cryingalonewithfrankenstein:

buckyballbearing:

buckyballbearing:

At the risk of pissing off the entire internet again (and it’s not even Tuesday), at this point I’m genuinely wondering if Antis will go the way of GamerGate

As in: a few asshats start a harassment campaign, wind up attracting a whole group of ideologues, and eventually cross into political action because nobody took them seriously enough

I mean seriously, it’s no longer Voltron fandom pairing drama or whatever

This week’s Target Du Jour appears to be AO3

For anyone who lived through Strikethrough, Boldthrough, or the Big Buyout on LJ, this should raise alarm bells

And I can’t help but wonder, in five years, are these going to be the people campaigning for free speech restrictions on the internet?

Cause let’s be real, if antis really wanted to solve the problems they purport to have, they could be out there doing it already

They could put energy toward teaching fans how to use AO3 filters to hide content that isn’t safe for them, or even setting up their own moderated archives

They don’t want a safe space of their own though, they want everyone else’s spaces to stop existing, and they don’t seem to care what tactics are required

And I can’t help but worry this will only pick up steam while a huge, oblivious chunk of us continues to laugh it off as “fringe weirdos”

I was going to amend this post with the note that at least antis aren’t backed by sexism (like gg) but then I realized I’m not even sure that’s true

Coming into a female and nb dominant space and demanding that we all enforce moral values and Think of The Children feels a hell of a lot like that old time push for women to be the purity champions of the world

ao3 makes it super, super easy to avoid content you don’t want to read, and filters make it even easier – you can go from “oh i don’t want to read that *scroll scroll*” to not seeing a full listing for whatever the hell it is. it’s so painless. (i wonder if any of the people involved in that sort of campaigning have ever used other fic archives, tbh.)

but to some people just the existence of content they don’t like, somewhere out there where they don’t even have to see it, is Absolutely Not Okay. the fact that, a lot of the time, writers who produce… whatever content the holy war is about this week… are really good at tagging / warning for content is not a concern to them. it is the existence of content they do not personally sanction that they have a problem with. 

(i think this may have always been the case with fandom drama of this species. you can go out of your way to be considerate all you want, and antis will still take issue with the fact that you put words on paper and they don’t personally like those words. their end game is to only see content they personally enjoy and find unproblematic, and for all other content to never be created, much less posted.)

anyway hopefully it all just dissolves into nothing of substance happening, but we live in the dumbest fucking timeline so who knows