I don’t understand what’s controversial about friends to lovers. that seems like the most middle of the road, inoffensive trope there is. How are antis mad about that?

freedom-of-fanfic:

it’s not the trope itself that militant fandom antis get mad about. it’s the ship.

imagine that you’re in a fandom where characters A, B, and C are all protagonists with friendly canon interactions – not necessarily friends, but definitely not enemies.

For a variety of reasons, you don’t really like it when people ship A & B together romantically. maybe you like B/C better. maybe you just don’t like the dynamics of A/B shipping. maybe it reminds you of a relationship you had that ended badly. Whatever the reason: A/B bothers you, and you wish nobody shipped it.

Imaginary You decides to try to stop people from shipping A/B. You start by telling people that based on canon, shipping A/B is morally and socially objectionable. with the redefining of words like ‘pedophilia’, ‘incest’, and ‘abuse’, it’s easy to turn canon molehills into mountains: A few years age difference is now ‘pedophilia’. knowing each other from childhood is ‘incest’. an argument is ‘abuse’.

But not only do people keep shipping A/B: they keep shipping it even while following your rules about what’s okay to ship! They make AUs where A&B are the same age! They age A&B up! They write slow burns where A&B start out friends and become lovers!

When you said ‘don’t ship A/B’ and gave reasons why not to, you meant for people to stop shipping A/B, not to ship A/B a different way! 

So you find yourself having to teach people that A/B is always bad. it doesn’t matter how you ship it: it doesn’t matter what tropes you use. Any use of the imagination to make A/B a safe, ‘healthy’ ship is off-limits. (maybe you suggest that if one has to go to such lengths to make A/B okay to ship, they should just switch to the already healthy ship, B/C? it’s just a coincidence that you like B/C better. or maybe you like B/C because B/C isn’t gross like A/B.)

and that’s how you’ll find people objecting to tropes like friends-to-lovers. 

it’s all just a means to an end – which is attacking any and all iterations of shipping the ship they don’t like.