I know I said it isn’t worth writing about, but actually, it is. I just don’t think one post or two is enough to cover the ridiculousness in full. This is a follow-up post to the post I wrote about hypocrisy in the queer community with regards to consensual incest. See that post here.

Antis don’t always come from the queer community, but the anti that I encountered did. I am writing this post because I think this kind of incident is worth recording and analyzing a bit. It might be useful to someone who has been bullied for liking something different in fandom or for having a different opinion on a controversial topic.

So I am going to share.

After the incident I spoke of in my last post, I didn’t bother contacting that person again. The whole thing happened on a forum dedicated to kinks where people could share their characters and stories (different place from my fiction forum, though it was also 18+). After that ugly interaction, I was wondering if the place was not as inclusive as I had thought.

The worst thing that came out of that interaction was that I felt like I couldn’t trust anyone else on that forum either. The anti had been there for years, had a lot of followers and had basically made a reputation for himself over there, whereas I was ‘the new guy’. So I felt alone and wasn’t sure if anyone would take my side.

I kept hesitating to tell anyone else what happened but then I finally decided to take a chance and I messaged someone else on that forum (another person who had been there for years and had a reputation and who seemed to be generally nice). I wasn’t sure what to expect. I guess I just wanted to vent to them and find out once and for all if I could continue posting my fiction stuff in that place.

After I opened up to them about what happened, the person told me some pretty eye-opening things. They said that the anti was one of their suspects when I had described the incident. This second person told me that the anti had often done things in the forum that pissed people off, always starting pointless arguments as though he were fighting for some cause… and that he was hypocritical because he often posted a lot of really sexual things that were not everyone’s cup of tea. He had been a control-freak long before I ever arrived on that forum and he had acted extremely childish before. So, this was his real nature.

I had strongly suspected this long before I talked to this other person but it was nice to get some deeper insight into the forum’s past. This whole dumb incident really reminded me that the key to moving past the poison that antis will spread is to remember that they don’t represent everyone’s opinion.

Before I had ever interacted with the anti, I had already posted some things about my incestuous OTP on that forum, and people seemed to love it (I got several Likes on my character pictures). So who was the one with the problem? The anti. The anti must have been extra angry that even in a place where they had been there for ages, they still had to deal with incest in their face.

He was used to being part of the Tumblr anti club. He was used to being celebrated for his hypocritical, garbage personality traits. It was hilarious, actually. Anyone who has an unconventional OTP can learn from this kind of thing.

In fact, if you can’t learn from it, it’s a waste.

If an anti ever comes at you with an authoritative tone, keep calm and put them in their place. Don’t let their twisted perception affect the way you see the world around you. That guy spoke of that place and the people there as though it were a hell-hole full of sex-obsessed fetishists, reducing all their creativity down to porn and fetish. Yet that’s not what I saw when I looked at that place. Something was off between what he told me and what was actually there. It seemed that he acted more like a shallow sex-addict than anyone else on that forum.

The longer I stayed, the more it became obvious that the place actually had some really amazing, sex-positive, kink-positive people who were willing to support each other and at least tolerate things they weren’t that into. Consensual incest had its own special place there.

It was the anti that didn’t belong in that space. It was the anti that brought their ugliness and shallowness to that space and thought badly of people who were, at the end of the day, far better people than he was.

I learned from this, as always, that some people’s negativity has much more to do with their own issues and insecurities than anything else. These people will try to convince you that you need to change something about you. But if all you are doing is being yourself and loving what you love in peace, they are the ones being a bully. The worst thing you can do in this kind of scenario is to allow yourself to believe that everyone else is a bully too.

If you can push past the anti and think rationally about the incident, you will see that these people’s false righteous sense of power comes from their ignorance and the ignorance of others they associate with. It’s not your problem and there’s nothing wrong with you loving what you love. Antis have major issues they need to sort out because they can’t seem to share the world with others, or even a forum. That’s pretty sad.

When you come across garbage like that, ask yourself how much do they really know about you? This person assumed all kinds of things about me just by knowing my interests in fiction. They didn’t know anything else and they didn’t care to know. When these things happen, you have to think calmly, recognize the hypocrisy the anti is in denial about, and find others who are clear-headed enough to see it too.

The angrier and more childish an anti acts when talking about stuff that still very much involves consent is an indication that they know not everyone agrees with them. It’s pathetic, because they lose out on the acceptance they could have all because they don’t want to share that space with others and because they have no empathy for others.

If you come into a space where people are generally treating each other with dignity and are mutually supportive and kind and open about kinks and are sex-positive (almost a kind of paradise), and you feel nothing but anger and distaste and a desire to start drama, it is obvious that you are the one who is broken.