What is proshipping and why is it bad? What is the opposite of a proshipper?
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There’s a corner of the internet where young people have decided that “shipping” fictional characters (imagining/discussing fictional characters having romantic or sexual relationships) is toxic or predatory. I _think_ this was originally limited to shipping characters who are minors in the source material, but they keep expanding the definition of what they find problematic. The most recent extreme example of this that I saw was someone claiming unironically that writing about two fictional characters having sex is sexual coercion because those _fictional characters_ don’t have agency or ability to consent.
pro-shippers are anyone who rejects this ideology.
In the context of underage characters specifically, there’s nuanced discussion to be had. Outside of that, I don’t even know where to start with how misguided the anti-ship echochamber is.
Proshipping is an overloaded word. It can mean one of two totally different things:
1. Being for (or “pro”) freely shipping characters together. Any shipping is okay because it’s fiction. No one can get hurt from writing a story about people who don’t exist. The opposite of this is “antiship,” which means “no shipping that doesn’t meet my personal real life moral code.”
2. “Problematic shipping.” Namely, nonconsensual sexual encounters (“noncon”), dubious consent (“dubcon”), ships where one person is a minor, abusive relationships, basically anything that wouldn’t fly in real life. The people who complain about proships are people who are usually “antiship” as by the definition above. They tend to think that what you read and write starts to define who you are, so if you consume that media, you must somehow endorse or at least be okay with normalizing very bad behavior in real life.
Proshipping is not a proper verb. You don’t proship something, you *are* proship. It’s an anti-censorship and anti-harassment stance in regards to fiction, a stance where morals do not matter in fiction because fiction is not real and, therefore, anything goes.
It does not mean you ‘have’ to support the content if you’re proship, simply that you won’t harass or try to censor someone for their taste in *fiction*. Many proshippers don’t like content featuring fictional incest, for example, but they will still support and defend another person’s right to create or enjoy it.
Largely because we understand that what one likes in fiction, is not what they want to see or do in real life. Thought crime is not real. Otherwise, everyone who likes slasher films and cheers on/stans the villain should be on a watch list (and many, *many* chicks fawn over Ghostface, Jason, Myers, and Freddy), and anyone who watches and *likes* Game of Thrones should want to fuck their brother, and that’s just stupid.
As for antiship, they range from people who mind their own business and just don’t associate with proship persons, to people who harass others via death threats, trying to ruin their life over art (like the Ang Vondra situation), and there have even been some who have dug up their victims’ CSEM material to send to them and the people they know. In fact, similar things have happened quite a bit. It doesn’t even have to be their victim’s CSEM material, there are antis who somehow just have shit like that on hand to send to people they don’t like. And if it isn’t CSEM it’s gore, but gore’s a nothingburger in comparison.
There was at one point a Twitter thread that listed ~40? 50?-ish accounts of antishippers who turned out to be actual true-to-definition predators. I’d try to find it but Muskrat made it so you have to have an account to log into to do *anything* on Xitter now 🙄
Not saying proshippers are 100% innocent angels but I have yet to hear of any doing that to someone who declares themselves an anti, lol. It’s usually just dumb comments and overstepping DNI boundaries (which antis do a lot too).
And both sides can be two-faced. If you ship one (1) thing some anti deems “problematic,” even if both characters are adults – maybe it’s a height difference, or one’s 20 and one’s 50, or one is autistic and therefore declared by that side of the fandom to be “child coded,” (which let us be real, is ableism), or, or – and you, personally, think it’s fine, you can end up on a harassment shitlist and be accused of a myriad of things that aren’t, by definition of the buzzwords used, true. And if some proshipper spreads a rumor that you’re an anti even when you aren’t, chances are people will just believe them and block you out of their communities without any fact checking.
This schism in fandom erupted from the Voltron fandom, iirc.
These have been my observations over my years spent lurking in fandom spaces. 🤷
Pro shippers are people who believe that people should “ship and let ship”, meaning whatever a person ships is fair game. The opposite of pro shippers, “antis”, are people who think that there are limits to shipping that should be obeyed. Stuff like pedophilia, incest, necrophilia, zoophilia, and real person shipping.
The issue with pro shippers and antis are that both tend to be very extreme. They will argue endlessly, accuse each other of heinous things, send death threats etc. against the other group. There are no gray areas in these arguments, you’re either an incestuous pedophile who doesn’t care about rape victims, or you’re a facist dictator cop who hates queer people and thinks anyone who disagrees with you is a nazi and should die.
Proshipping
that you like creating or consuming stories, drawings, etc of relationships which look problematic.
Originally it was for things like relationships (in fiction)
with minors, minors with adults, real people, kinda bestiality
from there it led to complex relationships like incest (of legal age), anyone who is a political relative with a family bond, large age differences.
Muto a third time, but it is not as popular, now it includes: clearly toxic relationships (I’m not talking about naruto and sasuke, strong things), size difference.
In the end what matters is that the proshipper is going to ship things that most people don’t, It’s like a sing to know what are you gonna find there. the “normal” ones would be anti-shippers, but please, never call yourself that we already have enough shame from them
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