shipping-isnt-morality:

shipwhateveryouwant:

pidgeonlance:

shipwhateveryouwant:

just-antithings:

frisktastic:

tumblr: when people include racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. ideas in their stories it has real life consequences

also tumblr: but ships are never problematic, what’s with all these “antis”? it’s just fictional and can’t affect anything

Just Anti Things: I honestly don’t see any difference between popular mass media and someone’s obscure fanfic

this….isn’t a new argument. we’ve had it before. many times. representation matters, people can also ship what they want. those don’t contradict each other.

if a producer puts something racist, sexist, or homophobic work, it is their fault for broadcasting that out into the media, where it affects hundreds of thousands of lives and portrays an imbalance in the system we live under.

if some average teenager from kentucky has racist undertones in their 20 page, freely-made fanfic, then that just shows that they’re racist. and you can go on with your life avoiding/blocking/not liking them because of that. because racism in people won’t die so soon, but racism in the institution absolutely should.

the internet and tumblr, however, are just places where average people congregate. It is not an institution and absolutely shouldn’t be treated as such. that’s why tumblr isn’t held to the same standard, because their users are average people.

“It is not an institution”

Thank you for bringing this up. Fandom is not an institution. It should only overlap with social politics in the sense that fandom should be inclusive – beyond that, assigning responsibility to everyone in fandom to portray only non-problematic things is not only impossible, but presumes fandom has way more power than it does. A nebulous gathering of people with similar interests in fiction is not an institution that you can or should hold responsible for fixing society’s problems.

Fandom is not an institution is such a good goddamn point

Institutions – and thus the benefits and downfalls of them – require enduring purpose, social acceptance, and power and goals independent of the individual members. Governments, churches, schools, companies, charities, and legal systems are all institutions. Mass media, as a whole, could be considered an institution, as could individual media companies.

Fandom is not an institution and has little, if any, centralized social power. It’s not formally organized, it has no proclaimed goals and few longstanding traditions; fandom is to mass media what a pick-up football game is to the NFL. I don’t want to downplay the influence that small, loosely organized communities can have on lives, but they’re neither the cause nor the solution to institutional problems – at worst they’re a symptom.

Fandom activism aiming to address social problems is basically doomed to fail. The best it can accomplish is education of individual members, because fandom is not an institution.