Note: I originally did this as a thread in like… 2018 but I think it’s still extremely relevant and so… it’s a blog post now! (If it was a blog post before this, pretend it wasn’t. Mkay?)
I love seeing folks who ship ships that came about as a way to distance a Black character from their white faves be like:
Read More »“The only reason antis are mad are because they think [Black character] is nothing without [white character]”
If you listened to my review of BTS’s new album Map of the Soul: 7, you might have clocked that I’m really fucking feral for BTS’ trio of rappers – RM, Suga, and J-hope. I mention it a bunch of times across my review and my social media.
On top of that, I’m a huge fan of hip hop from around the world and have been since I was a teenager listening to m-flo on my Zune. Like if I didn’t love hip-hop, there’s no way that I would’ve spent a huge amount of the past year having public opinions about hip hop and working my fingers off on this project.
That’s why, when I saw someone I follow retweet a Porochista Khakpour tweet about BTS’ rapline, I kind of like lost it (laughing) at first. In the linked tweet, Khakpour writes that:
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Gravitation was one of my early queer “firsts” and it falls into the same vein as many of the pieces of media I worshiped as a baby queer. Like Queer as Folk and Interview with the Vampire, Gravitation was an incredibly problematic piece of media that, on some level, shaped how I viewed queerness. (Which kind of explains a lot of my earlier understanding of what it meant to be queer…)
Watching Gravitation now is… a little bit painful.
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This is not actually a review of K. M. Szpara’s Docile.
Not really.
It’s a review of what the novel doesn’t deal with and what people are clearly getting out of it in publishing and fandom spaces.
Docile is a near-future dystopian work of erotic science fiction where people in debt sell themselves into something that’s in-between indentured servitude and the horrors of the historic slavery in the United States. The book revolves around Elisha – who sells himself into debt so that his younger sister won’t be subjected to the traumatizing effects of service – and Alex – the trillionaire who buys Elisha, tries to break him, and then… quelle suprise… falls in love with him.
The novel reminds me of Captive Prince and Ai no Kusabi, two series that deal with male/male relationships and sexual(ized) slavery in one capacity or another within the main story… and the fandom responses to both of those things absolutely reminds me of Docile’s intense early defenders who’ve already shown up to fret about “antis” coming for their slavefic.
(And when the antis in question include Black people and anti-racist allies simply annoyed at yet another white author going “look at this thing that happened to Black people, what if something similar happened to my white main characters”… Yikes.)
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I’m putting things together for March and this is what my schedule currently looks like!
Three of the things are catch-ups (2 for my site and 1 for Patreon) but everything else is fresh content that is NOT carried over from last month. The blog is going to have a fair amount of k-pop, but Patreon this month is going to primarily be about fandom and a return to my Urban Fantasy 101 series.
(There will be some surprise light and fun k-pop content because I live for it though!)
I haven’t decided what my next podcast episode will be about – I’m thinking about Castlevania since the new season drops in two days – or what the fiction or poetry will be, but I’m literally leaning towards polishing the first two parts of a poem I started about privilege…
Day job continues to be A Lot and I just picked up some freelance work since I have to try to save up for a potential move/the inevitable moment when this job no longer exists so I will be Supremely Busy. But please feel free to nudge me extra hard if/when you need me.
I’m honestly NOT ignoring anyone, but I am also really scatterbrained and don’t focus well on a good day, much less the days I’ve been having where all I do is work and write.
Thank you once again for supporting me and I hope that you’ll all enjoy my March content!<3
I know that not a single one of y’all wanted to know that there’s going to be a South Korean musical version of Tupac’s life called All Eyez on Me performed by a cast that, as far I can tell, only has a single Afro Korean performer at this moment.
I know I sure as hell could’ve lived my life without knowing.
But here we are, with this knowledge fresh in our minds.
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Episode Notes
Transcript/Notes
(Not a 1:1 match with the audio as I did go off script a few times and might not have caught them all.)
Regular readers and listeners know that complaining is my love language. The first two episodes of Stitch Talks Ish probably proved that considering that that’s like what… over an hour of me complaining across the episodes?
But we’re breaking from the trend with the third episode of my series where in I give into the urge to get downright obnoxious on main about all things BTS following the release of their seventh studio album (fourth if you’re only counting the Korean ones). Map of the Soul: 7.
If you’ve managed to miss everything I’ve been going through for… what I want to say is a year and a half edging close to two years if you count the offline fandom-ing I’ve been doing – I’ve spent a lot of my time talking and thinking a lot about Korean popular culture. Like I will keep my foot on the Star Wars fandoms’ throats until the damn fandom stops being shitty, but in the rest of my time?
Well… I’ve been k-popping.
(Look, y’all know that I’m a cheesy mess at best and I needed to get that out.)
Read More »Jump into Indescribable Joy if you’re not ready for the rage:
On February 11, 2020 twitter user @revegina uploaded a ninety-two second video set to SEVENTEEN’s만세(MANSAE) that highlighted several supremely antiblack moments in the relatively recent history of Korean pop and hip hop.
The video – embedded below since the user in question has since been suspended – includes such gems as:
Part One, Incredible Rage [Incoming]
The thing is that being in this fandom is not all white-knuckled rage at antiblackness…
I promise.
Korean pop music and hip-hop spark genuine joy in me.
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Near the end of October 2019, Korean rapper San E posted a photo on Instagram of his favorite (“best”) Korean rappers as part of the promo for something he’d reveal in the following days. He has ten rappers on the list, and while many of them would be on my top ten list… none are female artists.
Now, here’s the thing… I’m not actually surprised that San E couldn’t bring himself to place a single female MC on his list.
First, there’s the way that San E seems to hold female rappers – and women – to a different standard in his time as the host of m-net’s Unpretty Rapstar (2015 to 2016).
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If you’re not on Twitter or don’t/can’t follow my main account, here’s what I’ve been up to since Friday… a twitter thread review of Monsta X’s new English CD All About Luv that I’ve turned into a blog post because I worked REALLY hard on it.
Last February, the closest I got to a Black History Month post was my review of Horror Noire on Shudder. This year, I’m aiming a little closer to what I’m writing about on the regular, by focusing on Black and Asian celebrities – as I’ll be writing a short piece on Afro-Korean celebrities at some point in my series on Korean pop and hip hop later on in the year. I stan talent first and foremost, but it has been incredibly convenient that I already had this list loosely sketched out in my mind with these incredibly talented celebrities.
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During the first two weeks of January, I came across an exchange between two Star Wars fans who were absolutely holding on to the narrative that the Rey/Kylo shipping fandom was being burdened with false accusations of racism – two weeks into the fandom as a whole going off on John Boyega over separate comments he made on New Year’s Eve.
@enfysblessed – I’ll repeat it until I’m blue in the face. Fandom as a whole is racist because society is racist and scapegoating one wildly diverse, large group who have one thing in common isn’t helping anything and is actively making it harder to combat fandom racism
@bensvvolo – this is honestly the most baffling thing to me, people not realizing the racism they recognize is societal and, I’d argue, not even fandom’s “job” to “fix”.
Two things stand out to me about these two tweets.
First, there’s the idea that supposedly scapegoating a “wildly diverse, large group” (Rey/Kylo shippers) for racism they are either participating in or not stopping from their fandom… is “actively making it harder to combat fandom racism”.
As someone who’s been writing about fandom racism relatively professionally since 2015? (And casually, to an extent, since the time of the Sleepy Hollow and MCU fandoms’ initial antiblackness?)
It’s actually fans like those two that make it hard for me to have my work taken seriously and for other fans to recognize and work against fandom racism.
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This is essentially a prototype – originally posted on Patreon ages ago – of WFRLL: Woke Points For What. It’s definitely a bit… spicier than that article. I fixed some spelling errors and comma placement but for the most part, this is the article posted on Patreon… whenever I posted it on Patreon.
Right about now, in fandom spaces, “fake woke” has all but replaced the GamerGator popularized “virtue signaling” when people want to get mad about the fact that some of us care about the delicate challenge posed by trying to get positive representation for marginalized people in fandom and media.
The second that I see someone call someone else “fake woke” or accuse them of being interested in talking about or unpacking social justice in order to get some sort of social credit – via “woke points” (courtesy of the Reylo fandom who keeps using that specific phrase to discredit anyone that’s even vaguely critical of their ship) or “virtue signaling” or even the good ole fashioned “ally cookie” – I know to be wary.
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I get a lot of weird ass messages and mentions, but this message, sent on the first day of Black History Month 2020, definitely ranks at the top of the weird ones.
In case you’ve missed it, January was a month full of Star Wars fandom criticism:
All of these were written/created in response to a fairly large amount of Rey/Kylo shippers showing up and showing their racist little asses over John Boyega’s initial “lay the pipe” comment (a single sex joke) and then over him dunking on their ship.
But it’s not actually about my feelings about the ship. Actually, the one thing I tried not to do was talk about my feelings about the ship because that’s not what any of this is about.
It’s bigger than ships. It’s about how this fandom has been antiblack on main for years and is finally throwing off the hood to show its real face.
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