jumpingjacktrash:

copperbadge:

Oh man, wow, okay, I have two answers for you Anon, short and long.

Short: OMG, no, I don’t mind at all if you read me! I don’t like anti-Steve content either! 

Also, before we get to the long answer, I need you to understand that everything I’m about to say is yelling at fandom, and not at you. In fact, I am gently hugging you while yelling at fandom over your shoulder. Just hold that in your mind. 

Long Answer:

So, what you said crams an incredible amount of information about present-day fandom into two sentences. I’d like to break it down a little because I want to dispel some of the toxic myths that are flying around in fandom culture.  

One, it is truly mind-blowing to me that in the span of about five years, fandom has gone from Tony/Steve being the massively dominant ship to a person believing that if they like Steve Rogers they can’t like Tony Stark or vice versa. For decades, they were the best of friends in comics, and fandom loved both their friendship and the super gay subtext it contained. Even after the comic book Civil War, where Steve and Tony basically argued the exact same thing as the movie, they were a heavily dominant ship. I don’t think the movie changed that, necessarily – I think fandom culture did, more on that below. 

And I’m okay with the ship losing people. There’s still tons of fanfic out there, it’s not that I’m mad I get less content now, I consume less content now anyway. It’s this bizarre idea that if you like one character you cannot like a character who is in opposition to them, even if those two characters still have a relationship. Or if they don’t! 

It is okay for two characters to fight with each other and even spend time hating each other and for them to both be protagonists, and for you to still like them both. This isn’t a dysfunctional divorce, you don’t have to choose, whatever Marvel and the more toxic side of fandom is telling you. One of the reasons my old Stealing Harry fic is so popular (aside from being kidfic) is that I wrote Sirius Black and Severus Snape as two thoroughly damaged war veterans who hated each other not because one was good and one was bad but because they were very different people who had a long history of being assholes. They could both still be likable characters. And because of that, they could both experience growth into Non Assholes in my story. 

You can like Steve Rogers and still like Tony Stark. Or like Steve Rogers and just not give a shit about Tony Stark. I love them both deeply, separately and as a partnership. And so I don’t allow haters on my dash. Of either of them. 

And that leads us to point two. Not allowing haters on my dash isn’t some kind of purity thing. It’s not a form of CASTING OUT ALL WHO DISAGREE, there’s no ideology behind it. Not that I could stop them reading me anyway – even if you ban someone, they can still read your tumblr unless you password-lock it, and we’ll come back to banning in a minute. 

Not allowing haters on my dash is about the active curation of my fandom experience and no one else’s. I like Tony Stark so I don’t want to see people hating on him. I do have friends who don’t care about him one way or the other, and some who don’t like him, but the difference is that when they don’t like something…they ignore it and talk about the stuff they do like. I do the same with them. We aren’t haters. We’re just people with disparate interests. 

When there is a culture of hating on any character, which is apparently what the tonky stank thing is about (according to reports; I haven’t seen it for myself), it tends to be less about that character and more about an excuse to indulge in a kind of mob-based negativity. If it’s interesting to examine canon critically, that’s one thing, I could and often do engage in critical discussion of canon. If it’s fun to hate a character so you do a lot of it as a pastime, or all your critical focus is on one specific pinpoint of canon that you just hate so much, then, well, you are enjoying hating something, and that’s…not a great mental place to be, tbh. (We saw this in Torchwood with the antigwenallies, so it’s not new, it’s just in a new fandom.) It’s essentially schoolyard bullying where you feel okay about it because the victim is fictional. 

And I’m not here to say “Stop, you are hurting Tony Stark’s feelings.” He doesn’t exist, he has no feelings to hurt. But bullying is like an addiction – it’s an unhealthy outlet for people who haven’t got healthy ones.  

So, here’s part three: you can’t stop haters reading what you say, but I don’t even bother trying. I don’t care who reads me because I only care about what I consume and where my work goes, and someone else’s reading involves neither of those. Besides, you can tell people not to read you, but someone who hates something you love is still probably going to do it. 

If they make a nasty comment, then you can ban them, but that goes back to curating your own experience. Banning is best when used to shield you from hearing their voice or to stop them putting your work on their blog. Like unfollowing someone, it’s not meant to indicate a difference of opinion, it’s meant to remove that harmful influence from your life. Because even if someone you TRULY HATE is reading your blog passively and not commenting, you pretty much have no way to tell. So why worry? Maybe they’ll learn something.

So that’s pretty much my ban policy: I don’t ban people unless a) they’re motivated solely by a desire to ruin someone’s fun or b) I don’t like the content of their blog and don’t want my name appearing on it (porn bots, Nazis, misogynists, etc). There’s a significant overlap, for sure. 

Anyway, in closing, it is possible to like multiple characters even if fandom is telling you otherwise, your fannish experience is your own to control and not a stick to hit people with, and I don’t care who reads me because they will anyway and also I want to model good, healthy fannish behavior for those who do, especially for those who maybe haven’t learned that healthy behavior yet. I do my best, anyway. 

PHEW. We got through it. I’ll stop hugging now. 

this is a really good takedown of some toxic aspects of fandom culture, and a building up of some healthy ones. i really feel that people who took ‘civil war’ to mean you had to hate either tony or steve really missed the point of the work. the tragedy and power of that story came from the fact that the heroes were divided and fighting over a real issue, but still loved each other. not just tony and steve, but all the avengers. they’re still family even when they’re fighting.

and whether you ship stony or see them as friends or what, it hurts to see them fighting, and it hurt THEM to be fighting, and that’s what makes it a powerful story.

all the ‘team cap vs team iron man’ merchandizing was playing on that, and simultaneously leaning on the tension and lessening it by treating it kind of like a pickup football game. like, shirts vs skins, kinda thing.

you see it lampshaded a bit in the actual movie when natasha and clint are fighting, because they’re reassuring each other they’re still best friends even while they kick the crap out of each other.

anyhow, i feel like fandom infighting is fading back a little now that there are so many obvious and undeniable enemies in the real world. but i’m hoping maybe we can all remember this perspective and not go back to biting holes in each other over fiction once the nazis are beaten.