Oh Shame

[mark_asphodel]

"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.  

Comments

[samuraiter]

I am 100% in agreement, of course. Something's gone wrong with fandom's mentality; a militant wing has taken control of the discourse and distorted it into something that is causing long-term damage to our survivability. I would venture to call this militant wing a hate group, but, even in that, I feel compelled to at least partially censor myself, which I suppose speaks to the depth of the problem.

On the up side (if there is one), this infection hasn't penetrated anime / manga and video game fandom quite as deeply as it has the traditional Western fandoms, presumably because Japanese creators could honestly not give a flying fuck what these people think.

[raphiael]

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!!"

[shimizu_hitomi]

I like to imagine tumblr is mostly populated by ages 12-20 to spare myself a lot of headache. Because honestly that's what a lot of it feels like to me: cliquey high school posturing, and oddly disconnected from the real world. And sure, there was a lot of this happening on LJ too (and elsewhere), but never on such a wide yet centralized scale. Eh centralized is probably not the right word I guess. Maybe the better way to describe it is unapologetically public? (though Tumblr actually feels a lot like an exploded version of ontd to me)

But yeah my one biggest turnoff re: the social justice scene on Tumblr has consistently been that aggressive focus on easy targets/surface symptoms (which I do think has a place in the conversation but is ultimately kinda unproductive, especially when it starts to dominate the conversation). Plus the way Tumblr works is that it's more or less established this bizarre universe of "this is bad" vs "this good" with not much room for gray area in between (even when individual posts are nuanced, that kind of thing tends to get buried in the overall hive mind). At best it's offputting, and at worst it's kind of a dangerous mentality...

Every time I get tempted to use tumblr properly instead of as a lurker, I'm reminded of how much I hate fannish culture there and would rather just not deal. I don't even know how to articulate it -- like you said, at some point it just kind of stopped making sense. On one hand, I sometimes suspect this is just the natural evolution of stuff like anon memes/ontd/fandom_wank... but that doesn't make it any less weird.

[blankspectrum]

While I don't think tumblr is the only place this happens or where it began... I do think it's undeniably a hotbed of this sort of outrage-seeking attitude. Given the close proximity of fandom and SJ communities on tumblr, there's bound to be some crossover of ideas between the two, and I agree that the issues your brought up seem to have become more prominent within fandom over the last few years (which is when the shift to tumblr happened for many fandoms). So I think it's worth examining how fandoms are influenced by ideas that the SJ side of tumblr tends to espouse.

The thing that bothers me the most is what you said about "deep-diving to find something 'problematic' about every aspect of every work" - which I think is something that happens frequently outside of fandom matters as well. This is just a small case in point out of many, but weeks ago I saw a photoset of several famous disabled people that at first appeared to be celebrating their accomplishments... until I got to the text part and read the OP's weird rant about how well-wishes were offensive to the disabled community and how we should all stop saying such an obviously awful thing. (And of course it had thousands upon thousands of notes.) I probably don't need to explain why this particular instance rubbed me the wrong way, but while I do think that microaggressions toward disadvantaged groups shouldn't be discounted, there's a difference between small transgressions that actually hurt people and manufactured outrage, and all too often I feel that the things tumblr gets up in arms about fall into the latter category. As a person who falls into some of those disadvantaged groups, I have more than enough real issues to handle already. Making up things to get angry over just for the sake of being angry does not help.

As far as fandom goes, as a consumer of media I don't really want to see it in that context either. Does attacking Rule 63 fanart really help the trans community? Does attacking fanart of a female mountie hugging a bear really help people affected by police oppression? It all just gets exhausting after a while, plus I think it actually detracts from the causes they attempt to support. When so much anger is being wasted on these non-issues, how does that reflect upon the larger picture? After a while I think it almost starts to feel secondary to the outrage.

Tuning out this sort of thing is more or less what I've done too. I've become very careful about who I follow on tumblr. The fandomers I do follow are people I've either known prior to tumblr, or who have proven to be reasonable over time, and my love/hate relationship with tumblr has improved considerably since I got more strict about who I follow. :P But mostly I just feel similarly to what you said - I only have so much energy to expend on feeling outraged about various injustices, and I'm not willing to waste it on nonsense that I consider inconsequential at best (and manufactured at worst).

[amielleon]

This mentality definitely has a community on tumblr. However, I also think it's only one part of tumblr, and not in any way a majority. On my own dashboard, I know to expect posts of that nature from five people, out of the thirty-some I follow who have an active presence. Several others dabble in "social justice" type topics, but they're not of the "STOP LIKING MS OFFICER AND MR TRUFFLES" variety and more of the "DID YOU KNOW females are more likely to get time in the slammer for murder!?" variety.

The extent of their presence in various fandom varies substantially as well. Some fandoms, you're constantly tripping over them. But the base of FE SJWs, if you could call them that, are incredibly marginal.

Meanwhile, when I see a militant "defending someone's right to be a bigoted asshole is not being principled, it is enabling oppression" something something post, I roll my eyes in annoyance and grumble about it to my other friends. Some of whom I met through tumblr.

(I do think that posts of that nature demonstrate in the most flagrant way that there's a sense of blind moral superiority bubbling beneath the movement.)

[damoselceles]

This is a very interesting post, because I've definitely noticed this trend on tumblr especially with Frozen and that genderbend Disney. Appearantly I was reading into the latter wrong, because when I found the art I was all "huh, the princesses as dudes, I wonder what all their male counterparts would look like as women?" Then I found one cross post complaining that little girl's female character focused media was under attack because fangirls were injecting it with the gays (I admit I've got no knowledge if the recent Disney genderbend trend started as guy-on-guy fantasy or what, I just liked the redesigns). And with those additional issues you mentioned, it's left me terribly confused if I ever want to reblog anything to do with it again.

Wait, I thought kink-shaming was the act of a bad fan? I guess that's all so 2008 now.
I wonder if this is why the larger fandom themed Kink-memes are anonymous and have multiple modposts of how "wank over _" isn't allowed. I mean you can get some really really weird prompts and kinks that you might be embarrassed to immortalize on the interweb as being yours, but it likely started because of flamewars over choices in content. Possibly which devolved into the shaming and personal attacks.

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.
This is definitely how I've reacted to it. I joined tumblr to follow art blogs and then, hey cool, fun fandom peeps, but the "REBLOG IF YOU TRULY CARE ABOUT RELEVANT ISSUE/FOR AWARENESS" I just can't take seriously. Most times they're preaching to the choir, and when not, the maintenance crew will be contrary just on principal of being preached at...if there's even preaching with authority.

I'm out of university and working, but the "finding problematic" issues within everything reminds me of all the Literary Theory classes I went through where if one had enough quotes or sources to apply, all problems could stick to a text. Critical analysis is an important skill, but if you're tearing everything apart for that express purpose alone you won't enjoy anything or accomplish anything constructive. I really don't know if tumblr can reach a level of affecting social justice, but they certainly can come off as obnoxious.

[the_geek]

The suppression of ideas on the stance of being "inherently bad" is something I see a lot of. Conflicts with canon, being similar to certain reviled fanfiction *cough*AllHillofSwordswannabes*cough*, the aforementioned connections to sensitive topics (though the parts of the internet that I lurk on are generally a bit less strict in that sense), all of these are grounds on which people stall others' ideas.

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.

Usually the way I see it is less like "This is horrible and nobody can do it well!" and more like "You wanna do that? Good luck making it work."

I usually see this kind of thing in regard to in-fandom memes. I recall a particular discussion of a meme that shows a particular character in a rather negative light. This character has both dedicated haters and extreme over-the-top zealous fans, and those fans (among whom I count myself one of the less zealous members) didn't take too well to this meme. It took me and one of the admins to calm them down. It's pretty crazy.

*Please excuse my fragmented sentences.

[kyusil]

I wonder sometimes if or, more accurately, when these subcultures on Tumblr and other places will reach outrage burnout. I would imagine there's only so long you can go getting angry over things before you just don't have the energy for it anymore. And to clarify, I certainly believe there is a difference between feeling righteous indignation over social issues, particularly if you're affected or involved, and what you and others are describing (surface issues, non-issues, manufactured issues, etc.). One is sustainable and constructive; the other is ultimately about ego-boosting ("I have to prove that I care about this too!") and competition ("can I find something wrong that someone else hasn't brought up yet?").

I'm mainly bothered by how the social dynamics play out in these situations. You will not change somebody's behavior or line of thought by bullying. Period. Even if they do change, it will be out of social fear rather than an authentic change of heart, which could then lead to a fear of even engaging with any of these issues (or worse, people).

Again, it's not all or even most of Tumblr, but I'm sure I don't have to explain that it doesn't take much negative energy to outweigh the positive. One fight or rant will stick with you longer than 100 pictures of corgis or cats-- that's just the way we work, unfortunately.