Long vent, but I've witnessed the transformation of antis dominating fandom spaces since the very beginning. (CW mentions of SA and glorifying harassment)

I'm gonna just drop these screenshots I took from something I was replying to. I see a lot of people say that antis either started becoming a thing in the Steven Universe fandom, Voltron fandom, or during quarantine... but I saw the slow burn of antis since 2012. Antis were born from a mixture of cringe culture and misguided attempts to create accountability culture. It ended up turning into a whole domino effect of how we got to now, these completely inescapable culture wars.

The thing is, there were A LOT of genuinely awful people in nerdy communities. Sexual harassment and assault were rampant at conventions, a lot of people had really horrible boundaries in friend groups, racism, etc. That's why blogs like weeaboostories became a thing around that time, to share awful experiences we had with creeps and abusers. The thing is though, even in this period, people had a lot of misdirected anger when venting about these genuine issues and concerns.

But humiliating artists through bad art blogs, normalizing body shaming, or carelessly throwing around the word "weeaboo" (which was supposed to talk about racist orientalists who fetishize Japanese people and culture) were not constructive criticisms. They actively created toxic environments that eventually ended up bleeding into the performative activism we see so much online today.

And then over time, this ended up creating more reactionary movements like gamergate and anti SJW youtube around 2014 to the mid 2010s. Which also led to current youtube's reactionary destruction through commentary, reaction content, and drama channels. Gamergaters are antis too, except they want to censor diversity and politics in their games, even though they already play very political games like Metal Gear Solid. (These conservative gamer bros don't have any media literacy either)

The most oppressed group of all

I thought I'd bring up gamergate too since proshippers bring up violence in video game discourse all the time from the 90s-2000s. The discourse suddenly shifted from general fictional violence that could influence children and teens, to suddenly influencing men to commit misogynistic hate crimes against women. Notice how it doesn't even matter if video games are violent, so long as it isn't towards women. Which ends up creating all kinds of convoluted forms of censorship on how we should handle violence in media. While propaganda games and media exist, not every fictional thing with sensitive themes is propaganda.

Like I don't think we should censor videogames, but attacking gamer girls and women in indie game development didn't do anything either. It just made shit even worse. That's why I avoided that whole movement like the fucking plague, even though we can look back to it now and notice that feminist critiques like Bayonetta's character design weren't so great either. Or taking specific game mechanics out of context to make them look more malicious than intended. Not all women and misogyny affected people feel sexually objectified by "bad representation", just as I've mentioned with KLK having an empowering impact on them. But radfems didn't want them to have a positive relationship with the anime, they wanted to police their fictional tastes and sexual autonomy.

A lot of media criticism by fandom feminists around this time wasn't very good in general. It's one thing wanting to expand on different female narratives, playability, and character designs, but it's another clutching your pearls over horny video games and cartoons being the "TRUE SOURCE of misogyny!!!!!!!!!!!111!!" This is a long, nuanced video essay on gamergate, but it's so good and worth the watch:

A Full GamerGate Retrospective | DEEP DIVE

Since I started lurking and eventually engaging with the proship community, I saw a lot of improvements that could have genuinely benefited our experiences handling this better. Most proshippers are already wary of child grooming, respecting people's boundaries, and how to appropriately navigate fandom misogyny, racism, queerphobia, etc. I'm not saying that every proshipper is a good person, but because we advocate for safer spaces via anti harassment and anti censorship, I feel like there were a lot of missed opportunities to solve these problems much more productively. Which includes very insightful discussions on fiction vs reality, how to safely separate the two, and why antis blowing it out of proportion hurts real life victims by these distractions.

It just makes me so sad that "Wow, there sure are a lot of fucked up people in our communities" descended to "Actually? The root of this problem is fiction. We gotta censor everything that's encouraging these cringy and icky behaviors!!!!!"

NOTE: I am not excusing Christine for her sex pestry, elderly abuse, and abusive behavior in general. I'm just using her as an example in my screenshots to demonstrate how mass stalking online and offline, ableism and transmisogyny are not how we should be approaching accountability culture.