I have been online for a long time. I started on LiveJournal, if anyone remembers that. My best and only friends there were two much older adult fujoshi who drew really amazing fanart of the character Black Jack, a character who is directly responsible for my career choice in art. I wasn't particularly into yaoi/BL at the time, but I didn't care -- their art was just so amazing. In this sense, I say, yes, ship and let ship. When extreme racist and then-mayor of Tokyo Ishihara Shintaro proposed the Seishonen Hogo Ikusei Jorei, I agreed with many creators and the Comiket folks in opposing it. Not to mention Ishihara is an insane right-winger. The purpose of this page is to both explain my stance and to counter some misinformation I often see online.
I am also Japanese (though raised in the US) and was groomed online as a child. These facts are relevant as many people partaking in this culture war like to speak for both survivors and Japanese LGBT people. My grooming was directly facilitated by the supposedly harmless fiction -- as a child, I was deeply fixated on lolicon, shotacon, and big brother/younger sister content. Aside from giving me deeply incorrect information about AFAB anatomy, it also instilled in me a lot of misguided and dangerous ideas. The less harmful end of misinformation was that hentai made me think that something was wrong with me for the shade of my nipples, due to the colorist notion that darker shades mean you are a slut. This did irreperable damage to my psyche and put me in a situation where a much older adult man was asking me to meet up, though he was thankfully in Japan so this did not happen. I liked an Utaite whose main schtick was that he's a lolicon (Samuraiman, if any of you are wondering). This is the reality of this kind of content being allowed to exist.
I've also noticed through years of observation of the self-labeled "pro-fiction" community that many of them are actually quite reactionary. This isn't too surprising when you center your identity around consuming media -- the utmost capitalist behavior. What was a bit more surprising was how many of them are becoming open transphobes.
My Points
Fiction does not exist in a vacuum. There is cultural context for what a horror movie expresses fear about. In the same way, it speaks many volumes about misogyny in Japan how women are depicted -- raped into submission, limbs amputated so they can't escape, beaten, killed. This is an unfortunately unchanging aspect of otaku culture. I know because I immersed myself in it for over a decade. I have been to the summer Comiket multiple times both as a minor and as an adult. This sort of content isn't at all sectioned off. This isn't even mentioning the homophobic stereotypes in Japanese media, or the racist charicatures. Manga and anime are a major way that Westerners see and learn Japanese stereotypes about Black people, transfeminine people, gay men, and more. While the average Japanese person watching these anime or reading these manga also sees the same charicatures, Japanese society further pushes these same stereotypes via other media like TV, news, etc. I find it both incredibly naive and dangerous to deny the effect that manga, anime, or games can have. On this note, I've noticed an influx of BL fetishizing Indigenous men, and it's insanely racist and primitivist.
Fujin isn't a word that Japanese LGBT people came up with. It is an external invention that nobody Japanese uses. I know this because I looked up 腐人 on Japanese websites and only found a BL whose title includes a pun on the word for lady 夫人(also read fujin). The fact that this myth is so prevalent demonstrates how little these folks care about actual Japanese people. This is, of course, reinforced by people shutting me out and blocking me without acknowledging any of my criticisms when I bring this up. I find it incredibly demeaning that a presumably American white person made up a concept and ascribed it to us out of some sense of holy duty. This is white knighting at its finest.
Not all coping methods are healthy. Dependence on substances or self harm are also coping methods, and these are widely understood to be unhealthy. I mention this not to shame addicts or those who self-harm, but as a neutral statement. If this is something you struggle with, I genuinely wish you the best. Rather, this is something people seem to gloss over when talking about this despite taking a pseudo-psychiatric approach to it. For example, making vent art may help some people, but for me it worsens my ideations and intrusive thoughts because it makes me focus on these things.
On the topic of the recent credit card holder debacle, I wish to make it clear that I don't think censorship is good. However, free speech absolutism is, at its core, a reactionary stance. I did not grow up arguing with people who wanted the 'right' or 'freedom' to say homophobic, racist, transphobic things just to hear it all over again in 2025. There is no difference in the end goal or rhetorical tricks between these two groups. The only difference is that this new crowd claims this to be a leftist or progressive stance, which should be laughed out of the room. Plenty of self-described "proshippers" are center-right at best. Not to mention the over-valuing of individual freedom is very typically American. That doesn't mean Japanese people don't do it -- far from, as Japan has a lot of American cultural influence -- but that assuming everyone everywhere values 'personal freedom of speech' over anything else is American chauvinism. It's also not accounting for private companies' right not to host hate speech or violent content. Steam is not the government.
"Antis" as a group is a strawman. I am not an anti. Most people get lumped into the "anti" category arbitrarily if they do something self-described "proshippers" do not like. The few I have seen who describe themselves as antis are teenagers, who these big ol' adults should not be actively seeking out and arguing with.
Moving goalposts to claim that you are "anti-harassment" is intellectually dishonest and often just false. It is very easy to find proship harassment of artists and fans alike. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this argument is that "proship" folks get worked up when an artist has "proshpi DNI" in their bio. I thought we were supposed to set our own boundaries and filter content, but when an artist does such, Western proshippers got so infuriated that they tried to mislead Japanese Twitter users into equating of people who put "proship DNI" in their bios with "antis".
Examples of Proship Racism
Other Reactionary Proship Behavior
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