Since Tumblr never runs out of new ‘improvements’ to inflict on us, here’s a broad-blast Greasemonkey script that nukes any post on your dashboard by a blog you aren’t following. To use: install the Greasemonkey Firefox extension or the Tampermonkey Chrome extension, open link, click “install.”
Created to fix the latest BS where unmarked, unlabeled sponsored posts kept getting pinned to people’s dashboards, with nothing to distinguish them from regular posts except that they were random crap from blogs you’d never heard of. On the bright side, it should also whack the vast majority of posts from your saved searches that keep cropping up like dashboard herpes no matter how many times Tumblr has ‘helpfully’ shown them to you already. It won’t kill ads that aren’t actually Tumblr posts, but that’s what XKit and ad-blockers are for, right?
Only applies to the dashboard, so it won’t mess up search results or blogs in sidebar view. Unlike the Adblock-filter fix, it won’t block legit posts if (…when) Tumblr changes where the sponsored posts appear on the page.
Ping me if you run into any issues with it. I wrote it in one hour in a fit of pique and Tumblr randomly stopped doing the thing while I was testing it, so it may behave unpredictably in situations beyond basic dash-browsing.
i was at the zoo and just kind of vagueing out leaning on a rail and watching the duck pond and in the background a kid started yelling “he’s coming for you! he’s coming for you!!” and i thought it was some game she was playing with her family or something up until i felt a little hand grab my elbow and looked down to see this tiny wide-eyed child staring up at me with the world’s most serious expression and she said in a solemn voice
“he’s here for you”
and something reached out and grabbed my other hand
it turns out that a resident cockatoo has figured out that if it just waddles back and forth along the rail it can get the maximum amount of attention and headskritches with the minimum amount of flying and objectively this is very cute but at the same time this was very nearly the way that a grown adult died of a heart attack at the zoo
i love bird tumblr so much, where else could you go “hey look at this bird” and have a complete stranger not only know where it lives, but declare that it’s their nemesis
honestly “i’ll do whatever you want” “then perish” is the single most powerful exchange possible in the english language and it’s from some bizarre “hewwo” obama rp
And there was that other post where someone dreamt that Obama said “violence for violence is the rule of beasts” like what is it about Obama that makes people come up with such raw fucking dialogue for him
my mother had a dream where he lived in the forest and she had a cigarette with him and he said “to become god is the loneliest achievement of them all” and put it out and walked into the mist and i’ve never fucking forgotten that
I once dreamed that a giant meteor was headed for earth, and the government had set up loudspeakers throughout the cities so Obama could give a final address – I’ll never forget how strangely comforting it was when he said “there are places we’ve never been before. Some of us have never been to the Alps, some of us have never been to Marrakesh. The next life is simply another place we’ve never been before, and we’re all going to go explore it together.”
When I was a teenager on the internet looking at adult content, the fear was that some “concerned” parent would stumble across any of the relatively small fan communities and raise hell with the ISP until it was shut down.
Now I’m a grown-ass adult, and the fear is that the teenagers themselves will threaten, doxx, bully, and harass content creators off of large social media sites who have entire legal teams dedicated to covering their asses because their parents have done such a shit job teaching them internet saftey that they operate under the delusion that the entirety of the worldwide web was created as some “safe space” for minors rather than the godamned seedy back alley it has always been.
I don’t like overgeneralizing teenagers, I mean many anti-antis are teenagers, many of my followers are teenagers. But when talking about broad generational differences I believe Roach Patrol or one of their friends once said something kinda potent about how being born after the world trade center attack could shape the beliefs of some people into thinking it’s normal for any freedoms or potential dangers to be squashed in the name of public safety.
The rational here being that they were kinda born into a world where that is widely the response to danger.
But I think many people now are aware that a lot of the extra security we’ve put in place since 9/11 is mostly for show so that people feel safe, ie; security theater.
So sometimes what antis are asking for amounts to security theater for the Internet. Where they think that if we can squash these fan fictions, fan arts and pairings the world will have less rapists, domestic abusers and child molesters.
I may have been responsible for the ur-post of the 9/11 Generational Hypothesis. Or one iteration of it, anyway; I assume it’s been suggested independently multiple times. I’ve seen some of the critiques that have emerged since, many of them sensible, others not so much, but the one that’s stuck with me is: the people who are old enough to remember 9/11 are just as susceptible to the black-and-white fear mentality; hell, we’re the ones who inflicted it on the next generation. The difference is that we have an alternate mental model available. If a bunch of the kids who are just starting to graduate college have trouble conceptualizing it as anything but Bad People Danger World, well, they’re not the ones whose choices brought that about.
I’ve grown fond of that description of the problem because I like problems that suggest their own solutions.
In any case, “security theater for the internet” is a fucking brilliant summation of this particular instance of the problem.
okay, the reason that I get mad and antsy about posts that are like “despite what tumblbllblblbllblblr says you can like people who are problematic :)” is that God, “problematic” is the most vague wimpy bullshit baby umbrella term in the entire world
if my friend says “he’s my problematic fav ^_^” i instantly get worried because “problematic” can mean literally ANYTHING from “said something mildly insenstive about a political issue” to “voices distaste about those gosh dang horrible Latinos coming to steal American jobs” to “sexually harassed and groped his underage fans.” what did he do? who cares! it’s insignificant enough to just shove under a single bland inoffensive word and never touch it again, i guess
you’re allowed to like famous people (or like, shows or video games or whatever) that have flaws, but you can’t just hide bad things under a single tidy little word so can absolve yourself of any guilt you get over supporting a guy who’s beaten his lover or who’s whined about how there’s no more racism in America.
stop cooing to yourself and your followers that it’s okay to like ~problematic~ things, we GET it,
nobody’s perfect, so let’s move past that. grow a fucking spine and say words like “sexist” or “bigoted” outloud. and not just in a watered down “yeah she said some bad things :(” kind of way, get MEAN about! “yeah i like her work a lot, but i hate all that bullshit racist stuff she says on her Twitter” you’re allowed to like something while being loud, vocal, and angry about how much you hate the bad parts. be mean, be unpleasant, but never just be the person who gives a pass to all the bullshit that assholes can get away with in this world just because you don’t want to feel bad for liking a tv show or celebrity
The reason people make posts like that though is that a huge portion of this site DOESN’T get it and CAN’T move past it. I’ve had 16 year olds scream at me that they are in fact completely ~unproblematic~ and that no one should ever be forgiven for anything they’ve ever done, even if it was five years ago. I’ve seen huge crusades to literally drive people to suicide because they enjoyed some popular content one time. I agree that problematic is a stupid word, and it’s a good idea to pinpoint exactly WHAT it is you do and do not endorse, but I think these posts are more a response to a problem than the problem themselves.
~problematic~ culture is more about this black and white lumping of all transgressions together, not to diminish terrible things, but to uphold this puritanical idea that unless you are completely perfect at all times, you will be cast into the deepest pits of hell and you will deserve it. It’s a power structure, meant to lash out and control others and feel self righteous about it. Even worse, people will retroactively call their victims problematic, when they were actually just plain old bullying and harassing them for their sexuality, race, etc., but its all okay no questions asked because they claimed Problematic™
Thesee posts about how its okay to enjoy content even if its problematic aren’t trying to say “absolve yourself of ever thinking about what you support,” they’re trying to say “that guy who’s literally sending you death threats about your interests is wrong.” The wording may not be great, and can unfortunately lead to the situation you’ve described, but the solution isn’t to stop making these posts, its to actually try and dismantle this whole idea that a person can only ever be either a perfect saint or literal satan.
yeah, i don’t see a lot of people using ‘problematic fav’ to excuse real crimes. i see them using it as an attempt to head off the inevitable dogpile from, say, admitting you enjoyed bumbersnub cumberpickle’s work in doctor strange, even though to the purity crusader’s eye he’s Forever Tainted from playing sherlock.
on tumblr, ‘problematic’ doesn’t even mean problematic. it means someone once heard a rumor you have an unspecified prejudice, or disliked you for a different reason but didn’t think they’d get buy-in from their pet mob so they made up a prejudice, or someone misread something you said, or was in a combative mood and squinted until something you said looked kind of bad.
OP kind of looks like they’re mad someone might be doing thought crimes and not being properly shunned. that’s a real steep slip ‘n slide you’re on, OP. you might not like where it goes to.
(x) Oh wow. Tbh I don’t think there’s a single thing I wouldn’t apply to antis? Amazing.
I wanted to c/p the text and discuss it, but springhole won’t allow me to that so, sorry.
Honestly I would recommend this entire page as a must-read for anyone. It’s entirely possible for any group to become this toxic and you could end up swallowing extremist ideologies without even realizing that it’s happening.
I know this isn’t an exact answer to the questions you’re still waiting on from me, but I think this website is definitely directly addressing some of your thoughts on how to identify your community as being abusive in the first place.
Here’s the text of the section being discussed above:
The group fosters and nurtures irrational hatred and fear of anyone or any outgroup (often by creating an atmosphere where negative generalizations are the norm).
The group fosters and nurtures the belief that it is inherently superior to any outgroups, and that members of outgroups are inferior by default.
The group justifies actions that in any other circumstances would be considered morally wrong or abusive.
The group ignores or minimizes flaws within its own members and ideology that would be harshly criticized if they came from anyone or anything else.
The group’s narrative and ideology are more important than facts, truth, and logic; and they demonize anyone, inside or outside of the group, that questions it.
The group thinks little to nothing of exploiting people to achieve its goals – eg, by defrauding them, by overworking them, or by pressuring them into giving up absurd amounts of money and assets “for the good of the cause.”
The group takes a “shoot first, ask questions later” or “guilty until proven innocent” attitude, especially toward dissenters and outsiders.
The group doesn’t consider it possible to go too far in what they do to spread their beliefs or agendas, or they have no concept of what would constitute unethical means of spreading their beliefs or agendas.
The group doesn’t consider it possible to go too far in what they do against their opponents, or they have no concept of what would constitute a crime or wrong against their opponents.
Like, people who identify as Queer know the word is used like a slur. Trust me, we know.
So when we say “queer is a slur” was started by terfs, maybe use some critical thinking and try to understand what we mean. That is, if you actually care about queer people and the damage terfs do, rather that just screaming “queer is a slur!” and ignoring the actual point.
Terfs did not like that queer was reclaimed. End of. This is a fact. Queer was too broad, too accepting, and embraced all the people they wanted gone. And I know y’all exclusionists feel the same but get pissed when we point it out so you deny it, but sit down and listen for a minute.
Queer was the preferred term for poc. For bisexuals. For trans people. For people with multiple identities. It neatly encapsulated everything, and was a friendly community to those who felt thrown under the bus by mainstream LGBT activism. It was a political and social statement, “you treated my like I was different and weird, and guess what? I am and that’s something to be proud of.”
So the response? “You can’t use that word. Its bad. Its a slur.”
And at the time, a lot of people rolled their eyes. Everyone knew why they didn’t like the word and brushed that off. It was fine.
So they started more subtly. “Just so you know this word is very harmful and is a slur so be careful how you use it :))) in case you didn’t know :)))) its a slur :))) friendly reminder :))) for the sake of other people of course :))))” type shit on every post involving the word, including and especially posts simply mentioning self identification.
Always worded in friendly, concerned ways, like the derailment was meant to be nice and considerate, and not about normalizing their rhetoric.
And what happened because of that was a younger generation of community kids growing up with these statements being thrown at them and absorbed on every. Single. Post. That. Mentionioned. Queer.
The result? That same generation of kids cutting it all short, removing the meant-to-be-palatable niceness, to just say “queer is a slur.”
Exactly how it was originally intended. “Queer is a slur.” People drop on posts where young queer people talk about it being a self identifier that actually fits them. “Its a slur,” they comment, with nothing else, on posts they clearly didn’t read past that word, written by people twice their age who had reclaimed it before they were even born.
Its nasty. Its disgusting. It’s plain old bigotry, whether the people saying know it or not. It is a terf tactic, plain and simple.
And no one wants to deny that it is indeed used as a slur (right along with all the rest of our identities.) No one wants to be insensitive and force it on people who haven’t reclaimed it.
But invading queer people’s posts to spit “queer is a slur” is flat out queerphobic. You do the dirty work of terfs, of cis straight oppressors, by saying in one simple sentence: “its a dirty word, there is no pride in it, you haven’t/can’t reclaim(ed) it.”
And regardless of your actual intentions, when you do this, that is EXACTLY what you are communicating and doing.
“Queer is a slur” is a terf movement. Stop fucking supporting terfs just because you want to pretend like it isn’t.
This is why I block people who say ‘Queer is a slur.’
You quack like a terf, I block you like a terf.
This thing was so weird to me when I first encountered it on tumblr, because like… in academia
queer studies
is a thing. Queer Theory is a thing. If I search my Uni’s library for ‘queer’ I get 138,481 results. Here are some of them:
Queer in Europe : contemporary case studies / edited by Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett.
Queer Phenomenology, Sexual Orientation, and Health Care Spaces: Learning From the Narratives of Queer Women and Nurses in Primary Health Care, / Cressida Heyes, Megan Dean, Lisa Goldberg.
Playing With Time: Gay Intergenerational Performance Work and the Productive Possibilities of Queer Temporalities / Stephen Farrier
Postcolonial and queer theories : intersections and essays / edited by John C. Hawley.
Showing Your Pride: A National Survey of Queer Student Centres in Canadian Colleges and Universities / John Ecker, Jennifer Rae, Amandeep Bassi
Mad for Foucault : rethinking the foundations of queer theory / Lynne Huffer.
Do those look like queerphobic texts? And do you think that most of the writers writing about queer theory are straight? Lols. If you don’t want to be personally be called queer, that’s cool. You don’t get to stop other people using the word though. It’s ours now and we’re keeping it.
Did I reblog this already? If I did, doesn’t hurt to blog it again.
I usually unfollow people who use the tag (or the equilivant) q-slur.
Because fuck you, I’m queer. Have been since like 1986.
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise – female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship – and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios – this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming – again, for the sake of simplicity – that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom – and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women – for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. 🙂
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.
When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.
Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.
If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…
And then we will ship an OT3.
I would like to add a probably problematic addendum to this. In that in certain pieces of media that are pretty much all centered around families–where everyone interesting is related to each other in some way–that makes the probability that incest ships will get somewhat popular fairly high. Simply because there aren’t any real OPTIONS for ships that aren’t in some way incestuous or otherwise weird and taboo, like huge age gaps or really noticeably unbalanced power dynamics.
I’m not CONDONING shipping those things. I am simply saying that when you decry the horrific depravity of fandom for daring to ship two people who are related, maybe consider the statistics involved, and consider HOW those ships are commonly shipped over the fact that they are at all. Like if you find that fans are going out of their way to write characters who are siblings as not related to each other in AU for fic or whatever then like?? Yeah. That’s probably a factor.
I’ve been in different fandoms for ten years so far, and in that time, I also happen to have gotten a Sociology degree. And these are the “rules” I’ve picked up on.
1) Shipping will happen. Accept it and plan for it.
2)The most popular ship will be amongst whoever character’s inner life, relationships, and screen time are delved into the most–as long as…
Addendum to 2: they’re marginally attractive. If that important main character happens to be, say, a talking dog, then most of the fandom will resist and ship other things because of the “marginally attractive” rule. Others will come up with elaborate body switch/humanization/whatever plots to handwave it away and imagine the dog looking like their favorite actor. There will be a small group who straight up ships the dog as is anyway, but waaaaaay smaller than if it was a normal attractive male human. But still–you’ve put a talking dog in center stage, so prepare for fanfic to be written about it in some way. It will just be significantly less if it breaks the “marginally attractive” rule.
3)There will always be outliers in fandom. Just because a fanfic exists of Roy Orbison in clingfilm, doesn’t mean much. That just tells us about the proclivities of that particular dude who write it. When we notice overall TRENDS and popular ships of broad swaths of people, then we can start seeing actual patterns. So there WILL be people who break these rules in disturbing ways, but those people are exceptions to the rule that don’t discount the overall trend.
Now, WHAT fandom and people as a whole considers acceptable for the “generally attractive” rule, that’s when we can notice some interesting things. The majority of fandoms where I’ve seen lots and lots and LOTS of ships around what are technically underage teenagers are from media that are a)Films with characters played by much older actors, and b)written narratives where we can imagine the characters as said much older actors. Our idea of what certain ages “look like” is warped pretty heavily from Hollywood casting much older people in the roles. Fanart of teenage characters from written works usually bear this out–they will usually be drawn older than an actual person that age tends to look.
Now, let’s apply this rule to one of the mysteries of Tumblr: The goddamn Onceler. Now WHY of all goddamn things the completely mediocre Lorax movie got so much fanart and fanfiction attention, I don’t know. I’m still picking apart what creates MORE fanfic of one media property over another(its not just popularity–lots of book series can be popular but have bupkis for fic), but I have a feeling, even if I did, the goddamn Lorax would probably still end up as a paradox. But when you look at the characters with ACTUAL SCREEN TIME in the movie, it becomes easy to apply this rule. The only people with significant lines and screen time are characters who are VERY clearly children, a strange little creature voiced by Danny Devito, and the Onceler. The only marginally attractive one is the Onceler, so the only possible option fandom could come up with is to pair him with HIMSELF from the FUTURE.
When you frame it in terms of how fandom makes decisions on who gets shipped, it makes perfect sense. Weird Onceler time shipping was bound to happen just from how the movie is written. If your only alternatives are straight-up pedophilia and imagining this strange orange creature with DeVito voice having sex, then yes, I’d choose shipping the Onceler with a future version of himself too.
Let apply it to another fandom: Supernatural. Now, any fan of that show can tell you that for a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time, everyone but the two main characters–who are brothers–dies around them. ESPECIALLY if you’re presented as a love interest in any way. The two attractive brothers have absolutely no one to depend on but each other, only about once a season visiting a long-time associate holed up in a bunker, who provides pretty much only resources and infodumps(spoiler alert! They also inevitably die, it just takes longer). Think of the rules: the Supernatural writers basically wrote their fandom into either writing incest, or sitting on their hands and shipping nothing at all. I will certainly not deny that incest is a kink some people have, but statistically there are no doubt lots of shippers in Supernatural who never thought of doing such a thing–and for which the kink has no particular thrill–who have nevertheless been roped into doing so just because the need to write SOMETHING to comfort those beleaguered characters.
After Supernatural had an episode or two lampooning fan culture and generally letting the audience know they were aware of their fandom, they finally wised up that they’d put their fans in this weird position and gave the brothers the consistent angel associate, Castiel. But this was seasons and seasons late in the game, so for some, that damage has already been done, so to speak.
You’ve made a show where most of the characters are robots, like Transformers? Well, prepare for written robot sex. You’ve written a show about humanized animals and their adventures? Congratulations, you’ve made furries. You can apply this to basically anything.
I think this also ties in with fandom’s accepted problem with racial minority characters as well. If the show just shoves a character in there for diversity’s sake and the writers seem unwilling/afraid to actually use a character, then the fandom won’t either. The characters fandom will write the most about will statistically be white males, because those are statistically the most common heroes and characters with the most development and screen time. Now, does the usual unconscious bias of fans also hurt matters? Ab-so-fucking-lutely. But fans also aren’t writing in a vacuum. They’re building off the original work, and some of the flaws of the original are going to come through.
It’s amazing to see how this post has grown and the amazing additions to it.
Regarding race: yes, when (white) writers are lazy and biased and write POC poorly, those characters are gonna get passed over/ignored in favor of better-developed white characters.
But it also happens even when the character of color is well-written. Fuck, it even happens when the POC is the protagonist. For example, Finn from The Force Awakens. He’s young, attractive, has an angsty backstory, plenty of heroics, has interesting relationships of various kinds with basically everyone in the movie. Given that there’s also a female protag (one praised by loads of (white) people for being good female representation) who is, at the very least, Finn’s canonical BFF and more likely his love interest, then you’d expect the mega-ship to be FinnRey.
But it’s not. Of the 23,000+ Force Awakens fics on AO3, there are well over six times as many Kylo Ren/Hux stories, and three times as many Rey/Kylo stories, than Finn/Rey. There are about twice as many Kylux stories as FinnPoe stories. And there are 50 times as many Kylux as Finn/Kylo Ren, despite all the ways in which that ship resembles Harry/Draco and other popular enemy ships. And that’s just looking at pure numbers, not even touching on problematic fanon.
So to the addendum we have to add that racism plays a part in which characters are considered attractive. We see the protagonist of color being passed over for less prominent white characters in the Teen Wolf fandom too. Given the fandom numbers for that, I had no idea Scott was the protagonist until I read @lj-writes, @luminousfinn, and @diversehighfantasy all discuss this phenomenon.
This very good point about racism can also be pointed back at the original gender argument. It’s not just that there are more white and male characters than POC and female characters, it’s that many fans go out of their way to center narratives about white male characters over all others.
I’m not disagreeing with the point about the disparities between the number and importance of female/POC characters vs. white male ones; that’s a definite failing on the part of scriptwriters. But how many times have you seen someone write fic about some absurdly minor white male character–I’m talking about someone who was in one ep of a show or one scene of a movie–passing over a more prominent female or POC character? I admit that I’ve done it myself in the past.
I’ve often heard people say, about minor or poorly written white male characters, “This character is so great! They’re like an acceptable OC: totally canon, but really a blank slate because we don’t know anything about them uwu” or, “lol yeah they’re bad in canon but that’s what fanfic is for” But bring up minor or poorly written female characters or characters of color and it’s, “They’re not interesting because we don’t know anything about them/they’re badly written.”
if you can write complex emotions and shit for Kent and fucking FRY GUY then u sure as hell can write about nursey a biracial black possibly Muslim boy in a white dominated sport
I’m not giving a pass to the writers and creators of our favorite shows and movies. I’m saying that crying, “Fan artists aren’t racist/sexist; we can only work with what we’re given!” is a huge honkin’ cop-out when we’re being so blatantly selective in what we count as “what we’re given.” We need to do better.
It’s honestly so fucked up that I have to worry in leftist spaces that talking about rehabilitative justice will lose me friends.
In 2010 I took a class called Terrorism in the Modern World, which was one of the best classes I’ve ever taken. We learned all about the causes and cyclical effects of terrorism, about why people get seduced by dangerous worldviews, about how we cannot possibly offer more than palliative solutions until we reckon with the task of trying to understand them. About how futile America’s endless escalations have been. It was awesome.
The following year, when Osama bin Laden was killed, all my liberal friends joined me in reminding the world that he might have done terrible evil, but he was still a human being. We huddled together to grin smugly about how much more empathetic we were than those evil hawkish conservatives. Not that I endorse that, but we were 18. Point is, at the time we construed liberalism, and leftism more broadly, as an explicit rejection of the vengeful, punitive ethic that was blanketing our world. And I know we were not alone in that. Liberals around me talked about prison reform, about transitions from criminal dysfunction back to a productive life, about reaching out to the people who were hardest to reach. I was, at that time, proud to call myself a bleeding-heart liberal.
And now I’m seeing them, the very same leftists who joined me in calling for empathy with our enemies, posting endless diatribes against those they deem too far gone for any kind of understanding. The same people who stood up in a sea of patriotic zeal and reminded us that terrorists were real human beings with motivations beyond mustache-twirling villainy are the people I see calling Trump supporters garbage, calling them worthless, calling any attempt to understand them “collusion with the oppressor”. I’m over here advocating the same exact outreach I’ve advocated all my life, the same outreach you once praised me for, but now because it’s your pet enemy I’m evil and weak and awful for it.
These were once my people, and now I don’t recognize them. I’m horrified to see them acting exactly like post-9/11 nationalist zealots, dismissing any attempt at understanding or empathy as spineless, as cowardly, as oppressive. You think I haven’t heard this all before? I’ve heard it all my life. I was a child when 9/11 happened. I don’t remember a United States not at war in the Middle East. My whole life I’ve been a pacifist, raised by pacifist parents in a pacifist community, and my whole life I’ve heard that trying to understand and reach out to your enemy instead of fucking annihilating them was weak and cowardly and siding with the terrorists. The difference is that I once had the left on my side.
Your principles do not cease to apply when it’s your pet enemy on the chopping block. Believe it or not, people who got cruel and hawkish in the face of terrorism were exactly as scared and powerless-feeling as you are now. They weren’t spouting martial rhetoric out of pure evil – there was real fear there, but they let it make them into hateful people with no sense of empathy or common humanity. Like hell I’m going to let that happen to people I once called mine.
Holy fuck, this.
The reason I don’t want to punch Nazis today is because I had all the violent graphic appalling vengeance fantasies about bin Laden…
…and by the time we got him I didn’t believe in war any more.
If we believe that extremism is seductive, why do we want to punch the people it seduces? Does half of Tumblr have some weird belief that a good whack on the head will dislodge it, like curing a mindwiped character in a cartoon show?
Thiiiiiiiiiiiiis
I can respect people who draw their lines for “When is punching the guy considered an act of defense, rather than offense?” in a different place than I do. But a lot of what I’m seeing on the Left (not just on Tumblr, but in a lot of Leftist spaces) is straight up warmongering on a small scale.
Now, I’m a Filthy Liberal, not a true Leftist, so maybe this is one of those idealogical differences that I didn’t pick up on until I understood the distinction between those two things, but…I seem to recall a time when pacifism (real pacifism, not the Batman kind) was considered a virtue on the Left.
And I can’t help but see a connection between the fact that the people who really loudly advocate punching Nazis (and honestly, I find myself struggling to care about whether or not Nazis get punched. It’s the people who merely Look Sortof Like Nazis I’m worried about) are the same people who call shippers Actual Child Molesting Pedophiles. And then those same people move from sending anon hate to doxxing and organizing mass calls to people’s bosses and to CPS and shit.
And now we’re right back to punching Nazis, except that we’re trying to ruin the lives of child molesters, except that anyone we don’t like is a Nazi or a child molester, except that when that stops working we’ll call them something else (maybe we’ll call them terrorists), and really we don’t even know who we’re shooting at anymore but goddamn it feels good to pull that trigger.
And in my head? All I’m seeing is scared, angry redneck neighbors threatening a terrified woman in a headscarf because she sortof looks like what the warmongers told us the wives of the people who attacked New York City might have looked like, and that’s enough to brand her Terrorist ‘round these parts and we don’t hold with Terrorists here.
When they say “violence begets violence,” they don’t mean the people you punch are gonna punch you back. They mean that when you run out of people to punch (or can’t reach the dude you really wanna mangle,) you’re gonna broaden the criteria for who’s an acceptable target. Osama Bin Laden becomes All Terrorists becomes Anyone Who Looks Vaguely Middle Eastern.
I wonder if the reason we’re seeing this same logic among Leftists and Liberals now is because so many of them are the kids who grew up post 9/11; in the era of warmongers telling us all to punch an amorphous and difficult to identify Enemy for the good of American Decency. And even if they recognized that the “looks like a terrorist” criteria is bullshit, they still internalized the underlying message: Violence Against the Enemy is Righteous.
All they needed was a different enemy.
I wonder if the reason we’re seeing this same logic among Leftists and
Liberals now is because so many of them are the kids who grew up post
9/11; in the era of warmongers telling us all to punch an amorphous and
difficult to identify Enemy for the good of American Decency. And even
if they recognized that the “looks like a terrorist” criteria is
bullshit, they still internalized the underlying message: Violence
Against the Enemy is Righteous.
I believe in rehabilitative justice because I’ve seen it work, honestly.
And I’ve seen so many people who were nominally defending me or people like me end up broadening the “people I can attack” criteria until they included me… You know after a while the pattern sinks in.
just moving along like everyone else 