Consider the following:

a fandomgoer’s fannish consumption & creative tastes are not enough information for you to judge their moral character

queeranarchism:

disassociationstations:

largishcat:

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

Some one explain this to me like I’m five

I’ll try:

The way we talk about characters in stories would be better if we really understood that characters are just tools that writers use to tell a story.

Once we understand that, we can start talking about how the character is used to tell the story, about whether we think it’s an interested story, and about what makes something an interesting story to us.

Which are all really fun and interesting things to talk about.

But we can not do that unless we accept that characters are not people. They do not have thoughts. They do not have opinions. They do not make decisions. They only exist as tools to tell the story.

Other tools in a story are things like a chair in a story where people sit, or a palace in a fairy tale, or the sun in a story about a hot dessert. A character is like that chair, that palace and that sun: only a tool to tell the story.

A character is not like a real person. A real person can be ‘good’ or bad’ (or both) because they do good or bad things (or both), a character can only be a useful tool or a not useful tool to tell a story.

So when we hear something like “I like this character”, what we should hear is “I like this tool because it is an interesting tool to tell an interesting story”, we should not hear “I like this person and approve of their actions and would do similar actions”.

i’m here for the discussion, not the discourse (a manifesto)

In my FAQ I mention that ‘despite running a blog that talks a lot about anti-shipping, I try to ignore anti-shippers.’

Of course, I don’t actually ignore anti-shippers. I read their posts regularly and think about what they mean, and why they’re saying it, and who planted the rhetorical seeds condoning their behavior. But I try to not get into arguments with anti-shippers.

There’s a lot of reasons for my reluctance to argue with members of a community I frequently analyze. Most importantly: anti-shipping rhetoric is intolerant*. But another reason I avoid arguing with anti-shippers is because they discourage and shut down nuanced discourse on complicated topics. When any attempt to engage in a less than black&white discussion of fraught topics such as taboo sexual fantasies in fictional works is buried in an avalanche of disgust, no meaningful discussion can occur.

What I’m advocating for these days is less ‘anything goes, absolutely no limits, full stop’ and more … well. what the rest of this post gets into.

Here’s my FreetoFic manifesto, aka: why I run this blog:

• Mainly:I believe nuance is everything. 

Hardly anything is black&white ‘bad’ or ‘good’, ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’. For example: in moving to huge aggregate social media sites, fandom became easier to locate and adult/dark fandom content easier to access on accident. Realistically, we can’t just censor all adult/upsetting content: so how do we keep underage minors/anyone who doesn’t want to see this stuff from seeing it? What is the responsibility of the creator vs the consumer? Sites like tumblr and twitter make it hard to address things in nuanced ways, so I’m trying my best to discourage simplified groupthink and encourage nuanced, independent thought on complicated & fraught subjects.

• I prefer accurate education on potentially dangerous things to censorship of the thing. 

Censorship doesn’t made hated things go away; it just pushes it into hiding. Pretending upsetting things don’t exist by forbidding people from writing or talking about them doesn’t actually make the upsetting thing stop existing. I advocate letting ppl talk about these things via fiction if they want while increasing education on the reality of the thing, so even inaccurate, bad fiction doesn’t trick ppl into thinking the fictional version is realistic.

• I think reality and fiction have a complicated relationship that can’t be reduced to ‘fiction does not affect reality’ or ‘fiction affects reality’. 

I use this blog to examine the actual relationship of fiction and reality.

• I think fandom and activism have been conflated, to the detriment of both. 

When fandom/fanworks are ‘supposed’ to be activist, it stifles creativity and hurts ppl who consume fanworks while thinking they’re all activist educational material when they’re not. I try to fight this conflation.

• Words have definitions and they matter.

people who defined themselves as ‘anti-[ship]’ had begun to use words like ‘pedophilia’, ‘children’, ‘child porn’, etc in wildly expansive ways, which has been used to justify accusing people who ship what they hate of being sexual perverts and child molesters. It upsets and tires me out, so I use this blog to address the hyperbolic rhetoric.

• I’ve noticed a lot of abusive, cultlike behavioral patterns and intellectual dishonesty among people who argue fandom should be censored according to their tastes/beliefs. 

It makes me worry because (1) I’ve noticed that these behaviors are spreading, even to some people making counterarguments, and (2) the dishonesty and misdirection irt how to identify dangerous people in fandom is literally making it easier for abusers to hide. I do my best to point out the abuses and untruths perpetuated in the name of ‘anti-pedophilia/incest/abuse’ rhetoric - and to address that predatory people are on all ‘sides’ in fandom, advocating for whatever their chosen prey advocates for - to protect people from false flagging.

• I am increasingly aware of a connection betweeen fandom policing rhetoric and anti-kink/anti-porn rhetoric, which are SWERF arguments.

I want to draw attention to nonintersectional radfem influence in fandom for those who don’t want to be influenced by them.

• I want to remind people who are targeted for harassment campaigns by people policing fandom that they are being abused, and no matter what they said or created that triggered the attack, it does not justify the treatment they are receiving.

.

• I want to remind people that it’s okay to imagine and examine potentially harmful/dangerous concepts. 

It doesn’t make you a bad person & doesn’t mean you’re doomed to act on your imagination in reality. Fandom policing seems to have made a lot of ppl scared of themselves, and I try to dismantle that.

• fandom is a microcosm that echoes the social climate it’s swimming in. 

For example: as authoritarian thinking has swept through America / the western world, so it has swept through English speaking fandom. Sociologically speaking, fandom is a great place to observe comparatively low-stakes behavioral patterns. I write about what I notice here.

• Finally:I love fandom.

and I want everyone - even fandom policers - to find fandom a happy place to be instead of an upsetting place. I don’t know how we get there, but I figure talking about it is the first step.

—

‘discourse’, in the academic sense, is an ongoing (& ideally intersectional) dialogue dedicated to defining, debating, expanding, and exploring complicated, often-fraught topics. This is deeply valuable!

But colloquially, ‘discourse’ means ‘ongoing public argument in an open forum.’ Modern social media is designed to encourage it - and nothing keeps the argument going like limiting context and nuance. Intolerant groups thrive in environments like these.

I’m not here to participate in the colloquial ‘discourse’. I’m here for something deeper (and kinder.)

*intolerant rhetoric dehumanizes and scapegoats a group of people, then advocates for committing acts of violence - physical, mental, or institutional - against them.  As a person who calls for tolerance of opposing ideals, I’m obligated to ignore and shut down intolerance. (This is the Paradox of Tolerance.)

satans-tiddies:

You know, this isn’t the thing that fucks me up the most about BL/“yaoi”/fujoshi discourse, but it’s high up there so I’m going to say it.

It took me my whole lifetime to accept the fact that I’m a feminine guy. Every time I was laughed at for being girly, nonviolent, called a sissy, bitch, or worse, it hurt like hell. And when I realized I was attracted to boys, that was when I started to question whether I was a real man. It felt like a stab to the gut.

I was there, little teenage me, reading BL, because I couldn’t connect with anything else I knew of. Straight romance didn’t do anything for me. I watched Brokeback Mountain and liked it, but I couldn’t relate to almost any part of it. Gei Comi (“bara”) wasn’t my taste back then — I wanted to see boys who looked a bit like me, not big hunky adults with facial hair! So I fell back to BL.

And you people on here complain about “straight girls squeeing and saying ‘my sinful gay babies!!!’” — guess what, I was around when you actually DID see fangirls say this type of thing. I was there consuming BL and slash by the truckful, ignoring the occasional homophobic comments from the author/uploader. I saw all the hate every other corner of fandom threw at BL fans, and you know what.

None of that hate was because they had homophobic attitudes.

It was purely because “yaoi is for stupid girls”, and they were “ruining the source material with their dirty gay hands”.

If girls touched anything that was “meant for boys”, including male characters themselves, it was “dirtied”, “ruined”. (Sounds familiar?)

And the boys who liked BL? Who preferred a romantic manga about androgynous guys slowly falling in love, with cherry blossoms being swept by the wind in the background, rather than just watching gay porn featuring masculine men? We weren’t “real men”.

If you thought there isn’t a fuckton of toxic masculinity in the gay male community, boy do I have news for you. Feminine, camp, flamboyant men, they all “made gays look bad”. Because of us, cishet people wouldn’t accept gay men as “real men”, so there were attempts to exclude us to protect the reputation of the unoffensive, masculine macho gays.

Obviously, it didn’t work, but damn if it didn’t make me and guys like me feel horrible that even other gay guys hated us.

---

It took me a long time to accept myself. Little mid-to-late-teens me, with light hypogonadism that stunted my growth and made me look very feminine. Before I started taking hormones per my endocrinologist’s advice, I barely had appetite to eat decently. I only lost my baby cheeks and started gaining muscle mass a year or so into hormone treatment.

Me, still flaming gay.

As I grew up, came out, and made queer friends, I became less and less dependent on BL for self-esteem and entertainment. But BL fans were slowly being more accepted in animanga fandom (or at least, people made peace with the fact that we weren’t going anywhere). Same for slash shippers in western fandoms. I was so happy to see all the M/M content. I was so happy to see a space where girls could share their passion (including erotica) and support each other.

When they learned that a gay guy liked the same things as them, they were ecstatic. They never shamed me for sharing their “girly” interests. I had serious conversations with them when they said insensitive or ignorant things, but it was becoming less and less necessary to do so. Fans were becoming progressively more conscious of queer issues.

And now.

---

Now,

“Yaoi is for cishet girls.”

“You must be lying about being a gay man. You’re obviously a straight girl.”

“Nasty fujoshits.”

“If you have more m/m than m/f or f/f ships, you’re fetishizing mlm.” 

Good fucking lord.

It’s so transparent. You feel so self-righteous expressing hate for women (plenty of whom are queer, but yeah, straight women too!) having interests, and god forbid, sometimes sexual interests(gasp!).

You dress it up as “concern for MLM” in the hopes that people will sympathize with your campaign to shame and harass women, men and gender non-conforming folk for daring to like content “not meant for them”, just like 2ch and 4chan dudebros in the mid-2000’s.

It makes me sick to the stomach.

Don’t pretend this is about homophobia. You don’t go after the exact same content if it’s made by “real men” featuring masculine macho “real men”.

You’ve heard of seme/uke tropes? Get ready for aggressive tops and “bottom bitches”!
“Fetishizing Asian men”? Well, good thing that gay dudes have rice queens, and on the other end of the spectrum, “no fats, femmes or asians”.
Transphobic themes? Some men consider “sh*male” or “tr*nny” to be porn categories! But neither anti-fujoshi nor transphobic gay men will talk about trans men — they’re “not real men”, after all, just “straight women invading gay spaces”.

And let’s not get into the rape, abuse, incest, racism, sexism, violence, and plethora of other problematic things that cis gay men portray in gei comi, original fic and fanfic — it puts dark BL and fic written by anyone else to shame.

But it’s okay, because it’s “real men” creating and consuming it, right?

---

Look, I get it. You want to seem like you’re doing good and fighting for queer men. I’ll hazard you even were fujoshi/fudanshi before and are ashamed of how you acted back then.

But all that you’re doing is misusing terms of a language you don’t know, from a culture you’re not part of and fandoms you don’t participate in, speaking over gay men and Asian fans, othering Asian people, and fostering an environment in which harassment of innocent fans is encouraged and marginalized people are used as scapegoats.

I feel for the trans guys, who go to fandoms to escape the hate and transphobia from the world, only to be misgendered and send hateful messages in the spaces they wanted to have fun in. Who are already accused of “faking it”, of not being “real men”, by bigots in the real world, and now have to face the same horrible things in fandom.

I feel for the queer girls, some of whom may not even be attracted to men, but to whom BL and/or slash means a lot. Who often don’t even have female characters to relate to, much less queer female characters, or simply can’t relate to them very well for a variety of complex reasons. They seek refuge in fandom, only to be misoriented, called “cishet”, having their identity erased to push an agenda.

And I feel for the straight, cis girls, who put genuine effort into educating themselves on queer issues, for whom fandom was a welcoming space where they could finally share their interests and be themselves, be allowed to have sexual interests… and now are being called perverts, deviants, and being told that they taint everything they touch.

And as much as it pisses me off to be called “basically a cishet girl”, it doesn’t get to me. At present, I’m secure in the knowledge that I am a real man, despite being gay, despite being feminine, despite liking BL. I am comfortable with myself and my identity.

But little teenage me would have been devastated.

Hey, anti-fujoshi? I don’t need your faux-activism. Kindly take your misogyny, efemmiphobia, transphobia and identity politics and leave us alone. Or —OR! Listen to the people you’re supposedly trying to protect.

Sincerely,

a gay, Asian, fem, queer as fuck fudanshi.

idealistic-realism00:

mikkeneko:

freedom-of-fanfic:

there’s so much to tell about this subject that I might add more to some points on subsequent posts.

everything in the below post is from observation and reading about the experiences of others on web 2.0. please feel free to add anything you feel is necessary.

(socmed = social media in shorthand.)

What even is web 2.0?

Web 1.0: web model where dotcoms generated their own content and presented it to users for free, depending on advertisers for their income. ‘social media’ mostly made up of mailing lists and forums on these content-oriented sites. collapsed because ad revenue wasn’t sufficient to support site maintainance costs.

Web 2.0: web model where dotcoms create a free space for users to generate their own content, depending on advertisers for their income. these sites define social media today. likely to collapse because ad revenue still isn’t sufficient to support site maintainance costs (even after shucking the cost of paying content creators).

(if you want to read more about how ad revenue is the social media Achilles Heel, check this link out: Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure.)

What makes Web 2.0 social media so much worse than web 1.0?

mostly: web 2.0 socmed exacerbates the pre-existing conflict of interest between users and site owners: site owners need ads. Users want to avoid ads.

With web 1.0, users were attracted by site-created content that had to appeal to them: users were the clients and advertisers were the sponsors. (Forum interaction was a side offering. sites dedicated to user interaction were small, scattered, and supported by banner ads.)

Web 2.0 socmed strips users of client status entirely; the content we generate (for free!) and our eyes/eyes we attract to the site are products the site owner sells to the actual site client: advertisers.

early web 2.0 social media sites (livejournal, myspace) used hybridization to pay site costs - users could buy paid accounts or extra blog perks. they also had privacy/limited-spread sharing functions and closed communities, which still ‘exist’ but with limited capabilities on current socmed sites.  privacy, it seems, isn’t very profitable.

now web 2.0 is geared towards spreading content as far as possible - and further if you’ll choke up a little cash to grease the algorithms. ;)

–

Web 1.0 had its fair share of problems. Web 2.0 generated new ones:

• following people instead of joining communities based on interests has negative emotional and social implications
  
• social media sites benefit from knocking down privacy walls. Maximizing content spread and minimizing blocking/blacklisting capabilities benefits advertisers - the true clients of websites.
  
• social media sites benefit from eroding online anonymity. they track user site interaction, searches, and more to precisely target their ads at your interests (unless you deliberately turn it off). tracking data can endanger anonymity and make doxxing easier.
  
• social media sites benefit from conflict. Conflict generates user response much more effectively than harmony/peace. More user interaction means more eyes on ads, increasing ad space value.
• social media sites are therefore deincentivized to address abuse reports, increase moderation, improve blacklisting tools, or offer privacy options. and there’s nothing you can do about it because
  
• there’s nowhere different to go. it’s difficult to compete with existing social media sites as a startup. to draw social media users, a newcomer must offer something bigger, better, and equally free*, and offering any of this on startup capital is … unlikely, at best.
  

*‘I’d move if they just had privacy features!’ the joke is: any successful socmed site that starts with privacy features will have a hard time keeping them down the road under the present profit model. they will be forced to cater to their advertisers if they want to keep afloat.

–

how does the structure of web 2.0 socmed harm fandom?

in aggregate: it forces fandom[$], a diverse space where people go to indulge niche interests and specific tastes, into overexposure to outsiders and to one another, and exacerbates the situation by removing all semi-private interaction spaces, all moderation tools, all content-limiting tools, and all abuse protection.

The result is that fandom on web 2.0 - tumblr in particular - is overrun with widespread misinformation, black & white reasoning obliterating nuanced debates, mob rule and shame culture as substitutes for moderation features, fear of dissent and oversensitivity to disagreement, hatedoms and anti- communities, and large/expanding pockets of extremist echo chambers that have no reality check to protect those trapped inside.

to be more specific:

• moderated communities were replaced by following unmoderated tags, directly leading to and encouraging the creation of hate spaces - ‘don’t tag your hate’ leads to negativity-specific tags that could themselves be followed, forming a foundation for anti- communities to develop from
  
• no privacy, minimal blacklisting options, poor blocking tools, lack of oversight, lack of meaningful consequences for TOS violations = ‘fandom police’/vigilanteism (attempts to assert authority over others without actually having that authority) - some people react to the inability to get away from content that they hate by trying to force that content to stop existing entirely. without actual moderating authority, they accomplish this by social pressure, intimidation, and shame tactics.
• the people-following structure of web 2.0 is fundamentally incompatible with web 2.0 reshare functions and search engines. content posted on a personal blog is rarely intended to stand alone because people who follow the blog presumably see all the blog’s content in an ongoing stream. but reshare functions and search results separate the content from the context in which is was presented, causing misunderstandings and strife. (for site owners, the strife is a feature, not a bug.)
• following people instead of joining communities based on a shared interest creates social stress - following/unfollowing an individual has more social & emotional implications than joining/leaving interest communities
  
• Unmoderated conflict is polarizing. Web 2.0 specializes in causing unmoderated conflict. - exacerbated by the depersonalizing effect of not being able to see or hear other users, conflict in the unmoderated spaces on web 2.0 social media quickly devolves into extremism and nastiness. web 2.0 socmed structure even eggs the conflict on: people are more likely to interact with content that makes them angry (’someone is wrong on the internet!’ effect), which shares the content with more users, which makes them angry, so they interact (and on, and on).
  
• The extreme antagonism generated by web 2.0 socmed creates echo chambers - the aggregate effect of unmoderated conflict is that the most extreme and polarizing content gets spread around the most. polarizing content doesn’t tend to convince people to change their minds, but rather entrenches them further in their ideas and undermines the credit of opposing points of view. it also increases sensitivity to dissent and drives people closer to those who share their opinions, creating echo chambers of agreement.
  
• reacting to content that enrages you increases the chances of encountering it again because algorithms - social media site algorithms are generally designed to bring users more of the content they interact with the most because they want more site interaction to happen. if you interact with posts that make you mad, you’ll get more recs related to content that makes you mad.
  
• everyone has an opinion to share and everyone’s opinion has to be reshared: reactionary blogging as a group solidarity exercise. when something notable happens and everybody has to share their reaction on social media, the reaction itself becomes an emotional and social experience, sometimes overwhelming and damaging.
  
• when the reaction is righteous anger that everyone can reaffirm in one another, it creates an addictive emotional high. one way to reproduce it? find more enraging content to be mad about (and web 2.0 is happy to bring it to you).
• It’s easy to spread misinformation (and hard to correct it) - no modern social media site offers ways to edit content and have that edit affect all reshares. Corrections can only reach fractions of the original audience of a misleading viral post.
  
• web 2.0 social media discourages leaving the site with new content notifications and by lacking tools that keep your ‘place’ on your dash, deincentivizing verification checks before resharing content.
• web 2.0’s viral qualities + misinformation machine + rage as a social bonding experience = shame culture and fear of being ‘next’ (tumblr bonus: no time stamps and everything you post is eternal) - when offending content is spread virally, each individual reaction may have proportion to the original offense, but the combined response is overwhelming and punishing. many people feel the right to have their anger heard and felt by the offender, resulting in a dogpile effect. fear of inciting this kind of widespread negative reaction depresses creativity and the willingness to take risks with shared content or fanworks.
  
• absolute democracy of information & misinformation plus too much available information leads to uncertainty of who/what is trustworthy and encourages equating feelings to facts - social media doesn’t give content increased spread and weight based on its truthfulness or the credibility of the OP. misinformation is as likely to spread as truth, and the sheer amount of available information - conflicting or not - on the web is overwhelming. when fact-checking, it’s hard to know who to trust, who is twisting the facts, or who is simply looking at the same fact from a different viewpoint. information moves so fast it’s hard to know what ‘fact’ will be debunked by new information tomorrow. People give up; they decide the truth is unknowable, or they go with what ‘feels’ right, out of sheer exhaustion.
  
• information fatigue caused by web 2.0 makes black & white thinking look attractive - conflict and polarization and partisanship erodes communication to the point that opposing points of view no longer even use language the same way, much less can reach a compromise. the wildly different reference points for looking at the same issue makes it difficult to even know what the middle ground is. from an outside point of view this makes everyone on both sides seem untrustworthy and distances the objective truth from everyone even more.
  
• it’s easy to radicalize people who are looking for someone or something to trust/are tired of being uncertain - information fatigue leads to people just wanting to be told what to think. who’s good and who’s bad? whose fault is this? and don’t worry - lots of people are ready to jump in and tell you what to think and who to blame.
  
• everyone is only 2 seconds away from being doxxed: our anonymity on the net is paper-thin thanks to web 2.0 - before facebook encouraged using our real names and the gradual aggregation of most people to a few major socmed sites, anonymity was easier to maintain. now we have long internet histories with consistent usernames and sites that track everything we do to improve ad targeting. anyone with minimal hacking knowledge could doxx the large majority of socmed users. 
• and all it takes is one poorly-worded, virally spread tweet to send the whole of twitter after you with pitchforks.

[$]using the vld discourse survey as a reference, fandom is (probably) largely neurodivergent, largely queer/lesbian/gay/bi/pan/not straight, has many non-cis and/or afab members, and around 20% are abuse survivors/victims. fandom is a space we made for ourselves to cater to the interests we have in common with each other but mainstream society doesn’t often acknowledge. 

I agree with this and I’d like to add another angle to consideration, and that is the conflation of private and public space.

I doubt Tumblr is the only one to do this but it’s the one I’m most familiar with. Here’s the thing: Tumblr is set up in such a way as to make it feel like your space. You can customize your blog style, make things feel nice and homey, fill your dash with the things you love. It feels like your room, your space, your place. 

But it’s also a broadcast platform. Broadcast  platform. Every post you make on Tumblr is being screamed out to the whole world, potentially, with no control or lockdown options available. Aside from a “post privately” option that is so broken as to be functionally nonexistent (things you post ‘privately’ aren’t even visible to you  unless you know which hoops to jump through) everything is public, all the time.

Your blog feels like your space, your room, but at the same time it is also a public space with the “if you don’t want it out there you shouldn’t post it public on the internet” caveat applied. It’s hard to remember that when you feel like you’re minding your own business. “I have a right to post what I want on my own blog,” I’ve often grumbled, and I stand by that. But then your post is on everybody else’s dash, and that’s a problem because – 

The dash/feed is even worse for the contradiction of a public and a private space. In one sense, it’s everybody else’s  private spaces, their own personal rant grounds, but it’s being streamed into your  space. When something disagreeable turns up in your dash it feels like an intrusion, a violation of your privacy. It’s not just a “see, disagree, move on,” it makes you mad. “Why is there untagged character hate on my feed?” I’ve fumed, in violation of all common sense.

Retags and reblogs exist in the same dual public/private space. If someone makes a post, that post is theirs, on their dash. But if someone else reblogs it, they can add tags and comments that, too, are on their own personal blogs. And yet at the same time the original poster can see the comments and retags. Once again the “I can post what I want on my own blog” comes into crossfire with “How dare you say that on my  post?” 

The moment you made it public it was no longer only your post. But it feels,  again, like a violation.

Reasonable debate is almost impossible on a broadcast-only platform. Even if the two initial parties are able to set aside their emotions to talk reasonably, with every reblog the argument is exposed to a whole new set of people who all then have their own reactions. Discussion on tumblr is like two people trying to have a philosophical debate on opposite sides of a crowded room by megaphone; the people in the middle will swiftly start to get angry just at the noise.

Back in the __Journal days there wasn’t this conflation. Personal blogs were private and communities were public. There was a clear distinction which was which when you were posting it, with some nuance available – setting to public on a personal journal set a tone of “This is my space and my opinion, but I invite discussion” while setting to protected on a community signals “I wish to share this with others, but only those of my choosing.”

Remembering habits from the Journal days I’m usually, generally, pretty good at keeping a clear sense of what’s appropriate to post in a public space and what’s not. What I don’t want broadcast, I largely just don’t post, and say only to my friends in private. But.  

But as shown by the examples above, even I’m not immune to the sense of outrage and intrusion when a public post is made in my private feed or a private reblog is make on my public post. And what of people who never had that past experience and have no mental schemas to keep the two apart at all? And as the march of web 2.0 socmed squeezes onwards, other forms of social communion get increasingly crowded out – that which I don’t say on my broadcast blog, I can be left feeling lonely and discontent as I find I have nowhere and no-one to express it to at all.

I would just like to share some perspective as a Black fen in fandom.  I’ve been around since web 1.0 and made the transition like so many fen from less active platforms like Livejournal to sites like Tumblr.  There is a clear breakdown in communication, even a sort of environment of fear where saying the “wrong thing” could result in what we used to more widely recognise was cyber-bullying.  In the fandoms I have participated in, there is a clear enforcement of group-think where a certain number of the most widely followed bloggers in the fandom set the tone and determine the acceptable discourse to be agreed upon “or else.”  Often this is wrapped up in shame tactics that depend on a very shallow bit of lip-service to social justice and it’s that latter point that make it all the more insidious.

See, OP theorised that much of fandom is made up of “largely neurodivergent, largely queer/lesbian/gay/bi/pan/not straight, has many non-cis and/or afab members, and around 20% are abuse survivors/victims” but one of the issues is that fandom remains a microcosm often reflecting wider social attitudes and mores.  Too often, the fen who are deciding what the popular discourse/group-think for a fandom is are largely also white fen.  Many of these, as I said, show themselves as all too willing to pay lip-service to social discourse as far as it serves the purpose of propping up their ships, favorite characters, or fandom discourse and keeping any detractors in line.  When you’re a fan of colour in a fandom, unless the fandom happens to be very specific to your culture, the majority voice in your fandom are white fen (often women) who are quite eager to discuss the issue of privilege so long as the focus is on where they have less privilege (whether they are lgbt, neurodivergent, etc.).  

My experience as a Black and queer woman in fandom has always been the same in each fandom.  White fen in the web 2.0 appropriate tools that activists of colour have developed for a specific purposes in this age of social media and they have taken them and turned them into a means to strengthen their positions of hierarchical privilege in a fandom.  So, a fandom becomes toxic, and what is blamed is “cancel culture” and “sjws” and the finger is pointed in such a way that it becomes easier for fandom to dismiss the concerns of fen of colour.  As an example, try to bring up the issue of people suddenly insisting that an interracial ship shouldn’t happen because one of the few characters of colour on the show relates to the lead white character more like a “sibling” and it would feel like incest.  Suddenly, then the issue of social justice discourse in fandom is divisive and the fens of colour trying to draw attention to the racial microaggression of always claiming that any interracial pairings seem more like siblings than romantic makes the fandom more toxic and, of course, it’s all the fault of the angry fens of colour who are to blame and why couldn’t we just keep silent and let them enjoy the show and why do we have to hate their ships, and so on.

The idea of fens organizing and using their influence is nothing new.  Fens of colour are particularly creative when it comes to not only looking for existing representation in our fandoms but actively pushing for more and better representation.  We were doing it long before the web 2.0 but now I’m seeing a trend of many of our tactics being taken and used for unrelated fandom wank and twisted into politics of shaming for the sake of enforcing group-think and then turning back around and invalidating legitimate issues raised by fen of colour by lumping any outspoken fen of colour in with the same group of antis and cyber-bullies who send death threats to people anonymously because: “Omg! You ship x and I ship a rival ship to x and I’ve come up with all the ways your ship is toxic and mine is the most woke because that makes my ship feel like the better one!”  To be clear, cancelling began in the Black community as a way for us to organize in solidarity and enforce some kind of consequences for racial intolerance by drawing more attention to the issue as a community.  It was a tool to force accountability and a means for us to use our collective voices to raise awareness, to fight for more and better representation, to use our power as consumers to boycott content that whitewashes us or portrays us offensively, to close ranks against the sort of racism online that people of colour have so long had to deal with on our own so that we can provide each other with a support network, etc.  It wasn’t ever meant to be a tool for white fen to single a person out for cyber-bullying because “their fav is problematic.”

It’s very frustrating to see our discourse and our activism taken and turned against us because once more we’re being shut out of fandom spaces and it is so very insidious.  I cannot properly be critical of certain content in fandom without coming up against accusations of being “one of those sjw antis who make fandoms toxic” or avoid the nervous knee jerk responses of fen who are afraid my criticism of certain issues means that I want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and I expect people to cancel the entire fandom and stop enjoying it so they defend everything about it dogmatically.  It often feels as if there is no longer room for thoughtful critique or discussion in fandom.  The fandom is either unproblematic or problematic and God forbid you’re the one to point out any issue because then you come under fire for trying to cancel a fandom and take it away from everyone, so people are quick to shut you down at any cost.

Sometimes a critique is just an invitation for thoughtful conversation. Sometimes it is an open ended question about how it could have been handled better. Sometimes it is a call to action because it needs to be handled better.  As things are, between the blatant lip-service and abuses of social justice to reinforce certain group-think in fandom, the anxiety resulting from the new culture of shaming and cyber-bullying, the knee-jerk responses that often lead to fen defending things in fandom they should not be (including attitudes of racism because they fear acknowledging even that much will mean giving up their fandom for good) being a fen of colour in the web 2.0 age is too often an exercise in frustration and an experience of open hostility where you find yourself being subject to scapegoating, tone policing, and invalidation.  If you’re not prepared to be quiet and nod along with the majority then you can expect a dissenting opinion or unpopular observation will single you out for harassment (either blatantly racist or thinly veiled) and accusations because an ability for discernment, for nuanced thinking has been all but abandoned but for some niche corners of social media and the rare individual who can swim against the current tides of fandom. 

In another reblog somebody else pointed out that my initial post said nothing about race in fandom, and I had reblogged to agree and apologize. As I’ve said before and as @idealistic-realism00 says here: [English-speaking] fandom is a microcosm of [Western, mainly American] culture. It’s *impossible* to have a discussion about fandom culture evolution across platforms without discussing its overwhelming whiteness, or the impact of - and impact *on* - fans of color (here, specifically on Black fen).

I really appreciate @idealistic-realism00 taking the time to add such detailed, nuanced description of their experience to this post.