Shipping discourse
Beginning in the mid-2010s and continuing into the 2020s, significant discourse emerged in online fandom spaces around the ethical implications of taboo and abusive content within shipping fanfiction. "Shipping", clipped from "relationshipping", is a fanfiction term for the depictions of romantic or sexual relationships between characters from an existing work of fiction. The disagreement between "pro-shippers" and "anti-shippers" is primarily based on the amount fictional works depicting such content affect real-world behavior and attitudes.
The internet allowed fans to share their works freely and anonymously, enabling them to depict disturbing content such as rape, incest, abuse, and pedophilia, often with little connection to the source material. Anti-shippers, also referred to as "antis", take the view that such fictional portrayals normalize harmful dynamics and behaviors, and pose a risk to children and sexual abuse survivors. Fanfiction depicting underage characters in sexual contexts is often characterized as child pornography, with the legality of such works varying greatly between jurisdictions. As a backlash to antis, pro-shippers oppose censorship and generally reject the notion that works including such themes influence the behaviors of their readers and writers.
The discourse has been most prevalent among the younger, heavily-LGBTQ fan communities on websites such as Tumblr and Archive of Our Own. Both pro-shippers and anti-shippers generally espouse progressive beliefs and share similar demographics. Members of both factions have been accused of online harassment. Critics of antis have characterized the movement as a moral panic or censorship campaign, and oppose the equating of fictional content with real-world sexual abuse, and the spread of moralistic attitudes towards sexuality. Pro-shippers have also faced criticism for minimizing other critiques against fan works, such as anti-racist criticism.
Background
The term "shipping", derived from "relationshipping", initially emerged in the mid-1990s within the X-Files fandom to refer to the fan practice of supporting a hypothetical romantic relationship between the main protagonists, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Supporters of romance between the two characters titled themselves "shippers", seeing it as the inevitable resolution of the show's unresolved sexual tension. They were opposed within the fandom by "No-Romancers", who viewed the two characters' relationship as platonic friendship. Shippers often turned to fanfiction to depict romantic and sexual interactions between the characters, leading to contemporary fanfiction websites aligned with either camp. The term later broadened to include supporters of any fan pairing of fictional characters. Such dynamics paralleled far older romantic pairings depicted in slash fanfiction, a term first originating in the early 1970s Star Trek fandom. Even earlier examples of romantic fanfiction retroactively described as shipping include the 1914 novel Old Friends and New Fancies.Many shippers become strongly emotionally invested in their preferred relationships, even when no such romantic relationship is portrayed in canon. Because of this, conflict can emerge in a fandom between proponents of different ships. This is exacerbated when there are multiple plausible partners for a particular character, such as within love triangles. By the early 2000s, anti-fans opposed to certain ships came to be known as "anti-shippers". This term can include both fans who lack interest in the ship and fans who oppose the plausibility or morality of the relationship. In smaller communities, such conflicts can affect which ships are featured in the most fanfiction, leading to increased stakes for participants.
Internet fandom and AO3
The emergence of Internet fan communities during the 1990s allowed for the proliferation of taboo fanfiction in an anonymous environment. Traditionally, erotica, homoerotic romance, and depictions of torture were carefully distributed only within small cliques interested in such works. In the 1990s, fanfiction proliferated on forums and platforms like Usenet. However, controversies about erotic fanfiction dissuaded some authors from posting their works.Later on, large fan-work host websites, such as DeviantArt and FanFiction.Net, allowed the free spread of work without gatekeeping or the risk of connection to their creators' offline identities. However, these websites still forced works to adhere to terms of service that allowed the fansites to remain profitable to advertisers. Fanfiction portraying graphic violence or explicit sexuality was subject to frequent bouts of censorship and removal, which fans called "purges". Some purged fanworks depicted abuse, torture, gore, rape, incest, necrophilia, pedophilia, or bestiality. Such taboo works usually have no specific basis in the source material, which is often originally marketed towards children and young adults.
In 2007, a pressure campaign to remove extreme sexual writings was launched by an American group named "Warriors for Innocence" against LiveJournal, a blogging website which served as the largest fan content host in the 2000s. Six Apart, the owners of LiveJournal, briefly removed around five hundred journals in response; this prompted widespread community outrage, and Six Apart apologized and reinstated much of the content over the following months. When LiveJournal was acquired by the Russian online media corporation SUP later in 2007, the site underwent a mass-scale removal of content considered explicit under Russian media laws, including many LGBT works. The "destruction of LiveJournal communities" and ongoing censorship from Fanfiction.net led to the creation of the Organization for Transformative Works and the Archive of Our Own, a nonprofit and advertisement-free hosting site for fanfiction. The gradual migration of much of the fanfiction community to AO3 allowed for the sharing of taboo works without censorship. AO3 implements a tagging system which allows authors to disseminate the work to particular fandoms and mark works containing triggering or upsetting content.
Emergence
While LiveJournal centered around communities divided by theme, making it more difficult for fans to discover content they wished not to see, social media sites such as Tumblr and Twitter centralized the content of fan communities, allowing for more crossover between disparate parts of the community. Fan communities on the internet grew rapidly with the rise of social media, leading to many younger fans with little connection or knowledge of prior fan communities.Tumblr, launched in 2007, received an influx of fan creators from the controversies on LiveJournal. The site's unique system of post dissemination and tagging both allows for the discussion of social justice issues and intense conflict between different online fan communities. Tumblr discourse trends towards separate camps around specific viewpoints and identities, creating highly combative "contact zones" where rival factions debate issues. The tagging system resulted in fans and opponents of the same ships using the same tags to discuss it. As this led to conflict between fans, "don't tag your hate" became a point of fan etiquette. However, this inadvertently formed groups centered around their opposition to a ship. Fans in these communities sought to emphasize their dislike for the ship to gain acceptance from their peers, leading to more extreme backlash and harassment towards their opponents. The use of "anti-" as a prefix in tags opposing a ship led to other fans dubbing members of such communities "antis".
Tensions over pairings between various characters within the 2016–2018 television series Voltron: Legendary Defender contributed to a large-scale expansion of shipping discourse in fandom spaces. Opponents of the romantic pairing of the characters Keith and Shiro characterized that relationship as pedophilic in nature. Fans of the series saw a canonical gay couple as likely, due to comments by the show's creators that they wished to have an inclusive cast of characters. Conflict between different ships in the fandom became politicized, with each side wishing to present their ship as the moral option. Media scholar Mel Stanfill described the advocacy for a particular gay ship by fans through their works as "the ingredients of the anti argument that fan fiction is advocacy for whatever sex appears in the story".
In Chinese fan communities in 2019, conflict emerged over a real person fiction ship between Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo, the main actors of the TV series The Untamed, re-imagining Wang Yibo as a minor and Xiao Zhan as a transgender sex worker. The Chinese government banned AO3 in February 2020, which many fans believed to be the result of the controversy over the ship.
Explicit content on Tumblr was stymied by a ban on "not safe for work" material in November 2018. Many antis migrated to Twitter in the late 2010s, although the movement has not gained the prominence it previously held on Tumblr.
Viewpoints
Anti-shipper
The terms "anti" and "anti-shipper" often refer to opponents of fictional sexual content considered harmful, although "anti" can also be applied to anti-fans more generally. The question of whether "fiction affects reality" is a central point of dispute between antis and the opposing camp of "pro-shippers". Antis generally believe that taboo or abusive sexual content within fiction directly influences the views and actions of those who consume it, with pro-shippers disagreeing with antis for a broad spectrum of reasons, ranging from a complete rejection of fictional media's influence on behavior to a defense of harmful sexual dynamics when properly depicted as abusive.Although specific viewpoints vary significantly within the community, antis generally share a number of core beliefs. Antis oppose depictions of rape and sexual abuse, describing them as harmful to sexual abuse survivors. Antis consider the opposed content harmful to minors and abuse victims, especially depictions of rape, incest, and pedophilia, as well as power imbalances in relationships and the perceived fetishization of homosexual relationships. Depictions of pedophilia are a major focus of antis, who argue that sexual content involving underage fictional characters is child pornography and that the dissemination of such works can function as a grooming tactic to normalize sexual relations between adults and children. Antis generally view an author's inclusion of such harmful content or themes in a work as a reflection of the author's personal views and desires.
Legal restrictions on such material varies greatly between different countries and jurisdictions. In the United States, where the Organization for Transformative Works is based, sexual material which includes fictional depictions of minors is prohibited under federal obscenity law, although such restrictions face frequent legal challenges. Antis oppose the Organization for Transformative Works's policies towards such content, arguing that it should be banned from the site. When depicting characters that are canonically minors in sexual contexts, artists often include disclaimers that characters in their work have been "aged-up" in order to protect themselves from possible legal ramifications. Some fans warn that they do not wish to see such content or interact with their creators through "DNI" notices on their personal pages.