Category: Fandom

What Fandom Racism Looks Like: #NotAllFans

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WFRLL - #NotAllFans

Inspired by this tweet thread I wrote.

Fandom really doesn’t like to acknowledge that it has multiple problems with race and racism.

From members of fandom writing racist alternate universe stories where characters of color are dehumanized, tortured and killed off (as a form of “putting them in their place”) to the harassment that fans direct at fans and performers of color, there’s no way to escape the fact that fandom – transformative and curatorial fandom spaces– is racist as hell.

One thing that I’ve noticed as I move through various fandoms is that few fans want to acknowledge that the problem and commentary calling out the problem are coming from inside their specific fandoms and social groups within fandom. If a fan of color points out the racism in an aspect of fandom or in harassment they’re receiving from people in fandom, one of the first responses that they get from members of that fandom is…

“I know racism sucks, but don’t generalize a whole fandom based on one person.”

Basically, that’s one of the most useless responses you can give a person talking about something currently impeding their ability to enjoy their free time and security in fandom. Read More »

What Fandom Racism Looks Like: Only 33 Words in a Trailer

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WFRLL - White Feminism in Fandom.png

Yesterday, the Captain Marvel teaser trailer broke the internet.

Today, I saw a tweet about said trailer from Shakesville.com’s Melissa McEwan from the night before that reminded me that when it comes to feminism and fandom, people of color are always stepped over on the path to (white) female empowerment.

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“In the first Captain Marvel trailer, Samuel L. Jackson’s character has 67 words. Brie Larson’s character, i.e. Captain Marvel, has 33.

Come on, Marvel.”

McEwan’s tweet didn’t just inspire me to write a whole tweet thread about White Feminism ™ in fandom.

It reminded me of a bunch of different brushes I’ve had with White Feminism ™ in fandom – from Maggie Stiefvater’s beef with the The Force Awakens fandom apparently focusing more on Finn and Poe than Rey, to Anne Theriault’s desire to keep Uhura “Strong and Single” in the Star Trek reboot films, and the Star Wars “Dude Free” edit of The Last Jedi that not only cut out Finn and Poe but… all of the Tico sisters’ screen time in the name of feminist satire.

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What Fandom Racism Looks Like: White Prioritization

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I think my pal Holly over at DiverseHighFantasy was one of (if not the) first people to use “white prioritization” in a fannish context in a piece on The Walking Dead fandom and the Rick/Michonne ship. So I’d like to open my piece by shouting out to hers.

As I’ve researched, I’ve found a really great starting point for talking about “white prioritization” in Sincere Kirabo’s definition of “white-centeredness” in this piece entitled “On White Supremacy And The Nature Of Norms”:

White-centeredness is a deeply-rooted aspect of U.S. culture. White-centeredness denotes the centrality of white representation that permeates every facet of our dominant culture. It upholds as “normal” and “expected” the ubiquity of language, ideas, prejudices, preferences, values, social mores, and worldviews established by the white perspective.

Like white-centeredness, “white prioritization” is all about focusing on white people alone. It’s a term that refers to the way that people constantly centers whiteness (white men and women primarily) and how that centering comes almost exclusively at the expense of people of color. It’s all about focusing on white experiences and making sure that everything is about white people – even the experiences of people of color.
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Who the heck is Ben Solo?

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who the heck is ben solo

In the past couple of months, there have been several tweets from twitter users with the hashtag “SaveBenSolo” because Ben Solo, should be protected and should survive Episode IX and if you don’t want that, then you’ve got no empathy to speak of.

Many of these posts are also tagged with “Reylo” (because saving this “Ben Solo” character seems contingent on Rey doing the saving despite him shutting her down in the last movie) while others claim that Ben Solo needs to survive because he is, as far as we know, the last surviving Skywalker. They use Leia’s distraught internal monologue over her “lost” son in Jason Fry’s novelization of The Last Jedi to paint a portrait of this Ben Solo as a mythical and magical boy, caught helplessly between destiny and other people’s desire for power.

Ben Solo, fandom argues, needs to be saved because he is the last, the best, the least responsible for his actions, and the most sympathetic…

But who the heck is Ben Solo?Read More »

What Fandom Racism Looks Like: (Not-So) Sexy Slavefic

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Note: before we get into this piece, note that I am coming from this position as a queer Black person who has, in the past, purposefully read and written stories of the kind I am talking about in this piece. I’ve also got experience in researching and writing about Blackness in history, media, and fandom.

Predominantly, the form of slavery I’m going to be talking about in this piece relates to the enslavement of Africans and their descendants because that’s the form of slavery that many of these stories build off of (and I’m Black), but I’m going to mention slavery in ancient cultures. Additionally, any links to my blog stitchmediamix on tumblr won’t work because I have the blog locked while I’m on hiatus.

Content Warning: This piece will talk in depth about slavery in romance work, fanfic, and in history in a way that highlights the violence of slavery. Many of the website links embedded in this piece will link to pages that contain images and/or descriptions of brutality related to slavery including lynching, rape, and whipping.

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Right now, on the Archive of Our Own, there are currently 12,236 stories tagged with “Slavery”.

Almost half of the stories with that tag are rated “Explicit” – most likely for sexual content and/or violence – with “Rape/Non-Con” making up a third of the stories’ warnings. While the stories are too varied to stand out with one or more particular pairing having the lion’s share of stories, in the relationship tab for that tag, the top pairings (with under 400 stories each) are primarily M/M stories focusing on white characters.

This is just a small snapshot of what slavefic[1] in fandom and how slavery is portrayed in fandom looks like.Read More »

Where Are Y’all Getting Your Characterization From? Finn Isn’t A Coward, Or Selfish, And He Doesn’t Need A Damn Redemption Arc.

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I’m not Resistance. I’m not a hero. I’m a Stormtrooper. Like all of them, I was taken
from my family I’ll never know. And raised to do one thing.  In my first battle, I made a choice. I wasn’t going to kill for them. So I ran, right into you. You looked at me like no one ever had. I was ashamed of what I was. But, I’m done with the First Order. I’m never going back.

— Finn to Rey in Maz’s cantina in Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I know that the Star Wars fandom – both the dudebro hubs and the supposedly feminist and progressive parts on Tumblr and Twitter – is racist as shit, but I still can’t believe the audacity of people calling Finn a coward and demanding he be killed off as like… a form of progressive protest on his or Rey’s behalf.

In her article “Star Wars: The Last Jedi Could Have Been Better If This Character Had Died” author Alessia Santoro goes above and beyond in order to “prove” that The Last Jedi would have been a better movie if only for one death – that of John Boyega’s Finn. She does so, of course, by completely crapping all over his character, problematizing his behavior and, wishing for his death because that’s the only possible way for him to matter to her.

Despite the fact that she – and many other members of the Star Wars fandom – claim that they really do like the character, there’s no bigger sign of disliking a character than by wanting them dead.Read More »

A Quick Quibble: Supposedly “Straightwashing” Okoye in Black Panther

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A Quick Quibble_ Supposedly “Straightwashing” Okoye in Black Panther

In a (now deleted) tweet thread from April of this year, writer and artist Kate Leth went in on superhero media for the lack of queer representation in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The thread was fine and absolutely valid right up until the last tweet where she wrote that:

“There were queer characters in Ragnarok and Black Panther whose scenes were cut. Okoye was awkwardly made straight with a plot that went nowhere. Loki exists in subtext. It’s bullshit, pardon my french, that we’re just supposed to go “oh yeah of course, because of money”

You know what this tweet shows me?

It shows me that Leth might not be able to tell Black women apart from one another and that she doesn’t see the value in a character who chooses love of country and her faith in justice over the love of her life (after he sets himself against their country).

It shows me that while Leth knows the basics about the characters and the film (the cut scene with Ayo flirting with Okoye and the Ayo/Aneka relationship in the World of Wakanda comics), she doesn’t know enough to recognize that Okoye and Ayo (or Aneka) aren’t the same characters.

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Headcanons only go so far when it comes to representation

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Headcanons Only Go So Far

In my head, my version of Harvey Dent will always be associated with three things: his Blackness (he’s biracial), his bisexuality (he was totally in love with Bruce Wayne), and how he deals with/manages his mental health issues (which are far more detailed than “spooky split personality” crap from the comics/other media).

None of this is canon even though I used canon to build my mental image of the character.Read More »

Queer Coded Villains Aren’t That Awesome

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AKA “Hux and Kylo aren’t the queer coded villains you’re looking for”

I woke up  on MLK Day swearing that I’d dreamt up a tumblr post where someone quoted Martin Luther King Jr. in order to defend Hux, Kylo Ren, and the First Order. When I went through my archives, not only did I find out that the post was real, but I then stumbled back over a post I made in response to one arguing that Star Wars’ Hux was coded as queer and that said queer-coding was a good thing.

And I mean –

A fair amount of people not only read Kylo Ren and Hux as queer-coded within their canon, but:

  1. Queer coded villains are actually kind of shitty and they definitely shouldn’t be something to aspire to or admire, and
  2. I don’t know how they leap to that conclusion of Hux and Kylo as queer coded in the first place.

For one thing, there’s a difference between a character – especially a villain – being coded as queer in their canon (typically via stereotypes about femininity/masculinity, style of dress, speech, interactions with other characters) and a queer fan deciding to read a character as queer because they see themselves in the character.

If they’re actually present in canon, queer coded villains typically come from a place of homophobia – conscious or otherwise. They come from a fear of supposedly non-normative genders and sexualities and from society straight up repurposing queerness (or stereotypes about queerness) as a go-to for “spooky and scary” because well –

Heterocentrism kind of needs to portray queerness as a dangerous avenue to stroll down.Read More »

[Guest Post] Finn as everyman? How about no?

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After the release of The Last Jedi, there was a noticeable shift in how members of the general audience discussed Finn – if they talked about him at all. People who resented his inclusion in The Force Awakens – viewing him as a sign of P­C culture run amok or as an extra whose sole purpose was to diversify the cast – had little to say this time around, likely because his marginalization in the series’ latest installment merely served to confirm their negative view of his place in the trilogy.

Instead, it was those viewers who claimed to like Finn whose tune changed.

As it became clearer that Force sensitivity would never be part of his arc, at least not in this segment, there arose a collective sigh of relief from certain quarters: “Good! He doesn’t need to be Force sensitive to be important. Let him just be Finn. Let him just have a blaster and kick ass that way. Let him be the everyman the audience can relate to.”

Except that – to paraphrase Luke Skywalker, as he faced off against Kylo Ren in The Last Jedi – “Amazing. Every word you just said is wrong.”Read More »

What Fandom Racism Looks Like: The Smartest Girl in the World Has To Be A Mary Sue

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Fandom Racism - Mary Sue

On the first day of Black History Month, a random writer on Archive of Our Own gave to me… two separate stories that framed Shuri – T’challa’s brilliant baby sister in Black Panther –  as a character that couldn’t possibly be as smart as the MCU claims and as a victim of child abuse by the Wakandan elite who are “taking advantage” of her brilliance.

These stories were written in response to Black people calling out the author’s racism in deeming Shuri a Mary Sue in Black Panther in a tumblr post (that used the Black Panther tag) and subsequently writing off the film.Read More »

Intersectionality Fail: Star Wars The Last Jedi Without Men

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INTERSECTIONALITY FAIL

I think at this point, we’ve all seen (and mocked) the misogynistic re-cut of The Last Jedi that cuts out all of the women. The re-cut film takes out all of the women in The Last Jedi in order to get rid of all the gross cooties that the women of Star Wars apparently has. Significant plot points were changed in order to center male characters with the gist of the projects being to keep men and male characters in charge and blah blah blah.

The end result of the “Defeminized” cut of The Last Jedi is a shoddy mess that’s not even fifty minutes long. It manages to be misogynistic and racist (in cutting out Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico and Veronica Ngo’s Paige Tico) and boring as hell. There aren’t that many men in The Last Jedi to make a cohesive story come out if they’re the only characters present.

But cutting the men out of The Last Jedi in response to misogynistic Men’s Rights Activists is not the answer and winds up being just as problematic for similar reasons.Read More »

Let Black People Feel Things in Fandom 2018

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LET BLACK PEOPLE FEEL THINGS IN FANDOM 2018

In 2016, I made a list of things that I wanted to see fandom leave behind as we moved into the next year.

Fandom left absolutely NONE of those things behind in 2017.

I’m not going to talk about the stalking, the increase in harassment, the doubling down on the claim that Armitage-fucking-Hux being a more interesting character than Finn or Poe Dameron are in the Star Wars fandom. No, I’ll save those hot takes for another day when I don’t feel quite so much like doing a salt-and-burn on several fandom spaces which have crossed boundaries I didn’t know existed.

For now, I’m going to talk about how fandom is incapable of letting Black people – real Black people and the Black characters we love – feel things without rushing to delegitimize those feelings.

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To a significant chunk of the Star Wars fandom, Finn is a traitor and a coward for turning against the fascist organization that stole him from his family and brainwashed him.

The Flash’s Iris West is supposedly spoiled because she made a private comment about her frustration at having her friends disrupt their wedding celebration and ignore their wishes/needs.Read More »