Author: Stitch

Stitch writes about what needs to be written.

Stitch Does Stuff In August 2019

Stitch

Hello pumpkins,

I know I was like “I’m not going to do another month with three public installments of What Fandom Racism Looks Like” but uh… so far that’s what August is shaping up to be.

I’ve got three installments of WFRLL on the docket to go up on my site this month: a piece on “Fandoming While Black”, the cultural appropriation in Korean pop/hip hop essay I’d been working for about two weeks after I failed hard at foregrounding, and a short installment on intent behind racist fanworks and how intent isn’t magical.

I’m also playing catch-up this month with my rec list for F/F content, the series squee post for Grayson, and, if I can get the time to reread it, my review for Alyssa Cole’s A Prince on Paper.

I’ll also be posting public video content related to the upcoming cultural appropriation essay and the Supergirl fandom’s continuously racist reactions to Mehcad Brooks and James Olsen. (And, despite the fact that I’m behind on my attempt at having a podcast on Patreon, I’m contemplating doing mini-podcast episodes starting the end of this month! We’ll see how this goes!)

On the Patreon front, I am supremely busy.

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Ships n Shit: Team Kill Dracula

Stitch

I’m a sucker for a good enemies-to-friends-to-lovers romance. And Team Kill Dracula – a silly non-namesmush of a ship name for the triad relationship between Alucard/Trevor/Sypha from Netflix’s Castlevania series absolutely provides that potential.

This ship is relatively popular in fandom with 188 of the 835 stories across the AO3’s section for the anime series. (No idea how many stories are on FanFiction.Net specifically for the anime, but I’m assuming that there are… some?) The only ship that’s more popular is solo Alucard/Trevor, which is still pretty darn quality.

For those of us who grew up with tragic and romantic vampires and the folks who hunted (and were haunted by) them, the ship offers a lot to love in terms of potential. Sadness, serious angst, shirtless vampires, a spunky Speaker –

Look, y’all. The ship basically sails itself. You can create pretty much any content for it and it’ll probably work because the ship is so so versatile. Interested in learning more about the next best thing to happen to triads in fandom since the Leverage OT3?

Let’s get started:

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What Fandom Racism Looks Like: James Olsen is Pete Ross 2.0

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I’ve talked a ton about what fandom spaces look like when Black woman steps into a racebent role, but not about what happens to Black men who play racebent roles in the same franchises.

If you think that things are any easier for Black men in fandom well…

You’ve thought wrong.

This installment of What Fandom Racism Looks Like will look at how the racism behind how the Smallville fandom treated Pete Ross – played by Sam Jones III – and how, over a decade later, the Supergirl fandom pulls from the same playbook in order to excuse heaping a ton of racism on James Olsen and the black actor that plays him, Mehcad Brooks.

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A Very Special Unboxing

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In super awesome and (probably super surprising) news, I’ve got a gosh-darned BOOK coming out in a MONTH!

Judge Anderson: Flytrap, my second novella and my first work published in a standalone book with my name on the cover, is coming out from 2000 AD in August.

This is a story that was incredibly fun to write and that gave me a chance to flex my writing muscles. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to write in Anderson’s world and I don’t know that I can ever convey how much this opportunity means to me.

If you want to preorder this fantastic (if I may toot my own horn a bit) novella, preorders are open here at the 2000 AD online store and there are just 200 physical copies available!

Judge Anderson: Flytrap

Two hundred floors up on Wormwood Block, in one of the poorer corners of Mega-City One, a cit turns on her neighbours, biting and raging. Just another futsie, in a city filled with everyday tragedy.

Psi-Judge Cassandra Anderson and her new partner take the call. It should be an open-and-shut case, until she tries to read the poor futsie’s mind and finds… nothing.

Somewhere in Wormwood is a predator, setting a trap for people like Cass. Hell of a way to finish her second year on the streets…

Thanks for watching and thanks for (hopefully) reading!

Note: the video Absolutely freezes and then skips a bit partway through – no fault of the terrific teen helping me by holding the camera at all – all issues across the board are my own!

Stitch Likes Stuff – Stitch’s Favorite BTS’ Songs

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We haven’t had a ton of truly celebratory fandom-related content on here in a hot minute and that’s because my critical brain is in overdrive working on various projects.

However, one thing I’ve wanted to share with y’all across my deepening investment in K-pop and alongside the critical work I’m doing about the genre/industry and its related fandom spaces is what I flat out love about it.

So instead of the BTS World review I’d actually planned to try and get out, I’m going to do a post looking at my favorite BTS songs and why I love them. I’m including solo member songs (solo meaning that they’re not a part of the EPs/CDs they put out with the group) in this and uh… you’ll be able to tell really fast what my favorite kinds of BTS songs in terms of arrangements/who gets the focus.

(And on the subject of BTS World: no joke, the game’s a time and money sink and I am surprisingly not captivated by it despite my love of dating sims on top of the frustration. And since I can’t screenshot anything since I’ve got an Android phone – the game lets iPhone users screenshot with a warning ugh – it’s kind of annoying.)

Anyway! Here’s a list of my most favorite BTS songs!

I’m glad I can share this sort of purely celebratory experience with you nerds!

❤

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[Stitch Answers Feedback] What Can Non-Black Fans Do?

Stitch

The text, from a screenshot of a really cool message I received, reads:

hi stitch! im a regular reader of your site, and i wanted to ask a question that im unsure if you’ve addressed so far or not. having grown up on tumblr from 2011 onward, i definitely feel you hit the nail on the head about the “blank slates ghost” and migratory slash fandom always hyperfocusing on white men. it’s really telling how ships like stucky (while i personally enjoy it) can completely overshadow and create hostility toward steve/sam; i had a friend who got routinely vagued and harassed for that exact thing. but what im wondering is, on the flipside, how can white and nbpoc interact w black characters in ships without being creepy abd voyeuristic? i liked your post about the finnpoe racist fics where finn is always hyper-big and sexualized, that kind of demonstrated some stuff Not to do, but i wonder if there’s more nuance to it? should we accept that black fans will sideye/be more wary of nonblack people getting involved in the slash scene for black characters, or are there more dedicated steps we can take to openly be supportive and non-fetishistic? thanks for reading this even if you dont have much time to answer!!!

I got this message in my inbox a few days ago, but since the email address attached to it looks like it’ll bounce back if I email them back and this is a topic I’m sure many of y’all have been wondering about… I decided to make public! I hope that my anonymous reader sees this and knows that I’m grateful to them for being a longtime reader and for sending this message!

There are two real questions being asked here and I’m going to try my best at tackling them in clear and relatively concise ways.

Now, to the answer(s):

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The Great Big Anita Blake Reread: Sorting Out Shifters

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“Peggy, that’s my wife, she’s a lycanthrope.”

The Lunatic Café (Anita Blake #4)

Shapeshifters are people too.

At least, that’s what Laurell K Hamilton is trying to convince us and Anita across the twenty-six books in her Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series: one of the core themes across the Anitaverse  is the idea that shapeshifters are people and they deserve the consideration that people get.

It’d be an admirable approach to take if not for how Hamilton sets up shifters and their pack dynamics. Shifter society and the dynamics between members in a particular group towards insiders and outsiders – especially if those outsiders are human – really make you question what she’s actually succeeding at.

For this pint-sized primer, we’re going to be talking about the main shape-shifter groups Anita interacts with across the Anitaverse – wolves, leopards, hyenas, tigers, and lions, the lone prey group in the whole dang thing, swans – and why Hamilton’s worldbuilding and her rationale behind using shapeshifters as metaphor for various marginalized identities remains more full of holes than a slice of Swiss cheese.

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Antiblackness in the K-pop Industry and its Fandom Spaces: Introduction

Stitch

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Anti-blackness is universal.

Outside of maybe a handful of countries around the world, there aren’t many places where I’m guaranteed to be entirely free from anti-black racism. Even my home island of St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands isn’t a safe space for me as a Black person –

And I grew up there.

Because anti-blackness is so ubiquitous across so many different spaces and how often it shows up in situations where Black people aren’t actually present or involved, I am not surprised at anti-blackness being present out of the blue – to me at least.

I am really not surprised at how antiblackness shows up in the K-pop fandom – because antiblackness is everywhere in fandom spaces.

But there’s something a little… extra about how anti-blackness works in K-pop fandom spaces and how much of that anti-blackness is actually fueled by issues present in the music industry’s consumption and repackaging of Black culture.Read More »

Stitch Does Stuff in July

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I love Day Job.

I love being able to get up, come into work, and put together ads or blow through edits on a batch of articles for one of our clients. I love having the chance to use my English MA Editing Skills (TM) to make our marketing department a better one.

What I don’t love is not having time to write.

Sure, I make time as often as I can – if you follow me on twitter, you’ve probably seen my handwritten notes for my upcoming What Fandom Racism Looks Like series – but it’s not enough.

But I’m going to make it be enough… Somehow. Read More »

[Post PCA Roundtable Wrap-Up] 10 Years After Racefail ’09: Where’s The Growth?

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10 Years After Racefail '09_ Where's The Growth_

This is a wrap-up/write-up of my overall comments during the PCA 2019 Roundtable on Racism in Fandom/Fan Studies Spaces (which I chaired). Feel free to check out write-ups from Robin Anne Reid and Samira Nadkari, two of the other participants on the roundtable.

Across transformative and curatorial fandom spaces, racism is so entrenched in the skeleton of fandom – from erasing fans of color via the ahistorical rewriting of fandom history to killing off or torturing characters of color in fanworks – that to uproot and remove racism from fandom would leave it looking like those floppy cored sheep from the bone vampire episode of Futurama.

PCA 2019 was my second time attending this conference in three years. It was my second time coming into these academic spaces and getting up to talk to a hopefully invested audience about racism in fandom spaces.

But it wasn’t my first time talking about the way that misogynoir works in fandom.

Not in general.

Not even for that day.

(As I’d done my presentation on misogynoir the previous panel session)

Talking about misogynoir and other forms of racism in fandom and media is kind of… my thing.

It’s an aspect of fannishness that I feel proud of working on and where I feel compelled to continue honing my skills. It’s a form of fannishness that I like because I finally have the room and the words to verbalize my concerns as a queer Black person in fandom.Read More »

Short and Salty #1: They’re All About The Whiteness

Stitch

Normally, I keep my saltiest thoughts to twitter or my Dreamwidth account. It’s better for all of us.

However, this salty thought is part of a currently shelved follow-up to my What Fandom Racism Looks Like article on Beige Blank Slates and I figured… “Why Not”.

So, have at it, friends and folks:

Attraction is supposed to be subjective.

This subjectiveness, in fandom, is used to say that attraction and desire can’t be connected to or criticized for on the grounds of morals or politics as if Black people weren’t legally prohibited from marrying outside of our race until the 60s and as if people of color aren’t seen as inviable partners to most white people.

Sometimes, when I look at the fandom darlings that fandom loves – the dark/light haired go-to duos like Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), Merlin/Arthur (Merlin), and Hux/Kylo (Star Wars) – I genuinely question what I’m seeing and how subjective attraction is.

Across multiple Western slash fandoms, when you look at what gets popular and what characters just get the fans a-thirsting one thing stands out to me about their attractiveness –

The most attractive/appealing thing about these guys – or the thing fandom actually finds integral to their adoration – really is their whiteness.

Even if they won’t say that.

Fleeting Frustrations # 7: Archive Frenzy and Being (Un) Grateful To Our Fannish Foremothers (Stuck In 2002)

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Note: This Fleeting Frustrations installment mentions racism as well as fanworks involving sexual violence and underage characters. It’s also not very nice. Obviously.

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There are things to love about the AO3. I won’t list them here because I don’t need to. Almost every single piece written about the big ole archive – especially in the wake of its 2019 Hugo Award nomination – has been positive. 

It’s been gushing. 

The AO3 is positioned as a site for queer and/or female exploration and empowerment.

It’s so amazing, these articles and adoring fans write, because it allows queer people and women the freedom to understand their identity and play around with sexual and gender roles as they figure themselves out.

We should be grateful to the grand ole archive because it gives us room to be queer, be women, and to explore kinks and identities that we can’t in real life.

Which is a cool story, let’s be real here.

If I wasn’t a queer Black fan who’s used the AO3 and been in fandom for most of my life, I’d even take those claims at face value. After all, a space for female and/or queer fans is pretty cool, right?

But what about the racism on the archive – in the form of fanworks or in how fans of color have talked about the response from archive staff volunteers have given when they talk about their experiences with racism on the platform?Read More »

Bloodbath (Harietta Lee #2) by Stephanie Ahn

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Bloodbath Cover

I spent a lot of time reading Bloodbath (Harrietta Lee #2) and wondering how on earth Harry manages to make it from one day to the next. To be fair, I’m pretty sure that she has no idea how she’s managed to survive as long as she has either.

In case y’all somehow missed me talking her up, Stephanie Ahn is currently my favorite urban fantasy writer in the game.

Her first book, Deadline, left me stunned by how amazing it was. My introduction to Harry, a dashing and disgraced witch booted from her community after making a bad call and dabbling in some demonic magic that led to the death of her mentor, really changed the way that I flat out looked at the urban fantasy genre.Read More »

Stitch on The Shipping Podcast

Stitch

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I had a blast talking about cannibalism and Hannigram with Shirasade! This was such a delightful experience and I loved every minute of it!

If you’ve ever wondered about one of my favorite fandoms (and one of my favorite ships) or how devoted I am to my #EatTheRich ideology… this is something you’re going to want to listen to.

If you want to listen to Shirasade and I talk about cannibalism, the value of Hannigram, and how much I REALLY like the ABO fanfic from this fandom well…

Have I got a podcast episode for you!

Major thanks to Shirasade for having me! It was brilliant!

LISTEN HERE

Urban Fantasy 101: A Fast Guide to the Freaking Fae Folk

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I’ve been reading about the fae in urban fantasy ever since I first got my grubby little hands on Holly Black’s Tithe way back when and I think that the fae get a weird rap in urban fantasy series.

Like with the other predatory species, they exist in this weird in-between space where they’re generally oppressing someone but oppressed by others. Fae hold a complicated space in urban fantasy because you never really know when you’re going to get an innovative fae-filled fairytale retelling or something that poorly handles tough themes like imperialism, abusive relationships, and slavery.

But the fae are fascinating even when I don’t exactly love the way they’re being written in an urban fantasy book. Like some of the supernatural species I’ve written about before, they can often hide in plain sight as they navigate a world that actively harms them – literally considering that many fae physically can’t interact with man-made materials and the pollution of the human world can kill some of them – but that’s not the only fascinating thing about them. Read More »