rsasai:

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 highly recommend giving this a read.

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. 

Thank you.