Stitch Talks Ish: Episode 3 – Stitch Talks Map of the Soul: 7

Stitch

ON BUZZSPROUT

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.)

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Two Sides of Being A Black K-Pop Fan: Incredible Rage

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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:

  • Two separate members of Super Junior (Yesung and Shindong) in blackface
  • (g) i-dle’s So-yeon having her “ethnic hip” moment on Queendom
  • Lots of fucking cornrows, locs, and box braids on scalps that cannot handle that shit
  • Wendy from Red Velvet and RM from BTS mimicking Black people on two separate variety shows
  • Hwasa (from Mamamoo, a group that slathered on the brown makeup as a unit to portray Bruno Mars on a variety show back in 2017), dropping an absolutely unsubtle “nigga” into her cover of Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable” like we wouldn’t fucking notice
  • A clip of RM telling interviewers, in English by the way, that he couldn’t see two of his bandmembers in the dark because “they were too black” from early on in their time as a group
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Authenticity Essay #2 – Girls (Not) On Top

Stitch
https://www.instagram.com/p/B4CDtDrFQCV/

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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Featuring… Blasian Celebs

Stitch

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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Whose Job Is It To Fix Fandom?

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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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Fuck Your Fake Woke

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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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[Stitch Answers Feedback] Do You Know What True Antiblackness is?

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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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Stitch Gives Away Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby

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Ella has a Thing. She sees a classmate grow up to become a caring nurse. A neighbor’s son murdered in a drive-by shooting. Things that haven’t happened yet. Kev, born while Los Angeles burned around them, wants to protect his sister from a power that could destroy her. But when Kev is incarcerated, Ella must decide what it means to watch her brother suffer while holding the ability to wreck cities in her hands.

Rooted in the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is as much an intimate family story as a global dystopian narrative. It burns fearlessly toward revolution and has quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience.

Ella and Kev are both shockingly human and immeasurably powerful. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by racism. Their futures might alter the world.

It’s only February, but Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby is already of my favorite books of 2020. This novella is riveting, painful, and above all… full of familiar experiences. I started reading this book and couldn’t put it down even when it got tough. It’s just… incredible.

So I’m giving away two copies.

To enter, leave a comment on this post using a valid email telling me about a work of Black speculative fiction that has moved and/or haunted you!

I’ll choose the winners on the 29th and send you the kindle copies then!

Stitch Watches Watchmen

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Note: This isn’t a full review(in fact, I primarily focus on the first episode) because I don’t have the time for it right now! If you want to talk about specific parts of the show, drop me a comment and we’ll chat about some serious spoilers!

HBO’s Watchmen series leaves me just as unsettled as the end of Jordan Peele’s Us did.

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The Slash Ship Checklist

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Source: Slash Shipping, Pseudo-Progressivism, and Reinforcing Patriarchal Standards in Fandom

Sometimes, when I see a white dude slash ship pick up steam across transformative fandom, all I can think about is how the ship seems like it exists just to check off boxes on an imaginary checklist that’s been shared across slash fandom spaces for the past forty plus years. 

Sure, sometimes the ships are populated by characters who have chemistry in some way. But often, it just kind of feels as if the fans are putting together elements to a formula in order to get the “perfect” ship. 

It doesn’t actually feel… organic. 

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Urban Fantasy 101: Stitch Reads The Hollows – Dead Witch Walking Chapters 1-5

Stitch

Part of officially deciding that I’d break away from the Anita Blake series was trying to figure out another series to focus on that did more interesting things.

I wanted to tackle a series that I had positive memories of, but also know I can criticize it solidly without losing it. Kim Harrison’s The Hollows series was another one of those urban fantasy series that I kind fixated on as a teenager and kept at it until I was a younger adult.

So, I have the positive memories, but then room to criticize it. 

So I’ll be covering the books five chapters at a time blending snarky sporking with the kind of criticism I wanted to return to but couldn’t with the Anita Blake series.

(Not sure how this is going to work? It’ll be something like the spork I did of “Shutdown”, but far less unkind and wordy because I’m not going to go through this book the way I did Shutdown. We’d be here all month.)

Let’s get started.

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What Fandom Racism Looks Like: Weaponized White Womanhood

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Note 3/31/21: Are you here because you googled “Jenny Nicholson racist”? Did a Twitter user link this to you to explain why ~people~ don’t like Jenny in the replies to a tweet calling out a breadtube user? Let me clarify a thing for you:

THIS POST IS NOT ABOUT JENNY AND IT IS NOT ABOUT WHAT SHE MAY OR MAY NOT SHIP. She’s mentioned in one segment in the article and over like 4-7 tweets (out of over 100) in the supplemental PDF/thread. It is literally not about her or about my beef with what other people ship in the Star Wars fandom but about white women and BIPOC who ship Rey/Kylo who tried to say John Boyega was a danger to Daisy Ridley over an IG comment about REY. Please learn to read and think critically and then GO AWAY. Thanks!

Content notes: As with a majority of my pieces, this one focuses closely on antiblackness including the antiblackness inherent in weaponizing white womanhood to excuse dogpiling and slandering John Boyega as a misogynist, as a potential sexual predator, as a bunch of other gross and untrue things. I talk briefly about some examples of Rey/Kylo fics from the fandom’s past including non-graphic (I believe) mentions of sexual assault and include links to a recap of one and an image of the other.

White women have most (if not all) of the actual observable power in transformative fandom spaces.

White women are the image of the typical “fan” in Western transformative fandom spaces.

They are frequently the most popular Big Named Fans (BNFs) in online spaces, the people who dominate discussions about and displays of Being A Fan. If you’re in transformative fandom and you see a particular set of headcanons or a white dude slash suddenly get supremely popular out of nowhere, chances are that a group of white lady BNFs are behind it.

White women in fandom often get to “graduate” from fandom, dominating what we and outsiders think about transformative with staff writer, researcher, and professor jobs that they can tie directly into their experiences and time in fandom.

(Look at the overarching fan studies academic field for an example or fandom-focused journalism on sites like WIRED, The Daily Dot, The Nerdist, and CBR. Chances are that many of the names you know in these fields, if you know any names, belong to white women.)

With that much power already, it can’t be a surprise that many white women in fandom will do pretty much anything in order to keep the status quo level.

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