In this video, I cover:
- what’s coming up over the future of this account
- what content you’re guaranteed to get at the different tiers
- the future of my content period
Tiers:
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Rey/Kylo Shippers: A New Look At An Old Face of Fannish Entitlement
The day after the premiere of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (December 16, 2019), I watched a roughly seventy-second-long video of a young woman absolutely losing it over the idea that Kylo Ren – I’m sorry, Ben Solo – probably died a virgin.
I mean, she went on a whole tear about how this was actually about fighting for abuse survivors in the fandom to see someone like them make it to the end of the franchise (hello, Finn exists, binches) but like… at the end of the day, her real big beef with The Rise of Skywalker days before it actually got a wide release was that… Ben Solo didn’t get to plow Rey’s oh so fertile fields before becoming one with the Force.
That sentiment – that Ben Solo somehow deserves to get his dick wet in Rey and that The Rise of Skywalker somehow robbed him of the right to fuck when it’s obvious that he’s the ultimate Space Incel – is featured heavily across too much of that fandom’s response to the end of the film.
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Quick Coverage: John Boyega Ends 2019 With a Bang (And a Hearty ‘Fuck You’ To Rey/Kylo Shippers)
In case you missed my lengthy post about how Rey/Kylo shippers really don’t like John Boyega, I’m here to remind you of that fact by covering the sheer unsubtle nonsense that’s been going on in this fandom for the past twenty-four hours.
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2019 General Wrap-Up: Stitch Talked A Lot About Racism In Fandom This Year
There’s something that I’ve learned about what fandom racism looks like across 2019.
Something that makes me think about the future of fandom and my input/output as we inch towards 2020.
Fans of color – especially Black fans – who talk about racism and race in fandom are systematically rewritten in and excised from fandom in order to reframe conversations about race/race in fandom until the only people who are allowed to discuss race and racism in fandom are PIckMe POC who bend the knee to whiteness in fandom and white people who aren’t staying in their lane either way .
Yesterday, I saw one of my (white) mutuals talking about racism in fandom and the importance of listening to fans of color with someone (possibly a fan of color themselves) who seemed receptive to an extent. Thing is? I couldn’t see the tweet… because the person my mutual was talking with had me blocked.
I’d never once interacted with this person. I don’t know this person.
They definitely don’t know me.
But they know about me –
Apparently.
Enough to block me without actually ever bother engaging with me or my work outside of someone else’s screenshots – probably.
This happens literally all the time these days. People will block me in droves – usually because I am critical about racism in fandom, but one time when I said that it wasn’t racist to affectionately refer to Yoongi from BTS as a goblin or gremlin – without me ever once interacting with them.
And the thing is that I don’t expect anyone to let me run roughshod across their timelines. Half of the time, if I’m on one of my other accounts and I see my own content, I find myself getting annoyed. And I wrote those damn tweets.
If you’re out here claiming that you really care about racism in fandom but you and your friends have all knowingly blocked and/or constantly subtweet me, the most vocal Black voices in transformative fandom talking about racism in fandom and you pretty much only listen to sycophants of color who want to cling to their space in your orbit, –
How solid is your anti-racism stance in fandom?
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End of the Year Project Wrap-Up – K-Pop Industry and Fandom Antiblackness Project
I don’t regret how I’ve spent most of 2019.
It’s impossible to miss that I’ve spent most of 2019 writing about, listening to, and talking to other people about Korean pop and hip hop music. I have spent so much time, energy, and effort talking about what is now my primary fandom and at the end of these past eight months –
I can’t say that I regret any of it.
Criticism is part of my fandom way.
I love critical conversations about fandom. I love making connections between the theories I learned in grad school and the things I love. I genuinely and truly love getting my critical little claws all over something that I’m fond of.
And I am fond of these things.
I promise.
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What Stitch Listened To In 2019
If you’re so inclined, you can check out my Spotify 2019 “Top Songs” playlist for what I had on repeat this year, but if you want to know the songs I played even when I was just screwing around on YouTube and what I was thinking/why I liked it, this list is for you!
I spent a lot of 2019 listening to recent Korean pop and hip-hop. That’s probably not a surprise considering what I’ve been working on across this year.
And of course, I’m still listening to Hamilton.
Title: Love U
Artist: Monsta X
What Had Me Hooked: A few weeks ago I made a tweet about how Monsta X makes “some good songs about fucking” and “Love U”, one of their newer English releases that’ll be on their upcoming Valentine’s Day release, is one of those songs. I love this song because it is so semi-subtly hornt. Are they talking about not being able to say the word “fuck” on the radio or are they talking about not being able to say “I love you” in Korean on Western radio? Who knows! It’s exciting!
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[Letters To The Author] Dear Laurell K Hamilton
Quick Coverage: CLC’s Sorn Should Think Before She Posts
If you’re in or adjacent to Korean pop culture fandom spaces and somehow thought we’d be ending 2019 without further antiblackness from idols or their fans…
a) I’m not sure how you got to that conclusion considering how bad 2019’s been
b) You were wrong.
You were wrong, and now we have another month where an idol has thoroughly proven themselves to give less than zero shits about Black people and Black fans.
Have we had a month yet where an idol hasn’t fucked up on some way? Have we had a month in 2019 that wasn’t rife with antiblackness directly revolving around Korean pop and/or hip-hop as genres or within their fandom spaces?
Read More »What Fandom Racism Looks Like: Power & Privilege
This was originally posted on Patreon in November without any real extra-text.
One of the most interesting (and frustrating) things about talking about fandom and media and the racism present in these spaces is how many people view my position as one that has any power in fandom.
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Fic-as-Lit
Note: This essay contains critical references to and some descriptions content in fanworks that is/seen as objectionable including underage characters and sexualized/eroticized racism.
I spent a lot of my time in graduate school arguing that “literature” as a word could encompass entire worlds of media that were consistently dismissed as not being sacred or classical enough.
I found the potential for literature in pretty much everything that had text in it and made a point of challenging the expectations that my classmates had about lit on a regular basis.
So I get that urge to be like “fan fiction should be as valued and as valid as literature” and I even embrace it – up to a point.
And that point comes when you look at the differences between how literature and fanfiction are critiqued. Or rather – how we’re allowed to engage critically with them.Read More »
What Fandom Racism Looks Like: The Star Wars Fandom (Part One, Probably)
Few fandoms fill me with the kind of anger that the Star Wars fandom does.
In fact, there are times where I’d go so far as to say that I hate it.
Times like Wednesday night.
When I got home Wednesday night from my first A.C.E concert, I was flying high. It’d been a great night with fantastic music and a stellar performance. Everywhere I looked, I saw fans loving their thing and loving that they got to share that thing with other fans. For a few blissful hours, I’d experienced fandom at its best: people coming together in joy and in celebration over something brilliant.
And then I was rudely reminded that the Star Wars fandom exists and that a whole huge chunk of the Rey/Kylo shippers who dominate much of the fandom discourse is made up of just really terrible people.
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Fleeting Frustrations #11 – True Fans, Who Fans?
There’s nothing about my Twitter account that clearly pings the mind and calls me out as an obvious fan of K-pop – or… pretty much any form of nerdery outside of a single comic.
My profile picture is a picture of my face, not a Korean artist or a superhero. My display name and @ aren’t a fandom in-joke. (Although the little leaf/tree emoji in my display name is a reference to Kim Namjoon of BTS. I did it for his birthday in September and then… just never changed it.)
I do get that the only notably nerdy thing about my twitter account is, at first glance, my header image of Lunella Lafayette from Marvel Comics’ Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur. And if you don’t know anything about her comic, it’s easy to assume it’s not nerdy.
But between my apparently invisible fannishness and my very visible Blackness, no one ever assumes I know anything about K-pop. Or Star Wars. Or fandom.
The first thing is my thing, you know?
I’m into a ton of different fandoms and when faced with having to try and choose one to represent fully across my Twitter profile, I kind of froze and chose one thing. So that inability some fans have to recognize me based on my profile and whatnot? That’s on me.
But then there’s the thing where Black people aren’t necessarily read as fans across many different fandom spaces around the world.Read More »
No Time To Die – Trailer #1 Thoughts
Back in 2015, I devoted pretty much half a year of my life to covering the Bond films for The Mary Sue (except the last one, somehow). I made that franchise my life and it was, for the most part aside from how I didn’t get paid to do any of it, pretty awesome.
My interest in Bond fandom comes and goes depending on what content is coming out. I got hyped for the comics from Dynamite (so good, for real) and then that waned because I have a short attention span. When news of No Time To Die started coming out and it looked like we were finally getting back on track, I was like “okay, let’s do it”.
Everything about No Time To Die has me hyped up so far. The cast – new and returning – looks wonderful. The director – Cary Fukunaga – is both talented and a major babe. My anticipation for this film is pretty high and the trailer does an excellent job of returning me to my Bond Babe roots.Read More »
WFRLL K-Pop Antiblackness Project #HoodCosplay
I’m just so pleased about how well “hood cosplay” as a term works for my needs across my project on antiblackness in the k-pop industry and its fandom spaces. I had to do a video!
WFRLL: Black Sound… Somehow Not For Black Fans?
Back in in the beginning of April, when I first started this project and the idea for this section started to take form, I screenshot and shared a tweet from a K-pop fan (though the group they preferred, escapes me) that said:
“I don’t know why black people are even stupid enough to like K-pop. It isn’t for you. Go listen to rap.”
Go listen to rap.
Imagine having the nerve to tell Black fans to “go listen to rap” because – in this case – you were frustrated by yet another conversation about cultural appropriation in the K-pop industry.
Imagine being that much of a walnut that you zoom on past the fact that even the cutesiest of girl groups will have something that’s attempting to be a rap line and rap breaks in their songs – specifically so that you can tell Black people to get the hell out of “your” fandom space/genre of choice.
This is just a taste of what international fandom spaces are like for Black K-pop fans on social media. When we are even a tiny bit critical of the way our idols try to emulate our cultures, folks tell us that we need to get out of the fandom because there’s no way that we belong.
They tell us to return to rap music, the same rap music that our favorite idols and artists are listening to and performing in South Korea.
Imagine being that awful.
Stitch's Media Mix 
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