the deeper i get into fandom the weirder it is to me that Whedon-style nerdboys ever managed to convince people that the True Fans™ are the people who memorize shit and lord their knowledge over other people. like ok you know the exact dimensions of Batman’s cave penny. sure. but did you survive the HP ship wars? do you know how to customize your Ao3 search to filter out all the creepy and/or poorly tagged shit in the massive fandoms? have you ever gotten in a fight over SuperWhoLock? would you last more than ten seconds on _coal or FFA? have you felt the burning pain in your fingers as you scramble to bang out just a hundred more words before the exchange deadline comes down? can you do research to make your in-universe artifacts accurate? can you vid? can you edit .gifs? can you sew costumes and do makeup? like yeah ok you love Jace Beleren enough to know his backstory and all his stats but i’m sorry did you personally stitch what looks like over two hundred eyelets onto your stockings so you could cosplay Liliana Vess? fake geek girls my ass. get back to me when you can do something with the worlds you love other than memorize them.
get back to me when you can do something with the worlds you love other than memorize them.
I felt like OP’s tags had to be included here, because it’s not memorizing lore that makes someone’s involvement in fandom bad, it’s specifically using it to gatekeep others’ fandom experiences.
There’s no wrong way to be a fan! Which means it’s not cool to tell people they’re not being a fan the right way.
it is responsible, and the mark of a good audience, to critique problematic elements in the media we consume. For example, I love gothic lit – but a lot of it is incredibly sexist and racist. I can acknowledge that these elements are a problem and objectionable while still enjoying the piece for a multitude of other reasons. I can also say to myself “if I ever want to write my own gothic lit, here are some elements I should avoid.” Or, if I do want to tackle the issues of racism and sexism in my future gothic lit, then I can say “I will avoid writing in a way which implicitly or explicitly condones racism or sexism, while still emulating the praiseworthy elements of gothic lit.”
In essence, the fundamentals of intersectional media critique is this: “these elements of [x media] are problematic and we should rethink them in future media, both as audiences and as creators.” By rethinking these elements, I don’t mean utterly doing away with them, but rethinking how we approach them and how we read them.
We enter purity culture when our statement moves from “these elements of [x media] are problematic and we should rethink them in future media, both as audiences and as creators,” and becomes “these elements of [x media] are problematic and therefore anyone who consumes or creates [x media] is condoning everything about [x media].” The implication here is that, if one wants to be a good person, one should avoid [x media], because to do otherwise is to either implicitly or explicitly condone everything in [x media]. This type of attitude towards media is very common in conservative religious circles.
It moves fully into censorship when the statement moves from “these elements of [x media] are problematic and therefore anyone who consumes or creates [x media] is condoning everything about [x media]” and becomes “these elements of [x media] are problematic and therefore nobody can consume or create [x media] for any reason.” Those who break this rule are seen as evil and shunned. This type of attitude toward media is very common in fundamentalist circles.
A culture of censorship is the natural outcome of purity culture, because purity culture by its very nature seeks purity until even the whisper of objectionable content, in any context, is suppressed.
I would wager a guess that many people who are against anti culture are familiar with either these toxic conservative or fundamentalist attitudes towards media, and we are alarmed by their striking similarity with antis’ attitudes towards media. It is most certainly why I am against anti culture.
(this post is mostly an expansion on the twitter thread i did a while back, which addressed this question: why is fanfiction often blamed for harming young people in fandom? (please also read the spinoff additions to the end of the thread, which start here.)
this post deliberately does not address whether or not fandom should have particular social expectations/obligations. I think these ethical questions are complicated and require nuanced address, particularly because of how social media works these days. rather, this is my offered explanation for why fanworks are the chosen scapegoat for the cumulative harm of systemic social problems.)
Note this post is US-centric because the scapegoating of fanworks seems to come primarily from Americans in English-speaking fandom spaces.
I think that because fanworks have long been slapped with warnings of dark content (abuse, noncon/dubcon, etc) it’s difficult for me to believe they directly play a major part in setting young people up for abusive situations irl … for the most part. It’s less the fanworks themselves and more the environment in which fanworks have been presented over the last 5-8 years.
In my opinion, the sad irony is that fanworks only have the potential to cause direct harm by causing people to believe their contents are models for safe sex/relationships/etc because of the expectation that fandom is a space for education.
fanworks have been around for ages, but currently they are:
in a post 9/11 social environment where the unknown/unfamiliar is feared, critical thinking is discouraged, safety is prioritized over freedom, and censorship is treated as protection,
(but information is available in unchecked quantities that outstrips the individual’s ability to process it);
available in a viral-sharing environment featuring nigh-infinite freedom/no moderating authority and on a highly-networked, easily-searched internet;
where young people are often more expert at navigation than their guardians, and thus easily able to access content that isn’t age-appropriate/safe for them
(but being young people, they often think they’re ready for that content);
furthermore, content that is not only inappropriate for their age/maturity, but also on topics that they will never/have never received a proper, thorough education on
(because schools have their hands tied by religiously-motivated regulations and guardians have abdicated responsibility for sex ed and lack acceptance for non-straight/non-cis identities);
targeted marketing has encouraged and exacerbated existing stratification by income, age, gender, and sexual orientation; and
increasing social awareness is constantly creating tension between social tradition and social advancement, putting incredible stress on anyone who represents ‘advancement’.
On that last point, my thread and this post are particularly concerned with (perceived) women, who are burdened by both traditional and ‘progressive’ social roles:*
women are traditionally seen as child caretakers, educators, and burdened with upholding social morality as the heart of homemaking. all perceived women have to deal with this social expectation.
as agents of social advancement, those perceived as women are still burdened with educating the ignorant and being ‘good examples’, as their mistakes will be magnified as evidence that tradition is better.
*these problems are SUPER magnified by being non-white. (and I didn’t even get into the sexual expectations.)
As an isolated space, fandom – with majority women and/or afab participation – did a pretty good job of shaking off the social expectation that perceived women are educators and caretakers. but when fandom gained visibility by the move to tumblr and Google trawling tumblr content/content going viral + all the social factors above, the ‘(perceived) women as educators’ expectation came back on fandom, and with additional exacerbation:
in a culture focused on purity and prioritizing safety over freedom, disgust & feelings of shame both act like a moral compass & a safety warning. fandom’s judgement-free attitude about nsfw/kinky/horrible-irl content looks like a community of people who condone all these things as ‘safe’, if that’s how you’ve been taught to view the world.
Basically: if the people who are writing/creating this stuff are treating it as nothing to be ashamed of, it must not be dangerous. right?
Combined with the not-unusual adolescent belief that you’re ready for literally anything and know more than most adults, it’s a recipe for disaster.
fanworks often echo aspects of the source material, including aspects that are not healthy: canon romanticization of abusive relationship dynamics, for instance. Fanworks that share canon’s unhealthy features can become a form of reinforcement/seen as tacit approval of existing messages in mass media for fans who don’t have outside education to protect them.
in fact, fanworks are often (deliberately or not) ‘in dialogue’ with the existence of these kinds of harmful cliches. it’s important to view fanworks as what they frequently are: individual reactions/remixes/retakes on things in mass media and real life, created by victims/potential victims of the harm those things can cause. (viral sharing sites often separate these works from this context.)
on fandom tumblr in particular, people are consuming a cominbation of fanworks, fantasies about fictional characters that may or may not be nsfw, educational posts about safe sex / queer/lgbt history / sexual orientiations / gender identity / being a good ally / intersectionalism, and the importance of minority representation in mass media. conflating fanworks with good representation & educational content seems a natural consequence.
within fandom spaces, the expectation is that fans are enlightened on social justice issues. as victims of marginalization, or at least people who are constantly exposed to education on marginalization, we obviously know better than creators of mass media. This contributes to the attitude that fan content should be ‘better’.
Ironically, the content warnings, lack of fan culture shame, and the creators being vulnerable to negative responses together contribute to making fanworks/fan creators unusually visible examples of ‘corrupting’ content to point at and condemn.
between terrible education, a reactionary and conservative background radiation to English-speaking internet culture thanks to the US being a mess, and the fact most people are blind to social constructs that have formed their whole worldview, fanworks are getting a really bad rap.
altogether: fanworks are treated as being on par with mass media, social expectations, and culture norms in terms of the harm they can cause, even though they have comparatively little visibility and are usually created by marginalized people with little relative influence. They are reactions to mass media, social expectations, and culture norms rather than the cause of them.
however, because fanworks are easy to access without supervision, open about the content being potentially harmful, and produced by people who should ‘know better’ or are perceived as caretakers/educators, fanworks get blamed for the cumulative effect of culture/mass media/social norms. And unfortunately, because young people have formed expectations that fanworks will educate them due to those same social norms, the possibility that people will treat fanworks as models for social behavior or comprehensive guidelines to material they lack education on is increased.
–
I can’t hope to propose a comprehensive solution in this post. Taken altogether, fandom is really the tip of a large iceberg of systemic problems: sexist expectations, lack of outside education, and a reactionary cultural environment are the underlying issues.
Anything fandom can do on its own will amount to little more than a band-aid. Antis will never wipe out potentially harmful fanworks, and all the declarations by fandom members that they abdicate responsibility for educating young fandom people won’t make society less expectant of us.
the only things I know we have to do in the long run is keep fighting for real sex ed, keep warning for and flagging adult-oriented fan content, and do our best to respect each other’s taste and comfort levels. (and it would be a lie to say that I expect any of it to be easy.)
In 2k17, a lot of us have pledged to be more cautious about ‘fake news’ posts on Facebook
I propose we extend that concern to fandom
There’s a very low bar on this site (or any site) for people to post whatever tf they want, and a very high incentive to post fake receipts to win arguments
(Or at the least, misleading “receipts” such as “Artist XYZ is a bad person” because they drew a picture of bad things happening to completely fictional characters)
So this year, if you see a callout post:
Look for signs of bias. I have the sneaking suspicion that “XYZ-is-bad.tumblr.com” is not an objective source.
Be wary of unsourced accusations. “Person A is a homophobe!” is a statement, not evidence. Look for original sources. Did Person A post “I hate gay people” on their blog? Or did they draw fanart of an unpopular het pairing?
Look for context. Check out Person A’s blog to see if you have the whole picture. Did Person A pick a fight out of nowhere, or was that viral post made in response to an anon harassing them?
Ask “what real person was hurt”. Writing a fanfic is not the same as committing a crime in real life. If Person B claims that Person A is a real-life “abuser” because they shipped two (100% fictional!) characters, Person B is out of line.
Consider ulterior motives. Did Person A recently open a Patreon and receive a slew of hateful messages about ‘selling out’? Did Person B have an argument about characterization with their co-author and then suddenly “reveal” a list of unsourced accusations? Who stands to gain if someone else is driven out of fandom by angry anons?
Long story short, I don’t believe everyone in fandom is evil – nor that every accusation is unfounded. I do believe that unfortunately, in this modern ‘post-truth’ world, we are all going to have to get much better at fact checking and source validity…both in fandom and in real life.
I love this.
One little thing I find helps with this is to remember:
A thing that makes you feel bad, is not necessarily a thing that is bad.
So, you know, people shipping your NOTP, or having headcanons that contradict yours or writing fic on topics that make you frightened or uncomfortable is actually upsetting. And you can totally be upset about it.
But it doesn’t actually follow, necessarily, that the person upsetting you, is actually doing something wrong. They might be. Its possible. But its more likely you need to add some tags to your blacklist and put it from your mind.
The very first thing to ask yourself when assessing a callout post, IMO, is “what are readers supposed to do with this information?”
If the answer is “go give this asshole a piece of your mind” or “unfollow/block this person, tell all your friends to do the same, and send ‘helpful’ anon messages to anyone who hasn’t gotten the shunning memo yet,” I don’t give a fuck how solid the proof is, you’re being enlisted as a foot soldier in someone else’s grudge wank.
If the answer is “be cautious about trusting this person with your money, personal details, or intimate friendship” or “think twice before giving the benefit of the doubt to any accusations this person makes about others,” it’s time to start looking at whether the receipts hold up. It doesn’t automatically make it credible–in the second case, especially, you’ll have to evaluate accusations and counter-accusations on the merits, because pre-emptively smearing the whistleblower is a time-honored technique of assholes everywhere. But at least the thing you are being asked to do is a valid purpose of the “callout post” format.
FWIW, I think most callout posts–as in, standalone posts addressed to the community at large and meant to discredit the target, as opposed to something said in the course of an argument/discussion or addressed to the target themselves–are grudgewanky bullshit. If the members of Person X’s newest fandom don’t know they’re an asshole with unsavory opinions, believe me, 99 times out of 100 it will become obvious soon enough. But, since it’s impossible to build a community whose trust can never be abused, there are situations where announcements meant to discredit someone in the eyes of the community are warranted. Namely, when someone is abusing fandom’s trust in them to defraud/control/destroy other people, especially if the trust was gained under false pretenses.
Fandom’s not immune to scam artists, charismatic abusers nurturing cults of personality, or assholes who use strings of false identities to fly under the radar long enough to hurt people before their reputation catches up to them. The purpose of a legit callout post should be to build a case for revoking the community’s presumption of trust, thus removing what allows such people to operate. The offenders still get to exist, chat with their friends, make art, write fic, bang out entertaining shitposts that rack up 50,000 notes, whatever–the point isn’t to stop them from doing that. It’s to warn everyone else not to buy them stuff based on a sob story, register for their “convention,” get enamored of their oh-so-true badass exploits, or uncritically believe the smack they talk about people who’ve gotten on their bad side. In the less noxious cases where someone has simply “earned” a reputation as an authority which they’ve been using to shut down others’ opinions, and it turns out their reputation is based on total bullshit, the goal of a legit callout should be to take the argument-from-authority crutch away from them and make them back up their points like the rest of us peons. It’s not that they can’t be right, or that the former scam artist will never deliver on something they accepted money for. It’s that they should have to to disprove a presumption of shenanigans instead of being taken at their word.
Callout posts began to warn newcomers to fandoms about known abusers and predators. Someone shipping your NOTP is not the equivalent to someone who preys on underage fans online or sexually harasses people at conventions.
If someone shipping your NOTP tags, block the tag. If they don’t tag, politely ask them to tag, or block their blog.
The above are the first half of the slides I presented at GeekGirlCon (along with some annotations to explain things I only said out loud 🙂 ) – for the second half, read more below the cut. I’ll also be sharing the slides from the other presenters here, too, as they’re posted!
The gender representation work is part of a longer analysis that I will be posting in full soon!
Beneath the cut are also a few additional slides that I would have presented with a bit more time – several of which address things that came up in the question session.
…And the extra slides:
Are you telling me that there’s three or four times more straight romance labelled as ‘queer’ than lesbian romance?
I wondered if I was the only one picking up on that too. Because really, are you kidding me? Why and how is it even there in the first place?
Ah – okay, this is a place where the slides by themselves (without the accompanying talk I was giving) can apparently lead to confusion. I’m writing a much longer post on this for Tumblr that should be a lot clearer (and more in depth), so stay tuned. 🙂
To clarify, I wasn’t calling F/M queer; it was there as a point of comparison in all cases. The first “queer relationships” slide shows the breakdown of AO3 by every available relationship category (not mutually exclusive, since some stories have multiple tags). I highlighted the queer and potentially queer categories in rainbow colors, and my main point was that there was more queer than straight fic, mostly M/M. That’s partly historical archive reasons and other factors, but my next step was to compare those shipping ratios to the ratios you might naively predict – at least in movie fandoms – from the fact that only ~30% of characters onscreen in the source material are women (I’ll post more on that soon, too), though of course there are also many other factors that influence shipping and what fic gets posted to which archives. I showed that based on canon you might actually predict M/M > F/M > F/F, though not in exactly the numbers on AO3. I also put FFN in as a point of comparison; there is far more F/M on that platform, for various reasons (more soon, too… you may begin to see why I’ve been working on the more complete write-up since May! ;D )
Hope that makes things a bit clearer in the meantime!
Also, responding to the sort of sneering tone I’m detecting towards queee m/f. It’s real, and I write it. Bi/pan/trans and ace characters exist and their m/f relationships are queer. Do I think there’s four times as much of this as there is f/f on AO3, no, and that’s clearly not what Toasty was saying either. She was predicting the ratios of f/f, m/f, and m/m pairings based on canon gender ratios and then comparing them to the actual ratios on AO3. But there’s no neeed to clutch your pearls at the idea that m/f relationships might be counted as queer.
Excellent additional point about queer F/M… I can’t detect that using these particular methods (and it’s definitely not the point I was trying to address in this case )… But it totally exists, and I’m so glad it does (both because I value having a wide variety of stories out there , and because I’ve been involved in a number of queer F/M relationships).
Super interesting stats, and I am so glad to have queer F/M as a term–I hadn’t heard this word before but I really like reading it and am thrilled to have a better way of referring to it!
a year ago
I did a femslash-fans survey for my bachelor thesis. So many of you helped me
and filled out the questionnaire. Again: THANK YOU!
Today I
wanted to share the results with you. There aren’t a lot of studies out there that
research femslash-topics but I do think it’s an important topic. I focused my
study on cyberbullying of femslash-fans and its emotional consequences. I asked
people if they witnessed bullying of other femslash-fans or experienced it on
their own.
Just to be
clear: I only asked about cyberbullying from outside the femslash-community.
This does not mean that everything is “rainbows and unicorn stickers” inside
the community. And I’m also aware that not all femslash-fans are saints, some
cyberbullying goes the other way around too.
And yeah of
course I knew that there is a lot of cyberbullying going on but I was still
shocked to see the results.
Why this is
so problematic: Femslash-fans see their community as their safe-space. A lot of
LGBT+ people need safe-spaces because life outside the internet is sometimes
cruel. So some find a safe-space (like a femslash-community), were they can
speak freely and openly. BUT even in this place they are not always safe.
If you have
further questions, don’t hesitate to ask me 🙂 My bachelor thesis is in German or
else I would publish it for you guys.
Yesterday we put up a tiny poll and took it down after .02 seconds because we realized ONE POLL WOULD NOT BE ENOUGH. So: Take this super tiny, unscientific poll either by responding to this post OR by voting on Twitter, then watch this space for TINY POLL PART 2 coming in a day or two! We’ll post all the results here and on Twitter when they come in…
This has generated SO MANY discussions, it’s delightful.
My initial thought was defining “in” for me was a distinction of *in* versus ~in. I still feel like I’m ~in Harry Potter fandom. But I am *in* Black Sails fandom rn—that is the thing I spend lots of time thinking about. Like…lots of time. Help.
Other people are finding that the tricky part is defining “fandom” on a personal level. One person said they wrote tons of fic for YOI but didn’t think they were in the fandom—but never read or wrote fic for something else but totally felt like they were in *that* fandom.
Some people have tried to gauge by time spent or merchandise purchased or pure “participation,” which like, go with God, folks, this is about self-definition, but for the record, Flourish & I are not placing any sort of gatekeeping parameters around “fandom” or “in fandom”! Just sayin. 🙂
Oh, and for the record, I can be ~in many fandoms at once—essentially the ones I was in in the past, specifically Harry Potter, since that was like 10+ years of my life. But I can only manage being *in* one fandom at a time! I am fandom-monogamous. It makes trying to reread old favorite fic from past fandoms hard—I really need to be *feeling it* actively to connect on an emotional level.
Keep telling us your thoughts (and voting in the poll)!
I appreciate the extra notes @elizabethminkel ! I am usually only *in* one fandom at a time (or none, which was the case for a few years) but am ~in TONS all the time.
In a different sense than how it works for you though I think–I’m obsessively in one fandom right now, in terms of being the most into it, thinking about it, creating content for it, but I still read a wide variety of fic. The impulse to READ ABOUT MY CURRENT OTP/FAV CHARACTER FOR THE FEELS is different than the impulse to read fic bc I want good writing (sometimes even regardless of whether I’ve ever been in a fandom) and just the experience of reading something of a certain length, or something that will make me smile–and I do have both impulses at around the same time.
Question of Smoke 
