here’s the facts: Fandom anti-shippers* aren’t going to stop trying to police fandom.
(
*where anti-shippers are people who characterize certain fictional pairings as ‘pedophilia’, ‘incest’, or ‘abuse’ under greatly expanded definitions and consider ‘shipping it’ to be support of rl pedophilia/incest/abuse.)
Abusive fandom anti-shippers aren’t going to stop cyberbullying people who ship what they hate by sending nasty anons, posting negative/abusive things in the ship tags, doxxing them, threatening them, humiliating them, and dogpiling them. Anti-shippers who don’t participate in the cyberbullying won’t stop looking the other way when it happens and won’t support the victims of their abuse. And fandom antis will never see their bullying as anything but just punishment for the greater crime of shipping fictional pairings that they perceive as harming the moral fiber of fandom (nay; all society).
Instead: take steps to protect yourself so you can still have fun, even when your ship is under constant fire.
—
Block ship hate. You see a hateful post/tweet? Block the OP. Block everyone who liked it. Don’t even look at the rest of their blog. Do this enough and eventually you will have blocked most of the haters in your fandom. (And report any posts/tweets that are outright abusive or threatening.)
Use site filters. Block popular anti-shipper tags. Even if they crosstag their hate it won’t be visible to you. (And filter the word ‘anti(s)’ to see less shipper salt about fandom antis too)
If you don’t want publicly posted replies/tumblr content to spread far, censor ship/character names. Stops them from appearing in site-wide searches.
No-platform anti-shippers as much as you can. If you love an artist’s work but they openly attack shippers for ‘bad ships’, don’t spread their art. refusing to promote even their non-anti content will help protect fellow fans from being exposed to surprise ship hate.
Keep abreast of the latest anti-shipper trends, but keep salt intake to a minimum. It’s good to know what antis who hate your ship are up to, but try to avoid spending too much time dwelling on it. It will only make you angry and tired.
Focus on what you love. Create content that makes you happy and praise content that makes you happy. Celebrate your ship. Haters are loud, but they’re not the majority.
Find private spaces to fandom. Join ship discord servers or create private groups for your friends. (be careful about what personal info you share b/c anti-shippers do ‘raid’ ship discords sometimes & publicly share what they find (both ‘sides’ do this, in fact.))
Targeted by antis? Don’t be afraid to cut off all methods of contact on social media. Lock your Twitter/mute the thread, turn off anon asks & post replies, use notification blockers & mute functions, delete things if you want. They’re not ‘winning’. You’re cutting off assholes.
Support others who are targeted by antis. Send them support and say positive things about them to counteract the nastiness anti-shippers are spreading. Use every instance of anti-shipper nastiness as an excuse to be even more positive and loving of your fellow ship fans. (If you can, do this instead of attacking the anti-shippers. Nothing you say will make them feel bad enough to stop, and your anger empowers them.)
I don’t want to minimize the effect of anti-shippers projecting negativity into fandom/ship spaces. And these suggestions are hardly a cure-all, or a solution for a long-term, hardcore campaign of hate against a single fan. But while negativity is easy and feels powerful, ignoring negativity and projecting positivity instead is hard but even more powerful.
A lot of these might seem like common sense to my followers, but I hope that you’ll share it to anyone who does need it. Because fandom antis aren’t going anywhere – but neither are shippers.
and in aggregate, our positive, creative ship content will last longer than their hate.
Interesting comment about Tumblr being more community focused and welcoming in 2013 – that is very much what I’ve found. It used to be a utopia of gay fandom, now everyone is 1v1ing to prove their respective moral purity. I’d like to leave, but I have ~10k followers here and only 1k on twitter. My business relies on Tumblr, #fml