freedom-of-fanfic:

Kinda
depends.

In
regards to the moralist stance of fandom anti-shippers – the stance that
anything smut-related, kink-related, or addressing sex in any way, with
particular objection and/or attention paid to LGBT+/queer sex, will ‘harm the
children’ and must be eradicated and/or hidden from sight – it’s at least as
old as Christianity as an organized religion.

Such
moralists have gone after transformative fandom in the past, particularly
targeting sexually explicit content and especially
LGBT+/queer content.  MLM-friendly
(slash-friendly) transformative fandom’s run-in with such a group, calling
themselves the Warriors for Innocence (you can’t make this stuff up), led to
Strikethrough and Boldthrough on LJ, which helped galvanize the creation of the Archive of Our Own.

In
regards to intracommunity violence with words, threats, and more over what
people choose to ship: that’s definitely as old as fandom itself. Shipping wank
(as we called it back then; now we would say ‘discourse’) forms the backdrop of
the wild and entertaining story of con artist Miss Scribe, who expertly played each faction of the Harry/Ginny, Harry/Draco, and
Harry/Hermione ship war off each other to push herself to fandom fame. HP
fandom was wild: fandom is wild, and has been for a long, long time. being
truly cruel and nasty to one another in personally devastating ways over fandom
is not an anti-exclusive phenomenon in any way.

In
regards to using social justice language to bully other fandom members: the
first instance of widespread damage being inflicted on a creative online
community specifically by calling everything they hated ‘problematic’ (that I
am aware of) is the case of
RequiresHate/Winterfox/Benjanun Sriduangkaew. The devastating and chilling
effect WF singlehandedly inflicted on the SFF community – particularly on other
authors of color – was detailed by The Mixon Report ( http://laurajmixon.com/2014/11/a-report-on-damage-done-by-one-individual-under-several-names/
).

WF was –
is – the Fandom Anti precursor case, complete with terrifying threats of
violence and exposure towards people who dared to disagree with her cutting,
cruel ‘reviews’ of SFF works. She couched her cruelty in terms of social
justice to make it much harder for people to call her out and found it very
effective at protecting her for a long, long time. And in the years since her
reign of terror was partially checked by Mixon’s callout, social media has only
become more ripe for abusive bullying via progressive language.

Using
social justice language and moralist purity culture together – our own members torching
fandom creativity and freedom from the inside in order to win ship wars and
drive out social enemies – is the latest remix on all of the above.

The
landscape of the internet changed a lot between 2007, when Strikethrough happened,
and the mid-2010’s, when the Mixon Report was issued and fandom-as-activism
started to really get wings. Also, a lot of LGBT+/queer strides were made in
the US & across the western world in terms of improving visibility,
awareness, and legislative protection. (Not as much as one might hope, but still.)
shipping The Gay Ships in fandom is still relatively weird (believe it or not,
mlm shipping is still a minority of shipping activity), but not seen in such a
destructive, deviant light as it had been before. There’s a lot more open
acknowledgement of being not-straight or not-cis than there used to be, and
fandom spaces are no exception.

Nonetheless,
fandom antis picked up the torch that groups like Warriors of Innocence
dropped. While many antis ship mlm ships themselves, they take rival mlm ships
and scrutinize them under the scorching rays of purity culture, find them
wanting, and call everything touched by that ship tainted. They even echo the
WoI cry that everything they hate is secretly pedophilia and only loved by
pedophiles, perhaps unaware of how devastatingly dangerous this narrative is to
push in LGBT+/queer spaces.

Like
Winterfox, their only goal is self-advancement (or advancement of what they
like over what they hate), and they have no scruple about causing harm to
others in the name of getting what they want for themselves. In their
worldview, they are the protagonists in a story with protagonist-centric
morality. fandom antis are warriors for innocence! They are, of course, Always Right.
Everyone who is against them must be evil and dangerous and harmful; everyone
who slows their progress or questions their actions is against justice, fair
play, and protecting the marginalized. No attack on the character of a
dissenter can be too strong, because it’s impossible to be against antis and a
good person at the same time.

But in reality: it’s just a shipwar, and purity/sj language is just the newest ammunition.

Moral
panic isn’t new; people being cruel to each other with whatever tools they have
at their disposal isn’t new. transformative fandom being considered weird and
socially unacceptable isn’t new. Fandom policing fandom on a large scale is
somewhat new. But the only thing that I think is truly, completely ‘new’ about fandom
anti-shipping is that where we used to argue ship wars based on what was more
canon, now we argue ship wars based on what is ‘more pure’ or ‘more progressive’.

Incredibly,
this is even more subjective than interpreting canon!  In fandom, no ship is more pure or moral than
another: the ‘rules’ of shipping are all artificial in an environment built for
infinite imagination. It’s literally arbitrary. Imaginary. Absurd.

Antis
impose these rules, loosely based on morality and progressiveness, because without
them, they have no power. And many of us ‘buy’ into anti-shipper ‘rules’
because if we don’t, anti-shippers will do whatever is necessary to traumatize
or intimidate us into submission or silence.