LGBTmazight: an update across fandoms

Apparently, our original post has now spread to the Kpop side of Twitter, which is not something we predicted, and we received screenshots of tweets regarding that.

Len has spent years being active in and writing for various Kpop fandoms, going by “figure8”, “8figures”, “8loops”, “junmotions”, and other similar nicknames. The Old Guard was and still is a very small fandom, and it’s very obvious that she took advantage of a space that she could easily colonize. She played up her Moroccan ancestry a couple of months after the movie came out, changed her Tumblr URL, pretended she was fully Moroccan for a couple of weeks, and wrote “informative” posts regarding North African culture.

As we have already mentioned, this pattern of pretending to be a certain ethnicity was not exclusive to The Old Guard. She has been doing it for years, and one of the examples can be found in the main post, namely in the screenshot where she said that her grandmother was of Romani origins so she could lecture people on Dick Grayson’s racial identity. She did a very similar thing in the Seventeen fandom, and possibly others.

On Twitter, she said in late 2013 and for some time after that that at least part of the Greek side of her family is native of Smyrna, a Greek city that is now part of Turkey and was destroyed in 1922 at the end of the Greco-Turkish War. She was adamant that Smyrna is not Turkish, and found it offensive when people would refer to it as such, displaying a great amount of pride specifically in the fact that she was descendant of the survivors of the Great Fire of Smyrna (in other words, always made sure that her Twitter followers knew that she is of Greek origins):

(link)

This is why it was a surprise, initially, to discover that on CuriousCat (a second profile called “eightfigures” that she has deleted little after the post was posted) she would define herself as being from “Asia Minor”. That definition is often understood to mean “Turkey”, and no one who is so proud of being Greek and so against Turkey would normally define themselves as such. It took a moment to realize she was using that convoluted definition because she was in various Kpop fandoms at the time, and was doing the same thing she would do in TOG months later: using fine-print definitions to gain power and school others in how to properly write the culture of the fandom she was interested in. In this case, she tried to pass of her supposed “Anatolian Greek” ancestry she also occasionally deployed to say that she was not “white on both sides” as her being Asian.

For someone who claims to have spent the past years being loud and proud of her North African, specifically Riffian Moroccan Amazigh origins, it sure is weird that she was suddenly shy about this side of her identity to the point of hiding it completely.

However, she didn’t stop there. Not only did she use brownface in TOG, but she appears to have used digital yellowface in the Kpop fandom, as these tweets we have received mention. Because of their length, they are under the cut.

@darkskvnbeauty x @hhourglass @fiftharray ( On Instagram)