I don’t even want to dignify this with a response. What is your fucking definition of abuse, because last I checked, feeding people sewing needles, doxxing minors, harassing people to the point of suicide, putting someone’s entire life in the spotlight so their every word can be watched and judged, punishing people in the group for not conforming to their shitty ideals of “morality”, cutting someone’s entire support system just for having a “bad” ship, telling people they deserve to be killed and raped for making fanart and giving people with OCD constant morality obsessions definitely qualifies as fucking abuse.
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just don’t understand the scope of the harm I’m talking about, because if you knew about that and still decided to leave this in my inbox, then you are a vile fucking human for downplaying the harm that the purity police have caused to fandom communities and to internet spaces in general. They fucking destroyed me, just like the mormon church destroyed me, and I will never forgive them for making me spiral into oblivion over a fucking label that just means, “hey, maybe we should not harass people over FUCKING SHIPS”!!!
And I wasn’t even abused that badly! Most of it just shaped my ideas of fiction being directly connected to real morality, which aligned with what I already believed from mormonism, but many have it far FAR worse, usually trans people and people of color. Many have been harassed to the point of suicide, but many more were simply left with a broken puritan psyche that takes years and YEARS to fully deconstruct and makes you more vulnerable to other cults like neo-nazism and radical feminism.
When I was about 12, I was so ashamed of my budding fictional crush that I cried for three days. When I was 15, I was told that only a real pedophile would write underage fiction. When I was 18, I was afraid of my sexual thoughts, leftover shame from years of purity culture eating away at me until even when I was free, I wasn’t really free, constantly scared of being judged. It’s only within the past few years that I’ve finally moved on to fully accept my weirdness and my own “bad” thoughts. At that point, antis had contributed to my shame about as much as the mormon church had, by implying that thoughts lead directly to action, especially if they’re sexual thoughts, meaning bad thoughts make you a bad person.
If you don’t believe me about that abuse, just look at the tag “#anti recipes” here on tumblr. It doesn’t take long to find examples. Death/rape threats, general harassment, suicide baits, false allegations, and much more. You’ll find every kind of bigotry in vast volumes. I’ve seen racism, sexism, transphobia, antisemitism, ableism, literally any way you can be bigoted, they’ve done it, and they’ve done it in VAST volumes.
And people like you make it easier for them to do so, by downplaying that harm and trying to gaslight their targets into thinking it’s really not as bad as it is.
Don’t cite the ancient magic to me, witch. I was there when it was written. Now get out of my sight.
