The concept of “critical consumption” seems to kick everyone’s ass in fandom.
Let someone know that you think that critical thinking and reading should feature at least a little bit in how they engage with the content they consume for their fandom – source media or fanworks – or how they create it and you can expect a whole lot of incredibly angry people acting like you’ve just told them you want to burn every single Arthur/Eames age-gap omegaverse story on the internet.
Or, you know… they call you an anti for using your brain.
So uh… I wasn’t expecting to win the Ignyte Award for Critics in 2021. Part of it, is that I don’t expect anything really and this way I get to be pleasantly surprised in the end.
The other thing is that the past two years have been a hell so upsetting that it has been hard to believe in myself and the power of my community. I’ve done my best work, tried to be my best self – but a lot of times, the reaction has been frankly horrific harassment including dogpiling, spammy comments, and successful attempts at destroying and disrupting my life/career.
So far, the only thing I haven’t gotten have been death threats. There’s been at least one false police report filed (according to the person who filed it), different kinds of slurs, and still-active attempts to destroy my reputation and career. But not death threats… yet.
All because people think I care… about what sort of fictional characters they want to see kiss on the mouth.
There’s no such thing as an “unproblematic fave.” People — and the things that we create — are informed by the world around us, and we can be exposed to some pretty problematic environments that are hard to move away from. And if people, especially ones we admire, are going to continue making both positive and negative choices, then what actually matters in fandom isn’t finding some mythical angel celebrity who never does anything wrong. Rather, it’s unpacking our own responses. What do we do with the realization that someone responsible for our fandom happiness in some capacity has been careless, or made a mistake, or been intentionally cruel or predatory?
A) I forgot to link to this article last week when it went up! My bad! Things have been very busy!
B) As with the majority of my work, this pulls from experiences I’ve had within fandom and how I had to fight off the knee-jerk response to go “no that person couldn’t have done that”. I mention it in the piece (and have mentioned it elsewhere, I’m sure) but I used to be a huge BIGBANG fan. My bias wrecker was the rapper TOP. My bias… was Seungri. My nieces and I listened to his solo stuff regularly and we thought he seemed cool… until I started seeing threads on Twitter about the Burning Sun nightclub scandal and the extent that he was… very much not cool.
Instantly, I cut him off. I took the BIGBANG songs out of my playlists, deleted his solo songs from my phone, and resolved to never say a nice thing about him again – a thing made that much easier by the knowledge of the things he’s rumored and confirmed to have done. We don’t speak his name in our house and he’s basically dead to us.
But that sort of merciless pruning isn’t the norm. We link so much of ourselves to the celebrities that we love that sometimes, when our favorite public figures are accused of something minor to majorly awful, we look for reasons to keep on moving. We look for excuses to explain away the minor-to-major bad thing our person did. Sometimes, as seen in multiple fandoms and especially in the case of Seungri and his still-active fanbase, we hurt others over the situation rather than acknowledging the harm done by this public figure.
But we don’t have to. We can see when our favorites do bad things – whatever they are – and decide on our own how we’re going to handle it without defending them or hurting someone else in their name.
For @teenvogue, the latest #FanService installment is all about how there's no such thing as an "unproblematic fave".
What matters the most is how we respond to our faves' screw ups or scandals AND how we handle other fans' responses to them as well.https://t.co/lbO6nlJ76K
Content Notes: descriptions of police brutality and violence from law enforcement that includes sexual violence and violence against vulnerable people like children. Screenshots that mention harassment that include racism, threats, harassers urging people to self harm, and doxxing.
I also swear a lot and in a way that can be read as “at” the people who pull the nonsense I’m talking about.
Anyone who is seriously using the word "fanpol"/"fan police" to write off conversations about racism in fandom and in some of the works hosted on the AO3/the racism done on the platform and in defense of it… Really cannot be taken seriously imo (& might be racist tbh)
Genuinely, I can hardly think of a clearer example of what fandom brain rot does to a person than the repeated insistence across multiple fandoms that ACAB – “All Cops Are Bastards” – somehow includes people on the internet who are critical of fandom at any level including just… being critical of racism in fandom and media in public.
The thing is that yes, ACAB as a term existed well before the horrific events of Summer 2020, the time period when lots of people on your social media feeds decided to put the acronym in their bios and display names for the first time… But it has never revolved around anything other than rejecting the violence that law enforcement/policing does as a system.
Something is very, very wrong in American police culture. This is why the saying “ACAB” — or “All cops are b*ds” — has become a popular rallying cry. It doesn’t actually mean every single cop is a bad cop, just like saying Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean white lives don’t. “ACAB” means every single police officer is complicit in a system that actively devalues the lives of people of color. Bad cops are encouraged in their harm by the silence of the ones who see themselves as “good.”
Holding one police officer accountable every time a black person is killed by police is not enough. The issue isn’t “a few bad apples”; it’s a tree that is rotting from the inside out, spreading its poison.
ACAB serves as a punchy shorthand referring to the way that there can’t be such a thing as “good cops” in a field fueled by violence including fatal antiblackness, sexual violence, theft, bigotry beyond all of that, and just… an entitlement to other people’s lives in literal cases.
I understand that with this somewhat valid fear of random people harassing others over fandom – a thing that happens no matter what you’re into – it is tempting to not just accuse people of policing your fandom experience… but to compare them to the real police.
“Fandom police” as a term has been around for ages too… but it’s the way it’s being used now to refer to fans as actual cops that’s literally the problem.
Hello Stitch’s Media Mix readers! My name is Amanda-Rae Prescott (she/her/hers) and I’m a Black and multiracial fan of period dramas, Doctor Who and other UK TV from New York City.
Racism in period drama fandoms can take many forms, but one form that’s very easy to spot are complaints from racists after new productions announce Black actors in traditionally white fictional character roles. Due to the success of Hamilton, Bridgerton, and other diverse-casted series, more production companies in the UK are adapting racebent or color-conscious casting. (Many of these series still have white writers and/or few Black people or other POC behind the camera, however, the UK entertainment industry is much further behind the US on this conversation for structural and population reasons.).
It’s easy for Black fans to miss these discussions online because these fandoms, with a few exceptions for mainstream fame, are outside traditional geek/nerd/fandom culture. There’s also an age gap to consider.
This is a strikingly honest description of culture war politics: create a brand that evokes negative feelings regardless of the details or merits of the case. In other words, the goal is to create a *bias* one that short-circuits reasoning and automates a political response. pic.twitter.com/YryY0adQ7z
Guess what racist fandom discourse accounts (and of course, their tokens of color) do to conversations about racism in fandom~
(literally it’s the same thing. they even use the same language – like woke as a pejorative, panic about censorship, Black people as villains – wow)
I know folks won’t “get” it but there are several points from 2017 to now where people across “transformative” fandom have tilted the needle HARD towards alt right ideology and language in the name of defending fandom specifically from BIPOC and folks just write it off as drama
But it’s not drama.
It’s racists manipulating marginalized white people’s fear of being harmed/silenced for their marginalization (which HAS happened) in order to turn them against BIPOC in fandom who are anti-racism to the point of inspiring long-term harassment campaigns.
If you’ve seen me gush over Lezhin’s Painter of the Night, you’ll remember that I actually love webcomics. And as you all know, I fucking love DC Comics… especially the Batfamily. This latest comic – by artist StarBite and writer CRC Payne – taps into a lot of the slice-of-life content that the Batfandom I grew up with flat out adored.
I read the first six episodes (paying for the last three on Fast Pass) and I loved every moment of it. For the most part, this blends canon personalities/visuals with headcanons from fandom – one noted difference is that Duke is explicitly part of the Batfamily… something that modern (more modern?) fandoms still struggles to accept. It’s a very cute comic in the webcomic tradition, simple one-shot, family-oriented comics that reminds us that Batman doesn’t have sidekicks… he’s part of a whole Batfamily.
The characterization is largely solid (the fandom influence is obvious though) and it’s definitely far away from the way many of the dudes working on Batman across the decades have handled the Batfamily as a unit. I’m not necessarily concerned about the coloring, but Damian Wayne being relatively dark skinned is largely a fandom thing and if Talia and Ra’s aren’t dark skinned themselves, I will have questions. I loved having Cass and Stephanie back in the Batfamily in a way that’s super hard to ignore. I know they’re in the comics as of late, but it’s still super hard for me to get back into the comics I used to love… so I’ve been sticking to the outskirts of all of that… but this makes me want to try again to get back into the DC game.
Anyway, if you’re interested in checking out the comics for yourself, the first three episodes of the webtoon are up on well… Webtoon. And I’m interested in hearing your thoughts even if they’re critical!
It’s been over a year (this piece was originally supposed to go up in June 2021) since the Organization of Transformative Works’ Board of Directors, Chairs, and Leads released a statement of some solidarity with fans of color – particularly Black fans – in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the worldwide protests against antiblackness, police brutality, and white supremacy that shifted the world on its axis back in 2020.
The OTW – and its “child”, the Archive of Our Own – has yet to make any meaningful inroads into making their segment of fandom accessible, welcoming, and safe for fans of color. In fact, racism done in the name of the Archive of Our Own specifically has increased to some extent with fans of color being subject to increased attacks including shunning, slander, and direct attacks on their fandom and offline reputations for going “perhaps this space could be… less racist”.
Seeing people recently kind of… gank “lil meow meow” for their fandom sexyman – almost always a white man with a background including somewhat horrific violence – has been wild. It’s a meme format that has recently picked up steam across the past few weeks on Tumblr and Twitter and has been used to “jokingly” refer to how people basically woobify a certain class of villains the way we do our cats.
The thing is? It actually has its roots in my primary fandom, BTS.
But you wouldn’t know that from all the people that insist on applying the meme to various Tumblr Sexymen like Loki and Kylo.
As we’ve covered, there’s a specific class of fandom weenie that I cannot stand because of how willing they are to support racists and racism in fandom using their POC-ness as a shield.
I use “PickMe POC” as a term for them – which remains not a slur despite what rabid racists in fandom insist – but they also define themselves as POC TOO. As in “I’m a POC TOO… and this isn’t racist/this other POC is actually the real problem in fandom and somehow racist against me for pointing out racism”.
In the… decade or so since I started actively speaking out against racism in fandom spaces and in media – primarily antiblackness, but I’ve talked about whitewashing, anti Native racism in fanworks, the weird way white fans can approach East Asian celebrities or characters in different fandoms , etc – who pushes back against me has shifted.
First, the loudest people were white people who prefaced everything with “I’m queer and” or “i’m a trauma survivor and”. But as people started to absorb a particular form of Tumblr social justice diss-course that hinged even more heavily on specific identity politics, it shifted to “I’m a POC and”.
That wasn’t really a thing in fandom discourses when I was growing up in fandom.
(Probably because for most of modern fandom, anytime you’d preface a conversation on racism by talking about how you were affected by racism here as a person of color, people would basically laugh you out of the room and/or gaslight you because you were “too close” to the issue and couldn’t be seeing things straight.)
August went by so fast that I don’t feel like I was able to get everything done.
Scratch that, I know I didn’t get everything done. Website content got completed because it was largely completed in July, but then Patreon content got drafted or recorded and I didn’t polish or publish. But to quote Dulé Hill in Holes:
In this “Bonus” Episode, I talk about… how Steven Hassan’s BITE model of fandom can be applied in multiple fandom contexts because fandom is a space that’s kinda… rife for cults of personality, manipulation, etc at EVERY level. But also that there’s a difference between “culty” and “a cult” and people do need to get that too.
You can find the original thread here but I’ve expanded and edited my own thoughts to cover more of what’s happening with DARVO because it’s something I’m super interested in talking about because it’s happening constantly and people just… don’t see it or care.
This is such a great thread and it spells out a common form of transmisogyny I’ve faced so many times on here.
“I see you talking about your oppression and I’m going to ignore it so I can zoom in one one point you made that I twist against you” https://t.co/RhC2Y0vMhd
— 🌸May Peterson, Twinkette (she/her) (@maidensblade) August 14, 2021
Thinking about Elle’s thread on weaponized specificity and transmisogyny as well as May‘s thread riffing off of it. I don’t want to derail so here are thoughts on how I deal with weaponized specificity here.
It’s a goalpost moving form of derailing, obviously.
It’s something that excuses what people then do to you.
Outside of richly, weirdly romantic superhero novels like Devin Grayson’s Inheritance, Weldon is right. The visual nature of superhero comics leads to queer readings in a way that prose often won’t. Prose, up front, often rejects the interpretations that fans have put together. There’s less wiggle room for fans to interpret a lingering gaze or the nearness of two characters or the oft-used Pieta pose as queer when the words on the page are explicitly saying otherwise. As a result, fans have largely had to make do with what they’re given and interpret these moments queerly, playing with characters in their fanworks that largely weren’t “confirmed” to be queer by the powers that be… until recently.
This is the nicest thing I have said about DC in my entire life and… they deserve it. I was a diehard DC fan from about 2009 to 2016 (my peak was 2012-13 in terms of content) and the whole time I was surrounded by other queer fans who just really loved these characters a lot and wanted the representation that came from seeing your favorite character be just like you. I am still friends with my core group of DC fandom friends and it’s been over a decade of growing, writing, and shipping together. I’m considering dusting off my old fics just for those babes. That’s how real it is.
Anyway; so when I saw “Sum of Our Parts” in Batman: Urban Legends and realized that Tim Drake, one of the Robins I queered (yes, I did that for them all, shush) was getting a queer canon? I just knew I had to write about not just him, but about the Big Two’s queer superhero game. This piece is heavy on DC because that was my main fandom for a huge portion of my life, but there are Marvel references and a quote from Danny Lore, a creator I adore. I think that it’s important to
And of course: there are indie comics with queer superheroes, like The Pride! And those comics exist too because queer fans didn’t see themselves in the mainstream superhero comics! I didn’t cover indie superhero comics for this because the focus was the fandoms, but that’s on me! I’m slowly returning to my roots as a comics fandom loudmouth though, so I will make up for it!
Please share the link to the article with anyone you think would be interested in it and share on Twitter if you can! Thanks!
In my latest #FanService column for @TeenVogue, I returned to my comic fandom roots to talk about some things that are near, dear, and very queer to my heart: Tim Drake’s latest life change in @DCComics, queering comic characters, and representation!https://t.co/ug0JPNAIuG
It’s always so hard to pare down my links to a manageable amount rather than pouring out the entirety of my bookmarks for the month. But between last time and now, I have read some incredible things! Here’s a sampling with the usual added commentary.
She finishes her brief segment on her Twilight Apologia grievance by doing a classic “see I’m a liberal ally to the brown folks” move straight out of a JK Rowling’s tweet: adding the link to the Quileute tribe’s fundraiser to prove that she’s not racist, she cares about ACTUAL problems that the Quileute folks face. Not something as trivial as representation in Twilight but REAL problems. Clearly she cares more about indigenous issues than the indigenous people she’s arguing with.
In any case, you don’t need to be native to know there isn’t much sincerity to someone who dedicates two hours to taking shots of whiskey for every “apology” they have to make. Quite frankly it would’ve saved her time to just upload a five second Youtube video of her telling us to eat shit. The same message would’ve been delivered expeditiously.
A lot of people think that ignoring a problem like racism in media – here anti-Native racism in Twilight and Pocahontas… and Ellis’ coverage of both after the fact – will just make it go away. Add in a heaping helping of Ellis weaponizing her white womanhood and lumping in real Natives trying to educate her in with the very legitimate harassment she does get… And you’ve got a disastrous approach in one.
I thought this piece by Ali Nahdee was brilliant, insightful, and is a must-read for people who genuinely care about representation in media, fighting anti-Native racism, and holding ourselves and our favorite content creators accountable. In this country, Indigenous communities are mistreated and misrepresented as the norm. Media is one of the biggest ways that their cultures are repackaged – often being boiled down to a single experience set up to serve for the whole – and it’s important to recognize when we and our favorite/popular cultural critics drop the ball on recognizing that.
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