During that time, fans of the group would respond to any person with a BTS-related icon that commented on that particular instance of cultural appropriation with comments dismissing their comments because “Don’t you stan BTS”.
Many of the comments were like “But Namjoon [had attempted an afro, had whatever this style is supposed to be, covered that one Shinhwa song, etc] so how can you be critical of anyone else if you like him”.
If this was strictly an attempt at calling out hypocrisy that acknowledged that our faves in this industry are all (largely) similarly problematic when it comes to respecting Black culture(s), maybe I could’ve gotten it. Maybe I could’ve even managed to gloss over it.
But this is not a fandom where that sort of thing happens – most fandoms aren’t.
“What is the opposite of fandom? Disinterest. Dislike. Disgust. Hate. Anti-fandom.”
Melilssa A. Click. Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age
The anti-fandom(s) – and anti-fan(s) – of 2020 look far different from what Jonathan Gray put together in 2003’s “New Audiences, New Textualities” when he described anti-fans as, “those who strongly dislike a given text or genre, considering it inane, stupid, morally bankrupt and/or aesthetic drivel,” (70).
The internet and fandom as we know it have both changed drastically in the past decade and change since he first attempted to provide that definition – a definition that Gray himself has tried to expand upon and contextualize across the years, culminating in his essay in Melissa A. Click’s collection on anti-fandom referenced in the introductory quote.
At this point, if you’re in transformative fandom, you’re probably faintly aware of the term “anti” and the variety of ways it’s used to describe other people in fandom who seem to be against fandom in some way that is rarely fully explained.
In part because most of the people explaining it… can’t explain it very well because they have wildly varying definitions of what an anti is and what anti behavior looks like.
At this point in fandom and fandom discourse, what is most “anti”/opposite/against fandom is not letting fans do what they want without any criticism whatsoever. Which includes, as I’ve noted across the years… fans creating purposefully or incidentally racist fanworks.
I mean, really… considering that when John Boyega was getting shat on by Rey/Kylo fans – members of a fanbase that’d been harassing him and shitting on him publicly for his entire time in the Star Wars sequel trilogy – I saw tweets accusing him of “siding with fandom antis” –
It becomes clear that in many fandom spacesm, the term “anti” at this point is mostly meaningless.
(And that Black people who aren’t doing what fandom wants will always be viewed and (mis) treated as outside of or against (anti) fandom.)
There’s a chance that I mispronounce Sik-K’s name when I talk about m-flo’s collaboration with him, eill, and Taichi Mukai (“tell me tell me“). Apologies for that! One note though is that I and Sik-K (in this one HIphopKR interview) pronounce it the same way which is unexpected!
If you can afford it, please pick up a copy of Myoung-Sun Song’s Hanguk Hip Hop: Global Rap in South Korea. It has changed my life for the better and her scholarship is stellar and timely!
Korean pop and hip hop have come to mean a lot to me over the past significant chunk of my life. In some ways, I am an hold hand. In other ways, I am a baby fan. It’s fascinating to see the ways that these spaces are and aren’t similar to other fandom spaces I’ve been in. In excited to keep working, researching, and writing in these spaces and broadening my understanding – oh, and having fun in fandom which is like… actually happening on the regular, y’all!
I mention constantly how I couldn’t do a lot of my work without the friends I’ve made along the way. I would like to thank, first and foremost, Jae and LJ. I could not have kept my head relatively cool without being able to shout in their general vicinity about it. I’d also like to thank my K-pop fandom friends on Twitter like Carrie, Brie, Morg, Caps, Misha, and Quil. There are so many of you who have opened your hearts, minds, and DMs up to me across the past year and I love you all so much.
Transcript
Speaker: Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 4 of Stitch Talks Ish. If you missed it check out last month’s episode where I reviewed BTS’s Map of the Soul: 7.
I feel like it’s a fantastic episode, just saying –
But on a related note, episode four is also going to be about K-pop, but from a more critical lens.
Note: The section on RPF and whtiewashing deals pretty plainly with real person fan fiction – where a real celebrity is treated like a character in fan works – but from the POV of “stop whitewashing them” rather than a judgement call on the fandom itself. I’d suggest skipping this section, scrolling down to the solutions section of the piece, and waiting a little bit for me to finish writing my actual RPF-focused installment of What Fandom Racism Looks Like later this year because it’s been in the works for a while and will tackle K-Pop RPF, Hockey fandom, and the One Direction fandom’s endless racism towards Zayn.
The Fanlore page for Migratory fandom describes it as, “the most recent term used to describe the idea that slash fans are always on the lookout for the next shiny, new juggernaut pairing”.
First seen in fandom discussions across Fail_Fandomanon – one of many multi-fandom anonymous memes – the term is a reference to this idea that slash fans are constantly moving to the next fandom that’ll provide them their dose of slashy goodness.
On the surface, there’s nothing even remotely wrong with moving to another fandom because the one you’re in is running dry on content. Honestly, I’m right there with folks because when a fandom I’m in is dried up entirely or the fan content it’s creating has been done to death before… I always feel like jumping ship at least for a little while.
So I get the motivation.
But this is “What Fandom Racism Looks Like” and you know that means that there is something I find frustrating about migratory slash fandom that falls under this series….
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:
“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:
Stick around because I’ll try to have a bonus featuring my BTS nieceling’s thoughts on the album and our thoughts on the official music video for ON ASAP.
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.)
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).
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.
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.
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.
Note3/31/21: 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.
Content Warnings: I talk explicitly about antiblack racism in fandom and white women weaponizing their femininity in service to it. I also briefly mention how part of this involves setting up a fear of John/that John will assault or is otherwise a threat to (largely white) women. I say the word “whore” once in describing a hypothetical username. I also swear a ton.
This is another grouchy episode because I am tired of this shit for real.
For folks I have blocked or that aren’t on twitter, I’ll be putting together a post collecting the tweets as soon as I can figure out how to do it well! Right now, what I have is… not up to my standards.
Hi, everyone, welcome to the second episode of Stitch Talks Ish.
It’s been about two and some change months since my first episode where I talked about like five minutes of The Tablo Podcast. And, and right now I’m back to complain again — not about Tablo this time.
If you follow me on Twitter, which you could if you wanted to, (and weren’t blocked,) I’ve been talking about the Star Wars fandom’s antiblackness from pretty much at the beginning of 2020. We’re only 12 days in. So I’m going to cover, as best as I can for podcasts, everything that’s happened, and about some really frustrating, and even worrying things that I’ve noticed about what’s been going on with the Reylo fandom, which is the ship name for Rey and Kylo Ren, and just overarching, transformative fandom.
So to start, I guess we have to begin from the beginning.
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