Not to be Like That on main, but a huge high point of doing these sporkings is knowing that you’re all cringing along with me as I do this. There is no point where you stop cringing across a modern Anita Blake installment, no point at which it stops being concerning, sexist, racist… or all three things at once. So thank you all for suffering along with me once more.
Read More »
The most interesting thing for me to realize was how many fandoms I’d been a part of since I was a child, without even noticing that I was doing so, without even knowing that this is how I was expressing my fandom. I grew up an only child, in a quiet household, and my Indian parents discouraged me from creating accounts online. Truthfully, I never found a need for that kind of Internet interaction. This is a trait that carried through my adolescence to the present-day in how I engage in fandom and express my fanning.
The first fandom I can really remember myself getting into came about from growing up in the late 2000s. This, of course, was loving the Disney Channel shows and Disney Channel Original Movies (salute to DCOMS!) of the late 2000s. I remember checking the channel guides waiting for new episodes of Hannah Montana, getting all the fun associated merch, and going to see Hannah Montana: The Movie in theaters in 2009. I listened to the official Radio Disney station for years, listening to all their playlists and am proud to say I’m still in possession of Radio Disney Jams 10, featuring a video performance of the evergreen Nobody’s Perfect. My early-day fanning was pretty much just me, with the sometime-resignation of my parents.
Read More »This isn’t a new conversation, but Return to Hogwarts and responses from fans past and present on social media invite us to revisit the question: Is it possible to separate the art from the artist?
The answer, of course, is complicated and nuanced. Except for the moments when it’s pretty straightforward. The idea that we can separate the art from the artist hinges on a form of privilege and a misunderstanding of how creators can put themselves and their beliefs into their work. French philosopher Roland Barthes’ essay “Death of the Author” is used as a way to explain that it’s “just art” and can be consumed without any input from the creator, making the creator someone whose shouting doesn’t impact the narrative or your understanding of it. Unfortunately, when it comes to bigotry, that’s not necessarily an approach that works.
On Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling’s Transmisogyny, and What We Owe Each Other
In grad school, there were a lot of books I read for my degree that were by people I would disagree with deeply or who were open and avowed bigots. The Marquis de Sade, who featured heavily in my class on transgressive literature, was a sex pest and pervert (negative). Philosopher Heidegger, who we had to learn about in literary theory because he… is apparently influential to it and influenced so many others – he did the whole “notion of ‘being'” stuff, was a whole ass Nazi. Lovecraft was a racist weenie weirdo. Some of the comic writers I did my thesis work on… were really shitty.
Rowling is a TERF. She’s claimed that title. She acts like one. She breaks bread with many.
Awful people often make things that are so important to us as readers and fans. Harry Potter is one of the most important thing in many people’s lives. It got them through hell.
How do you break free from that? How do you leave that fandom behind you or try to make it better? What do we even owe each other as fans?
I try to answer those questions in the first Fan Service installment of 2022… It was TOUGH
Is this our first text-based meme for this series? I do believe it is!
Rather than me pulling from a photo meme, I jacked the “You kick Miette” meme for my own ridiculous ends. I’m very pleased with the result.
I know a lot of people have been watching the various conversations about what content is “allowed” to be in fandom spaces with bated breath and anxiety – especially as we know that conservatives in the United States and elsewhere trying to ban books about queerness and race/racism. It is documented that the people and stories most often affected and silenced by censorship – even non-governmental – are queer or “non-white”.
Read More »I spent most of the past 36 hours researching and thinking about Harry Potter fandom and the barely still-around documentation of the racism that fandom enacted about characters of color – especially Blaise Zabini. They’ll be turned into organized thoughts eventually, but for now… thread collection:
Harry Potter fandom really has been openly racist for ages because they sure did ship Blaise with Draco and/or Hermione right up until the reveal he was Black and then, after the in-fandom rioting, he got the treatment that most Black characters get and his fanworks/ships went 📉
Read More »Spoiler note: this piece has spoilers for The Owl House through the parts of season 2 available on Disney+
The Owl House, two seasons in, has a well-earned reputation for inclusion. The show has made it clear from early on that its themes of not punishing divergence aren’t just glib platitudes intended to make normies feel saintly for letting the weird kid sit at their table. Instead, it treats all of us to a narrative that centers characters who navigate a strange world that doesn’t always suit them in the ways that make the best sense for them. There is a lot of good to be said about the show’s cast: the Latina main character, the queer and nonbinary rep, the older woman mentor, and a truly beloved fat character whose weight is never once remarked on, among others.
It is a breath of fresh air to see that, along with all the rest, there are some solid disability and chronic illness narratives and metaphors in the series as well.
Read More »
In which I cover the current state of racism in queer/feminist fandom. Newsflash: it’s even more racist than previous years and yet, next year will be worse!
0:00:01.8: State of Fandom Racism, 2021.
In 2021, Fandoms got more racist, so much more racist. Sure, the dude bros’ mad that anyone not like them gets cast and things are up and about, but my focus is on queer feminist Fandom, and friends, it’s a scary fact that so few of you realize how deeply enmeshed open, white supremacist ideologies and languages are in these spaces. Think about how often people use ‘woke’ in a derogatory way, about fans of color talking about racism, and you might start to see a corner of the full picture.
Queer/Feminist Fandom in 2021 has been a place where people are openly racist in the defense of whatever they like or care about in Fandom, it doesn’t matter what they’re into. It just matters that they feel as though their side is the right side, and that justifies being super racist in its defense.
Read More »Original thread here from May 2021. Collection edited for clarity.
Some long thoughts on misogynoir in fandom:
A) this person won’t admit it but [the reason] they feel like they need to loudly criticize this ship (with the claim that “they should’ve met earlier” knowing full well they don’t mean it) is because of the admission that the flirtation is canon
When we last revisited Rafael, it was with a relatively short (and actually super racist) set of chapters that ended with Narcissus (who is explicitly not into women) basically promising to ignore his actual sexuality to plow Anita for the power boost feeding the ardeur supposedly will bring him and the hyena shifters.
We return, in chapter twelve, to yet another discussion of stuff we’ve rehashed a bunch of times before. This time it’s the bodyguard situation. Anita can’t go to the rat shifter fighting pits without bodyguards because she’s technically a “leader” of the shifters but if she goes there without a bodyguard someone will try to kill her.
Read More »Back at the end of 2020, I did a lengthy piece looking back at everything I’d done before looking forward to what I hoped 2021 would bring me. As we’re at the end of the year, I wanted to look back and think about:
2021 was very busy. So busy that I’m still kind of trying to figure out everything I planned to do for December because there’s so much left undone and 2021 is just a little over a week from ending. I took most of December off and if you’re wondering how scary my backlog is… it’s a whole nightmare.
And I still have another video – this one on the state of racism in fandom in 2021 – left to plan, record, and upload next week on top of planning content on like four different fronts for the first quarter of 2022! Argh!
–
Below the cut is a version of my script for this, but it’s not a 1:1 ratio, some things I adlibbed in the process of recording and while I love talking, I also cannot stand the sound of my own voice so… I cannot go back through and add what’s missing. Sorry! Youtube has subtitles but they’re auto-subtitled so that might not work well… Hopefully in 2022 I’ll get a job that’ll allow me to afford to pay for subtitles and transcripts regularly but since I don’t have a job at all… lol
Read More »
People critical of the institution of fandom in any capacity and with any heat whatsoever are seen as outsiders to fandom. No matter how we deliver a critique, or how gently we suggest that fandom could be a little better, it is received as aggression and violence.
It’s seen as well… anti fandom.
Even when the people speaking are long-time fans, people who’ve lived online and moved through tons of different fandoms, we’re always seen as outsiders, especially when it comes to us talking about ways that fandom can be made more accessible for all of us – instead of just white women and queer people.
Read More »In November, I did a lot of content consumption. It was all incredibly interesting stuff! Any errors on my commentary under the pieces are because I did this via a dictation software across the month! 😀
Peter Jackson’s trilogy, while spectacular and ground-breaking in many ways, is glaringly white. Worse, the human villains are all coded as non-white; “bad men” from the East and the South, complete with either veils and kohl, or bearing tribal tattooing and scarification and riding mythical elephants. Worst of all, the inhuman Uruk Hai – muscled and merciless – have black skin and dreadlocks. While some of this British colonial racism and eugenicist thought are a reflection of the source material itself, Jackson made a – possibly thoughtless – choice to remain “faithful” to those parts of the text and even to exacerbate them. As a result, racist fans were not alienated by the films but accommodated, allowed to believe that their extremely racist interpretation of Tolkein’s work was the correct one. The film trilogy benefited from their racist support and everyone involved in it is therefore complicit in the abuse now raining down on series’ cast of colour (particularly the black cast, and more particularly the black women cast). The comments directed at Nomvete and Cruz Cordóva are not generic racism: they are rooted in the racist lore and imagery that Jackson’s films perpetuated. One of most frequent comments on Nomvete’s picture is “better be an Uruk Hai”.
I grew up on Lord of the rings and so growing up in the fandom, I realized very quickly that the negative aspect of Lord of the rings where people of color were absent from the narrative was a bonus for a large majority of the fandom. Unlike the Harry Potter fandom which would go on to racebend characters like Harry and Hermione, the Lord Of The Rings fandom never really took to racebending as a thing they could or even wanted to do. Instead, they seemed really happy to be faced with a version of Middle Earth where all the elves were white, and all of the men were too. The films, that I grew up with, were integral to building a fandom identity as an extremely online tween for many people in English language fandom who are my age at this point.
The problem is that when faced with updates to the franchise where characters might be of color who aren’t background characters or silent extras, the fandom doesn’t have a good reaction. Even before we see who all have been cast within the upcoming series that Amazon is doing, there is a history of Lord Of The Rings fans being upset at the concept of racebending even within their own communities. People who are fan artists or fanfic writers that choose to portray these characters using ethnic groups in our world, can expect to get really rude messages from diehard fans of the franchise. They’re subject to racism, even if they are not of color themselves, because they have chosen to “deviate” from Tolkien’s vision. And we’re told that these are all white men. We’re told that the Lord Of The Rings fans, like the Star Wars fans who raged at The Force Awakens and the sequel trilogy having people of color in relatively prominent roles, are all white men.
But that is not true and honestly, that’s why transformative fandom has a white supremacy problem that I don’t see any way to fix. Because people assume it’s all white men, so white women have nothing to do with any of it. Which leaves them to wallow in the mire of white supremacy in fandom and get worse. Anyway, I don’t know what Amazon will do with their Lord of the rings show or the fandom that builds from it, but I am frustrated that 20 years after the original massive trilogy came out from Peter Jackson, fandom still maintains that they don’t have a race problem even while being publicly and actively racist.
Read More »
(In) Famous, my novella about a too-online, fame-hungry teenager who starts hanging with a bad crowd & makes a bunch of crap decisions as a result for JUDGES Volume 3 (2000AD), will be out Dec 1.
Preorders for the novella are open now including for limited edition signed copies!
Today in “yeah that’s not what that means in fandom” we have… “trauma work”.
I first saw this crop up either in 2019 or 2020 where the response to “perhaps eventually there should be some kind of anti racist policy for the AO3 that would lead to overtly racist works/creators being yeeted from the platform – even temporarily” from an increasing number of people was to claim that moderating racist work was actually “trauma work” and more harmful for fans of color than… the initial issue of unchecked racist work in these spaces. There was a tumblr post about it and everything that picked up steam back then, and then 2/3rds of the way through September, there were several threads spiraled off a tweet doing that again (you can find a roundup of all of that here at Naye’s Dreamwidth).
Here’s the thing… that’s not exactly what trauma work is.
Read More »
Stitch's Media Mix 
You must be logged in to post a comment.