My two cents on antis stealing content in fandom
Reposting and stealing are common practices that occur, not always necessarily out of malice, but often persisting despite the original artists/authors attempting to explain why it’s wrong and damaging to them.
However, I think there are a few specificities to the mechanisms at play when antis do it, which I think are reflective of their attitudes and beliefs in general.
For starters, there’s the usual “tainted by association” fear of contamination. Reblogging from the ‘wrong’ people, or admitting to liking something made by the 'wrong’ people, is damning. The moment they find that a contribution they like was made by a shipper of something they dislike, they’re not willing to reconcile this conflicting information. Liking something made by someone bad would make them bad.
Of course, their feelings don’t justify their shitty behavior, but I think I understand.
This ties in with a broader attitude that I’m seeing more and more in how audiences approach the relationship with creators. In the face of creators turning out to be shitty - bigoted, abusive - or even simply flawed, many of us experience feelings of dissonance and conflict between our love for the things that are precious to us, or our feelings toward the creators, and the knowledge of things about them that we consider to be negative.
What current fandom purity culture tends to do, in these instances, is the attitude of “pretending the author doesn’t exist”. Instead of grappling with the contradiction, we have that joking language of “The author isn’t [Super Famous Writer] anymore, it’s [random meme thing].” Or: “The show is ours now!”
These can be jokes, granted. But I do think they’re an expression of a misunderstanding of what “Death of the author” is. I also think they serve as an avoidance of the unpleasant cognitive and emotional dissonance that we often find difficult to deal with when something 'good’ and something 'bad’ are simultaneously true about a thing we like.
People act like this with big name, mainstream creators, and they do the same to peers in fandom spaces. The glaring problem is, of course, that you can’t really 'steal’ a TV show or a film from their directors, writers, actors. You can’t 'steal’ a book from the famous novelist. You can ignore that they’re the authors for your own comfort, but everyone is still going to know who created the thing.
You can, however, steal gifsets or funny posts or fanfic or fanart from fellow fandom people much more easily. When all it takes is downloading a picture or copy-pasting text - when the original poster is just a username - you truly can erase the creator and pass their content off as your own, or at least sever it from the source that you find undesirable.
Which brings me to another interesting aspect. Many people who repost are not actually trying to pass off the works as theirs, necessarily. They might repost because they’re genuinely ignorant of the etiquette norms on this topic. They might want the traffic associated with having fanfic or fanart on their blog or profile, but even the vague “Credit to the original artists” shows that they don’t necessarily mean to imply they’re the authors. Again, it can be laziness or ignorance, but not necessarily malice.
However, what antis have taken to doing is actually boasting about stealing content from the people they consider freaks. Which is childish, infuriating, clearly meant to be provocative defiance toward the people they dislike. But it’s also an interesting reflection of the morality angle that they use to twist what they do into being “for the greater good”.
They can’t simply admit that they happen to like something made by someone they might not like. But because they’re immature and possessive, they also can’t simply let go and move on. Freaks taint the content they like; even if freaks made that content, antis have to have it. They have to rescue it. Which is interesting to me, because it’s selfish and entitled, but it also speaks of how they use their supposed moral superiority to justify doing things that just aren’t that moral, even within such a relatively small context. Fandom posts aren’t that important, sure, but they’re still something someone made. It shouldn’t take a lot to admit, at the very least, that knowingly appropriating someone else’s words or drawings is a shitty thing to do.
And look, I get it. Social media, Tumblr especially, is designed to remove everything from its original context and circulate it as vastly as possible.
I also understand the feeling of liking a meta post, looking into the original blog, and finding out that I don’t like the person. To me, as someone “on the other side” of this exhausting divide, it often comes in the shape of finding out that a blogger is an anti, of course. Especially since many antis often have to express this very performative attitude of hostility toward 'enemy shippers’, which goes beyond stating personal tastes or boundaries and is often needlessly rude and aggressive.
I can relate to that petulant feeling of thinking, “Ugh, why did you have to be like that, I was liking what you had to say!”
Another aspect to consider is that antis, of course, often make no distinction between bigoted ideologies - racism and white supremacy, transphobia - and fiction being flawed, or containing dark/upsetting topics that they don’t want to see. They lump it all together under “bad”, and that is how you have DNIs that associate “shippers of ship X” with violent, hateful political groups, and how shipping certain ships gets equated with being real life abusers.
This doesn’t change the fact that it’s immature to be unable to accept that everything was made by someone. You can dislike the person, but nothing can be fully separated from the person that created it. Even on the internet, where the characteristics of face-to-face interaction evolve in new and differently ways because we often don’t have a way of knowing much about who somebody else is. Not knowing doesn’t erase that there was a context, there was a person who originated the thing, even if you steal it. It’s still not yours.
As a final aside, this stealing is an attitude I’ve seen in discourse related to non-fandom topics as well. “I stole it because op was a terf” comes to mind.
The problem with that is that, on one hand, removing the author is erasing something crucial in the context of important discussions on real-life issues. The origins of what someone says are not casual and unimportant. If you propagate an argument, it still implies that you agree - which is how the rhetoric of different conservative groups can continue to spread. When it’s removed from their source, people no longer recognize it, they’re no longer wary of it, and they’re much more likely to find themselves agreeing because it wasn’t a 'bad’ person who said it.
Over and over, I keep seeing plenty of shitty radfem arguments being gleefully embraced by someone who has a useless “terfs dni” slapped on their blog.
I know I might be doing something risky by putting these two different examples in the same posts. I’m not implying that people having their fanworks stolen are the same as bigoted assholes successfully spreading their arguments because people co-opt them.
However, I found it fitting to mention both occurrences because I feel they’re an expression of a similar mechanisms. People erase the context and the original source out of a misguided sense of entitlement and moral superiority, because they think they can 'purify’ whatever they take and magically turn it into what they want it to be.
In doing so, they take the credit for things they didn’t make, and they make it more difficult to trace the original baggage of meanings and intent that did exist behind what gets appropriated.
