honestly… that antis are advocating for actual censorship, disregarding that they’re targeting often victims of abuse and/or discrimination, is the most terrifying part of their rhetoric. even if they don’t use the word themselves, that’s what they’re doing, and censorship has no place in a free, open, frankly liberal society. censorship is the tool of authoritarianism, something i don’t think most of them realize, which is equally scary.

freedom-of-fanfic:

what a good ask. censorship is always great in the first person (I censor dangerous content) and oppressive in the third person (they censor dangerous content).  And it’s not just a tool of authoritarianism: it’s a tool of maintaining the status quo.

what many antis fail to consider is that while they’re out here getting offended at disgusting fanworks and demanding they disappear, people with far more power and authority than them are offended, too, and want those same works to disappear … in addition to hundreds of thousands of other works.

•  that ‘every ship I hate is pedophilia’ sword that anti-shippers picked up? that’s a favorite conservative mantra against all content containing LGB/queer sexual orientations. (‘Gay’ and ‘pedophile’ were treated as quite the same thing in mainstream American consciousness up until very, very recently.)
• The ‘non-vanilla/kinky fan content is abuse apologism and inappropriate sexualization’ dagger? SWERF rhetoric against sex workers repurposed for fandom, which itself bears a striking resemblance to puritan repression of sexual expression. (also: kink and queer/LGBT communities have a long, friendly history. Is it coincidence conservatives hate kink, even straight kinksters? I think not.)
• the ‘mlm fiction is only for mlm to create and consume’ maul? it’s the exact same weapon against queer representation in the mainstream relabled to sound progressive. (conservatives don’t care if you’re trying to protect straight people from ‘corruption’ or gay men from ‘fetishization’: either way, non-straight content is out of the picture!)

In a bittersweet way, it’s good news that younger fandom members who are LGBT/queer and/or like non-straight/non-cis content are utterly free of fear that somebody will try to censor fan content simply for being LGBT/queer. It goes to show how far we’ve come in online – and to some degree, offline! – spaces in promoting acceptance of non-straight orientations and non-cis gender identities.

Unfortunately, antis use the same anti-minority censorship weapons on ‘smaller’ targets, and I worry that it will blind them to the warning signs of incoming content purges.  they’ll be in for a very unpleasant shock if a bigger fish comes into our little fandom pond and reminds us all what these censorship weapons are really for: destroying anything that doesn’t suit the comfort zone of the mainstream population. (such as – drumroll, please – LGBT/queer content of any kind. (sorry antis – that includes sfw kl@nce.))

(and all of this applies to more than lgbt/queer content, of course. it’s just been the main thing to come up again and again.)