Proship
Proship, proshipper or anti-anti are terms used in online fandom spaces (more commonly after 2020), primarily in reference to lolicon and other erotic fiction. They are used to describe someone who refuses to harass or shame others for their fictional preferences, regardless of their own gut reaction to the content of said fictional relationship (ship). Antishippers/antis oppose fictional content they deem to be problematic, and seek to eliminate it by shaming proshippers, sometimes regardless of age, and using reporting mechanisms against them. Their rationale is usually that sharing fiction on a subject is likely to encourage it in real life, particularly among the young and "impressionable". There is no actual evidence for this argument.
Relevance to MAPs
For ego-syntonic MAPs and their allies, the term "proship" has potentially negative connotations, due to the tendency of some proshippers to engage in Validity Policing against MAPs. Oftentimes, this is based upon reaction formation (i.e. the proshipper might be a lolicon themselves and a repressed/distracted MAP). MAPs engaging regularly with proshippers online are likely to be highly familiar with the Lolicon-MAP Equivalence Debate. This is a trivial philosophical debate, widely understood to be unresolvable, largely invisible to outsiders and a waste of resources. MAPs have coined the term "ironic lolicon" to refer to individuals who are not self-accepting MAPs, but nevertheless have a marked proximity to drawn child erotica, using various justifications such as being "attracted to fiction" or quasi-human "aesthetics".
Adjacent topics
Some of the following content is considered to be "problematic", and sometimes policed in online communities:
- Incest fiction/drawings
- Abusive relationship fiction/drawings
- Zoophilic/Zoo-map fiction/drawings
One particular tell as to the ultimately moralistic nature of antiship ideology, is that antishippers will attempt to fight even the most fantastical and impossible fiction, as long as it contains references to themes that offend their sensibilities. In this sense, the argument against encouragement is discarded, and the antishipper's counter-degeneracy agenda is laid bare. While it can be argued that shipping debates should be avoided by MAPs (due to a general inability to represent or influence real life events), it might also be the case that these debates play an important role in normalizing taboo themes, and engineering alliances with adjacent groups. A general level of literacy on this topic is now routinely encouraged among activist MAPs on social media, perhaps if only to identify, avoid and/or curtail unnecessary arguments.
External links
- Shipping discourse - MAP Wiki.
- When Pro-Shippers Turn on MAPs - Blog post.
- A Carrd on Proshipping
- Definder.net