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.

But that’s really not why I do this. Any of this.

In returning to Twilight — or starting the series for the first time — fans are coming across things they didn’t know about the vampires in the series. A major example? Jasper Cullen’s pre-vampire past as… a Confederate major in the Civil War. As young adult author Camryn Garrett pointed out during her own rewatch of the series, the fact that Jasper fought on the wrong side of the Civil War is never addressed again outside of the lone mention in Eclipse.

Twilight’s Jasper Cullen Is Part of Confederate Vampire History

I love vampires. Oh my god do I love vampires. (Slightly less than I love werewolves, but that is absolutely a personal problem.) Getting to stretch my muscles as a literature MA – this is absolutely what I did in college right down to talking about Twilight in the context of Fifty Shades of Gray and fic as something we use to take over Text – was pretty darn neat. And of course, I got to watch a lot of vampire-oriented media this week! It was great because I was cuddled up to Meems, my littlest niece, the entire time. The only thing I didn’t subject her to was True Blood because that is OBVIOUSLY not appropriate for her age.

I had a wonderful time researching and writing this column and I’m looking forward to writing more cool things in August! 😀

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Transcript

[Still in progress.]

Originally posted on Patreon at the $1 Tier on 4/2/2021,

Source: What Fandom Racism Looks Like: Phone A Friend of Color

Thinky Thoughts

If there’s one fandom behavior I wish I could Thanos-snap out of existence, it would be the habit that many people have of tagging in POC to  d-d-d-d-duel each other in the name of fandom discourse. It’s not just that it’s annoying and allows people adhering like glue to the one-drop rule to wave their 23-and-me test results in the face of other POC they’re stepping on and speaking over. It’s also the fact that this sets up a situation of people of color being essentially stuck in a specific role, almost on a shelf away from the rest of fandom, until they can be useful.

No one will say outright that they think the only role people of color have in fandom that lets them be valued is to in/validate someone else’s point of view on race and racism. But that’s what it boils down to.

We can’t just do our own thing on our own.

For PCA 2021 – an academic conference on pop culture – I’m doing a presentation on an under-represented and researched type of international Korean idol fans: Black women and other femme-identity aligned people within our community. 

A lot of the coverage of English language idol fandoms rightfully focuses on Asian fans (diasporic Koreans primarily, but also South East Asian fans as an incredibly large fanbase). I love the work I’ve read in media/fan studies circles because it’s helped deepen my understanding of these fandoms and how I can be a better fan on my own.. 

However, the thing I don’t like is how much more of this work explicitly or implicitly focuses on white fans even at a point of talking about things like fandom activism in the wake of May/June 2020’s BLM-related activism that was fueled by Black fans in different idol fandoms. There is a serious lack of understanding and research in fan/media studies and in mainstream-ish journalism about:

1. English language k-pop fandom spaces as a whole
2. The roles Black fans play in these spaces and in furthering the popularity of these artists in their home countries/specific fandom spaces

I’m still struggling to get back in the groove after being yeeted off the path in February thanks to That Nonsense and just… all the awful terrible things in the news (like the escalation in anti-Asian hate crimes on top of some bad stuff in local politics/policing).

I’m still writing through the stress though and I’m still looking for a new Day Job as freelance is not actually feasible for me for long-term since you know… insurance. However, I think I finished everything I had planned for March or moved them around so I felt like I did!

Here are some March highlights for y’all from my neck of the woods:

• Fan Service #4 How Do We Define Fandom?
• Fan Service #5 Lil Nas X Is Using Stan Twitter Tactics to Defend “Montero.” He Shouldn’t Have To 
• I learned about “The Ship of Theseus” and how it’s the same crap people have been doing to me/to tank my reputation for years
• We hit SEVEN YEARS of Stitch’s Media Mix
• Meghan Markle’s Critics Are Using Internet Troll Tactics to Perpetuate Misogynoir
• My first piece for Polygon: The torpedo of stan Twitter hurts everyone

So what’s up for April?

Originally posted as a thread April 30, 2019.

There’s a really good tumblr post about the progressiveness of fic (that boils down to “the OP can go to any bookstore and some grocery stores and easily find books about Black characters that don’t center white ones/whiteness and that really doesn’t happen in fandom”)

This marks my 7^th March of having Stitch’s Media Mix be a thing.

Holy shit.

7 years of functionally doing the same thing – for someone who has 2 of their three degrees in different things and the attention span of a hard boiled egg – is incredible. And of course, it hasn’t been easy. A lot of people in fandom hate me. Which fandom? All fandoms!

(Seriously, I don’t even watch 99% of modern anime series that blow up or talk about them/their fandoms and yet so many weebs hate me because they think I care about their latest lolic0n fixation? Meanwhile the weebiest thing I’ve done recently is call Megan Thee Stallion one!)

But I’m still here!

Mobile Suit Gundam Wing is probably the most important Gundam Series in my life – yes, even though I was very invested in the off-the-wall wackiness of G Gundam and would absolutely sacrifice myself so that Tieria and Neil Dylandy (the first Lockon Strators) could live happily ever after together. Gundam Wing was a series I was obsessed with as a teenager… and as a young adult… and now in my thirties. 

Who worked on this series?

I don’t wanna be like “who didn’t work on this series”, but Mobile Suit Gundam Wing has huge crew behind it. Produced by Sunriase and Directed by Masashi Ikeda and Shinji Takamatsu, this series’ script and story were written by Katsuyuki Sumizawa while the iconic character designs were done by Shukou Murase. If you’re a long time fan of mecha anime, you probably already knew that the best Gundams in the history of the franchise – and all the other mech and tech – were designed by Hajime Katoki, Junya Ishigaki, and Kunio Okawara! 

These dudes pretty much built out the Gundams we can’t stop thinking about – and one day I will get a good Deathscythe model kit and put that bad boy together while drunk!