Alrighty…. I wanna discuss stuff like this, as I personally think a group of defenders for the show have indeed been a tad overzealous, and I’ve been a bit worried about the possibility it may go too far and it will cause people to go ‘Maybe the RWDE are right after all’ when no, more then one thing Can be bad.
So!….Ill line up certain things that have bugged me lately.
One thing is the claims of many things, namely with Atlas and such, to be a result of Misogyny and such. Or other sorts of bigotry or pro fascist stuff. I don’t think this is okay, for a good deal of reasons. There’sabsolutely many who are influenced by those things, however, there are many who are in fact members of the LGBT community and there are certain unfortunate implications in it….Calling CRWBY genocide apologists goes way past the point of reason but my point is calling anyonewho makes hardcore RWDE points like defending Ironwood either Sexist or neo-Fascistic is wrong for a Number of reasons. That isn’t to say you have to agree or…Well even respect there takes on the Series. Some of them are still awful and with a few RWDE members I have interacted with, they were decent people but I still think there takes on the series are Dumb
My solution is to just keep in mind people can be…Wrong, even if they are not bigoted or Right wing and such, they can simply be wrong. Like, Hbomber doesn’t have to Hate Women for his video to have been wrong and for half his points to have just been him making things up, he could have just made a poorly made video where half his points were him making things up. Its that simple
That is the one thing I keep in mind…People can just be wrong, they don’t have to be bigoted and such they can just be…Wrong. And when they arebigotedone can can simply call it out there.
Another thing that bugs me…I have seen some people say that people critiquing the show or writers is automatically disrespectful to Monty and such, and that is wrong!, it is just as absolutely wrong to use a Dead man as an arguing point, just as the ‘Monty’s vision’ Stuff was wrong. As said before, people can simply be..Wrong without needing to do things like that. Now for quick clarification, if someone is outright insulting CRWBY and someone else brings up Monty having said to stop watching if they wanted to insult there friends, that is not what I am speaking of. Those were the mans explicit wishes and are worth bringing up, especially if whoever is insulting CRWBY is claiming CRWBY is disrespectful to Monty’s memory
I also dislike the Anger towards rewrites lately, I think they should be judged individually and if the Rewrite has flaws those flaws can be critiqued, and if they are actively claiming they fixed the show and did better then crwby then they Can be criticized for doing so
Overall, I do think there are some toxic aspects in regards to Defenders of RWBY lately, And I do think they are worth calling out early on, I have many, MANY criticisms for the RWDE and overall Yes, RWBY criticism has gone crazy for years and it gets far too much Crap. I just think The way some fans defend the show is flawed for many reasons and Wanted to talk about it in detail. I think people shouldn’t be, as dismissive about certain things, I think people should actually read and Analyze some of the arguments people Make….I have, I just don’t think many of them hold up under Actual Critical Scrutiny and such.
When it gets to the point where disabled fans are LECTURED by abled fans for critiquing the disabled rep in the show doesn’t help matters.
Although I don’t think Hbomberguy was a good example to use here, given that he gaslighted one of his friends when she came forward about being abused until she was convinced that the abuse didn’t happen. Just pick out someone who stopped watching the show when it stopped bringing them joy instead of a spiteful man child who constantly trash talked Monty when he was alive and used his memory as a bludgeon after his death.
But back to the main point, I honestly agree that the FNDM is TOO aggressive in rebuffing criticism, to the point that I’ve seen some folks say one thing (“It would be bad writing to turn Penny human and/or kill her off”), then do a 180 when the show itself did the thing they said would be bad (“What a wonderful way to conclude her arc!”), and then pretend that they never said the first thing.
fictional character discourse would be more fun if we all internalized the fact that characters are narrative tools, not people. once we have that basic fact down, we can start talking about what story the author is trying to tell using these characters, whether they’re successful, whether the story itself is successful and by what means we are measuring success—which are all really fun and interesting things to discuss! but we simply cannot get to that point unless we first accept that fictional characters simply do not have thoughts, feelings, opinions, or any agency on their own. a fictional character has more in common with the fictional chair theyre sitting on than with a real person
I don’t play Magic: the Gathering. I remember liking the art though from back in the 90’s when I was little. Apparently, the collectable card game is still popular and has been taken over by SJWs. Now said SJWs are trying to end the career of one of the most famous artists, Teresa Nielsen, who has worked on the game for decades, just because she liked some conservative tweets and Twitter SJWs found out about it. You can read more about it here:
Making it even more absurd, Teresa is a lesbian and has been married to the same woman for 25 years. She was a Mormon who was given a really hard time about coming out and was completely ostracized from her community over it as she explained in her letter addressing the “controversy.”
I’m sure a lot of people can relate to that experience and know how much it sucks. Yet, the fact she lived through that wasn’t enough for SJWs nor was her letter. The the fact that she liked tweets by Fox News, Hannity, James O'Keefe, Alex Jones, etc. was enough for these people to demand that she be removed from Magic: the Gathering and have her fantasy art career destroyed. You got that right. It wasn’t for anything she said herself. It was for liking tweets. That’s it. Liking tweets is now apparently enough to end someone’s job and livelihood over.
I just want to remind people that SJWs are not your allies, friends or anything else. They don’t want more rights for LGBT people, which would obviously include the rights of free expression and the ability to form your own thoughts. They want loyal pets and mind slaves to advance their own evangelical religion which is about fraudulent moral grandstanding and attacking, ostracizing, and destroying other people so they can feel high off of how badly the bullied someone else. If you’re a minority and move off the plantation of their ideology, you’re now just as bad as the KKK and need to be burned at the stake. Even apparently watching something as mainstream as Fox News is evidence that you are a fascist as bad as the Nazis to these people now. They are bigots who call other people bigots and revel in the hypocrisy of it all like pigs rolling around in mud.
Never let SJWs into your fandoms either. This is the perfect example. No living person can meet their ever changing standards that keep sliding down the slippery slope. They are in a never ending purity spiral, and like Don Quixote, will invent enemies when they run out of them to attack, even among people who you would assume would be naturally aligned with them. Not only will they drive out most of the long time fans of the fandoms they get into, but they will try to attack and drive out the people who created the fandom in the first place like Teresa Nielsen. The only thing you should do when SJWs start trying to exert political correctness on your hobbies is to tell them no and drive them out instead. It’s the only way to protect your fandom. Many people, sadly, are naive regarding SJWs and what they do and would rather not buck their ultra liberal orthodoxy because of the moral hectoring. Then they act surprised when their fandoms have been lain to waste despite being warned. Don’t be these people.
Addressed more eloquently here, but I find it grimly humorous that tumblr–the website as a whole–yells and begs for diverse stories told by diverse creators, and then when they get them, treat them as less than nothing: as someone inviting suffering.
They don’t want a story unless it talks about being LGBTA+ the right way. They don’t want a story unless it talks about race the right way. They don’t want a story unless it talks about being mentally ill the rightway.
If you imply there’s more than one way to be and address all of these, you are Bad. Your experiences are invalid and your work is shit and you should die, you hate the communities you’re part of you are terrible we don’t want your stories.
But omg, where are all the diverse creators at? Why don’t we see more of them? We need them! I’d support them! uwu
Thiiiiiis. Thisthisthis. THIS PRECISELY.
It’s a funny self-eating cycle of paradoxes, isn’t it? By its very nature, hardship–including the kinds of hardship that fundie-SJ puritanism uses as criteria for social standing–forces people to adapt creatively, ad hoc, in whatever ways they can, often without the benefit of a script or an existing, known set of best practices. Lack of resources begets a huge variety of approaches as people reinvent the wheel a zillion different ways just to get by. And part of the nature of hardship is also that a lot of those strategies will suck, have less-than-ideal side effects, be effective at solving a problem but wreak havoc in some other area that’s off your radar screen, take a complex and ambivalent stance towards whatever’s causing the problem, and generally be messy as fuck.
In other words, whatever life experience makes you qualify to check off an SJ tickybox also multiplies your chances of being highly inconvenient to whoever’s treating it as a single, unified tickybox with PROTECT AT ALL COSTS within the lines and PROBLEMATIC GARBAGE outside them.
(Well, unless you’re able/willing to exploit the fuck out of online-SJ’s inversion of stigma into the only legitimate source of authority, leverage your tickybox status, and shout down your detractors with “I think you will find that it is you who are problematic!” Which is itself an adaptive coping strategy–sometimes an appropriate one, often the only effective one to avoid being eaten alive in a subculture gone viciously dysfunctional, but always one that risks taking on the shape of the problems that created it. Messy as fuck.)
Anyway, I suspect that thinking of diversity in terms of how many different boxes you can tick off is directly, causally linked to the fundie-SJ suppression–even hatred–of diversity of experiences within those tickyboxes. Because the tickybox approach to representation is tokenism, and if you only get one token representing a group–one person, one experience, standing in for the whole thing–it leads straight into the construction of a “textbook” narrative which has to be perfect. A perfect distillation of The [X] Experience, which of course can’t exist. But once the textbook version is out there, other experiences tend to be viewed as imperfect–as problematic–and their messiness is tantamount to a slanderous claim about the entire group.
Or in terms of stereotypes: anything, anything, no matter how true it is to many people’s lives, no matter whether it’s insulting or complimentary, can become a noxious stereotype. It’s not about whether it’s true for some people, it’s about whether it’s treated as The Truth and generalized onto a whole category of people, crowding out or invalidating other narratives. This is why fandom’s approach to Problematic Tropes drives me nuts: most of the time, the trend is what’s ‘problematic’–the omnipresence, the way it’s used or not used, what that implies in the aggregate–and the individual instances are a far more mixed bag. Some of them exist out of laziness and failure to consider other possibilities, some of them are trying to generalize onto a whole group and say “this is what [x] is like,” a lot of them are merely saying “this is a thing that happens and what [x] can sometimes be like.” (And the really fun ones are going “but if [wildly creative and improbable intersection of circumstances], I bet [x] could play out in [weird and unexpected but totally plausible way].”) If some woman happens to fit a sexist stereotype, it doesn’t mean her existence or stereotypical behavior is sexist–hell, if enough women do something, it will become a sexist stereotype sooner or later.
I am talking in vague terms like [x] here because there are SO MANY TICKYBOXES that are subject to puritan-SJ bullshit–which ones I have personal cause to be pissed off about is kind of beside the point. But oh, man, can I just say? There is a special place in hell for fandom morality police who make a big show of decrying the culture of shame and silence surrounding sexual violence, then turn around and spew jaw-droppingly caustic bile at women who create noncon fanfiction/fanart–categorically, regardless of approach, any inclusion of the subject matter whatsoever, with occasional magnanimous exceptions for didactic textbook treatments of recovery–calling them enablers, apologists, propagandists, pinning responsibility for getting other people assaulted on them through the enormity of their contribution to rape culture. (Via… marginal and deeply non-normative depictions of rape that pay far more attention to the victim’s POV and hold a funhouse mirror up to the anxieties of living under rape culture? Okay, that sounds fake but… okay.) And then they go on to demand that those implausible, inconvenient noncon fans who’ve been raped themselves parade their trauma in front of a bloodthirsty audience for judgement on whether it’s “enough” to write off their unacceptable behavior as the maladjusted coping mechanism of someone who’s too damaged to know better, or whether they’re articulate and unrepentant enough need a stern lecture on how they’re monsters whose abuse has turned them into their abusers. Or whether they’re just lying about being raped to keep Good People from objecting to their sick fantasies.
….but oh, what a tragic injustice that the amorphous beast called rape culture has made the entire subject so taboo that survivors are ashamed and afraid to talk about their experiences. Dear followers, please join me in working ourselves up into a lather of righteous fury about what the devilthe unenlightened heathens the BAD PEOPLE WHO ARE BAD UNLIKE US have wrought, or you’re probably one of Them and should unfollow me and go sit in the corner and think on your sins.
That’s the version of SJ fundamentalism I find the most unspeakably revolting–the reductio ad absurdum of puritan hypocrisy–but it’s pretty widespread for the blowback against “diverse” creators of “problematic” works to be orders of magnitude more intense than against clueless majorities. Sure, we’re easier to push around–we care, deeply, and there are usually well-oiled mechanisms in place to silence us–but I think it’s more than that. We’re traitors; we should know better. It’s betrayal. That stereotype-threat anxiety, the fear that we’re using our privileged (ha!) position of credibility to peddle a less-than-ideal take on the subject, that someone whose experience is messy and imperfect will win the game of trump cards and become the token representative of the group and there’ll be no room for anyone else’s stories.
Gosh. How the fuck do you think that would feel?
*slow clap*
It often happens that our real-life experiences fit the same image that our self-declared advocates are trying to dismantle. “Where’s the diversity?”—try under the rug.
