Shipping ethics controversy in fanfiction

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, the depiction of romantic or sexual relationships between characters in fanfiction and other fan-made works. The disagreement primarily centers on the degree to which 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 sexual abuse, rape, incest, 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, and the legality of such works varies greatly between jurisdictions. As the main opposition against anti-shippers, pro-shippers view that anti-ship equates to restricting artistic freedom and allowing moral censorship, and generally reject the notion that works including such themes influence the real-world 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 anti-shippers have characterized the movement as a moral panic or censorship campaign; they oppose the equating of fictional content with real-world sexual abuse, and also 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 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: An Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen.

Many shippers become strongly emotionally invested in their preferred romantic relationships, even when no such pairing is portrayed in canon. Because of this, conflict (dubbed "ship wars" in fan communities) 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 (non-shippers) 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 fanfiction websites

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 (most notably in "hurt-comfort" works) 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. 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 works depicted abuse, torture, violence, 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 LGBTQ works. The "destruction of LiveJournal communities" and ongoing censorship from Fanfiction.net led to the creation of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) and the Archive of Our Own (AO3), 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

LiveJournal centered around communities divided by theme, making it more difficult for fans to discover content they wished not to see, whereas 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, creating many younger fans with little connection to or knowledge of earlier 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 discussion trends towards participants falling into separate camps based on the members' viewpoints and identities, sometimes 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, it became a point of etiquette to use separate tags for critical content; sometimes summarized as "don't tag your hate". However, the use of divergent tags inadvertently formed groups centered around their opposition to a ship. Fans in these communities sought to emphasize their dislike for ships to gain acceptance from their peers, leading to more extreme backlash and harassment of 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 characters within the 2016–2018 television series Voltron: Legendary Defender contributed to a large-scale expansion of shipping discussion in fandom spaces. Opponents of the romantic pairing of the characters Keith and Shiro characterized the relationship as pedophilic in nature; although both characters were adults within the source material, Shiro was seven years older than Keith. Fans of the series saw a canonical gay couple as likely, due to comments by the show's creators saying that they wished to have an inclusive cast of characters. Conflict between different ships in the fandom became politicized, 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 anti-shippers migrated to Twitter in the late 2010s, although the movement has not gained the prominence it previously held on Tumblr.

Viewpoints