Anti-Shipper Propaganda Calls to “Kill All Proshippers”
“Annita” the Anti-shipper Mascot Features an Arm Gun and Sexy Boots as she Massacres…Queers?
One must suppose that the easiest fashion in which to begin this article would be to provide a description and explanation of “propaganda” and what makes something identifiable as propaganda rather than a simple drawing or piece of media. Why? Well, mostly because propaganda is one of those hazy in-between subjects that anti-shippers get their claws into sometimes when they tell us all that “fiction affects reality” despite their meaning being more like the magic bullet media theory (this theory being that blasting someone’s brain with information will directly force them to act in ways which you intend, disproven by scientists in the 1940s based on presidential advertisements/broadcasts by the Roosevelt administration). The important part to take away about this is that anti-shippers can identify that aspects of propaganda are fiction.
What is Propaganda?
Propaganda is information, usually biased, which seeks to publicize or promote ideologies. Generally speaking, propaganda is a call to action. Examples of this include posters, pamphlets, audio adverts, even a person with a microphone. Most of the time, propaganda is promoted not as fiction but as fact. Jack Chick, a prominent fundamentalist Christian and cartoonist, wrote small fictionalized little tracts (colloquially dubbed “Chick Tracts”) usually presenting a short scenario which either asked the reader to re-examine their relationship with God or spread both common and uncommon conspiracy theories about non-fundie Christians (think Free Masons, muslims, catholics, etc.) Though these tracts were fictionalized, Chick’s meaning behind them was dead serious—repent or spend your entire afterlife burning in an unending lake of fire. These tracts were presented as accurate depictions of real-life scenarios that would happen to you if you rejected God’s message for you. This is important—this isn’t what might happen, it was a sure thing. The call to action was to accept God’s message.
To provide a clearer understanding of why Chick’s work was propaganda and other works that have a “moral” are not considered propaganda, let’s take a look at Fern Gully which is one of my favorite films to use in this context. Fern Gully, the 1992 film described by its producers as “blatantly environmental” portrays the destruction of a lush rainforest by workers utilizing a leveler to cut down the trees. The narrative of the film can’t exactly follow the real life implications of leveling an entire rainforest because there’s too much of a time-gap that would have to occur for such a thing to be realistic, so we get Hexxus, the sometimes sloppy, gaseous gloopy, inexplicably sexy pollution creature who possesses the leveler in order to spread destruction and mayhem in an otherwise idyllic landscape. Unlike Chick, the writers are setting up a pretty direct, in-your-face metaphor for the ecological harm that can be caused by cutting down trees and expanding industrialization into wilderness, but Hexxus isn’t real and is never portrayed to be an actual entity that can be sealed up by fairies into a magical tree. Though the message may be that nature will one day consume all that seeks to destroy it or rise above it, adult humans generally don’t believe that cutting down the wrong tree is going to release a pollution demon who can make machines run amok and who will do his best to end the natural world before it can end him. Fern Gully, though a bit preachy and definitely containing a moral (which obviously didn’t convince enough people to make much of a difference), might lean toward propaganda, but it isn’t generally going to be regarded as such. There is no call to action here, simply a tale to ruminate.
Let’s look instead at actual propaganda that conveys a similar environmental message: Smokey Bear. Smokey Bear, first created in 1944, has been one long-lived bear and is still in service to this day. With merchandise, posters, TV-ad campaigns, pamphlets, and multitudes of other outlets for his message, Smokey is utilized by the United States governmental agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service, to promote environmentalism via the iconic warning: “Only YOU can prevent forest fires.” With 36.21% of the United States being forested area, human-started wildfires can be a significant threat to safety and possibly endangered wildlife habitats. Obviously, bears can’t talk. A strangely intimidating grizzly by the name of Smokey isn’t likely to walk out of a forest wearing a hat and jeans to poo-poo you for having an unplanned fire in the wilderness during a burn ban. Smokey is a fictionalized critter, but the messaging is direct: Only YOU can prevent wildfires. Simple, effective, and direct—all the hallmarks of decent propaganda. If you are not careful with your outdoor fires, you will cause a wildfire. It’s not what might happen, it’s what will happen: a unique call to action that implores every outdoor enthusiast to take care not to be the next accidental fire bug.
Building Propaganda
Everything that is meant to sway someone one way or another is going to have “hallmarks” that make it identifiable. Smokey Bear is one of the most widely recognized characters in the United States and his catch-phrase is fairly universal and clearly connected to him. Propaganda will likely have a mascot. Whether it is a generalized depiction of a perfect blue-eyed, blonde-haired family braving looking off into the distance with a bold color behind them in Nazi Germany or Smokey’s clear-eyed face and claw pointing directly at you, propaganda is meant to invoke emotion and call to action. Caution, certainty, fear, bravery, patriotism, work ethic, these are all things that a mascot is going to ask of you, preying directly upon the natural human responses that arise from imagery with direct requests or direct intimidation. Consider Chinese communist propaganda, portraying their clearly roughshod workers as the truest heroes of their country, asking them to take pride in the obligations they take on in their station rather than aspiring to be more than what they already are: valuable elements of the essential system under Mao.
When one is trying to cycle out what is propaganda and what isn’t, it’s important to keep Spongebob in mind—that is, the little part of yourself that becomes slightly paranoid when minding your own business and getting the feeling that someone is trying to sell you something. Boiling down propaganda, we find all kinds of other things such as advertising campaigns for brands such as McDonalds or Burger King, clearly trying to portray to you that you will be happier with a McDouble and won’t you please come and spend your money here because you are valuable and loved and wanted and happy when you’re in a McDonald’s. Obviously McDonald’s will have a positive messaging campaign as opposed to intimidation tactics utilized by fundamental Christian cults such as Jack Chick’s shame-based fear-mongering designed to brow-beat you into the belief that your ever-lasting life is in peril. But they’re both propaganda. They’re both trying to sell you something. One is trying to sell you burgers. The other is trying to sell you God.
So what are anti-shippers trying to sell us?
The Careless Call to Action
TikTok user youretripleblocked, display name “pee🦀” with 39.3k followers posted both there and on Twitter under the username youresoblocked, an illustration they crafted of a character dubbed “Annita” who was then elevated by them as the “mascot” for anti-shippers. Annita, presented as a figure of mass violence evidenced by her climbing a pile of skulls and holding up her literal gun arm, is backed by a deep red sky and a bright spot behind her head as an allusion to the halo of religious iconography throughout history. At her feet is the decapitated head of a pink and rainbow haired individual—a classic symbol of today’s Leftists and LGBTQ community members and a stark contrast to the shiny black boots and austere aesthetic of Annita’s uniform-inspired attire. To the left of her is a smushed, and horribly-formatted call to action: “KILL ALL PROSHIPPERS!!!”
The layers to this little piece of propaganda are many. One can interpret the halo as a rising sun (ho ho, let’s not get into that) for instance, or draw comparisons to the militaristic uniform, even the distinct connections that could link to common fascist color schemes in historical propaganda. The artist, claiming to have taken inspiration from the Terminator series, seemed pleased by the immediate and overwhelming reaction to their work. Though they may have intended to cause a reaction in order to grandstand and showboat their way into some higher caste of the anti-shipper hierarchy, they seemed unable to cope long with just how razor-thin they had cut the line between them and the unthinkable. As friend of the stack, Twitter user adybpt stated in a thread: “Holy shit, I knew these people’s media literacy was dead but I didn’t know it was THIS dead” after pointing out that “Terminator LITERALLY INCLUDES FOOTAGE FROM AUSCHWITZ, SKYNET IS A DIRECT ALLEGORY TO THE NAZI REGIME” [sic]. But it’s not just the iconography that makes this little illustration propaganda—after all, if someone were to illustrate historical Nazi propaganda today without presenting it as a call to action, it would likely be considered only a derivative, in service of nothing. But Annita is in service of something, as she was stated to be and her image includes very clearly her call to action: direct violence against whoever has been dubbed a witch—I mean…a proshipper.
It really doesn’t matter what youresoblocked thinks a proshipper is, as they can clearly be anyone who doesn’t agree with someone’s insistence that books should be burned. It matters what the image says about “proshippers,” depicting them as rainbow-haired and deserving of summary execution at the hands of a state-sanctioned murder cyborg/android who apparently should impose ideological compliance through mass violence. Ahem…this sounds like an element of something…hmm…oh yes, it’s fascism. And who, in our popular political landscape is portrayed often as colored-hair young people who should be silenced with prejudice? Oh yeah…the queers. Huh. This is smelling more and more like Trumpism by the second (I’ll spare the Romney Republicans this time).
Not only does Annita portray anti-shippers as righteous, “bad ass” murder machines on a holy crusade to cleanse the Earth of human beings with opposing ideological views, she also serves as a warning to the other anti-shippers who might be questioning what the hell they’re doing in a cult under the coercive control of people who want very badly to commit emotional, mental, and sometimes physical violence in order to demonstrate their own loyalty to the cause. “This is what will happen to you if you try to leave” is a pretty huge indicator that you’re in a desperately traumatic relationship and you need to find a way out now. Annita is that indicator—that threat. Like Jack Chick’s lake of fire, Annita is selling you a god, but nothing like Chick ever intended.
Still, youresoblocked asked (stupidly), “what ever happened to fiction not affecting reality?” as if proshippers have ever actually argued that at all. They recognize that Annita is a fictional human being (or cyborg/android), but they fail to understand the hallmarks of what makes propaganda and what makes a simple moralistic fictional work. It seems fairly obvious to any casual viewer that the phrase “KILL ALL PROSHIPPERS!!!” would constitute a call to action upon the viewer and is clearly meant to inspire emotion in the viewer whether that be fear, righteousness, etc. The overt promotion of mass violence and imagery of a “holy” cleansing is hardly “fiction” when one directly asks the viewer to consider committing it, thus cementing Annita as a fairly obvious element of fascistic anti-shipper propaganda depicting its messaging as fact. Moralistic fiction, after all, is meant to alter your perception of objective reality and redirect attention to philosophical quandaries of the ages in order to stimulate thought while propaganda seeks to end thought with cliché.
I think it’s fairly clear what we’ve got here in Annita.