So this thread is gonna be a little hard for me to make because i'm going to be talking about a personal experience that i'm kind of scared of sharing for a few reasons i will get into in a bit but i really do feel like these things are important and should be talked about.

Regardless, this thread isn't really going to be about me and i'm not gonna get into what happened to me much later on, so let's first establish what i want to talk about: i want to discuss why anti communities are fundamentally flawed and are actually very, very harmful.

This isn't me saying all antis are bad people or that proshippers are the good ones. This isn't even about me defending fictional content. Instead, i want to talk about a few red flags i have observed and just... everything antis have done that crosses a line for me.

If you happen to find this thread and you are an anti (which i doubt is going to happen, but just in case) i want to make it clear that i don't care what you think about me. If you think i'm a creep who is doing something digusting, you are entitled to that opinion.

But even the most terrible people can have ocassionally good takes, and i think if you sincerely care about protecting victims you shouldn't throw away my criticisms. Instead, maybe try listening and see if you can use what i say to make your space safer. Or don't.

With all of that being said: i don't believe all antis are terrible but the community is very toxic and promotes some of the most harmful behaviour i have ever seen.

Antis don't help anyone. Sexual harrassment is normalized to a scary extent in their communities, predators can easily infiltrate their spaces and they don't understand abusive behaviour. All of this is terrifying because they insist that they are a safe space.

The first thing i want to talk about is the way antis misunderstand mental health issues and in some cases, actively harm mentally ill individuals. The most easy way to see this is the way they engage with content.

Antis are constantly exposing people to content that they know is going to upset them. The entire community is based around the negative feelings they have over certain types of fiction and it simply isn't healthy to constantly put people in a position where they are+

constantly looking and talking about things that they know will make them uncomfortable, angry, or even worse, trigger them. This can lead to some people feeling miserable because basing your life around things you dislike is just fucking horrible.

But the worst example of the way antis can negatively impact someone's mental health, is the way i've seen them talk about people who suffer from POCD.

If you don't know what POCD is here's a very basic explanation. In short, someone who suffers from POCD is constantly having intrusive thoughts about pedophilia.

This is what an intrusive thought is. Most of us have experienced at one point or another, but certain mental disorders (like OCD) cause you to experience them more often and it can be very distressing.

Intrusive thoughts aren't the same as fantasies or desires. Quite the opposite. They are specifically about things we DON'T want, things that make us feel bad. Someone who suffers from POCD is not the same as someone who is pedophile.

But because antis have the idea that just because someone THINKS of something in any way they MUST want it in real life i have seen them describe people with POCD as predators, which is incredibly uneducated.

POCD is VERY different from pedophilia, and it's very disgusting to shame someone for the intrusive thoughts they have. If you're going to call yourselves a "safe space" then you should also be educated about mentally ill people so you don't end up treating them as predators.

But moving on from that, let's talk about the way they endanger minors CONSTANTLY. One of the most commmon activities antis participate in is reposting and resharing "problematic content" some of which was previously out of reach to minors.

And keep in mind, most of this content IS VERY TRIGGERING and they are constantly sharing it because they want to "spread awareness". Some of it is not appropriate for minors at all and yet they STILL end up viewing it because their friends sent it to them.

While i haven't seen anything like this happen personally, there is something to be said about adult antis telling minors that they are "the safe adults" and in advocating for porn to be minor appropriate.... you guys do realize how easily a predator could exploite this, right?

But the worst way i've seen them endagering minors is with the way they discuss CSEM. First, we need to make some things clear: in most places of the world, nsfw art of fictional underage characters is not considered CSEM.

If you think this type of art is morally reprehensible, that's fine, i'm not here to debate that but you should stop equating them because this leads to people getting those two things confused.

And that's an AWFUL thing because it leads to some horrific things that could have easily been avoided if you guys actually educated each other on terminology: on two different ocassions antis have shared CSEM with each other.

And by that i mean: actual fucking footage of underage kids. This is horrible. Don't fucking do that, man. This is why it's so important to have a distinction. You can think both things are wrong, but stop mixing them up, fuck.

And i could also talk about the way sexual harrassment is so weirdly normalized. There have been multiple times where i have seen antis go out of their way to send VERY sexually charged messages to people they don't like and oh wow! Antis never call this shit out!

I remember so vividly the day i logged on tumblr and started looking at my dash and i came across this very fucking disturbing thing. Some i followed, who was a rape survivor AND A MINOR had gotten a very fucking detailed rape threat.

I don't give a single fuck about how you feel about proshippers. If you think we're disgusting that's great, but you shouldn't sexually harrass anyone that makes you an actual predator.

And i could also talk about racism because there's a lot of it with antis, but i feel like others have talked about this better than i can so i will just drop this thread by the lovely @mikudiary2 who you should all follow. https://twitter.com/mikudiary2/status/1303131568303726592?s=19

And i also want to talk about how antis fail at recognizing abusive behavior but i actually want to provide a VERY extensive example so before i can get to that, i want to share some stories people have shared with me.

Before i made this thread, i asked some people to share with me the experiences they had with antis and two people told me about some of their stories! So i'm gonna tell you about those before i do anything else.

The first one is fairly simple. An anti accused a 15 year old artist of lightwashing a character, when in reality they drew him darker than in canon and the only reason the character looked lighter was because the background was darker, which caused some contrast.

The person who told me about this story replied to them basically calling them out for making such a baseless accusation and explained to them why what they were saying was in reality very ignorant. The person didn't listen and simply called them a "cop".

Later, they made a post in which they admitted that the entire motivation behind what they said was that the person shipped something they didn't like. So in short: they made up some weird racism accusation just because they disliked a ship. That was it.

Again, if you are someone who believes these things are wrong i'm not here to argue against that, but be fucking honest instead of lying about a person? That's just immature and honestly kind of gross.

The second story is the one that pisses me off the most. I'm going to try to sum it up as best as i can and i will not name any characters or fandoms. But for context: the person who this story is about, is jewish.

So let's call them "Z". Z had joined fandom server and they were having quite a good time! The server was for jewish, so because of this they felt like they could easily communicate to the people of the server.

Eventually, a new person joined. Let's call them X. Z and X didn't seem to get along too well but it was nothing bad. That was until a VERY uncomfortable interaction.

Z was talking about one of their ships. Now, for context, this is one of those comic ships that basically have a lot of different interpretations depending on the work. In some, they are basically related and there is a really big age gap.

In others tho, they are not related at all and they simply live together as friends. THIS was the version Z was interested in. Now, noone seemed to care about what Z shipped except.... X.

So X basically @ them in front of everyone and called them disgusting, not even knowing what version of the ship they liked. They got very aggressive and later an admin would message Z to make sure that they were alright.

Months after that happened, Z comes across a link to a non fandom Jewish server. Z likes talking to other jewish people so they join. And guess who one of the admins is? Yes, X.

So Z decides that they're already there and so they shouldn't even mention what happened. So they just keep going. They haven't even finished with assigning themself roles and then... they get kicked out. Just like that.

So just imagine getting denied access to a non fandom cultural space because the admin doesn't like one of your ships? That's just... i can't put into words how much it bothers me that someone would do something like that over something so meaningless.

So i guess this gives you an idea on why i dont like antis so much, right? Well, if all of this wasn't enough i want to talk about one of the most infuriating experiences i've ever had with an anti.

This is something i've been wanting to talk about for so long because it was very gross to me. If the persons i'm going to be talking about happen to find this, i just want to tell them this: don't talk to me.

I will not mention your names, your fandom, nothing. Noone will know this is about you. So don't talk to me. I don't want to argue, i just want to share what happened because it wasn't okay.

With that out of the way, here's what happened. So this year i decided to join a fandom, made some friends there. This fandom is pretty chill for the most part but there is no denying that the antis in the fandom are popular.

I had some brief interactions with some of the antis in the fandom, but noone actually bothered me too much. I just blocked them and we didn't talk to each other.

The thing is, there's this anti that is pretty well known in the fandom for their art (and also because they once started one of the stupidest drama imaginable, but i will not get into that). This person has what i think it's probably the biggest server the fandom currently has.

As you would imagine, the server oesn't allow proshippers or anyone they consider to be problematic. Because the antis were getting a lot more common, some very unfortunate things went down and some people got harrassed to the point of leaving the fandom completely.

This all made me very frustrated and this ed to the creation of another server that was for proshippers in the fandom. Some people joined and we all got along with each other and quickly became friends.

Our server is a lot smaller compared to theirs but because of that it was a lot easier to get to know each other. One day we were just having a chat and an interesting thing came up: apparently, many of our members had actually joined the anti server before joining ours.

They shared some of their experiences with them and before i talk about the stuff that involved me, we're gonna go over those.

First, here's the shortest one: my friend tried to joined the server and they got immediately kicked out. When they asked why, the head mod told them they couldn't let them in because they were a proshippers and that made them a danger to survivors and minors.

My friend is both of those things, so hearing those things obviously made them feel very shitty. And then comes my second friend, who actually got to stay in the server before leaving because of how uncomfortable they were making them feel.

The first thing to happen was because of a ship. My friend ships two characters of the fandom together, this characters were originally planned to be brothers but the idea was eventually thrown out, so they are canonically NOT related.

In addition to this tho, the characters do have a very complex relationship that is not necessarily the healthiest. They are both rivals and there is a lot of tension between them because of that.

So my friend mentions that they like this ship, and while they don't get called anything weird, they do notice that it seems like the other members aren't too fond of this. The members are kind of rude about the ship and so my friend doesn't feel so comfortable.

And THEN something that really bothers me happened. Remember when i previously said antis aren't good at recognizing abusive behaviour? Well, that's what we're gonna talk about now!

Someone in the server mentions that someone they care about has been acting really weird. They describe what has been going on and my friend immediately notices some red flags.

So my friend lets them know what they think and EVERYONE shuts the down. My friend was just trying to help this kid, but instead everyone else decided that they were wrong and shouldn't be listened.

This is what my friend had to say about that thing.

So this is all really shitty, right? Well, eventually another person joins our server and lets us know that apparently they used to have a list of users they wanted to bombarded with anon hate. I never knew if this was true, but i personally believe this person.

And THEN we get to the part i was involved in. To keep it short, the server started requiring people to send pictures of themselves before they joined. We all found it really creepy, because many of the people in there were minors and we felt like +

considering what antis have done in the past this could be very dangerous to those kids. I called them out for it, basically said i thought it was creepy and another friend backed me up.

But this got quickly out of control. The mods accused us of saying they were predators and i remember the headmod pulling the "i'm a minor" excuse and calling us freaks (instead of... actually listening).

While i admit that i was pretty heated and said some things i now regret my friend was very calm and nice about it and actually tried to have a conversation with them. And yet, we both got the same treatment.

Eventually we learned that they started doing this because an old mod turned out to be a predator and they wanted to make sure it wasn't him trying to get back in. More on this later.

So my friend insisted that this wasn't a great idea and offered them some alternatives that could be safer. They didn't listen and ignored all of it.

And this is when it all got uncomfortable. This is the part that makes me mad and the part that made me realize how shitty they were.

One of the mods made a post addressing the situation. Both me and my friend are minors and they used that in their post to say that we had been groomed in the past and that's why we thought like this.

They basically didn't address our concerns and focus on our ships and then made up the grooming story. Now i want you to put yourself in my place, okay?

Please imagine you're me. A 16 year old girl who maybe doesn't know the best way to handle things, but it's still trying their best because you are genuinely concerned... and then you see a grown adult talking to all of their followers about how you've been groomed.

I don't know if this person realizes this, but that is basically them speculating about my possible sexual trauma. Can you please imagine how i felt when i read that?

Well, i didn't feel good. At all. It actually made me feel really grossed out. After that, they blocked us and we never talked to each other again but this experience really stayed with me because i had never through anything like that.

If you are an adult, or anyone really, maybe don't fucking speculate on the possible sexual abuse of another person? Especially if they are a minor? Like for fucks sake, what the fuck was that.

This thread is messy because i'm just sick of this discourse, and it wouldn't be all that bad if antis were actually fucking decent people. And some of them are! But the community as a whole it's fucking rotten.