The Anti Mentality and how equating emotions with reality makes fandoms turn toxic



One thing I have noticed when interacting with antis of all kind.

1. They are highly abusive in their behaviour, going as far as telling people to kill themselves



2. They believe their abuse is justified, because they perceive other people’s shipping preferences or fanworks as an attack against themselves

3. As a rule, they never address arguments made questioning whether their perception and their accussations are actually rooted in reality.

It is all about “Seeing this upsets me, so it must be wrong and the people doing it must be bad and evil….otherwise I wouldn’t be upset.“



Thing is….an while back, there was an excellent article on abusive parents and how they bond together in “estranged parents forums”, and the patterns are surprisingly familiar.

Here too, we have abusers, who believe that they are the injured party, NOT based on what has happened or what the facts of the situation are…but on how they feel about the situation.

Here too, we have people pulling a DARVO, denying the attack, and then reversing victim and offender.

Here too, we have people who believe that it is other people’s responsibility to cater to their feelings….and that if other people refuse, this must be because the others are the evil ones….NOT because they themselves are in the wrong.

But take a look at this excerpt from issandei’s article yourselves:



“Posts in estranged parents’ forums are vague.



Members recount stories with the fewest possible details, the least possible context. They don’t recreate entire scenes, repeat entire conversations, give entire text exchanges; they paraphrase hours of conversation away. The only element they describe in detail is their own grief or rage. Nor do the other members press them for more information.



Compare this with the forums for adult children of abusers, where the members not only cut-and-paste email exchanges into their posts, they take photos of handwritten letters and screenshot text conversations. They recreate scenes in detail, and if the details don’t add up, the other members question them about it. They get annoyed when a member’s paraphrase changes the meaning of a sentence, or when omitted details change the meaning of a meeting. They care about precision, context, and history.



The difference isn’t a matter of style, it’s a split between two ways of perceiving the world.



In one worldview, emotion is king.



Details exist to support emotion. […] Context is malleable because the full picture may not support the member’s emotion. […]



Emotion creates reality.



In the second worldview, reality creates emotion.



Members want the full picture so they can decide whether the poster’s emotions are justified.



Members recognize that unjustified emotions (like supersensitivity due to trauma, or irritation with another person that colors the view of everything the person does) are real and deserve respect, but they also believe that unjustified emotions shouldn’t be acted on.



They show posters different ways to view the situation and give advice on how to handle the emotions.



In short, they believe that external events create emotional responses, that only some responses are justified, that people’s initial perceptions of events are often flawed, and that understanding external events can help people understand and manage emotions.



The first viewpoint, “emotion creates reality,” is truth for a great many people.



Not a healthy truth, not a truth that promotes good relationships, but a deep, lived truth nonetheless.



It’s seductive.



It means that whatever you’re feeling is just and right, that you’re never in the wrong unless you feel you’re in the wrong.



For people whose self-image is so battered and fragile that they can’t bear anything but validation, often it feels like the only way they can face the world.”