mark_asphodel | Oh Shame

"Ideas are not bad. Bad happens in the execution."

I've believed that for fifteen long years now, since landing into BSSM fandom in 1998. I'm starting to wonder if this, like a lot of things that were acceptable in progressive/underground circles in '98, now marks me as a dinosaur.

See, back then-- when simply engaging in fanworks marked one as an outlaw-- a lot of fandom energy was spent on assuring one another that we weren't all deviants who did indeed deserve to be banhammered by society. It was OK for twenty-something het women to get aroused by guys making out. Wanting to see and write porn with technically underaged (in the US, anyway) anime characters didn't automatically make one a pedophile or hebephile or a threat to real flesh-and-blood children. And the biggest one of all was the rape issue. The original fandom heavies wrote oceans of text on rape fantasies and non-con fetishes and how moral it was to write non-con and what it all Meant.

And because fandom skewed older then, the tone was mostly more mature and ultimately pretty supportive, and the consensus leaned toward "No, having a fantasy about being ravished by pirates does not mean you want to be raped and does not mean you deserve to be raped. This is a place where we can explore these problematic things and find outlets for them and that's OK."

Now what I'm hearing a lot of, especially on tumblr, is this:

"I am offended by X. Do not write X, do not draw X, do not reblog or "like" it, because you're a bad person if you support X."

In other words, it's not about the execution. The very idea, the concept, is bad. That "genderswapped" artwork of Disney characters? Bad. Your fanfic written purely to satisfy your genderbend kink? Bad, bad, shame on you for trivializing trans issues in that way. Wait, I thought kink-shaming was the act of a bad fan? I guess that's all so 2008 now.

Or, even deeper, things springboarding off the fanwork itself are bad and liking them also makes you bad. If you "like" a cute picture of a plus-sized female Mountie cuddling a bear cub, you're contributing to oppression because the fanartist who popularized the Miss Officer and Mr. Truffles meme does bad things (OK, I can see that), white cops are agents of oppression (I thought we were supposed to support unconventional heroines?), and the real-life bear was euthanized (seems to be false).

Welp, again-- I may be a fandom relic, but I'm not going to be on-board with the idea that certain concepts are so inherently bad that no execution can make them acceptable, and the deep-diving to find something "problematic" about every aspect of every work is getting tiresome.

It's not going to drive me out of fandom, though. What it is going to do, what it's currently making me do, is to tune out of the dialogue about some of these issues. I've only got so much time and so much money and if enough about a particular cause and its adherents strike me as batshit, hostile, and against my own ideals for a civil society, I'm out of there.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

In the case of that tumblr artist - the problem is less that she's making the art, and more that she's profiting off it. (Claims are around that the "Ms Officer" has approved of it, but the only proof of this is a very new tumblr.) I don't really see much difference between "I don't want to support this art thing because the person profiting is an asshole" vs, say, "I'm boycotting the Ender's Game movie because OSC is an asshole and I don't want him to get any more money." Which is my stance; the artist in question is an asshole and I think it's unethical to profit off a real, living person's image without consent.

I do think the "don't do ___" is a minority, against "go ahead and do ___ but please tag it". And haven't batty self-righteous minorities always existed in fandom? I distinctly remember a crowd of BSSM fandom shaming people for saying the Starlights were ever male-bodied even in the anime, because "you're tainting Naoko's feminist vision!!"

I understand reservations about this lemonteaflower person profiting off of the whole MOaMT thing. I'm certainly not sending them money. However, the attacks I saw this weekend-- and there were many of them-- on the real-life "Miss Officer" for specifically being white and a law enforcement officer were bullshit. Same goes for the ones trying to make people feel ashamed of themselves because the bear cub in the photo may (or may not) have been euthanized. And you know they were going around because you yourself reblogged one of these before deleting it off your tumblr. And that wasn't even one of the worst things I read that morning.

"And haven't batty self-righteous minorities always existed in fandom?"

I am personally seeing more and more of "don't do X, X is inherently offensive." And there's the thing with tumblr-- when you see one of these gems circulating and it has thousands of likes, but very little commentary, it's awfully hard to figure out who and what this mob of 10,000+ people is actually in favor of. If it's the OP, then to hell with all of them. If they're reblogging the OP with "cry moar" tags or "liking" rebuttals, then it's just a shame tumblr doesn't work in a way that you can't actually gauge the temperature of a thousand-person mob.

Since I can't tell, I have increasingly less desire to interact with any of these people, much less cater to any of their soapbox issues, and it absolutely KILLS my desire to consume any of the media in question. There are TV shows about drug dealers and serial killers that have more inviting fandoms than the ones involving Disney princesses and cartoon bears, and that says something very weird about us all.

I reblogged one specifically because it had links to specific posts the artist had made that were pretty clearly not someone I or probably most of my followers would want to support. Even if I'm not on board with "white law enforcement = bad", I didn't feel like it was appropriate to start wank or take the same links and post them as my own findings. Ultimately it was my discomfort with the law enforcement thing that led me to delete it sometime last night.

I still see far more controversy over so-called "SJWs" than actual "SJW" posts. For every one "hey this is bad to trans people", there are at least 10 "omG TUMBLR so OFFENDED we can't have anything nice!!" Which was the case I found for Frozen (thankfully after I saw it) -- maybe like 3 posts actually calling it racist and a pile more mocking people for thinking that way. One of my friends did an untagged personal post that boiled down to "I'm not interested in seeing this and I wish there were more black princesses" and got slammed for being an oversensitive, impossible-to-please social justice warrior.

I think it's just really misleading to act like it's just one site being like this, or like it originated on tumblr. It was the LJ crowd raising the torches because of a slur used in a fic, right? And how many people have just shut down journals because they got linked somewhere or quoted saying something gross? Comment trains can be as hard to follow as reblog ones -- if I see a post with a pile of replies, from a glance, how am I going to know if it's all "yes, you go OP!" or "OP, get your head out of your ass"? Not without uncollapsing every single thread on the post, which takes about as much time as scrolling through notes to get a feel for what's going on.

What I found for Frozen specifically was a post by someone claiming to be from the Sami people who was saying that the Sami didn't appreciate having their cause taken up in a patronizing way by the internet commentariat and they also claimed that the Sami leadership was really quite pleased about Frozen and no one in their community was up in arms about cultural appropriation. This post was followed by a string of abuse that-- if the OP was telling the truth-- demonstrated their point about misplaced social justice in an ample fashion. But hey, I don't know if they were telling the truth. I don't know on whose behalf I ought to be outraged, or if I should be outraged on anyone's behalf, and quite honestly... eh, fuck it.

I think it's just really misleading to act like it's just one site being like this, or like it originated on tumblr

Outrage culture is all over the place, but the way things function on tumblr (which really came into its own circa 2012) demonstrates better than anywhere other social media platform I frequent the shift in tone, the same way that the current state of Salon magazine demonstrates progressive outrage journalism more than any other publication I read (I don't read the HuffPo).

Comment trains can be as hard to follow as reblog ones -- if I see a post with a pile of replies, from a glance, how am I going to know if it's all "yes, you go OP!" or "OP, get your head out of your ass"?

Aside from the LiveFyre system used by Slate magazine, which posts comments in reverse order even within a subthread, I've not seen any commenting platform that's as difficult to untangle as a tumblr "discussion." Not even LJ.

(LiveFyre is a hunk of junk. I found it unusable, which pained me greatly, since it meant I had to bid adieu to Topless Robot and all of the lovely malcontents I befriended there.)

I distinctly remember a crowd of BSSM fandom shaming people for saying the Starlights were ever male-bodied even in the anime

*chuckles* Yeah, in those days, the batshitters had their own little web sites, so, if people agreed with them, they could go there, and, if they tried to evangelize elsewhere, the moderatorship of whatever place they attempted to infiltrate was quick to blow their asses the Hell out of the forum / archive / etc. (Speaking from a fair bit of experience.)

Ehh, I saw plenty of it on the pretty big sites I trawled. Whether that was moderators failing or just allowing people to talk, I can't say, but it was hardly contained to one weird corner of the internet. There were also super widespread rings like HentaiFREE proudly proclaiming that the site displaying their button was morally pure and above all those anime boobs (and simultaneously condemning every site that had even "artistic nudity" - there was a kerfuffle over whether or not showing the original senshi transformations with the lines would make a site "hentai".) Different self-righteousness? Sure. But it was absolutely there.

Well, Hentai Free lost that battle in the long run. (If there's one lesson to take away from life, it's that Porn Always Wins ™.) It could just be that I'm remembering things a bit differently, or that I was one of the better-policed areas of my pre-Fire Emblem fandoms, but I had no issues putting the hammer down on that bullshit when it intruded into the areas for which I was responsible (and for which my friends at the time were responsible).

Well, Hentai Free lost that battle in the long run.

Well, I think that's the actually the key point here. The front line of the cultural battle shifted in a way that right now doesn't really make sense to me.

Oh Shame

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