– Praise the living daylights out of a show and shove its greatness in everyone’s face
– 2 years later, pick it apart violently and insult everyone who still enjoys it in as edgy a way as possible because negativity is cool
!!!
uhh maybe marginalized ppl were excited at the possibility of a show (such as su) representing them, only to be rightfully angry when the show ends up racist, homophobic etc. anyway, super bad post all around
I feel like a lot of hardcore accusations of problematic and offensive content that get thrown at media that was previously lauded as progressive come from a few sources; first, the creators are often a lot more accessible than the creators of mainstream media. you can message rebecca sugar on twitter personally to call her a racist bitch, but you can’t do the same to, say, jj abrhams or another large-scale creator. likewise, you can’t stand on a streetcorner and scream at people until they agree to stop watching law and order, but you can certainly bully large groups of people online until they stop supporting an independent creator.
second, the fandoms that tend to form around progressive media tend to be younger, more volatile, looking to media and fandom as forms of activism. mainstream media they can write off as garbage, but progressive niche media that makes a sincere attempt to represent marginalized folks must be Absolutely Perfect. the idea that a piece of media can have good parts and bad parts, that it can try and only partially succeed, but that that partial success is still worth something, is completely lost on many young fans. either its irredeemable garbage or its the literal messiah, there’s no in-between. so if a show falls short of perfect, as is inevitable, then it goes straight into the “total garbage” pile and must be condemned by the masses.
genuinely trying to represent certain groups and making a few missteps is not the same thing as being ignorant or malicious. making a sincere effort to mean something to folks who don’t get a lot of things made for them is something to be proud of. would you rather go back to the times when fucking nothing got made for us? when the only characters we saw that we could relate to were only there to be made fun of? you’re spoiled by a rush of new creators who took “go make your own thing then” to heart and set out to make content for people like them, you have the gall to look at what they’re trying to do and spit on it for not being better. no creator owes you shit, no creator has to bow to a bunch of teenage bullies who do nothing but demand and harass, that’s all there is to it.
Dear lord can everyone please read this post because it’s so relevant
honestly the harry potter fandom is so wild like we’ve all collectively refused to accept cursed child as canon but some college kids tell us hufflepuffs are particularly good finders and we don’t even question it
I didn’t truly get the whole “death of the author” paradigm until I watched the harry potter fandom collectively divorce JKR
Man I have never known straight dude writers to shy away from putting out stuff like ‘my thinly-veiled self-insert goes on a mediocre adventure but more importantly ends up in a love quadrangle with these four female characters who are all incredibly hot to me’, but most of the lady writers I know get nervous if they write one (1) love story where *gasp* two whole dudes compete for the same lady’s love!
So listen.
Listen.
Go out and give your warrior witch lady a magic talking panther that flies and five hot elf boyfriends (or girlfriends, or datemates, whatever) who all happily share her. Or fight over her. Whichever. Make each of them as smoking hot as you please. Indulge yourself. Live.
And this goes absolutely double for WoC and trans ladies and queer ladies and everyone else who has extra troubles with being shamed for your indulgence.
If you’re going to worry about stuff in your story it should be things like ‘is that trope racist?’ or ‘how do I fix this plot hole?’, not ‘am I putting in too many elements that I personally enjoy?’
I’m perfectly capable of enjoying the idea of “person A, a hero, ‘saves’ person b, a villain, with the power of love” in a fictional context, and all the different ways it can play out, while also recognizing that it’s a bad idea to try to save someone from themselves if they’re dangerous in real life. I’m an adult and I understand the difference. My enjoyment if hero/villain ships in fiction does not inform my real life relationship choices. On the contrary, they allow a safe outlet me to explore and live out these ideas without suffering negative consequences in my real life.
This continued insistence by self-described feminists that I actually don’t know the difference, and am potentially endangering myself by consuming fiction featuring that trope, is not helpful. It’s not progressive or radical. It’s not liberating or empowering. It’s not “smashing the patriarchy.”
On the contrary, it’s nothing but a rehash of old misogynistic stand-bys: that women can’t be trusted to understand their own thoughts and emotions, that they have to be told what they feel and think and why, that women are blinded by innate naivety and compassion, or by sexual desire, that women need a guiding hand to protect them from their own bad judgment.
The fact that it’s women applying this to other women this time around. does not magically make it okay, does not make it less condescending, less patronizing, less violating. Women have been enforcing misogynistic social norms for other women for ages; this is nothing new. It’s no different than when my female Sunday school teachers told me that my body is inherently a temptation to sin, and I must take counter-measures to prevent others from falling from grace by covering it at the expense of my own comfort. It’s no different than when they told me that women who aren’t virgins are equivalent to chewed up gum or licked cupcakes. Sexism doesn’t stop being sexism because it’s enforced laterally.
It’s funny that these people keep implying that women who enjoy this fictional trope have a savior complex. From where I’m sitting, we aren’t the ones trying to save people who don’t need or want to be saved.
Honestly I think we need a name for this kind of condescending “it’s for their own good” themarysue-style fauxminism and I’m formally submitting “helicopter feminism” as that name.
fandom: I’m anti [this] and here’s why you should be too. Lemme lecture you and everyone about this thing it’s important we all come together to hate on it. 🙂 I just wanna be positive and this thing is nOT POSITIVE AND HERES WHY I HATE THIS THING. I JUST NEED To HAVE A CLEAN PURE BLOG. BUT PLS HATE THIS THING WITH ME. me:
The documentary is a good hour or so along. We’ve already covered the inception of the comic and the fandom’s early days. I am sitting on a red leather armchair, holding a half-full glass of wine and looking thoughtfully at a pipe. I appear already mildly tipsy.
When I start to take a sip of the wine I just make a face and spit it back out into a potted plant, which makes you wonder whether I’m actually tipsy or if this is just my natural demeanor.
“Bad vintage,” I say. “Bouquet. Palate. Where were we? Oh, right. So, all of that, that’s why whenever I make a lyricstuck for a new fandom–hm?”
A muffled voice off-screen gently questions whether it’s still a lyricstuck if it’s not a Homestuck fandom product. I scoff gently. Take another sip of wine and immediately abort the activity in the same manner as before.
“Well, there’s a lot of debate about that. I personally think the term transcends fandom–we made it, after all! We built this medium!”
A montage of classic lyricstucks scrolls across the screen, each longer than the last.
“Oh, we weren’t the first to put pictures with music, but we were the first to stretch your Tumblr dash to inconceivable lengths in the pursuit of that combination! Back in the days when Read Mores were a sin, even on 76 panels of murderstuck set to My Songs Know What You Did In the Dark (Light Em Up) by Fall Out Boy.”
I pause and sigh. “Of all the options, I had to pick the one with a title almost as long as the song.”
Another pause. The background music swells gently. I turn to sit sideways in the armchair, but there isn’t room for my feet so I stop and turn back to the front, spilling the rest of my wine on myself in the process. I don’t appear to notice.
“But…you know, for all the weird shit you could say about lyricstucks or the fandom as a whole, no one could make crazy big art projects like we could.” I stare wistfully into the distance, shaking my head a little.
I hear a lot of people bitching that they can’t leave kudos multiple times per story, or can’t leave kudos on every chapter, or whatever.
Well, take a page out of this marvelous book, because I swear I’ve never been so happy to receive kudos as waking up to multiple people having done this on multiple chapters on a story I just posted.
The bar just got raised, folks.
Would… would writers be glad to read a comment, that is saying “kudos”?
We’re happy to get a smiley face, honestly. Leaving another kudos like this is great. Anything that tells us we aren’t just screaming into the void
^^^^^ This. Even the smallest comments are golddust.
Seconding, thirding, and fourthing all of this. Saying or typing anything is amazing.
There is nothing more bittersweet and heartbreaking than a character who is deeply in love with another but entirely convinced that despite their current romantic relationship (established or not) that they won’t get a happily ever after because they aren’t good enough and the person they love will realize that and leave them but they aren’t bitter or angered by this idea but calmly resigned. Like they love that person so much they’re okay with just being a placeholder for someone better, as long as they can stay by that person’s side despite believing one day they’ll be replaced.
I might have mentioned this before, but developments I am genuinely glad of in fandom over the last couple of decades:
Way less bashing of canon female love interests in order to hook up two male characters – some of that is the advent of the OT3 as a solution to love triangles, but it’s just as common to have the canon couple break up amicably and realistically, or simply tweak things so that they were never a couple, but still like and respect one another as friends
The rise of the reader insert fic, which I’m convinced has taken the pressure off to create an OC for people who really just want to write self-insert fantasy, thereby letting them do what they actually want and (hopefully) helping to lessen the stigma around OCs for those who really want to create OCs
Linked to that, a decrease in the amount that the accusation “Mary Sue!” gets flung around, and intelligent criticism of how gendered the whole “Mary Sue” concept has ended up
Less pressure to “explain” how a character could end up with a character of the same gender in fic, when they’ve always been paired with other-gender characters in canon
A decline in the popularity of extensively mocking/dragging individual fics for bad or inexpert writing (such as through writing MSTs in response where the canon characters read and reacted to the fic), which, looking back, was a pretty shitty thing to do to writers just starting out
Much less likelihood of getting virulently homophobic comments on any given slashfic (”My poor [favourite character] isn’t GAY, how dare you!”)
And, of course, the shining glory that is AO3, an all-inclusive single archive that’s actually run and controlled by fans, meaning no hours spent paging through webrings to find one author who has four fics of that pairing you love and then reading them over and over for months, and no chance of waking up tomorrow to find all your fic purged because some internet company got a pissy letter
I mean, don’t get me wrong, fandom today is no picnic; it’s not like homophobia or sexism have gone away entirely (and to an extent they’ve gone underground, which complicates things), and of course we have the new puritanical backlash, which can sometimes be even more complex to challenge. But fandom back in the day was far from perfect, as well, and some of the ways things have changed are a real breath of fresh air.
God, when I think of the sheer number of hours I spent scrolling through Mediaminer and FF.net, to say nothing of the private archives and their eye-wateringly primitive HTML. Enormous piles of unsorted, untagged, barely titled or summarized fic, all just in one long horror show of a list with that dreaded page count at the bottom. You’re on page 9 and you still haven’t found anything half-decent to read – and there are 73 more pages to go. You were lucky if the fic was categorized by fandom, and you only got pairings if the author felt like putting it in the summary. If there was a summary. I’m surprised that my mouse hand didn’t develop carpal tunnel from the scrolling alone.
Oh, God, just reading this description, I vividly felt like I was back there. *shudders*
just moving along like everyone else 