In the previous video on RPG Romance, I made reference to the way self-described "proshippers" often denigrate and devalue art and compared it to the way RPG romance reduces characters and their stories down to a set of checkbox tropes meant to be consumed like snack food and thrown away. This set off more than a few comments questioning this line of thinking. Namely
"How can people who are anti-censorship devalue art?"
And that is a question that is very difficult to unpack.
Terminology
Okay so before we can begin we have to get everybody up to speed on what the fuck a proshipper is, because it means something different depending on who you ask, and its murky definition is the result of near-constant shifting goalposts. Hell the very name itself is inherently disingenuous to its actual purpose.
So a Proshipper is someone who eagerly and gleefully consumes content featuring elements most people would consider over the line, such as illegal age gaps, incest, abuse, or content that glorifies bigotry, AND has made doing so a core aspect of their identity.
That's it, that's what they are.
Proshippers have been the subject of a lot of discourse, internet arguments and harassment campaigns, some directed at them, most directed outward, and the baseline opinion of proshippers is that they're fucking annoying, which isn't surprising. Nobody likes the guy who tries to play Devil's Advocate for Lolicon, or who brags about watching A Serbian Film, or who tries to sincerely argue that Zuko's true love was Azula the entire time.
Even if you're someone who is ambivalent or apathetic to those subjects, you don't want to listen to someone act like their porn addiction is some kind of champion's ballad for free expression.
Pixie - "Okay, CD. We get it. Where are you going with this?"
CD - "Well Proshippers are new, but the foundational level of crap they sit on is old."
The Internet's Ever Moving Goalposts
So if you've spoken to or identity as a proshipper, you've probably heard them describe themselves as being 'anti-censorship' or 'pro creative freedom' which is a bit like saying "It's about ethics in games journalism."
So the internet has never had a good relationship with the concept of censorship or free speech. It's thrown those words around in extremely poor cases all the time. But the one I'm going to highlight is Fanfiction.Net. Back in 2002, Fanfiction.Net decided it didn't want to host porn anymore and purged every fic that was rated MA or higher.
This had three major impacts on the world of fanfiction.
Fanfiction.Net users started using the M rating for porn and started calling it "Lemon."
AdultFanfiction.Net launched a week later.
A few hundred smutfics were lost forever, to be instantly replaced.
Fanfiction.Net implemented this new rule as a token effort to please advertisers, a rule it barely ever enforced and which the users immediately started skirting, and the whole thing was largely a brief annoyance for everyone using the site.
Now ask someone about it today and this is an example of censorship, as a platform decided certain types of fiction weren't allowed to exist and purged them from existence.
A very dramatic story that no doubt drives donations to AO3 every year, but false. Fanfiction.Net, being a private entity owned and operated by someone, had every right under the damn sun to decide "you can't host this on my servers anymore." Which isn't censorship any more than telling your racist uncle to get out of your house is censorship, because an important aspect of free speech is the right to not host things you don't want to on your property.
FF.Net may have made that decision at the behest of advertisers, but at the end of the day they were their servers to make that decision with.
Pixie - "But CD, it means a lot of fanfics are now lost media!"
CD - "...Whoop de fucking do."
Anyway, this was actually the norm for more specialized fanfiction sites over the years. For example, RPF, or Real Person Fiction, was banned on most fanfiction websites for both legal issues as well as the general creepy vibe of writing smutty fanfics about real people. At its best, it shows a complete lack of respect toward creators you claim to admire, which is why it's often banned.
Another one is when fanfiction authors remove or edit works they don't like being associated with anymore. People grow up and move out of phases that probably weren't all that healthy and don't like these things being out there. Especially in an increasingly vindictive internet where sad, psychotic people dig into your past the moment you do anything that rubs them the wrong way.
But to hear some people talk, this is some kind of existential crisis and proof of why fanfiction needs to be archived heavily, and if a creator has deleted their fanfiction then it's your moral obligation to reverse this self-censorship by reuploading it somewhere else!
You can probably see where the "anti censorship" argument is starting to break down. You can't claim to be a supporter of creative freedom, and then deny a creator their freedom to pull a book from shelves, or edit and alter their work. Indeed fanfiction having a recent archival panic is itself odd because fanfiction as a concept has always been the single most disposable form of art. It's consumed, thrown away, and moved right on to the next one.
I mean not for nothing, but there's a reason the most widely known and famous fanfic of all time is... not known for being good, it's known almost exclusively for people content farming it and attempting to track down the author over something she wrote when she was a kid. My Immortal's legacy is internet harassment and parasitic drama ghouls.
Fanfiction websites may be popular because of their community, but they're still owned by individual people or entities. And those people are not obligated to give you a wall to paint on. AO3 could shut down servers tomorrow, destroying the efforts to archive fanfiction and nothing could be done about it.
Where the Internet fundamentally gets the concept of Free Expression and Free Speech wrong is very simple: The internet is privately owned. Private websites, whether they're big corporations, self-hosted websites, or whatever the fuck AO3 is, are still their owners' private websites and the owner has the right, specifically BECAUSE of Free Speech, to decide what's acceptable to allow in their spaces. Just like how "Free Speech" doesn't protect you from being kicked out of a store or someone's home for saying something they don't like, the same goes for online platforms.
And abolishing capitalism won't change that, because unless you have publicly owned and publicly funded social media, this is going to continue to be the case.
The hardest pill to swallow is this: There's no right to be heard. You aren't entitled to exercise your free speech in the venue of your choosing. Nobody owes you a platform or a megaphone.
In fact, a core tenet of Free Speech is not being required to signal boost speech you object to as a private citizen. Sure, many platforms will have some kind of 'commitment to free speech' but that's a personal policy they can revoke at any time.
It is not censorship to tell someone to shut up. It is not censorship to tell someone to log off. It is not censorship to shout someone down until they're effectively drowned out. It is not even censorship to suggest that something should be banned, or to convince advertisers to pull ads from something you object to. In fact, it is your right as a citizen of a nation that has Internet Access to do all of those things.
It is censorship when the government withdraws federal funds from organizations for having politics the President doesn't like. It is censorship when the gestapo deport a man to an El Salvadorian Gulag for speaking out against a fascist police state's genocide.
Pixie - "Okay CD, but what about self-censorship?"
CD - "That's not a real thing."
If you try to convince a creator to stop making something, either through reason or coercive pressure, and they do it, that's not self-censorship. That is an expression of creative freedom. They don't have to do those things, and in fact they could just tank the repercussions if creative freedom matters that much to them, but if they don't then that's a decision they are completely within their right to make. To act as if this is self-censorship is to act as if the very concept of criticism is censorship. I know that's something a lot of people believe, but those people are fucking idiots.
You may not like it or agree with their decision, but you're an unrelated third party, you don't get to declare someone's actions self-censorship just because they didn't do what you wanted them to do. Which is pretty much the crux of this entire tangled mess.
See, Free Speech is one of those philosophies that is sort of above ideology as a concept. It's a Liberal idea, but like... big picture, opposite of Divine Right of Kings Liberal. As a result it's one of those concepts that everyone values, but which is just as likely to fuck you over as it is to help you.
The people who get heard the most are the people with the most pre-existing access to public attention. Which is the wealthy or the state. And it means they can exert pressure and incentives to make other platforms comform to what they want.
Pixie - "But CD, that's so... bleak."
CD - "I agree. But having values only when it benefits you or when things go your way isn't really having values at all, now is it?"
This is where we circle back to proshippers and other self-styled "anti censorship" groups, because at the end of the day their biggest concern... is getting to do whatever they want. Which is philosophically... nothing. And they value free expression only so far as it gives them access to media to consume. If a creator decides they don't want to be associated with something anymore, the dial immediately flips and it's suddenly all about preservation of art and free expression goes out the window.
Their primary concern is both
Having access to media to consume.
Shouting down anything that might call that into question.
There's been something of a storm in a teacup regarding AO3, and the fact that it flagrantly hosts child porn, material that glorifies racism, misogynistic manifestos, and other similar objectionable material. And any time someone suggests that perhaps AO3 shouldn't be hosting child porn at least, someone jumps up and accuses them of advocating censorship. But they aren't. They are attempting to convince a platform to make a decision about what's acceptable on their platform, something they have every right to do.
Hell, AO3 is, allegedly at least, a website that's publicly owned and has an elected board that makes these decisions. So people could run to be elected to that board with the specific intent of banning child porn on the platform.
Would that be censorship? Nope.
That's Democracy. That would be AO3 operating exactly on the values it professes to have. And it would be keeping in the spirit of free expression because it's their website and it's their right to make these decisions.
But in this hypothetical scenario it would be a decision that a minority of AO3's userbase dislikes, because it removes a venue to access their spank bank, and they'd certainly yell censorship anyway because the debate didn't go their way. And before you start getting huffy about that, this is exactly how it currently goes in reality, just flipped around where the majority of the site's userbase has to softly put up with the fact that the fandom website that is currently choking the life out of every other fandom website is being run like a Chan board or Twitter and they all have to either deal with it, or make repeated attempts to convince AO3's owners to change course.
If you don't believe in free expression when you lose a fight, you don't believe in it at all.
Pixie - "Okay CD, so what is censorship?"
CD - "When the government forces you to take these actions. Either through court order or threat of arrest."
Pixie - "...That's it?"
CD - "Yup. Other citizens trying to persuade you or giving you ultimatums isn't anti-free speech. It IS free speech.
I focus on fanfiction for this discussion because it's where these arguments and discussions are had most fervently and it's where they're at their weakest. What the arguments about censorship actually are, are people making a moral argument out of the idea that they should have free and unlimited access to content to consume endlessly, and anything that gets in the way of that is censorship.
The internet is a place that provides unlimited amounts of free content. Artists posting their art, writers posting their stories, video creators making videos, animators animating, FIVE GOLDEN RINGS! It's a place where there is literally so much content you will not live long enough to consume all of it. And it's bred an attitude in some people to just keep consuming and consuming and consuming. Reading fanfiction until 3AM, doomscrolling twitter, binge-watching, hell the entire idea behind generative AI is being able to click a button and get more more more. Just consume more.
It's created an increasing problem of people trying to make their identity or their politics out of their consumption.
Proshippers are people with... let's be brutally honest here, garbage taste. And because of this "consumption as identity" problem, they broadcast that garbage taste online, drawing increasing ire from others because they are... annoying... and gross. And that draws conflicting opinions and arguments and shouting matches as people battle for space. People argue and bicker and harass each other to keep their preferred venues on the internet friendly to them and only to them. We're long past the age where fandom existed almost entirely on forums, now it's on corporately owned social media, and the power to remove what people consider 'bad actors' has been completely taken away.
The only recourse to get rid of someone you don't like is to abuse them into leaving.
And like all internet discourse, the stakes and language escalates higher and higher as both sides keep trying to emotionally blackmail the other into shutting up and going away. Fucking hell, I could end on that line if I wanted to.
So proshippers weaponize censorship, something everyone thinks is bad, in an argument completely disconnected from it.
"Anti Censorship" in this context is really just "Anti criticism" which is really just "Anti Consequences." It has resulted in this escalating feedback loop where people go from being against censorship, to being against harassment, to being against critique, to being against the idea that art means anything at all, to being against the idea that your own thoughts mean anything at all.
And these things are inherently denigrating to the concept of art and expression.
And like... I'm not all that surprised that someone who jacks it to lolicon or thinks Coffin is peak fiction thinks that doesn't say anything deeper about him or her than "they just like it." They kinda HAVE to believe that. If they didn't, they'd be having a lot of uncomfortable conversations with themselves. Everyone with deeply unhealthy habits thinks it's not actually a problem, that's not a new thing. Have you ever met a stoner?
Really take something that has historically moved people, changed societies, and changed the way people think about many different subjects and say all of that doesn't actually exist and isn't real, and you sound like a fucking lunatic. And you only sound like a lunatic because you're using such high stakes language to wallpaper over what you actually want to be true.
What you want to be true is you want to consume art without thinking about what it is and what it's saying, and you want to do so loudly in public without anyone trying to yuck your yum in any way, and I'm sorry... you're never going to get that. If that's what you want, your only recourse is to consume it covertly.
Pixie - "Well we shouldn't have to, CD."
CD - "Well we shouldn't live in a world where basic necessities are commodities to be bought and sold, but we do. Y
our only other option is to convince every single person who uses the internet, including yourself, to start minding their own business, and good luck with that. Half the creator economy is built around people having their unwashed noses in other people's business.
Sigh Look, I'm not completely unsympathetic to the idea that people should be able to post about the things they like and dislike without some busybody turning it into a warzone, but the people who most frequently identity as being 'anti censorship' are often the ones who hear someone else state their own opinion and conclude that said opinion is being forced on them, or think that being blocked on social media is a sign of anything other than the fact that they're socially malevolent. The Anti-Harassment crowd does a disproportionate amount of harassment and if you believe otherwise you're seriously lying to yourself. It takes nothing to identity with an ideology, it's a lot more difficult to stick to it.
And whatever solution you think you can find to... having to share space with other people, acting as if the very idea of art having meaning is a fake thing that only puritans believe sure as fuck isn't it.
Nobody has ever changed their opinion as a result of angry dipshits screaming at them, no matter how much pseudo-intellectual warbling and emotional blackmail those dipshits use. This goes both ways. You won't convince a proshipper to grow some real taste by yelling at them, and no amount of rage disguised as anti-puritanism is going to make someone stop thinking you're a pedo for jacking it to anime toddlers.
But most importantly, when you try hijacking serious, important discussions to use as emotional blackmail in an internet argument, everyone can see what you're doing.
Pixie - "Okay CD, people are selfish. But where did you get the idea that they denigrate art as well?"
CD - "Coffin."
The Coffin of Andy and Leyley was one of the few instances where I actually cracked open the kind of media these people enjoy and compared what was inside to how it's viewed by it's fanbase and the differences are like night and day.
For all it's true crime trappings, the game is fundamentally about a deeply unhealthy relationship that gets progressively worse as one part of that relationship tries to keep hold of the control and power that came with its status quo. But the way its fanbase talks, you could be forgiven for thinking that it's some kind of twisted and tragic love story between two equally terrible and broken people.
In multiples instances it's creator has gone to great lengths to beat this idea out of their heads. Even something as simple and straightforward as one of the characters being a victim of extreme emotional and psychological abuse is so contentious among its audience that an entire hour is spent trying to get you to accept that.
Yet it's audience still seems to think there's a happy ending for the twoi leads in the cards that involves them doing the one thing the game makes it very clear is a catastrophically bad idea that makes everything worse.
If you're a bitch, you'd probably look at this as "the death of media literacy" but here's the important part: It's not that they can't get it, or don't get it. It's that they WON'T get it. These are people who only played this game because they were promised siblings fucking, so they want the siblings to fuck and for it to work out well.
They don't really give a shit about anything else, it's just a vessel for catharsis for them. That is what I mean by denigrating art. Even bad art like this.
Pixie - "Okay CD, so what would you do about Proshippers?"
CD - "Nothing."
At the end of the day, the persecution complex is the entire point, and a lot of the public shrieking is done specifically as rage bait. Engaging with it is only feeding that persecution complex. Given how they behave, there's no honest way to view someone who calls themselves 'anti-puritan' as something other than someone who likes to act that other people's tastes and opinions are a threat to them personally.
In cases where I've had to actively engage with the kind of media they champion, it's been made abundantly clear that for the most part they don't really care about art, and they view it as completely disposable. Shaving the part they like most off the surface and ignoring the rest.
Perhaps it's better for everyone if you put them out of your mind. Proshippers aren't bad people, they're just rude, gluttonous jackasses with a chip on their shoulder and enough paraphilias to keep their future psychologists occupied. And if you let that stop you from engaging seriously with art and what it says, no matter how frivolous someone else claims it is, then all you're doing is increasingly waddling toward idiocracy.
I'm CD-Call, thanks for watching.