So many anti friend groups are just straight up cults and it’s genuinely terrifying to see and be part of.
If you’re scared of your friends for whatever reason, it you’re scared of liking being in a specific fandom or liking a specific ship because you think you’ll lose all your friends over it, if your friend group is essentially built on the idea that you’re all good and everyone else is bad, if your friends use social ostracization and online stalking and harassment campaigns as threats and weapons, if your friends use fear and moral panic to keep people in line… . .
Please get out of there. This isn’t even about shipping or fandom or whatever, it’s about staying safe and not getting sucked into a literal cult. Cut them off, block them on all your social media, remake accounts if you need to, and make new friends who don’t leave you feeling like you’re walking on eggshells around them. Just stay safe.
Having to reblog the right call outs, memes, and discourse at the right time, or come under suspicion or attack yourself? Getting scolded or called out for delay in responding to messages, even if you were away from your computer? New friends must be vetted by powerful members of the group? Private discussions may be screenshotted and shared at any time? Behavior control.
Extensive block lists with social consequences if your friends find you still follow any of those people? Mainstream books or news sources with conflicting opinions dismissed as “problematic” or out of touch? Information control.
Being expected to adopt the newest language, positions and targets without explanation even if they rapidly change? Any concerns or objections dismissed as evidence of incurable stupidity at best, unforgivable moral corruption at worst? Lumping wide varieties of info and theory together in simple good and evil categories? Thought control.
Effusive praise for complying with group demands, including and especially behavior that may make you uncomfortable, like bullying others? Seeing your friends send dissenters death threats? “Hot and cold” treatment, favoritism, competition for attention by powerful or BNF members of the group? Guilt trips about spending time and attention elsewhere? Emotion control.
The antis in the notes are a good example of another cult tactic I experienced: trying to smear anyone who leaves their cult as a pedophile. When I was in a friend group with antis, anyone and everyone outside the group was a pedophile, a molestor, a predator, evil, etc. and if you left then by God they’d make sure everyone in the fandom knew you were also all of the above buzzwords. And in the same way, antis still in the cult that is being an anti yell “you’re pro-pedophilia if you disagree with us!” at the OP without providing a single way in which they’re not a cult.
And that’s because they can’t prove it. At the end of the day, they can’t say, “we’re not a cult and here’s three reasons why” because they just don’t have ammunition. If a group can’t give you a reason why they’re not a cult beyond “cults are bad and we’re good” or “we can’t be a cult, we’re against __”, it’s definitely a cult.
I remember being an anti and being constantly worried my friends would read something into whatever piece of media I’d watched/read lately. They could find evil in anything; whether it was Disney’s Tangled or Romeo and Juliet, everything was secretly pedophilia and you might have to denounce it any day now. Any admission of liking a thing could and would be used against you. My liking emo bands was used as proof against me at one point, as if crushing on men over a decade (or two) my senior was a sign of sexual deviancy. Having a Neopets account was “proof of pedophilic intent” according to them.
And as with all Evangelical conservative groups/traditional religious cults/secular cults that use group shaming, I was expected to repent of the sin of it all, denounce Disney and Shakespeare and Fallout Boy and Neopets as if I’d done some unspeakable crime by watching/reading/listening to the wrong thing.
I did not repent, and they attacked immediately. Everything ever said to them in confidence was used against me in public. The flood of suicide baiting was everywhere, as were graphic rape threats and death threats. One specific death threat was five thousand words long and the same person would painstakingly put it in my inbox one ask at a time. “We’re normal people,” this person specifically often said. “‘Anti’ just means normal person,” he would say on the same blog he was using to tell me how he wanted to carve me open and rearrange my organs while I was still alive. “I’m normal,” he would say while detailing what he wanted to do with my corpse after he’d killed me. “I’m protecting kids.”
This was also the same year antis tried to convince a woman to kill herself because she had her first initial + surname as her Twitter handle and her Twitter handle happened to share the name of a ship antis didn’t like/thought was pedophilia/thought was evil? IDK I didn’t watch the show, all I know is her initial + surname of Lance had people asking her if she wanted to fuck kids and telling her they’d beat her to death in the streets if they saw her.
“Normal” people will not fantasize about rearranging your organs because you liked a movie they didn’t like. “Normal” people will not threaten to murder a woman they’ve never met because her initials somehow equal support for pedophilia. “Normal” people would not believe someone’s initials are code for support of anything, because that’s just not a thing that makes sense.
Antis, Q-Anon, it’s all the same: “We’re normal! We fight pedophiles! We only hurt you because you deserve to be hurt!” Q-Anon thinks Wayfair furniture sells children in their cabinets, antis think initials are code for pedophilia, and asking how either of those things makes sense is not allowed, you just have to nod and accept it on faith no matter how outlandish the claim is.
If the only reason you don’t walk away from a group of “friends” or dare disagree with their strange, nonsensical opinions is fear of the mob turning on you, they’re not normal, they’re a cult.
If you feel like you have to show up on a post that’s just, “guys, if your friend group is toxic and cult-y, walk away and protect yourself,” and argue with that, bc not doing so makes you a “bad person” in the eyes of your friend group, or could get you in trouble… You need that post.
A list of warning signs for cult grooming is not controversial. Ever.
So, i dont get why pro-shippers are bad? but i also dont get why they do it at the same time, so i would like to hear from both sides as to why they should do what they do, and/or why the other side is bad
i want to be educated and i will do my own research, but i want peoples opinions
thx! (please be RESPECTFUL to everyone responding)
Proship is the default stance fandom used to have–we didn’t need a label because you were either normal or an asshole, and what we define as proship now used to be considered normal.
Essentially you abide by the principles of SALS (“ship and let ship”) and YKINMKATO (“Your Kink Is Not My Kink And That’s Okay” or “kinktomato”).
Basically “we all ship what we like and stay in our own lanes and have nothing to do with the ships or kinks that distress us”
People who didn’t abide by this were the ones involved in ship wars and were by and large regarded as raging assholes by everybody else.
Quite frankly if you look at the roots of anti behavior and how often they decry a ship that turns out to be the “rival” of their OTP, it becomes blatantly clear the anti movement is basically what happens when you mix ship wars with radfem and puritanical christian ideology.
Yes, I said radfem. There is a lot of anti-kink, anti-sex, anti-porn rhetoric in the anti movement, both things that are well known as things radfems (especially SWERFs) spout. Quite honestly they often literally word for word use the same arguments. You also see echoes of this in how they decry mlm ships as evil and corrupt and immoral while praising wlw ships that tick all the same boxes and wholesome and good.
I also brought up puritanical Christian thought–there is a heavy emphasis on “sin”. They don’t call it that but the concept is the same–if you have Impure Thoughts you’ll be an Impure Person and Impure People are Evil. Also you must protect the children from the corrupting influence of Impure People. Again, they pretty much word for word make the argument Christian fundies do about thoughtcrime and sin.
They also seem to have a weird obsession with making everything about incest and/or pedophilia even when the work in question is entirely innocent.
When an anti sees something they don’t like, the go-to response is telling people to kill themselves or threatening them.
When a proshipper sees something they don’t like the go-to response is block the shit out of it to never see it again, then go on with their day.
At the end of the day if you’re an anti, you want to eradicate everything that makes you even mildly uncomfortable without having to do any work to curate your experiences and you want to frame things that make you uncomfortable as immoral.
If you’re proship, you just wanna be allowed to ship your silly little ships in peace and avoid the ships that make you uncomfortable.
A huge chunk of proshippers don’t even ship anything problematic, or at least nothing majorly so. Lots are only into totally wholesome ships–they just don’t think defaulting to death threats (and now terrorism) is the right response to seeing shit that upsets ‘em.
Most of us are just Fandom Old And Tired and want the fighting to stop, people to learn how to filter and block stuff they don’t want (I’d have killed for half the abilities we now have to curate what we see back when I was young and getting in fandom for the first time–and kids today don’t even use ‘em!!! Why!!!), and for children to stop seeking out 18+ content if they’re just gonna scream at the creator when they find it.
I’ll also mention that the abovementioned “you want to eradicate everything that makes you even mildly uncomfortable without having to do any work to curate your experiences and you want to frame things that make you uncomfortable as immoral” mindframe is also very conservative Christian – there’s this idea in Evangelical Fundie Christianity that if you “allow” sin to exist around you, then you are guilty-by-association, and God will blame you for not purifying your environment, etc. etc. This is why fundies don’t abide by “Don’t like abortions? don’t have one” or “Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t get gay married.” In a fundie world, it’s their literal God-given mission in life to purify everything around them and make sure sin doesn’t EXIST.
The weird anti tendency to hate-follow tags, go looking for anyone who does shipping wrong, and send them aggressive, violent threats of eradication are VERY fundie in nature – “warriors of purity,” etc.
Anyway. It sucks, so.
Also, adding on because I was asked why it’s terrible to be uncomfortable with people writing fiction about things you personally consider immoral.
The answer is: It’s not terrible to feel uncomfortable with something someone else writes about, regardless of what that something is and for any reason. What is terrible is telling other people they can’t write fiction about it because you’re uncomfortable.
The main basis of anti wank is that no one can do anything to fake people in a fictional story that is morally reprehensible to do to real people… But the flaw there is that… Fake people are not real people. They cannot be harmed by what someone writes about them, and writing fiction about a thing is not at all the same as doing (or wanting to do, or wanting someone else to do) the thing in real life.
If you’re uncomfortable with what is being written about fake people, then just don’t read it. There are PLENTY of things that make me uncomfortable to read! But I don’t get to say to anyone else “you can’t write about X happening to fake people in a fictional story because I don’t like it.”
Butthat is the basis of anti dogma wank, and it reaches far beyond just shipping, it just tries to use the worst things it can think of, the things that guarantee a knee-jerk reaction, to get their foot in the door. They want people to have that knee-jerk reaction, in the hopes that people will hop aboard without thinking critically about the actual argument being had, which is the question of how morally pure and censored fiction has to be to be acceptable to them. The answer, for them, is “absolutely” and this, to them, justifies bringing harm to real actual people.
And the answer, for everyone else, is that fiction doesn’t have to be morally pure to exist, because being morally pure isn’t the point of fiction.Being morally pure is the point of religious texts.
i feel like i need to remind everyone episode four of the mandalorian took place over several weeks.
i know the show had several episodes that the time frame was between 1 to 2 days at best, but this episode explicitly said mando and the kid spent time there, getting to know the villagers as more than just victims to the klatooinans.
so i know everybody gasped at the thought of omera removing mando’s helmet, but as we’ve seen from other instances where others have tried the same thing, din reacted slowly, with hesitance. as if he himself wasn’t sure if this wasn’twhat he wanted. even when he grabs her wrists, it’s with care and nowhere near as abrasive as any other time someone tries to remove the helmet.
she was learning about mandalorian culture by learning about din, she didn’t know about the importance of the helmet or why din chose his path. paz viszla mentions in episode three how they live below ground, hidden. and sorgan wasn’t exactly a budding metropolis, so it was completely reasonable that she didn’t know anything about why he wore his armor in such a way.
a lot of people dislike omera for these reasons and i don’t think it’s fair to her character. and if she appears again in season two, i hope everybody reacts a whole lot nicer. because i’ve been a part of enough fandoms to know sometimes women are simply hated because of their connection to the (usually male) main character.
let’snot do that.
#i mean Julia Jones is also a native actress#she’s very clearly not a white woman so obviously the fandom is gonna do what fandoms do to characters of color
you know what, my tags shouldn’t just be tags, because i made points. Julia Jones is native, and she’s very clearly not white, and i’ve been a fan of color on the internet for 15 years, so I know how fandoms treat female characters of color, and the answer to that is NOT WELL AT ALL.
to the point that the minute sis appeared on screen, i knew that there would be SOMEONE out there who would somehow find an issue with something she did on screen, so when she goes to take off Din’s helmet, i couldn’t even enjoy the narrative choice on it’s own merit; my brain immediately went to “great, now the fandom is gonna light her ass up for no real reason.”
so this post made points, important ones, but i think it bears mentioning that because Omera is a woman of color, the fandom’s reaction was much harsher than it would have been had she been played by a white woman, and i have 15 years of firsthand experience as evidence to back me up on this.
YES! Omera discourse!
This is especially important now that people have suddenly started shipping Din and Cobb with little/no evidence for it. Like, Omera and Din had several weeks of context, of conversation—of *course* there was some romantic chemistry there! But Din and Cobb fight one (1) krayt dragon (and Din does the dirty work), and suddenly they’re banging? Naw.
Now don’t get me wrong. I love a good queer ship. I headcanon Cara as the stone cold butch I need in my life. I have a nonbinary character in my Mandalorian fic. And I actually AM QUEER. My gaydar is pretty fine-tuned, and I sensed nothing between Din and Cobb other than comradeship.
This is something that makes me so annoyed in fandom. Like, there’s almost this unspoken hierarchy of relationships in fanfic writing where it’s either a white self-insert or a queer white relationship on top, and Native/POC people like Omera get the shaft, even though she and Din have the most romantic tension in THE WHOLE SERIES.
I’ll get off my soapbox now. But yeah. This. Pisses. Me. Off. Not just because I’m a mandomera stan. Even if I wasn’t, the disparity is too obvious to ignore.
Omera deserves better. She and Din deserve their happy ending.
THIIIIIIIIIIS
ALL OF THIS!!!!
Idk about you but I think it’s a wee bit suspicious how the fandom is more willing to pair Din with their (white) OCs, Cara (who he has NO romantic or sexual chemistry with), or a white dude before a WOC who isn’t white-passing
Probably the only thing I’ll say on it because so many other people have said it better then I can but please stop equating IRL shipping to fictional character shipping aka ego shipping
If you think literally Marvin the magnificent is as in real life person as Sean Mcloughlin that’s your problem not ego shippers
True that. Literally the youtube fandom communities are the ONLY people who have this issue. I have not once seen someone equate an hollywood actor with their character and say it’s not okay to ship that character with other character bc it’s played by a real person (which all characters are, tf)
If you have that train of thought, consider it from this angle and why any other angle really doesn’t make much sense. You can be uncomfortable with ego shipping but you can’t force others not to ship the egos just because you’re uncomfortable that the egos are both played by the same person irl. At the end of the day, they’re just characters, and it’s okay to ship characters because the characters *are not real*.
And in addition to this, Seán has ACTIVELY RETWEETED ego shipping art. He knows we do it, and he’s clearly okay with that. If he’s fine with it, there’s no need for anyone to be attacking others for it, because yall can’t speak for him and shouldn’t speak OVER him.
Sometimes I hate when the fandom takes fanonheadcanons or ideas and treat them as canon material when it’s not and then get mad when not everyone in the fandom vibes with it. Like, it’s not an inherently bad thing, and most of them are actually pretty damn cool. But sometimes I just think to myself, he or she are not, in fact, gay or lesbian just because the majority of the fandom, for whatever reason, depicts that character(s) as their gay baby/lesbian girl boss wife. Like, if that’s how you feel, good for you! That doesn’t make that thought true for everyone though.
Literally no one likes it when their ship doesn’t work out, and I definitely don’t blame some fans for being upset right now.
But like… this didn’t come out of nowhere.
They’ve been building up to it all season.
Wearing shipper goggles can make it hard to see, but even the people I know irl who have no attachment to fandom (I work with a bunch of older folks who watch their ‘shows’ every week and discuss them) knew this was coming.
The signs were there.
Just because you didn’t see those signs and you don’t understand or like them doesn’t mean they didn’t exist and/or don’t make sense.
Calling this bad writing or acting like they shoved this in there to appease shippers is just… completely off-base.
It’s not character assassination for a character to make a mistake and to decide that he doesn’t want to be in a relationship where he feels like he has to compromise his values. Y’all really throw me off sometimes.
I honestly did not expect someone to randomly call me a N*zi sympathizer when they found out I liked AOT. I am so confused.
Ugh, this again. These people are insane. I’ve begun to realize that most of the people that think crap like this have never even watched or read AoT all the way through. Either that, or they’re so easily influenced by other people’s baseless accusations that they ignore the loud and clear themes and messages within AoT. It’s like they get some kind of boost to their sense of moral superiority because they think they have some special insight into AoT that no one else has, and they love to lord it over the ignorant masses, lol. I think the whole thing came from some lame ass article written on IGN a few years ago about AoT secretly being fascist propaganda, and all the idiots have been running with it ever since. They accuse anyone who likes AoT of not being able to think for themselves, which is ironic, because it seems to me their entire view point of the manga was formed by a third party, just some idiot with no real insight or connection to Isayama, writing a meaningless article which is nothing but pure speculation and far fetched inference.
Anyone with two working brain cells can see that AoT is anti-prejudice, anti-war, anti generational guilt. These themes are the very foundation of the story. It’s literally the opposite of fascist propaganda or Nazi sympathizing.
Yeah, haha. This is why I can’t stand bad journalism. Bad ideas in media spread like wildfire and suddenly thousands of people just judge things without looking into them first. AOT is so against racial prejudice in every form, I agree. The message could not be more clear.
I feel like someone who believed you were a Nazi sympathizer for liking AOT would freak out if they found out one of your favorite movies of all time was Schindler’s List, which it is for me. I mean, that’s the logic they’re going by, so….
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: it’s more important to know and understand fully why something is harmful than it is to drop everything deemed problematic. It’s performative and does nothing. People wonder why nobody has critical thinking skills and this is part of it because no one knows how to simousltansly critique and consume media. You need to use discernment.
This is ultimately why propaganda is going to work on you. Because you never learned how to think for yourself and the actual ideology behind things. You simply rely on group think and the bare minimum explanations to tell you what’s good and bad.
Sawthis article linked on twitter yesterday and…. yeah. YEAH.
I often wish that everyone on tumblr would read the Eve Sedgwick essay cited by the post just above this one. Here is the full bibliographical information:
Sedgwick, Eve Kokofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading: Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke U P, 2003.
I have more to say about this but it got long, so have a read more break.
This was such an edifying read, I encourage everybody to click on the read more. This puts into words something about online spaces that’s been causing me grief for a while.
Y’all need to stop saying “I like the movie but hate the writing” that’s not a real thing unless you were watching the movie from the perspective of a hamster.
The internet has made you believe you have to morally associate yourself with every person involved in a project. Nobody’s gonna cancel you if you like something made by a person you don’t care for.
I try to stay away from a lot of fandom discourse, but since I’ve been seeing this on my dash again and in tags, I feel the need to make a statement on this, particularly for any young fans who follow me that might get drawn into this mindset.
Stay away from purity culture. Warn your friends away from it too, if you see them starting to fall for it. It’s very easy to get drawn into it
Almost always, it starts with one of three roots, pedophilia, incest and/or abuse. Usually it’s pedophilia. Funnily enough, that’s also what congress usually uses to try to justify passing bills that undermine online privacy & security. Because it’s an easy, extreme target, and when people attempt to argue against it, it’s nice and easy to say “Oh so you likepedophilia” rather then actually engaging with their argument.
The logic goes like this, although there’s many forms of it.
“Pedophilia is bad.” -> Obviously, you agree with this. You’re a reasonable person, and the idea that anyone would do something like that to a child is horrible. This is a normal human reaction.
“Because pedophilia is bad, all fictional explorations of it must be equally bad.” -> Here you might hesitate, but it adds up, doesn’t it? The thought of pedophilia in any context probably gives you a bad feeling, that makes you inclined to go along with this logic.
“Anyone who creates content with a fictional exploration of pedophilia is also bad.” -> Maybe you pause here, or maybe you don’t. But still, it adds up, it’s a very easy flow. After all, we’ve decided that that is Bad, so why would anyone Good want to create something like that?
“Since people who create content with a fictional exploration of pedophilia are just as bad as people who engage in pedophilia in real life, it’s okay to harm them.” -> Here’s where you might pause again. The argument might not win you over entirely, you might not be willing to do harm yourself, but you may be a lot more willing to turn a blind eye to harm being done to someone. Or to consider it ‘justified’.
The pattern now repeats for anything else that’s considered “morally impure”, and “pedophilia” is expanded and expanded, often to ridiculous points, such as merely shipping two underage characters. “Abuse” becomes any ship that the person pushing doesn’t like, for any reason. And so on and so forth.
This is the foundation of “anti” culture, and it’s important to be aware of it so you can catch this false equivocation. Fictional explorations of something, are not the same as the thing itself. Fictional explorations are fiction. The characters are not real people. There is no actual harm being done. Equating fake harm and real harm is a dangerous, slippery slope, which leads us to fundamentally flawed ideas of moral purity. It’s a form of controlling people & making them feel guilty for their very thoughts, rather than holding people accountable for their actions.
A very handy trick for when you encounter this sort of argument, is to replace whatever the selected purity term is with murder. After all, we can all agree that murder is bad, but at the same time, we understand that a murder in a book =/= a murder in real life.
Let’s see that argument again, shall we?
“Murder is bad”
“Because murder is bad, all fictional explorations of it must be equally bad.”
“Anyone who creates content with a fictional exploration of murder is also bad.”
“Since people who create fictional explorations of murder are just as bad as the people who commit murder in real life, it’s okay to harm them.”
Hopefully, it’s now easy to see why the above argument is fundamentally flawed.
Keep your eye out for purity culture in your fandom spaces, and when you see it, refuse to engage with it. Warn your friends if you see them falling into the same traps, although try to be kind about it; this is a very easy thought pattern to fall into. I don’t recommend trying to argue/debate anti’s. The attention only feeds them. Block them instead. Don’t let people control or shame you for what you create or consume, and don’t control or shame others for what they create or consume.
Also, as a note, let me be clear about something. If you are uncomfortable with any of the above discussed things, or anything in general in fiction (ie, underage ships, murder, incest, abuse, penguins, needles, etc), that’s perfectly fine (it’s also called a squick, for those that haven’t heard that term before). Absolutely control your fandom experience by blocking people, filtering tags, unfollowing, etc. However, just because you are uncomfortable with something, does not give you the right to control other people. Other people have no right to control what content you create or consume, and you have no right to do that to them either.
Okay?
I think there are two other important arguments antis use that should be debunked. They will say that fiction should be censored if it could either 1) be used/leveraged towards harm or 2) causes harm itself.
The typical example of the first argument is usually about abusers using fiction that depicts pedophilia or other abuse in order to groom a victim. It is true that abusers have used fiction as part of their grooming tactics. Antis will say that this means that that fiction should be censored to prevent this. This is a bad argument for two reasons. First, it misplaces the blame for abuse from the abuser to the tool/method of the abuser. Second, it misunderstands the fact that even “vanilla” or “non-problematic” things are used by abusers as part of their grooming tactics.
The typical example of the second argument is usually about traumatized people being triggered, “re-traumatized”, or otherwise very distressed about certain fiction. It is true that certain fiction can cause real emotional/psychological harm to certain people. Antis will say that any such harmful fiction should be censored for this reason. This is a bad argument for two reasons. First, whether a piece of fiction is harmful is dependent upon the individual, i.e. no fiction universally causes harm. Second, things that are considered “problematic” are not the only things that are potentially triggering–anything can potentially be a trigger, no matter how “innocuous” it is to people without that trigger. When it comes to topics that are more frequently distressing/triggering, the solution to preventing harm is to use tags/warnings so people can avoid topics that will harm them.
it’s annoying to me as a Fanfic Elder that y’all don’t understand how consent works in regards to reading fanfic
last night I saw a fic that had EIGHT of my favorite tags included and a great summary BUT it also contained a tag for a topic that bothers me. I weighed the pros/cons and decided NOT to read the fic because the ONE tag I disliked was something that could trigger a panic attack if the scene went into any sort of detail - it wasn’t worth risking the eight good tags.
from the first moment I noticed the fic to the moment I decided not to read it, the entire experience was MY RESPONSIBILITY. the author tagged the fic correctly, I knew what my limits were, and I respected them.
if you find a fic with tags you don’t like, JUST DON’T READ IT
don’t harass the author, don’t post a big whiny rant about it on Tumblr, just keep scrolling
Men as victims - what makes the reactions to the Loki show so telling
Recently, I noticed something concerning on Twitter. There are several categories of people who liked and support the Loki show (2021), varying from casual fans who knew nothing about Loki before, over fans of the general MCU who perceived Loki mainly as a villain in The Avengers (2012), to rabid show fans who generally call everyone a misogynist who dares to admit they didn’t enjoy the show. Now, while I normally find some kind of common ground with people who are part of the first two groups, the last one belongs to a special kind of people. I noticed their habit to turn to verbal abuse quite fast (like so many others), but now there is something more they have in common: most of them believe and supportAmber Heard.
There are people on Twitter who love the show (by loving Sylvie as a proxy) to a degree it becomes meaningless to them if they thus support torture, abuse, and other crimes that are framed as morally acceptable. And they treat the Heart vs Depp trial just the same, attacking both Depp and people who believe him. They do so by utilizing ad hominem attacks, like calling people misogynists, social rights warriors, or men’s rights warriors, abusers, and toxic. They are trying to refute rather by character defamation instead of arguments. A frequently used move is to switch the abuser/victim dynamic and call everyone speaking up for Loki or Depp a victim blamer. To support their claims they apply other manipulative tactics, such as twisting facts.
Here is one example: after the show aired many fans of Loki (the character, not the show) pointed out that the relationship resembled autogynephilia, a harmful hypothesis that claimed trans women would want to adapt their gender because they were attracted by the idea of themselves, but as women. The pro-series fans claim to point out this would be actually transphobic (reversing the accusation), citing an article written by Julia Serrano (a famous trans-women who works in science). But if you check what she actually said about the matter, the article does not support the claim. She argued a dislike of the relationship could be caused by subconscious transphobia because people might perceive Sylvie as trans since she is the only female Loki variant. When genderfluid fans pointed out to her on Twitter that they did not feel comfortable with the Loki show, Serrano herself cited a tweet where she points out the flaws of the genderfluid representation herself. In conclusion, 1) fantasies about one’s own body but of another gender are normal, not limited to trans-people and not to be looked down upon! 2) presenting the relationship in the show in a way it will inspire discrimination against non-binary people because it reminds us of the harmful claims some “scientists” have made in the past is not a good representation. 3) pointing out this fact is in support of GF fans, and certainly not transphobic.
At the same time, men face much greater problems being believed when they get abused by women than the other way ‘round. Still, those people close their eyes from the abuse and support the abusers and in case of the Loki series, the framing of torture and abuse as being just. (While I am not a fan of Sylvie, since Loki was mainly disparaged to make her look superior, she is not mainly responsible for his abuse. That would be Mobius doing the death threats and the gaslighting, and ordering the groin kicking.)
Now why is this important? I think there is a social current happening we should be aware of. Women who hate men just because of their gender, who fight for increased discrimination under the guise of feminism and even pretending to act to protect trans-people. This is just as bad as patriarchy.
So, if you ever happened to be in a situation you were discriminated against and wanted the support of someone who would be believed where you wouldn’t you should fight this social current. I recommend doing so by asking if they liked the show. If they do, explain the torture, the transphobic representation, and the disparaging, and ask again. If they still stand behind it, that’s a bad sign.
On a side note: 1) those people are giving both feminism and LGBTQIA+ supporters a bad name, and I am getting annoyed by that. 2) I agree that the public defamation of Heard is not ok, and needs to stop. For one thing we should be over lynching in 2022, and secondly, it only contributes to the hardening of the fronts. Instead, we need to think about how we see people who have been convicted and that it is still a crime to abuse them.
Listen. All I’m saying is if decades of step-sibling/step-parent porn on the biggest porn sites hasn’t normalized fucking your family members then we don’t need to worry about some random fanfic for a fandom that died ten years ago.
I made it a meme but seriously: this is so important. In real life we don’t seek closeness with every single person we have something in common with. It’s common sense in that case. We recognize it as unnecessary, hard to maintain, and something that would lead to a lot of strife and a poor mental health. So why is it any different in fandom?
You don’t have to be friends with everyone, in fact you shouldn’t be. You don’t have to try to interact with everyone. You don’t have to follow people you don’t jive with. That’s exactly why this fandom in particular (pp fandom) deals with what seems to be magnified amounts of strife. The fandom really started in earnest within the past year and a half or so as such a small, tight-knit group that everyone knew everyone. And it continues to be small enough that you can easily follow most of the major interactors/active members. In other fandoms, it’s (generally) very different. In bigger fandoms it’s easier to find your niche, a sub-group that you mostly align with that generally fills your dashboard and gives you the freedom to, frankly, get away from the people you don’t get on with. It’s big enough that you won’t have to see people you don’t prefer being reblogged on your dashboard if you don’t want to.
Something about the intimacy of this fandom makes a lot of people feel that they need to be all things to all people or that other people need to be all things to them. And it doesn’t have to be that way. Don’t put that pressure on yourself, or others. Seriously.
Follow, I don’t know, <100 blogs? <50? Keep the people you hold dearly down to <20, even less if that’s what you need. Talk regularly with the people you deem “your people.” Keep loose ties with anyone else. I can guarantee you’ll have a happier, more encouraging experience.
petition to stop twisting everything Eddie says or does (or whenever something happens to him) into something to do with Buck and thereby robbing Eddie of his own agenda
is op actually preventing you from having fun or are you just a bit too defensive over your interests & habits to the point where a stranger in their own space joking or talking about not liking something comes across as a personal attack
There is a distinct difference between curating your fandom experience to only see positive things and being adamant that any criticism, existing anywhere, is inherently wrong and the critics must be bad people who don’t fandom properly.
So, now that I’ve processed THAT POST and the insanity behind it that made me spend the last week having panic attacks, followed by flashing back to all the traumatic shit I dealt with in the last 10 or so years thanks to people with similar mentalities to the puritanical, power-hungry demons on this site. Except that was in real life, and I can’t handle this crap anymore.
This year, I finally reached the breaking point to the extent that my family had to stop pretending I’m not damaged. I still can’t go to therapy, but I am taking anti-anxiety/depressants now. One of the things that elevated my already-high stress level was The Old Guard fandom and the toxic environment that killed the one joy I had last year.
What was that? Seeing a movie with an un-stereotyped, irreligious, artistic queer North African man who looks like a male version of me. Seeing him in a loving relationship with a fellow Mediterranean, like so many of the couples I grew up around, parents of ethnically mixed friends I had. I came into the TOG fandom, excited, immediately making posts of facts, translations, seeking out other MENA/Mediterranean people to connect with, because fuck has it been lonely.
And I did. Very briefly. Before shit went to hell because of Hélène and her circle of tyrannical friends.
I still can’t believe they were allowed to get away with this.
I went out of my way to write ridiculously detailed posts on MENA culture, history, language and religion, answer so many questions, with links and details that could only come from someone who grew up with this stuff and spoke Arabic. And I had people questioning my validity??? Talking shit about me, bullying me, or even trying to discredit me because I *gasp*stated a fact that upset their racist headcanons.
Meanwhile, a very Americanized Rich White French Woman, was allowed to get away with constantly changing her ethnicity, religion, economic status, skin tone, family history, make up insane contradicting stories of suffering, and claiming oppression points from so many unrelated demographics. Not just that, she got to peddle racist bullshit as fact, frame the Amazigh of Morocco as if they’re Native Americans, all the way down to the claims that her grandfather was a ‘shaman’, when that couldn’t be farther from the truth. That, and applying Black American stereotypes, experiences, and issues to MENA people, especially to herself.
And use the ‘I’m insert minority’ excuse to get away with being an unrepentant monster.
I smelled a rat ages ago, but any time I expressed it to someone they didn’t believe me, and then when I saw what happened to my friend after he DM’d her as a ‘fellow Moroccan’, the horrific shit that was mobilized against him that chased him off the site, I knew I couldn’t handle what would happen to me if I tried to question her bullshit. The stress this fandom gave me was much more than what I had managed to stomach all these years and I had reached a breaking point.
So, I left. I let them have my only representation in exchange for my sanity. I canceled all my remaining Joe-centric/culture posts and fic ideas for TOG and told myself to never let myself forget that I’m not welcome anywhere.
Oh, and these tweets?
They’re about me and nizarnizarblr, who was run off the site. I’m ‘an anti-arab fanatic’ for saying North Africans aren’t Arabs and that our dialects can be barely intelligible to actual Arabs. And he was a ‘rabid nationalist’ for saying the same things as me. We made large educational posts about OUR part of the world, OUR cultures, OUR experiences and that wasn’t approved by the Western Liberals of Tumblr dot com.
She fucking slandered us on a site known for mass-bullying campaigns and suicide-baiting people, called us these inflammatory terms because we actually knew what we were talking about. She used hot-button political terms to stoke mindless hatred against us, the people she was racefaking as.
This RICH WHITE WESTERN WOMAN hated that there were actual North Africans in the space she wanted to rule over, who could ‘threaten’ her position as the authority and token, and that us contradicting her could get her exposed, so she fucking weaponized her following.
DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW DANGEROUS THIS IS? DO I NEED TO EXPLAIN TO YOU HOW RACIST THIS IS? SHE COULD HAVE RUINED OUR LIVES!
The thing that had briefly brought me joy, encouraged me to write two enormous fics after a period of writer’s block, now makes me sick. The one space I should have belonged in could have killed me.
I, someone that actually shares Joe’s background and has been told I look like a female version of him, got suspicion, disrespect, hostility and chased out of the fandom along with fuck knows how many other Brown/Muslim people under the command of the embodiment of privilege and her cronies, that loved getting the platform to abuse others because they used her words as gospel.
Where are they now? The Anglo/North Euro women that appointed themselves the authority on how to write a MENA man, who tried to tell actual MENA/Muslim people in the fandom how he should be portrayed to the extent of organizing smear campaigns against us when we defied their authority? Why are they all suddenly so quiet when you couldn’t pay them to shut them up?
There was no way you could be friends with someone like Hélène, in groupchats with her for months, and praising her to high heaven for giving you ‘sources’ and ‘sensitivity reads’ and not know what kind of person she was. Considering they all were just as vicious and racist, xenophobic and antisemitic, they must have agreed. That’s why they defended her, went around DM’ing people to delete their reblogs of the exposé. It’s not that they didn’t believe the overwhelming amount of evidence, it’s that they were panicking about losing the pedestal she afforded them.
I ASK AGAIN: Why were they so horrible to actual MENA/Mediterranean/Muslim people yet had their head completely up her arse when she claimed to be ALL THREE. What made her so special? Why did she get sanctified while everyone actually part of those demographics was demonized?
They knew. The whole time they knew. This was all done to give her and her chosen few complete control of a fanbase, where their word was law and any deviation got you witch-hunted out.
Now that their golden goose of consequence-free tyranny had been scratched, they’ve switched to trying to deflect from the point of that post – that she’s a sickeningly horrible person – and are making it about the dumbest fandom shit imaginable.
This isn’t about that fucking half-baked movie. This about all the shit she’s done over the years and continued doing within the community that was built around it. Helene and her shithead friends, used her race-faking and lying about every part of her identity and background, and a fictional MENA man as their carte blanche to abuse others, when they HAD NO RIGHT OR SAY IN THE MATTER.
This woman didn’t just spend years lying about being poor to con people out of money, spouting tankie shit, being a genocide denier, a 9/11 truther, cycling through ethnicities, religions, backgrounds, pretending to be like 2 different types of Jewish while being antisemitic, spreading wrong cultural shit she Googled wrong as fact, a racist and a race-faker, who brown-faced and seemed to be bordering on digital blackface as well, I know I’m forgetting a bunch of other shit because HOLY FUCK!
This woman went about everything with a baffling amount of confidence, while I and so many others never disclosed our backgrounds, until this fanbase demanded it, out of the need to feel safe from racial abuse. Yet, she was basically pretending to be me and got popular off it.
She called Marwan Kenzari a slur that makes me sick, that is not a word that comes up randomly, especially the way she used it. It has to be something you say regularly, without hesitation, for it to be the first thing that comes to mind. Also, that image of him? The one that stirred up that hideous response from her? In it he looks like my dad, moustache, brown jacket, cropped hair and all. So, kosomik ya Helene.
The fact that her URL is ‘lgbtmazight’ when she isn’t anything of the sort is sickening. She couldn’t be arsed to check where Marrakech is or what color it was for her racefaking tall tales, or check that there tens of millions of Amazigh people in Morocco alone, or even understand that there are no literal translations, so NO ONE is using tbarkallah as a fucking mic-drop.
Seriously, she put no effort into this and everyone believed her.
And there are people defending her. How evil do you have to be to think there’s nothing wrong with any of this? Stop fucking making it about two fictional characters and think about the REAL PEOPLE THIS HAS AFFECTED!
I hope everyone that tagged her as or used her as a source deletes her posts off their blog, I hope no one recommends her wrong and racist posts as info, I hope anyone who claims she was their ‘sensitivity reader’ removes her name, I hope no one believes any of the shit she said or has their view of MENA people and culture shaped by her.
It’s the least you could do.
I have no words.
These people who claim to care so much about antiracism and representation are still protecting their lying bff.
I still remember their rants about “racism in the fandom”, “Joe as hyper-masculine caricature” and “the conversation around racism in fanworks is still relevant” and “decenter your psyche”, no matter how hard to try to bury all the traces.
Someone must have decentered their psyche so damn hard, they forgot they were rich,entitledandwhite. :)
These people’s perfomative activism is nothing but an ungodly mix of hypocrisy, arrogance and white saviour syndrome, and their refusal to apologize to the people who were hurt by their arrogance shows it clearly.
Also, keep sucking on Mademoiselle Oppression some more, why don’t you, but know this: è santo ca’ non suda.
You are free to headcanon characters because of personal reasons (i.e. seeing them as gay, trans, autistic, etc.), regardless of canon. However, having a personal headcanon is not an excuse to attack other fans who don’t share the same headcanon as yours nor the creators for not making it canon. Not only do you come off like an ass, you’re just making people not like your headcanon.
I’m probably not the right person to talk about this, but I just had a thought and I’m physically incapable of not immediately posting whatever comes to mind, so here you go. I think the tendency for fandom to fixate on white characters over people of color is not solely the fault of the fans themselves, particularly in US and western film. It’s not as simple as fans gravitating towards white characters (and by extension, white actors) when presented with a selection of equal options where the only difference is skin color, because that’s not what’s being presented. Main characters in mainstream movies have much higher odds of being white over any other race. Just look at how difficult it is for poc to find leading roles in Hollywood. They’re much more likely to end up playing a side character and as a result, a less complex character. On top of that, American studios consider making a character nonwhite to be a risk, so they might hesitate to cast more than a handful of poc and that further lowers the odds of a poc being chosen as a fan favorite. So yes, there is a bias in fandom towards white characters, but it doesn’t start at the fandom level. It can’t be blamed entirely on those stupid fangirls mooning over their white faves because in a lot of cases, the complicated roles with large amounts of screentime disproportionately go to white actors and those are the roles that fans latch onto.
You can’t separate fandom racism from racism in the movie industry or any other type of fictional media. It all feeds off each other and attacking the people at the bottom of the chain is not the answer. In the hierarchy of mass media and fandom, fans have the least power. It’s like trying to reform a corrupt company by yelling at the receptionist. Are they doing something shady? Possibly. Is making them feel bad going to change this company’s overall business practices? Nope. In my opinion, the best way to institute change in mainstream fiction is to become a creator. Obviously that’s a lot easier said than done, but it might be the only way things will actually change. You’re certainly not going to get anywhere by yelling at a stranger for having the wrong favorite characters.
people on this hellsite will endlessly nitpick wlw content, call anything that isn’t perfect and pure ‘bad representation’, make others feel guilty for enjoying rep they’ve labelled as 'bad…and then they’ll turn around and wonder and bitch about why there isn’t enough wlw content in fandom
that post about fandom getting prematurely angry about stuff they think is gonna happen before it even happening is really just the 911 fandom getting enraged every single hiatus over the potentiality of events of the previous season not being addressed, only to be proven hilariously wrong when the show comes back
“Doppio is actually a fully grown adult, he just thinks he’s a child and is at the physical age of one and everyone else sees him as and treats him like a child”
Woo. Okay.
Doppio, canonically, has DID. A veryinaccurate and bad portrayal of one, do not get me wrong, but DID nonetheless. He is written as a character who is meant to have Dissociative Identity Disorder- not acknowledging that fact at all because he’s a fictional character just doesn’t make sense.
Doppio, also canonically, is a kid. It is painfully obvious that is the intent with his character. It is pointed out multiple times.
Characters repeatedly refer to him as a “kid” and a “boy” (including Doppio himself), the information page about Doppio and Diavolo in the manga outright states that they fluctuate in age with only Diavolo having the “body of an adult”, and the body visibly grows significantly older when Diavolo is fronting.
This, in particular, is based off of a real symptom of said disorder that Doppio has. In people with DID, certain parts can be different ages than the body itself (again, heavily exaggerated- people with DID do not literally morph into the body of a child, but it is still based off of a real aspect of the disorder).
When people make the “Doppio is 33!” comments, and bend over backwards to try and insist that (like with what I was mocking here), they are not only being nonsensical when you look at the source material (which is already very annoying), but going off of an ableist line of thinking. Insisting that child parts of people with DID are just the body’s age and they’re just “pretending” to be kids is… well, shitty. You cannot fully disconnect Doppio from that since that is what he is based off of here. (People largely use it as an excuse to sexualize him or just make memes from what I’ve seen). It shows not only a misunderstanding of Doppio, but with DID itself.
Yes, Doppio is an anime character, but the intent here is obvious. Also, it’s just wrong.
Hot take: not all derivative works are fanfic, butnearly every argument against fanfic applies to all derivative works, so it is valid to bring other ones up.
