A genuine question for people here- how many of you were proship right off the bat? Without ever having encountered the term or the discourse, without having engaged in fandom wars of any sort?

To make it clear, I'm a proshipper myself, but I wasn't always one.

I initially viewed people who wrote typically "problematic" stuff about fictional characters as evil. I'd say I didn't really participate in the harassment myself, but was pretty supportive of it from the sidelines. I believed that writing some stuff inherently means holding the same views in real life. It was coming across this subreddit and its opinions, and actually really thinking about it which made me reconsider my stance.

Over time, I've seen a lot of people with a similar story of being antiship and then changing their point of view.

Antishipping tends to come almost instinctually to a lot of people, and you really have to be exposed to the other point of view to change your mind.

I'm interested to know how common this experience really is.