This year is actually… my seventh anniversary. If you’re surprised, don’t be. The passage of time has always been a struggle for me and numbers have always been… complicated for me.
Every year I talk about how big a struggle the past year has been and blah blah blah but this year, let’s try something new despite everything weird and bad happening in my life. Let’s try focusing on good stuff, hyping myself up, and manifesting cool shit for the rest of the year.
Today we’re doing some note-taking over Francesca Coppa’s “Slash/Drag: Appropriation and Visibility in the Age of Hamilton” in the 2018 book Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies.
when bucky barnes comes out with dark eyes and no memory, i think of myself. of how certain words make me fall back into the places i never want to return to. of how i can’t erase everything that’s been taught to me by the people who hurt me, but i’m trying. that love, above everything, helps me ground myself to the present so i’m not sent tumbling.
Coppa uses an opening quote from Tumblr user Inkskinned that really answers some unrelated thoughts and questions I’ve had about the violence people direct towards people who criticize fandom especially in the context of “comfort characters” – which tend to be white male presenting dudes in canon who are queered and, to an extent on top of that, “feminized”. Inkskinned clearly identifies with Bucky and his trauma is familiar and used to unpack and map their own trauma and responses to triggers left behind. So what happens when someone like Inkskinned – who is probably lovely, I do not know them and did not search them out at all as I did notes – sees someone talk critically (unpacking him or jabbing at him) about Bucky? Chances are… even if it’s privately, they’re not gonna have a great reaction because he has become their emotional support damaged white man.
Why slash? The question has been asked again and again, by journalists in sensation pieces, by scholars in academic articles, and by fans themselves in essays and convention panels and blog posts: why have women created this enormous archive of romantic and erotic stories between male characters from television and film? Why Kirk/Spock? Why Holmes/Watson (retroactively dubbed “Johnlock” in the age of portmanteau pairing names)? Why do we ship Dean/Castiel on Supernatural?
Anyway, moving on from that opening quote, Coppa starts by poking at the question/s asked of slash: Why? Immediately, the whiteness jumps out because in the “whys” are revealed some “why nots”.
Why not Sulu/Chekov? Why not Luke Cage/Danny Rand? Why not Scott McCall/Stiles (or another character if you don’t multi-ship your fandom bicycle)? Why is slash fandom preoccupied with white men for the most part? (This has shifted a bit in the years after Coppa’s chapter was published but a hefty amount of East Asian people – different diasporic communities whose homeland’s source media has become popular in fandom spaces – have spoken about how they feel about the way Western fandom understands masculinity/men outside of their narrow spaces.)
For eighth year of running Stitch’s Media Mix (does this count as the seventh anniversary?) I’ll be giving two very lucky readers/followers a streaming ticket for a single day of a stream for Permission to Dance on Stage! Well Weverse shop doesn’t let you buy things for other people, so you’ll get a paypal, cashapp, or venmo transfer for the cost of the ticket in USD! But same diff!
This is a flash giveaway so we’re going to do this REAL quick. It’s ending Sunday March 6th at Midnight EST and I’ll announce the winners when I wake up that day.
So what do you have to do?
Comment with:
Your BTS Bias
Your favorite B-Side
Your Favorite Music video
Bonus: A favorite piece of BTS content (blog post, podcast quote, YouTube video or tweet) from me!
After all, this is a giveaway to celebrate my very hard, very stressful work here and thankfully, for the most part, ARMY and BTS have been a balm in trying times. I love them a lot and I want to share the love even though I don’t do as much BTS content these days as I work on other things – the concerts coming up will change that! I made really great friends through this fandom, people who challenge me, introduce me to good music, and have kept me going as I engage with other fandoms intent on tearing me down. I want to make this experience possible for them! So… here we are!
You can comment with your Twitter account or your WordPress account if you have one. (Or other social media? I’m not sure what the limitations are for wordpress comments…) I apologize for not opening this up to more people who follow me/my work, but because of harassment from random people, I can’t just open this up to more comments because hate will happen because people suck!
If you are a reader who’s interacted with me in some other way but don’t have a WordPress or Twitter account, send me an email through the contact form or my regular email and your name will be added to the spreadsheet Editor A or BTS Nieceling will run through for giveaway purposes!
(Comments are auto-moderated so don’t panic if you don’t see yours show up immediately!)
I’ll have to sit and put all the links to the stickers and stationary pieces in here but for now just… treat this as pleasant background noise! Thanks!
A screenshot from Black Panther where T’challa and Nakia kissing at the end of the film. Over the image is a white overlay of lines in the top left and bottom right corner. The title “Lies Fandom Tells About Why Black Characters and Celebrities Don’t Get Shipped” is in a loopy script and then my twitter handle is underneath that.Read More »
I nearly lost my dad and was basically scared out of my mind for 48 hours minimum, my mom had to fly out to be with him because I can’t travel and work since there’s no internet in the house, got rejected from a college I applied to and a journalism opportunity, I found out that some racist freak maliciously edited my Fanlore page with bullshit “controversies” (and I still can’t bring myself to look what the page looks like now), and I possibly got my identity stolen/bank information jacked in a scam!
Even with the good things that happened (two excellentFan Service pieces, an interview with [REDACTED CELEBRITY], spending almost 2 uninterrupted weeks with my youngest niecelings and my first piece for Joy Sauce… a lot of this happened under the weight of a pressure I didn’t expect to have. (And my nieces being with me is directly related to almost losing my dad because I had to have the girls with me to keep going in case the worst happened and with my mom traveling so initially, that was not fun at all.)
It’s a truth universally (but accidentally) acknowledged across a ton of books about being a fan of stuff, that fandom does not like talking about race.
Regardless of how which side of a binary fandom is split into between curative fandom (they primarily collect things related to their fandom) and transformative (they primarily create things related to their fandom), one truth exists: it is easier (and better) not to talk about race at all than to talk about race and racism in fandom.
[I forgot about posting this lol, hence the lack of header. It’s actually being posted in March 22, 2023]
Personally, I think Anita should be allowed to kill Padma.
And she’s right about why she wants to do it too:
“He’s the son of a bitch that skinned Rafael alive as torture because he wouldn’t give the rest of you up,” I said. I’d have tugged on the door handle if I’d had a hand free, but I still had a knife in each hand, which raised the question of how I had planned to open the door in the first place. I realized I’d gone for the wrist knives. I sheathed the one in my left hand in the right wrist sheath, which was on top of the wrist; the left sheath carried the knife on the underside of the wrist so I could draw them simultaneously. I’d carried them almost longer than any other weapon I owned. They’d been the first silver I’d bought after bullets. I tried to feel bad about the fact that I’d gone for a killing weapon first thing, but all I could think was if we killed Hector, it might kill Padma and then we’d all be safer.
But because that would be too easy… she can’t just do that.
Because the rats will then turn against her and Rafael and challenge him endlessly until they do succeed in killing him.
So Anita is like “okay well no matter what, I’m going to kill Hector tonight” and you know what… I want that for her. I love it for her.
Originally posted on Patreon December 3, 2021. (A few edits were made to the piece before public posting.)
There’s a James Baldwin video from a 1968 appearance on the Dick Cavett show that features prominently in I Am Not Your Negro.
Recently, the clip has been floating around social media, and I think it’s actually incredibly relevant to conversations we keep having in fandom. Especially the part transcribed below the video:
JAMES BALDWIN: I don’t know what most white people in this country feel. But I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don’t know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know we have a Christian church which is white and a Christian church which is black. I know, as Malcolm X once put it, the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. That says a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means I can’t afford to trust most white Christians, and I certainly cannot trust the Christian church. I don’t know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me—that doesn’t matter—but I know I’m not in their union. I don’t know whether the real estate lobby has anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobby is keeping me in the ghetto. I don’t know if the board of education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools we have to go to. Now, this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen.
A common complaint I’ve gotten whenever I mention that a specific fandom is racist or say, generally, that fandom as a space is racist is… “don’t generalize this fandom” or “it’s wrong to generalize a fandom for what a few people do”. Some people literally pull the #NotAllFans approach I spoke of years ago.
This has been a constant over the years with people deigning to acknowledge racism in fandom being bad or terrible but then turning around to hit me with “but you shouldn’t generalize a fandom as racist because that’s just as bad”.
That’s… not how that works.
Racism is absolutely worse than people saying “hey that’s racist”.
TL:DR – at least one person (twitter user @/GoodyBarwicke) maliciously edited my Fanlore page in August 2021 – I didn’t go to check because no one ever updated it, but once I saw it yesterday, I got extremely upset. That user used Fail Fandom Anon users and people who have been harassing me for years over their love of racism in fandom as “sources” to essentially fill my Fanlore page with a trumped up “Controversies” section that has no basis in truth, lies fully about my behavior, and doesn’t even engage with stuff I have actually addressed even before the “racists in fandom have been harassing me for years and escalated starting in 2019” shit.
So far I haven’t heard back from anyone associated with Fanlore but the article is in edits of some sort but I can’t check because I am violently ill every time I think about this and I just managed to eat for the first time since last night. As far as I know, the user who put the changes in originally is still doing their best to argue that their biased inclusion of hateful anons and reylo shippers who’ve spent years harassing me is relevant – more so than my work, interviews I’ve done, my whole thing about vore, omegaverse, and namjoon – separately of course.
Edited 9:00PM – The Fanlore Admin Team just got back to me. They’ve found that the piece contravened their “Plural Point of View” policy and are reviewing and researching to ensure the page will be balanced. I’m hopeful that they look to people actually talking about what I do, people who like my work or learn from it – even if we don’t see eye to eye 100% (we don’t even need to), and that balance should extend to more than just who I piss off by doing my own shit.
Almost every “reference” link on my @Fanlore_wiki page is a Fail Fandom Anon link and the entire “Controversy” section is misrepresenting what I do/what I write without any recognition of the multi-year harassment campaign I’ve been dealing with (fanlore.org/wiki/Stitch)
Like none of this is true? Not only have I specifically said what could be done at the bottom of this post from SEPTEMBER (stitchmediamix.com/2021/09/08/whe…) but that “stitch advocates for harassment” tweet isn’t even doing what they say and is taken out of its context?
Last time, we left Anita panicking over whether or not the rat shifter she’d killed (the one who Hamilton had Anita posit was more Asian than Mexican apparently) had actually meant to murder or just maim her. Chapter nineteen opens with her realizing that he’d come armed with a silver knife and that validates her tearing his throat open and ripping off his arm.
I’m a huge fan of violence, but this is literally overkill. Especially because Hamilton has to justify Anita’s violence. It doesn’t, ultimately, matter if the guy had a silver knife or not because self defense is self defense. It’s wrong to stab people who haven’t done anything to you or your loved ones first.
This was originally posted on Patreon! Thanks to my awesome Patrons for giving me feedback across the process and helping me use my words effectively to get the ideas out!
Tackling racism in/from the big institutions within fandom – a Big Named Fan with a 20k following, that fan studies scholar with a book and a bad reputation, or the Organization for Transformative Works itself – is scary. They’re huge, they have followings that they don’t even need to actively weaponize against you, and it’s hard to wear down a big rock in your online community.
So, when it comes to figuring out how to handle racism in your fandom communities and make these spaces inhospitable to racists, let’s start small.
NOTE: the final link for this month includes a piece about the fights over rape in fiction and so my response/thoughts… revolve around rape in fiction (and a little bit about it in fandom). Read carefully, please.
We started by affirming simple truths: that Black critics have been setting the record straight and engaging Black citizenry “in the making of its own story,” as Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang wrote in 2019, across the centuries, from Frederick Douglass’s sharp observations about blackface minstrelsy to the barrier-breaking journalism of theater and music columnists like Pauline Hopkins, Sylvester Russell and Lester Walton in the late 19th and early 20th century. The long Harlem Renaissance gave us figures like Nora Holt, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. And Amiri Baraka and Phyl Garland wed Black nationalist desire with fierce, experimental music criticism in the Black Arts era.
I would not be where I am now without Black critics who came before me. I think about that often.
It’s not just about reading their work and learning or growing from it, but about having that access to content and understanding that without them paving the way, there’d be nowhere for me to step.
I’m always here to be a thorn in the ass of annoying people online and right now… that’s a lot of people who view themselves as (gate) keepers of Romancelandia’s Sacred Sexy Flame.
Let’s begin with a bit of backstory:
January 25th at 7PM YouTuber Jack Edwards – whose whole thing is being a guy who reads books and then talks about them for his subscribers – tweeted the following joke using a popular meme format:
no-one:
romance books: this man is so big. he is just so huge. he towers over me. all i can think about is how big he is. his arms are big. but i have to contain this feeling. we work together! yet my mind is imagining a life with mr big in all his enormousness. he is so… big.
romance books: this man is so big. he is just so huge. he towers over me. all i can think about is how big he is. his arms are big. but i have to contain this feeling. we work together! yet my mind is imagining a life with mr big in all his enormousness. he is so… big.
This is “normal”. Most people writing traditional M/F romances engage in a really dramatic size difference between their hero and heroine.
Back in 2014, webcomic creator and artist Adam Ellis posted an installment of a then-ongoing webcomic titled “Shhh” showing a guy fed up with his friend mocking his interest in sports. He pinches his friend’s mouth shut and says, “Shhh. Let people enjoy things.” Those two panels went on to become widely used as “reaction images” across the internet, shaping the way that we talk to people about what we like, especially when it comes to fandom. While the sentiment might make sense in a specific situation, the net effect isn’t great.
The context of Ellis’ comic gets lost when it’s divorced from the first panel. Instead of being about a guy tired of his friend putting down the thing he likes, it’s now about shutting down everyone who has a critical opinion. Because if you dislike something, no matter how or where you do it, that’s positioned as the same thing as pushing into someone else’s space to shut them down or make them feel bad about what they like. It’s positioned as an attack, which means that things like horrific backlash for speaking about things like… criticism of fandom being good for fandom? That’s not harassment. To them, it’s self defense.
There’s this great meme featuring a panel from The Simpsons where there’s a pamphlet that says “So you’ve decided to internalize any general critique of art you enjoy as a personal slight”. (You can see the meme below and please check out Sasha Devlin’s thread because it sure is relevant thread on what Romancelandia is going through on Twitter.)
He was on HIS OWN TL talking abt his PERSONAL experience.
Funny how we all understand what a plane crash is without personally experiencing it but when ppl interact with media you deem sacred they must be wrong & thank God there's a white woman to correct things! pic.twitter.com/rEl6ztv5fB
I cannot stand “Let People Like Things” culture because of the way the people screeching that don’t offer respect to other people who like different things or who offer measured critique. They don’t let other people like things or critique them because everything is about their thing and them as people and so if they’re taking things personally, they’re gonna make sure you do too. Because they’re gonna go after you personally.
Stitch's Media Mix 
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