shifted the attention to me. I had antis telling me to kill myself and that I was a "pedo-defender," meanwhile I had proshippers telling me to also kill myself and that I was getting upset over namecalling, on top of how I was harassing someone I had called my friend. The fact that proshippers boiled down people calling me, a CSA victim, a "pedo-defender" as schoolyard namecalling felt very belittling. It didn't help that checking some of their profiles to get an idea of the group of people upset with me, I ended up running into lolicon and shotacon. The fact that antis were saying my friends were on the same level as pedophiles and that I am defending the same type of people who had hurt me caused me to spiral towards suicide ideation. I had attempted on my life, twice. No matter how I tried to resolve the situation, my friends and I were belittled and attacked for the mere crime of wanting to set up boundaries. It was horrific.

I previously didn't like ship discourse before that particular incident, but that's what cemented it for me. It made me grow a hatred for both sides. In my experience, both sides of the discourse planted themselves on a moral soapbox telling people what to do, say and think and if you didn't agree, you were deserving of harassment. I've had people who called themselves "proship and anti-harassment" harass me saying that I am a horrible person for trying to solve the situation peacefully. They told me that I did not deserve having friends, that I deserved to be alone. I've had antis say that I was just as bad as a pedophile. It was mortifying. On top of that, I've had friends get harassed and targeted for having "abusive" ships, like enemies to lovers, rivals to lovers. I've seen antis claim the ship between Sans and Toriel is pedophilic despite the fact both are consenting adults who met as adults. Even worse, if you ship two characters who are similar in age together but have a toxic relationship, you're "glorifying abuse." It doesn't matter if you wanted to explore the relationship's dynamics and you don't condone abuse, because you may as well be saying "abuse is okay." This was a real point said to a friend of mine.

I think the worst part of it is both sides treat being on a side of the discourse as an identity. I've seen proshippers treat it like being queer, which is incredibly offensive to me. Taking a side on discourse is nothing like being gay or transgender. Discourse is not an identity. Being terminally online is not an identity. In fact, most people that are not constantly online do not care about ship discourse. Ideally, that would be everyone else's feelings too, but... well, you know how it is.

I roll my eyes anytime I see DNI's saying "proship DNI" or "antis DNI." I don't care. Both sides have damaged me, nearly beyond repair. I think people should step off of their high horse and just block what they don't want to see. Stop telling people to unironically kill themselves, and start using the block button. Being this invested in discourse can't be healthy. I'm not even invested, and I know it's been nothing but damaging to my own mental health.