#rules for life: 1. live and let live 2. don't yuck someone else's yumm 3. always allow yourself to have your own opinion

[mintacle]

So, you've seen the words "anti" and "proshipper" thrown around in people's bios and "batc*st dni" on people's posts. Maybe you want to know what all the fuss is about, maybe you have a particular opinion about all this fuss. In any case, this informative post is for you.

Using Samantha Aburime's paper "the cult structure of the american anti", I'm going to explain the issue.

First of all what is an anti even? It's a term people use to self-identify within fandoms. As the name anti implies, they mainly identify with being against things.

Which leads us to our problem of the anti mentality.

Most antis are minors or under 24. People who left the anti community have explained their experiences in the following manners:

Maybe you have felt the pressure to join in anti behavior as well. If any of the following feelings are familiar to you, then you are experiencing anti indoctrination:

If the shame and guilt instilled in anti members isn't bad enough, there are more consequences for the targets of the antis. In the batman fandom these are blogs that may or may not describe themselves as proship, meaning they ship characters that are (adoptive) members of the wayne family (Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake and Damian Wayne) with one another.

Essentially: this is how anti action works:

Examples of dehumanization and harrasement which are very commonly practised among antis:

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And threats of violence:

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Beyond the aggresive nature of the anti mentality, the problem is that the people it targets are overwhelmingly vulnerable minorities.

And I have often seen antis justifying their harrasement by explaining that they are themselves queer or non-caucasian, which is an example of moral licencing and does not actually excuse targetting other minorities or people of the same minority as you.

So what do antis specifically do? The anti community of the batman fandom will often throw around accusations of incest ("batc*st") and pedophilia.

Let us examine those three concepts, disinformation, virtue signaling and legitimate abuse.

We can find disinformation in the prectise of denying reasonable arguments for tolerance of proshipping. An anti will not engage in any attempt to understand why people ship something they find morally apprehensible. They will label proshippers as degenarates, thereby misrepresenting who it is they are targeting. Furthermore they will misrespresent the amount of influence that proshippers yave on influencing people.

Virtue signaling describes the practise of labelling things as problematic without delivering reasonable arguments for doing so and instead using strong emotional language to explain their judgement:

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Virtue signaling also represents the practise of self-describing the anti as morally pure and the "enemy", the proshipper as morally degenerate.

Both disinformation and virtue signaling allow for legitimate abuse. Depersonifying and villifying the opponent gives the anti a feeling of being legitimized in their abuse.

For followers of my blog, I would like to raise awareness of this side of anti culture. Emotional and shame-inducing language can easily sway us. I plead my case for reasonable and distanced evaluation of what you see online. Condemning pedophilia and incest will seem perfectly natural on face value, which is why it is so hare to understand that often time what is labbelled as such is misrepresented, and really all the time the anti myth will equate preference of fiction to beliefs of real life morality (see first image)

To finish my informational post, I leave you with one last essential quote from Samantha Aburime's paper:

"The anti movement perpetuates archaic systems of judgement based on personal disgust and region-specific morality, punishing powerless people for their fannish interests and tainting their online communities. Their work does nothing to dismantle harmful systematic institutions; rather, it embraces them, even going so far as to actively harm and destroy members of their own community."

Read the full paper here. It's very interesting and a not too long read.

https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/2147/2829

#fandom meta #batcest #or batc*st if that makes you feel better I guess #education as a way of combatting polarism and extremism #essentially. no matter what your opinion is. if you find yourself harrassing people online... you are probably doing something wrong #anti #anti culture #antis #the problem with being anti is that you define yourself through opposition #proshipping #proship #i happen not to be proship. but don't let that make you think I endorse anti mentality or dnis #because I really just HAPPEN not to ship any batfam members #there is more. but the post is already very long and I have hit the ten image limit #ideally I would have inclided a part about how antis call out. expose and target specific blogs #rules for life: 1. live and let live 2. don't yuck someone else's yumm 3. always allow yourself to have your own opinion #dc #batman