Category: Fandom

[Thread Collection] Revisionist Fandom History 2021

Stitch5 Comments

Still locked on main because being random racists’ hyperfocus remains distressing as hell, but if you’re already who already follows that Twitter account here’s the link to the thread. I also suggest reading these pieces on revisionist fandom history and the insistence that we as a unit be grateful to our beige fandom foremothers for… something.

Revisionist fandom history is so annoying because:

– it’s always people in their 20s and/or who’ve been in fandom for like nowhere near as long as EYE have lecturing people about how shitty the youth these days are (like being awful in fandom is new or exclusive to The Youth)

– it’s always very white fandom history UNLESS it’s someone tagging in like Japanese creators and/or appropriating the term fujoshi for their own ends (my feeling on the term is simply that if you’re not Japanese, you probably can’t ACTUALLY reclaim it. The end.)

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Meme-ing For A Reason #7 – You’re Out of Touch, Much

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The “Skinner, Out of Touch” meme where Principal Skinner represents people in fandom first asking “Is fandom racist?” before then deciding that “no it is the newer fans who are sensitive and out of touch. There’s no racism here, just weenies.”

The phenomenon of white people deciding that in fact there is zero racism in a space they inhabit, usually because they supposedly haven’t seen it, is bigger than fandom.

People of color experience this annoying micro-major aggression everywhere. We get to deal with it at work, in the grocery store, while watching the news – 

Basically, if you’re a person of color that has been in or around a racist place (digital or otherwise), chances are that you’ve had a run in with someone who thinks that there’s no racism anymore.

They’ve never seen racism and/or they’ve decided that what racism they have seen is too small to count and therefore, what you’re talking about is nonsense.

This is similar to how people deny that white privilege is even a thing in the first dang place. 

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What Fandom Racism Looks Like: No Safe Space/”Curate Your Space”

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I currently have almost three hundred thousand people blocked on my main (still locked) Twitter. 

Half of them aren’t because of any specific fandom thing (once, I chainblocked a massive “Report for [SPECIFIC IDOL]” account to see if it’d work in early 2020 and… it did, but now I can never undo it).

However, a huge portion of my blocks are because I ran RedBlock or some other browser extension on accounts I didn’t like, that were harassing me, or that were harassing others. (The other account, for my website, has about 150k people blocked, maybe. Because I exported my blocklist from main to that account in 2018 in the middle of a harassment campaign from the most annoying Star Wars shippers.)

So yes, I block freely.

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Facing Backlash For Anti-Racism… It’s More Common Than You’d Think

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When people of color talk about racism in a given space, we are always met with a truly disproportionate amount of anger. We are harassed, made into harassers, and essentially “policed” into silence, often by people who are publicly progressive at some level.

Back when I was working on #StitchProcesses Blackface, one of the things that stood out to me was about the inciting event. Sam Okyere is a man known for gently and graciously being “Korea’s Black Friend”. He’s also been someone that spoke candidly about antiblackness he faced in Korea when he first moved to the country. In fact, one of the first times I was introduced to Okyere was because of a viral video clip of him explaining to a rapt audience of Korean people that he had experienced racism here and it was a thing that happened regularly.

That’s why the backlash to him calling out the racism of blackface from the high school students at Uijeongbu High was so shocking to me. 

Here you have a Black man literally known for talking about racism and antiblackness in Korea and him doing so, offering gently to educate others on blackface so they know how harmful it is to do it, essentially triggered a bunch of antiblack assholes into harassing him and destroying his career in Korea. 

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Meme-ing For A Reason #6 – You Used To Be Able To Hide Your Dogwhistles…

Stitch
The Drake “Hotline Bling” meme where top Drake is rejecting “Making racists and racist fanworks unwelcome in fandom spaces” and the bottom Drake is totally down with “deciding that anti racism in in fandom is inherently anti fandom instead”.

In his 2019 release How To Be An Antiracist, historian Ibram X. Kendi defines an antiracist as “one who is supporting an antiracist policy or expressing an antiracist idea”.

There are few actual antiracists in fandom.

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[Thread Collection] Pro-Everything But Reading Comprehension, I see

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Thread on my locked account from Jun 17, 2020.

What I wrote: Black characters get a specific kind of racist fanwork where it’s clear that the author is using fandom and their fanworks to abuse and torture them into place. Those are clearly racist fanworks and exist to harm. This should be something we can do something about.

What someone conveniently ignoring what I’m literally and CLEARLY saying got out of it: Stitch wants all stories with violence against Black characters taken down because she is an ANTI

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[Thread Collection] Antiblackness & Anti Shipping (4/12/2021) + Additional Thoughts

Stitch3 Comments

Original thread here for those of y’all following me on the locked main & lightly edited for clarity and to input some explanation at the end.

I would genuinely like nonblack people in fandom to think about how antiblack fans devote months and even years of their time to hating Black characters… Usually over shipping in canon or fandom and how that NEVER counts as “anti shipping” while Black fans’ pushback always does.

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[Thread Collection] The Archive As Fandom Dream Thoughts (4/10/2021 + 4/8/2021)

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Today has been full of people talking critically about the AO3’s failures in response to a viral tweet about ao3 as “the fucking fan fiction dream complaint” and yet another moment of folks in fandom going “well i don’t see valid complaints so they don’t exist. As I am still locked due to the horrifying antiblack harassment from February and the fact that I’m multiple fandoms’ favorite punching bag for no actual reason beyond the fact that I write about racism in fandom like this… I’ve reposted some of today’s Twitter thoughts here.

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Fandom Racism 201: Introduction

Stitch

Starting soon, we’re leveling up to Fandom Racism 201.

The goal of what I’ve been privately calling my “school series” is to constantly level up and look at different fandoms, experiences, and displays of racism in fandom/fanworks.

Fandom Racism 101 is about general fandom experience linked with racism. So far, we’ve covered fandom fragility, the empathy gap, dealing with trolls, and body politics. While there’s more to cover for Fandom Racism 101 – we’ve got about 5-7 more pieces planned so far with commissioned guest pieces in the works – it’s time to move to the next level.

What’s the next level?

Looking at specific fandoms and talking about the facts of racism in those fandoms/their most popular fanworks. Incorporating screenshots and posts from people who were in the thick of it alongside theory and practical advice, Fandom Racism 201 aims to provide a framework for future understandings of where those fandoms went wrong and basic advice on how to avoid those particular pitfalls on your way through to other fandoms.

As with everything else I do: if you’re interested in writing about your fandom (past or present) for Fandom Racism 201,  feel free to send me a message on my contact form or in my DMs on my website’s Twitter so we can figure something out and I can commission work from you!

Class is in session this summer!

I’m looking forward to schooling y’all.

A Thought Exercise On Antiblack Microaggressions In Fandom, I Suppose

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I just want to talk about how people purposefully misrepresent my work/tweets and assign meanings to it that are actually entirely absent. Because I need to walk through the weirdness to see if I can make it make sense to any of us and just so I can express my feelings in my own space.

If I write a piece, like this one on queer coding villains and the Kylo/Hux fandom from 2018 (brought up because it’s one of the most recent times this misreading/misrepresentation has happened to me), I would think that the meaning is clear.

That piece uses the fandoms for Kylo and Hux (as a pair, but also as individuals) as a way to talk about how queer coded villains were created often hinging on stereotypes and who gets to be coded (or understood as such) within fandom. It provides examples of two social media posts about this POV on a queer (coded) Hux that I felt exemplified what the fandom at the time (in 2018) was saying, talked about historical queer-coding, explains what representation actually is in these cases, and quotes queer critical theorist Alexander Doty’s POV on queer-coding and what it’s bound up in it.

And what does wider fandom get from the post?

What they’ve gotten every single time they’ve interacted with or seen not the actual post but the combination of a quote from the article and the “Dark Side Trio” in the header with the title “Queer Coded Villains Aren’t That Awesome” this past Tuesday?

They complain that I am an “anti” of that ship or that I, noted Thrawn fancier and villain stan on main, hate villains.

They get that I hate Kylo/Hux as a ship. They get that I still hate it. (Even though, I have never really expressed an opinion on the pairings I talk about beyond expressing dislike of how the fandom for that ship and those characters woobifies those men, turning them into villains and actively pretending they’re not fash as fuck and hyping them in a way they straight up don’t do for anyone that’s not a white man in canon.)

None of what those fans believe of me or my work is true, of course, but as we covered in February… none of it has to be.

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[Image + Essay] Look At Those Launderers

Stitch

Originally Posted on Patreon 11/3/2020.

Source: What Fandom Racism Looks Like: Weaponized White Womanhood

There’s an interesting twitter thread called “The Fascist Infiltration of Subculture” and it’s something I find very interesting because of how people who can reference the infiltration of other fandoms or online communities… stall out when it comes to realizing what is active and present in their fandom spaces.

And believe me, there are a lot of fascists and bigots in fandom spaces outside of things like G@merGate or Comicsg@te or even the Brony and furry fandoms. Transformative fandom spaces are actually a space with its own issues that allow bigots to plant their seeds and grow fruit.

Think about it: fandom is a place where anything goes as long as it is clearly fiction or in defense of fiction. People are encouraged in this post-Voltron Legendary Defenders world to push back hard against anything they see as censorship in fandom or of media that fandom likes… and that has, increasingly, come to include anti-racism in fandom.

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[Thread Collection] Sinking the Ship of Theseus in Fandom Harassment Disguised As Discourse (3/15/2021)

Stitch

Originally posted here and retweets would be appreciated especially if your friends in fandom are falling for the disinformation focused harassment campaigns I’m talking about here.

This video absolutely speaks to my ongoing harassment from supposedly “progressive” fandom spaces (for writing about racism).

Like how this tactic of substitution & disinformation is used to cut people off from their communities + turn people against them. 

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Ships ‘n Shit: 13×5

Stitch

Images taken from the Gundam Wiki pages for Treize and Wufei.

Gundam Wing pairings were all about the numbers. For much of the fandom that I witnessed as a youngun in fandom, Wufei and Treize (signaled by their numerical designations in pairings as 5 and 13 respectively) were a small but still very popular pairing in the heyday of the series. 

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[Thread Collection] Your Priorities … Seem Seuss Skewed

Stitch

Still locked on main thanks to people who believe boundaries and fandom are a thing they get, but not me, but if you’re following me, you can see the original thread here.

if your talking point for why the biggest fic archive ever can’t (or ~shouldn’t~) do anything about dehumanizing racist fanworks or the racists posting them on the site sounds IDENTICAL to the weirdos screeching about Dr. Seuss’s most racist works being removed from HIS archives you have a deep RACIST problem and you should work on it

the first amendment protects freedom of speech, true. but if you’re using that to be adamant in protecting overtly racist fanworks along the lines of racists moaning about racist “children’s” books from decades ago…

holy fuck are your priorities scary (seriously, using the 1st amendment in fandom discourse is weird no matter what, but it becomes a PROBLEM if you’re using it to defend racists and NOT people of color who talk about racism here) and i hope you step on something very sharp!

😀

(also the 1st amendment protects freedom of speech from THE GOVERNMENT/CONGRESS making laws, not a TOS: referencing it to wield it against BIPOC in fandom talking about the racism here/in fanworks – who have no power in or out of fandom – is super fucking racist & needs to stop)