The Salmon Is A Metaphor - Tumblr Posts
Honestly you people need to start thinking about fanfiction like a restaurant.
You do not have to order the salmon if you don't like salmon.
If I order the salmon, I am not forcing you to eat the salmon. Nor are you obligated to order it just because I am.
If we are going with the intention of sharing food, that's okay! I happen to like steak too. I don't need to order the salmon. I'm capable of going to the restaurant and not ordering the salmon. We can order the steak.
There is a whole menu of things you can have. The salmon is just an option. We can even find a restaurant that doesn't serve salmon at all.
Yes, I know some people are allergic to salmon. But I'm not going up to them and force-feeding it to them. The only way my salmon can hurt them is if they come to our table and take the salmon.
The only way you'll expose yourself to my salmon and the unpleasantness of eating it is if I tell you my dish has salmon in it and you insist on having a bite anyway.
You're midway through your meal and realize it has salmon in it? Okay. Lets send it back and order something else. Maybe you didn't see it in the ingredients list. Or maybe the chef didn't put it down.
Its really that simple.
Pre-emptively blocking people is good for everyone.
Seriously. The amount of times I see people whining or laughing about being blocked when they 'haven't even done anything' just tells me that not many of you know its actually a really good way to properly curate your online space, and its not something to be offended over.
Blocking is a form of protection. Its also a form of mutual protection.
Especially on websites that don't offer more extensive or usable filtering, tagging and avoidance options. Twitter, for example.
Blocking isn't some personal insult. Its a method of saying; hey, we clearly shouldn't interact, so I'm gonna build this soundproof wall between us to make sure we can't.
To use The Salmon Analogy, if I run a restaurant based on salmon as the main ingredient, and you're allergic or or severely dislike salmon, me refusing to serve you isn't a personal sleight. Its me recognising that you can't or really don't want to eat salmon, and its me protecting you from an unpleasant experience and myself from you inevitably screaming at me for serving salmon.
If you are someone who enjoys 'objectionable' content, such as gore, and you stumble across an extremely anti-gore blog, its absolutely a viable option to pre-emptively block them. Maybe your paths never would've crossed, but its better to ensure they don't than potentially wind up the victim or hate or harassment.
Blocking is an absolute sure-fire way to ensure that you do not see something you do not want to. It should be used as liberally as you want to.
In case it wasn't clear:
Yes. Even as a proshipper, I firmly believe every single person creating content that has the potential to be unpleasant, triggering or upsetting should be responsible for making sure it can't be seen as much as they have the right to spaces where it can be seen.
It is your personal choice not to bother with things like tags or applying content markers.
But then you lose the right to be angry or upset when people complain about being exposed to your content with limited or no ways to avoid it.
Again. The Salmon Analogy.
You don't have to eat the salmon.
But its in both our best interests for me to be blatant about which dishes contain salmon specifically so you don't eat the salmon.
(And its in everyone's best interests to start bullying websites and services into giving us better tools to make sure this symbiotic relationship works.)