Tag: fandom wank

Come on. I just want to look at gifs of how fucking gay those two are, I do not need “also if you compare this ship to *unacceptable ship of the day* you’re wrong because this ship is Pure and Good and that ship is in every way reprehensible and everyone who ships it should die”

Just because it’s f/f doesn’t mean it’s automatically pure and unproblematic yall. Like. It’s objectively kinda codependent and fucked up, then with a dash of one-sided possessiveness thrown in. You can still ship it but ffs don’t pretend it’s superior because everything is sunshine and rainbows.

lierdumoa:

nawpitynopenope:

fluffycakesistainted:

savioto:

funereal-disease:

funereal-disease:

Do fanfic discoursers ever…read anything other than fanfiction? Like, I feel like it’s only possible to be this horrified by problematic fanworks if you’ve never actually read a book.

Then again, if your only engagement with media is Marvel movies, that explains a lot about why you’d be so blindsided by anything that smacks of moral complexity.

Do they know what’s in books? Or do they sincerely think that all media has the emotional and thematic depth of a PG-13 blockbuster franchise, and naughty fandom pervs are introducing previously unprecedented elements to this uniformly tepid world?

“They don’t know what’s in books” is definitely a possibility; after all, most books don’t come with trigger warnings that you can read at a glance to condemn the contents. The major books I see complained about are ones popular enough that “everyone knows” what’s in them even if you haven’t read it (e.g. Lolita, 50 Shades of Grey). “They only watch Marvel movies” is also a possibility; apparently there are people in the MCU fandom complaining about the Spider-Man/Deadpool ship because “Spidey is 17!!!”… in the movies. In the comics, he’s been an adult for a while now, and Deadpool canonically has a crush on him. Like, some of them seem genuinely unaware that the Marvel fandom has existed since long before the movies came out. Anyway…

But I also think a lot of the time it’s less, “They don’t consume other media” and more “They hold fanfic to a different standard.” For some reason, there’s this perception that all fanfic is some kind of wish fulfillment porn and anything you put in fanfic is something you want for real. Hence arguments like “shipping something bad is romanticizing it by definition because ‘shipping’ means you think that’s an ideal relationship” (even though many shippers have said repeatedly that’s not how we use the term) or “those silly women who ship Reylo, don’t they know that a guy like that wouldn’t make a good boyfriend in real life??” Whereas when the same elements appear in a professionally-published work, people seem more willing to believe it’s just part of the story and not necessarily the author’s fantasy of an ideal relationship.

The weird part is that “fanfiction is all shallow wish fulfillment porn” is something I’m used to hearing from normies who have never read a fanfiction and just think of it as some weird hobby. They don’t realize that many fanfic authors put a lot of work into writing and editing their fics, and think of it as basically, “it’s like daydreaming except you write it down.” But hearing this from people who are ostensibly in fandom and read fanfic is bizarre.

Maybe this is due to fanfic becoming more mainstream, so more new folks are coming in, who have a different approach to fandom and can’t/don’t want to understand that older folks who have been around for a while don’t engage with it the same way. For example, one argument I’ve seen against darkfic is along the lines of, “But the world has so much bad stuff in it already, why would you want to write about bad things happening?” which suggests that wish fulfillment really is the purpose of fanfiction for those people, and they don’t get that that’s not true for all of us. That might also explain complaints about “problematic” fanfics for franchises where the original work is just as bad (or worse); to them, the purpose of fanfiction is to “fix” canon so keeping the “bad” elements of canon must mean the author approves of them.

“‘They hold fanfic to a different standard.’ …there’s this perception that all fanfic is some kind of wish fulfillment porn and anything you put in fanfic is something you want for real.”

“But hearing this from people who are ostensibly in fandom and read fanfic is bizarre.”

“Maybe this is due to fanfic becoming more mainstream, so more new folks are coming in, who have a different approach to fandom and can’t/don’t want to understand that older folks who have been around for a while don’t engage with it the same way.”

“to them, the purpose of fanfiction is to ‘fix’ canon so keeping the ‘bad’ elements of canon must mean the author approves of them.”

^ These are the points that stood out the most for me. 

Lets not forget that the authors of fic are public, easy to access, generally women, and basically its socially acceptable to scold or yell at women doing free labor while published authors don’t have to deal with your shit. 

I would love to know if these same people go scream at authors on nifty.org for their rapefics? Do you write them essays about how wrong they are? No. You don’t. Because they are men for the most part. 

But policing women’s thoughts and virtue and tone is somehow ok? 

I find it particularly bizarre when people accuse fanfiction of “normalizing” things. Fanfic itself is not viewed as particularly normal in mainstream culture. Maybe Kinkporn Georg, who lives in a cave and reads 10,000 tentacle daddy kink rape fic a day, has a warped conception of what is sexually ethical in real world relationships, but he is an outlier. Most fanfic readers do not rely entirely upon fanfiction, of all things, to inform their worldview.

i get so grumpy when i see posts that are like “it costs $0.00 to stop shipping x ship(s)”

ya know what else costs $0.00? minding your own fucking business and blocking tags you don’t like. then no one has to be grumpy.

weconqueratdawn:

ardwynna:

I wonder where the break happened that such wide swaths of younger fans don’t grasp fandom things that used to be unspoken understandings. That fic readers are expected to know fiction from reality,  that views expressed in fic are not necessarily those of the author, that the labels, tags and warnings on various kinkfics are also the indication that they were created for titillation and not much more, please use responsibly as per all pornography. The ‘problem’ isn’t that so-called ‘problematic’ fic exists but that some of the audience is being stupid, irresponsible, at worst criminal, at best not old enough to be in the audience to begin with. And that’s on the consumer, not the author who told you via labels, tags, ratings, warnings and venues what their fic was about and what it was for.

I can’t stress enough how important this post is

obinopekenobi:

18th century Discourse: Women, especially young ones, are ruled by affect and lack critical thinking. Their minds are so soft and their sense of self so permeable that they identify with any fictional characters they come across, and must be shielded from sexual and morally ambiguous tales. The fictional stories they consume will effect the way they view the world (in particular their ideals of romantic relationships), which will effect the way they raise their offspring, which will in the long run poison the minds of our children and destroy our nation. We must socially regulate women’s tastes, making sure that all women are shamed into consuming only what we deem pure and morally didactic fiction.

Tumblr antis 2018: same

There’s massive drama about the new Star Wars movie on my dash and I’m just. Sitting here in my prequel trash pile writing trash fic about my garbage fire son and having so much more fun than any of you can y’all please chill a bit???

Fandom as a whole is not “minor-friendly”

harriet-spy:

Nor should it be.

If you want to live in a “Children of the Corn”-style bubble of innocence and purity, well, to me, that’s a startling approach to adolescence, but every generation’s got to find its own way to reject the one before, so: do as you will.  But you can’t bring the bubble to the party, kids.  Fandom, established media-style fandom, was by and for adults before some of your parents were born now.  You don’t get to show up and demand that everyone suddenly change their ways because you’re a minor and you want to enjoy the benefits of adult creative activity without the bits that make you uncomfortable.  If you think you’re old enough to be roaming the Internet unsupervised, then you also think you’re old enough to be working out your limits by experience, like everybody else, like I did when I was underage and lying about it online.  If you’re not old enough to be roaming the Internet unsupervised and you’re doing it anyway, then that’s on your parents, not on fandom.

If you were only reading fic rated G on AO3, if you had the various safe modes on other media enabled, you would be encountering very little disturbing material, anyway (at least in the crude way people tend to define “disturbing” these days; some of the most frankly horrifying art I have ever engaged with would have been rated PG at most under present systems, but none of that kind of work ever seems to draw your protests).  In the end, what you really want is to be able to seek out the edges of your little world, but be able to blame other people when you don’t like what you find.  Sorry.  Adolescence is when you get to stop expecting others to pad your world for you and start experiencing the actual consequences of the risks you take, including feeling appalled and revolted at what other people think and feel.

Now, ironically, fandom’s actually a fairly good place for such risk-taking, as, for the most part, you control whether you engage and you can choose the level of your engagement.   You can leave a site, blacklist something, stop reading an author, walk away from your computer.  Are there actual people (as opposed to works of art, which cannot engage with you unless you engage with them) who will take advantage of you in fandom?  Of course there are.  Unfortunately, such people are everywhere.  They will be there however “innocent” and “wholesome” the environment appears to be, superficially.  That’s evil for you.  There are abusers in elementary school.  There are abusers in scout troops.  There are abusers in houses of worship.  Shutting down adult creative activity because you happen to be in the vicinity isn’t going to change any of that.  It may help you avoid some of those icky feelings that you get when you think about sex (and you live in a rape culture, those feelings are actually understandable, even if your coping techniques are terrible), but no one, except maybe your parents, has a moral imperative to help you avoid those.  

In the end, you’re not my kid and you’re not my intended audience.  I’m under no obligation to imagine only healthy, wholesome relationships between people for your benefit.  Until you’re old enough to understand that the world is not exclusively made up of people whose responsibility it is to protect you from your own decisions, yes, you’re too young for established media fandom.  Fandom shouldn’t be “friendly” to you.