A little guilty pleasure I must admit to… I love seeing other people’s apologies. 

Especially when they’re celebrities. You may have guessed this because I have a whole article about celebrity apologies for antiblackness and other racisms and how fans should respond especially when they aren’t of the offended/harmed party. 

One of the things that I find fascinating, but unsurprising when it comes to apologies? How few apologies I’ve gotten over the years.

People have been openly nasty to and about me for talking about racism in fandom from the second I started talking about this stuff — basically a decade at this point. For talking about racism in fandom at any point, but almost always in my own spaces – as in limited reblogs and quote tweets on Tumblr/Twitter, mostly just me talking in my own spaces on my site – I’ve been viciously insulted… at best.

People have wished violent harm upon me and even death a couple of times. I’ve had random people bring up either of my parents to mock me and claim I’m abusive “like them” – and while distressing, let me note that they never get my relationship with either of them correct. I’ve had people make assumptions about the content I create and consume – mainly that I either don’t consume/create anything fun and spicy… or that because I do create/consume fun and spicy things, no one should listen to me about racism in fandom. People have harassed my friends. They’ve harassed people who I work for and actively, publicly have tried to get me fired from Teen Vogue from 2021 when my column began.  Amber Goldsmith publicly tells people she continues to call the cops on me because I was supposedly stalking her… on Reddit, a site i’ve never used/had an account on.

Even when I write it clearly everywhere, these people can’t tell you what I actually write at any level – from my feelings about “dark fic” to why I talk about racism in fandom through shipping/shipper practices, and even what I’m currently doing to a minor character in Jujutsu Kaisen on my side site – but they continue spread lies about my writing, my behavior, and my relationships across the internet and those get taken as facts. 

And I think, in the past decade of people being weird to me about racism in fandom… I’ve gotten less than ten apologies. Most likely no more than five.

(And one of the last apologies I received a year or two ago, the person then went on to hate on me for subtweeting their subtweet of me, where I pointed out that they were, at the time, misrepresenting my stance on kink… something they didn’t actually know anything about. So… I hate counting it because it was clearly not genuine.)

People are supposed to take in new information and then grow from it. No one does that with me. No one ever learns something new or that shows that the negative things they believe about me aren’t true and then… stops believing them.

When people are told (or they realize) that something they believed about me isn’t true or has been represented in the worst possible light, they never apologize and do better. They never go “oh shit, that’s messed up people are doing this, I’ll correct it when I see it and stop spreading it”. 

In fact, what constantly happens is that people get the new information:

• That I support, like, and create “dark fic”
• That people are actively working together to destroy my life for funsies and that they really like racism in fandom
• That I didn’t interact with or know a person claiming i abused/harassed them
• That a term I’ve used isn’t racist and has contextual info behind it
• That someone pretending to be a neutral observer has had a hate on for me for years for something I either don’t know about or is extremely minor
• That people on the anonymous fandom wank successor have been hating on me from day one of my site
• Etc

…

And then they decide that while all of these things “might suck” and will even decry the harassment I get (mostly insisting they don’t condone it even as the regurgitate the lies that get me harassed in the first place)… maybe I deserve it for being annoying, or rude, or mean to people I’ve probably never interacted with in my fannish life.

Maybe I deserve it for “being mean” to Reylo shippers – who were, at one point that I’m accused of “meanness” condoning and supporting people implying John Boyega was a sex pest who made Daisy Ridley uncomfortable just because he dunked on their ship. Maybe, the strangers I’ve never spoken to who are hating on me know me better than friends and followers who’ve known me for years.

Everything they learn gets shifted and twisted so it can contribute to why I must deserve this harassment across multiple years and social media platforms. 

And none of these people course correct.

Earlier this year… I remember seeing this random dude I’ve likely never interacted with before, blow_me_a_kis on Twitter, reply to our mutual TJ on some “stitch is an assimilationist queer anti who just wants to oppress worse perverts” nonsense earlier after TJ jokingly tweeted about how wild it was to see people call me a puritan when they (TJ) could see what I tweeted on extra priv about my Jujutsu Kaisen obsession Junpei. Like Kis is a full stranger rolling up to “well actually antis like freaky stuff too and stitch is an anti who hates kinkier people and made me be an anti when i was a child even though we are roughly the same age” our shared mutual.

Even after finding out from TJ that I didn’t believe what he insisted I believed – like he decided to talk about my thoughts on “dark content” and kink without knowing about my Teen Vogue article or the actual fannish content I write – he never apologized. He never passed along an apology through our mutual or deleted his tweets. (The screenshots here.)

And that’s someone who publicly made – and probably continues to make – several false claims about me based on wrong information (that I’m an anti, that I am an assimilationist queer, that I don’t like dark content and want to oppress others who do/who like “more stigmatized” content than I supposedly do, and that I am responsible for his behavior as an actual anti in fandom)… and then when faced with new information and pushback against his claims, claims that directly lead to me being harassed even more… what did he do?

Nothing.

An attempt wasn’t even made to rectify the issue. 

Or to acknowledge that one existed in the first place.

He just moved on as if he hadn’t lied about me, to our mutual, in order to further damage my reputation in fandom and perhaps to even try and damage that relationship.

No one ever apologizes to me or for the harassment they’ve directly participated in or supported in fandom.

And I mean, considering how apologies are for when you feel like you did something wrong, I’m not surprised that the vast majority of people in fandom won’t ever apologize to me or even just change their tune. Because they don’t… feel sorry.

Which is fine, I don’t think you should apologize for something you did that doesn’t make you feel apologetic. 

They’re doing all of this after getting new information or the same information clarifying what I’m saying, what I’m doing, and the fact that people have been harassing me for years with barely any pushback from fandom at large. So they know that this stuff isn’t true.

They know that I don’t think the way people insist. They know that the people they’re defending are racists doing racist things. They know that I’m not trying to censor the AO3 or fandom as a whole. They know that people are trying to hurt me. They know that people are maliciously misrepresenting me to an audience of fandom far larger than the one I supposedly have.

I guess it’s easier and safer to not apologize to me or to not leave me alone ever… because symbols aren’t people. Symbols don’t get apologies because even if you did feel bad, you can’t “really” hurt them.