Category: Fandom

To The Scott McCall/Tyler Posey Anti-Fans Who Think My Comment Section Is Free Real Estate

Stitch

You literally do not know me or anything I’ve been up to in the Teen Wolf fandom – because if you did know as much about me as you claim, you’d know that my actual OTP in the show was Sterek (followed by Scott/Danny and Allison/Scott/Isaac, to be clear) and you wouldn’t all keep insisting I was somehow jealous of my own favorite ship’s popularity.

If you have something you think I need to see/know because you think I don’t have an informed opinion about it in any of these situations, there are better ways to get that information to me than leaving an essay-length comment insulting me, making up things I’ve said or engagement I’ve had over a decade, and aggressively insulting Tyler Posey or Scott McCall.

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When Does Online Harassment From Fandom Stop?

Stitch6 Comments

If you’re a person of color… Never

If you’re marginalized in some way – queer, a person of color, not a cis dude – you can expect to be subject to months or even years of online harassment from people who insist that you deserved it. Mind you, you will deserve this unending harassment solely because your presence on social media, in a given fandom, writing for any platform at all, or your appearance in a show they like angers them so much that they need to punish you for it.

People will doctor screenshots, lie about their online behavior and yours, forge evidence, and just… make shit up to punish us for being in “their” spaces or in “their” way.

In September, Teen Wolf will have been off the air for four years. In December, it will have been two years since the premiere of The Rise of Skywalker. The first episode of The Flash aired in 2014. May of this year marked three years since I left Tumblr for good and three months since I permanently locked my main Twitter account after the latest escalations from a multi-fandom disinfo and harassment campaign.

Tyler Posey, John Boyega, Candice Patton, and myself.

Four people.

Years of harassment.

All for being inconvenient, for being in the way (of a ship), not playing ball, and speaking out about racism and other firms of harassment in the spaces they’re in.

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What Fandom Racism Looks Like: Revisiting “POC Coded” White Villains/Anti-Heroes

Stitch4 Comments

Recently, Shafira Jordan’s sharp and insightful article “How White Fandom is Colonizing “Character-Coding”” has been making the rounds around fanwork creating & consuming social media. It’s a piece that speaks to something that I also have talked about (a few years ago): the way that white fandom will code white male characters as POC while also hating the hell out of characters of color in the source media/dismissing them entirely. 

This ranges from deciding that a character oppressed racially in-universe like Loki being Jotun was directly paralleling an experience/existence of color to claiming they are “actually” of a marginalized identity like Kylo being Space Jewish because the actors playing Han and Leia are.

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[Stitch Talks Ish]Stitch Talks Ish… About Manga

Stitch

This was originally posted on Patreon 6/27/2021

Show Notes

Transcript

0:00:01.8 : Welcome to a bonus episode of stitch talks ish… A manga episode! I treated myself to a largely SuBLime manga haul the other day and I’d like to share the fruits of all of that reading. Every so often, you just have to take a break from the “real world” and spend time doing and reading something you love greatly. For me, that’s largely Boys Love. I don’t actually get to read as much BL as I used to, but I cut my teeth on Love Mode back in the day and I do keep up with what’s being published these days even if I don’t have the time to read it all. I had a rough week a little while ago and, in response, decided to treat myself to some books I’d heard good things about.

So this is a little bonus episode of Stitch Talks Ish where I do a quick sip manga review for the five titles I bought! Please note that I’ll be talking about series with sexually explicit content and violence and definite issues of consent [at best]. Also spoilers… There will be spoilers.

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Meme-Ing for a Reason #10: Blocked For Not Being Nice To Racists

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A version of the “for the better” meme where the Anakin on the top left is saying that “racism in fandom is a huge problem and we need to listen to POC who talk about it”. The Padme on the top right then asks, “Even POC who aren’t “nice” when talking about this, right?”. Then the bottom left Anakin represents someone blocking the fan of color for not being “nice”, leaving the final Padme staring in stunned silence.

No one is more surprised than I am that I’ve been able to get to ten memes in this series. While I’m genuinely hilarious and my meme game is on point, there are only so many memes in the world that work with the concept of “hey fandom is super racist and more attached to that than anything else”. But hey, here’s one more.

I have talked on end about how absolutely irrational people are when faced with my work.

The “i can tell from a post about white silence/violence and a link to an adult literacy resource that stitch is verbally abusive like my estranged father” weirdo from last month proves that. Fandom is not okay and racists in fandom are so sensitive that they publicly perform being triggered… by Black people expressing or creating boundaries and speaking about what hurts us.

This is not normal.

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Fandom Racism 101: Femslash Fandom Has These Issues Too

Stitch3 Comments

It is also interesting to note that Glee debuted in 2009, the same year as RaceFail ’09. In many ways, this event, though not engaged with at the same level in all fandom spaces, marked a watershed in the ways in which debates around these issues were framed. While fans who point out the overwhelming whiteness and US-centrism of fan spaces and texts still face backlash, there has been a definite shift in the ways these categories are approached.

““Yes, the Evil Queen is Latina!”: Racial dynamics of online femslash fandoms” by Dr. Rukmini Pande and Swati Moitra

I have written a lot about M/M and “dudeslash” fandom practices over my time of thinking critically in fandom because that was, for a very long time, the loudest part of the fandoms I was in, and adjacent to, and the thing I wrote the most as a fan creator. However, that may give the impression that femslash and F/F fandoms do not have the same issues that wider fandom spaces do and that would be incredibly incorrect.

For this Fandom Racism 101 installment, we’ll be talking about how femslash fandoms also suffer from some of the same issues that other fandom spaces do. We’ll also cover some reasons why more people don’t know that femslash has these issues, how we can clock racism in femslash in its most obvious forms, and some examples of how these fandoms fail… alongside ways they can be better about their practices.

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Quick Coverage: ENGENES… A New and Surprisingly Antiblack Idol Fandom

Stitch

I’ve been keeping up with what’s been going on with ENGENES (the fandom for BE:Lift’s flagship boy group Enhypen) for a hot minute. The most concise description of what is ongoing is here at @ENbackup on Twitter, the first three tweets in a thread detailing the issue with one member of the group and multiple members of the fandom on Twitter and fandom platform Weverse:

On 25th June 2021, the video [EN-CORE] ‘BORDER CARNIVAL’ MUSIC SHOW BEHIND EP.4 was released on ENHYPEN’s YouTube channel. At the 10:50 mark, a member is heard saying a racial slur. This has caused disappointment, offense and shock amongst ENHYPEN’s international fanbase.

ENGENE has demanded a statement from BELIFT, ENHYPEN’s label to clarify this situation. However, BELIFT does not have a public email address for fans to contact them in case of such situations. This neglect has forced fans to take to social media to voice their concerns.

Concequently, BELIFT continued failure to act has exposed ENGENE to harassment, slurs, death threats and violent images on all social media. Posts and hashtags demanding for the label’s actions have been suppressed on Weverse while vile racism roams on the feed unsupervised:

@ENbackup goes on to showcase several examples of extreme antiblack racism on fandom platform Weverse in that thread:fw

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Meme-Ing For A Reason #9 – Spare Some Oppression, Please?

Stitch
A screenshot from the Disney Robin Hood film with the disguised titular character representing “people in fandom with ‘problematic’ ships” and the text at the bottom, implied to be speech from him, saying “May I please have a spare crumb of oppression?”

It is incredibly strange seeing people say things like “TERFs and queerphobes hate [a specific subset of shippers] the most” and frame themselves as oppressed minority any/everywhere because of what they enjoy writing, reading, and thinking about in fandom.

Not in the context of “consuming and creating queer content that shows nuanced, positive, and/or erotic relationships and dynamics triggers bigots” but just… because they are into consuming and defending supposedly problematic content that happens to be be queer and/or consumed by queer fans at all. (Like comparing the people against them or merely critical of the thing on their own time and at any level to TERFS, Nazis or the people behind the Comics Code, even when, in many cases… they’re actually talking about other queer people who aren’t even talking to/about them when talking about their issues with something in fandom.)

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[Stitch Talks Ish] Season 2/Episode 3: Stitch Talks… with Jeanne… About Loki

Stitch

CONTENT NOTES

This episode obviously has spoilers for the first episode of Marvel and Disney+’s Loki. We also speculate about the future of the show and its arcs/plots in a way that may prove to become spoilers if we’re as accurate as we want to be. Additionally, we talk candidly and cheerfully about villains, what they do, and why we connect with them (in the specific and general sense). While we don’t talk about anything in specifics – I feel – we do brush over cannibalism, The Authority’s fascism, and all the dreadful things in the plot of the 1999 film Titus. We also talk about our experiences in fandom over the years. Use your own best judgment, babes.

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Let’s Talk About Tone Policing and (A Lack of) Reading Comprehension In Conversations About Racism In Fandom

Stitch6 Comments

In the sidebar for my website, I have the following block of text and a link to a resource on Adult Literacy:

Struggling with selective reading comprehension issues and think I’ve said something I clearly haven’t? Use this resource to brush up on your lackluster reading comprehension skills and consider leaving me out of your journey!

It is a snarky note, for sure, but this response to that block of text (from a Dreamwidth user who was responding to someone else who’d shared What Fandom Racism Looks Like: White Silence/Violence is really fucking out of pocket and nonsensical:

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Meme-Ing For A Reason #8 – Hello, CIA? I’d Like To Report Some Anti-Racism In Fandom, Thanks

Stitch
The top right of the meme has (not Voltaire) saying “I disapprove of what you say, but will support and profit from your right to say it.”. He represents “people in different fandoms reacting to bigoted fan content and/or fans”. On the bottom right is a Karen who called the cops on Black folks barbecuing with text that says “Hello, CIA?”. She represents “people in different fandoms reacting to Black fans applying anti-racism and critical race theory to fandom”.

I am always very fascinated by how many of the people online who claim to be “radically anti censorship” and who appear to be very strong advocates for freedom of speech also… actively work to silence other people and censor them. 

Most often, as we’ve seen lately, via constant and successful attempts at silencing Black and brown people who write and teach about anti-racism in any space they (these white anti-censorship advocates) consider their own.

As I said in What Fandom Racism Looks Like: White Silence/Violence, I make a point of connecting things in the world we live in offline with fandom. 

This is no different. 

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What Fandom Racism Looks Like: White Silence/Violence

Stitch2 Comments

I’d known that I wouldn’t be able to depend on others to defend me regularly from a series of traumatic offline events – some of which did involve racism/antiblackness in my local friend group – back when I was a teenager. 

So, in 2011, when I first experienced social shunning and harassment because I was a Black fan criticizing fandom – at the time, not even about racism, but about a BNF’s hypocritical hater stance on NSFW fanfiction – I kind of expected more of the same. I was not disappointed.

Fast forward to 2021 and now, I’m mad as hell about the fact that people will choose to be silent in the face of racism in fandom and watch as Black/brown fans are hurt and harassed for speaking up.

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[Stitch Talks Ish] Season 2/Episode 2: Stitch Talks Ish… With Sleeq

Stitch

Show Notes:

Transcript

[Watch this space…]