Fandom is Not Your Safe Space

God: In the end, both Aziraphale and Crowley realized that they did not need to share physical consummation, as those 6000 years shared together already symbolized their eternal love for each other well enough.

Like why are young girls so obsessed with ugly older men who play characters who have a bromance with other ugly older men. What's the point of that. What do you get out of it.

These days we have more and more female-centric stories with actual well-developed characters, women of different ethnicities and orientations doing all kinds of things in all kinds of genres .... And yet you girls choose shit like GOOD OMENS to go crazy over.

That fucking show doesn't even have good storytelling. Everyone is a shitty men and the three only female characters are poorly fleshed out stereotypes who then go on to date gross men who don't deserve them in true needboi fantasy fashion. It reads like a children's story that y'all are too old for but you all go crazy for it bc silly incompetent uglyboi 1 and tenth-doctor-but-meaner (a bit) chat a lot. That's it. They CHAT a lot, that's basically all they do, and then Neil Gaiman, in fucking JK Rowling fashion, says it was meant to be gay and you all flip out like it's the best thing you've ever heard. Like what the hell?? How do you all agree to obsess over something like that?

Anyway, so long story short, after my Tumblr has been inundated with good omens stans I finally decided to give it a chance. And oh boi was it a disappointment even beyond what I, someone who's been on this website since the days of superwholock, could have expected.

So yes, now I'm thinking about how no matter how many years pass, sad teen girls will obsess over the same type of media for the same reasons, and... It's not even about the media being bad (which it is), but it's about the lack of self love and being able to relate with people who have anything in similar with you, with your own gender and potential future relationships, that just makes me sad for you all.

There are so many great female characters out there, teenage or older and supernatural, often gay for each other too, and in better stories with fewer straight male author type cliches, so why are you not obsessing over those?

People who were crazy for destiel back in the day used to say you couldn't find love stories as deep with a het couple, which is fair enough, but that was years and years ago before streaming services started catering to audiences other than straight men. This is not that world anymore. There are alternatives. Please go find them and enrich yourselves, and stop devoting all your time to drawing reblogging and headcanoning middle aged white straight men in same sex relationships. That's not healthy.

Like what is up with homophobes like you who think that our society somehow has a dearth of the precious m/m friendships in fiction, when in fact they're common as dirt and m/m romantic relationships are extremely hard to get on screen or onto the page outside certain marginal genres?

Like what is up with misogynist soclds like you pretending to be all feminist but never ever lecturing boys on what they like and implying that the true cause of women and girls being abused is liking ~problematic~ content?

Like what is up with dickheaded shit-for-brains like you who police everything girls and women do but can't be fucking bothered to look up and notice that we live in a patriarchy and just about everything is geared toward teaching girls that they're second-class citizens?

I think…

Actually, I’m going to take this as an opportunity to nerd. So there’s a phenomenon in linguistics called a sprachbund. A sprachbund is basically an area where a bunch of languages that aren’t from the same family have been rubbing up against each other for a very long time. When this happens, these unrelated languages start to pick up features from each other in a kind of linguistic crosspollination.

Example: Romanian is a Romance language, like French or Spanish. But it has a bunch of weird phonetic and grammatical features that no other Romance languages have. Why? Because it’s been living next to a bunch of Slavic languages for so long that it started to act like a Slavic language.

What does any of this have to do with your question? Well, I think that there are a bunch of websites that form a kind of internet fandom sprachbund. Each has its own features, but those features bleed into the other sites, even though they don’t belong there. Think about how ff.net style “legal disclaimers” (that actually have no legal meaning or function) sometimes show up on works written for ao3, which is designed to offer legal protection that makes those disclaimers irrelevant. Or how that ao3 tag generator started getting used as a prompt generator for tumblr drabbles. And on, and on, and on. Internet fandom is an enormous cross-platform sprachbund.

So what does that have to do with tagging on ao3? Well, I think ao3 picked up that style of tagging from tumblr. Because of the way tumblr is structured, it’s considered bad form to add non-constructive comments on your reblog of a post. Otherwise, you get dozens of reblogs just saying “wow” or “mood” and the post becomes unreadable. So people started putting their reactions to a post into the tags they added to their reblog, which prevented the post from accumulating nonsense. But then people were used to thinking of tagging as a mode of expression rather than purely functional, so the expressive use of tagging spread to ao3, even though it doesn’t serve the same purpose there.

The cool bit is that the weird tagging conventions ao3 got from tumblr have come to serve an entirely different and still valuable purpose on ao3. Since author’s notes aren’t visible in search results but tags are, the tags can be used to signal a set of things about the fic that a summary might not get across. For instance, if a fic is tagged “hurt/comfort”, that tells you the genre of the fic, but not its tone. But if the author then adds a tag like “but really mostly comfort we’re all about the comfort here”, you have a much better sense of what kind of fic you’re about to read. So even though no one would ever filter by that tag, it’s still conveying important information.

  That "entirely different and still valuable purpose" is that the more of these nonfunctional "chatty" tags you add, the more you're telling me that your fic is probably shit and I shouldn't waste my time clicking on it.

  And some tags, such as "lmao i'm trash", mean I can block you completely and nothing of value will have been lost.

Misogyny also subjects women to what I have come to think of as a kind of tyranny of vulnerability- by point[ing] to any and every (supposedly) more vulnerable (supposed) person or creature in her vicinity to whom she might (again supposedly) do better, and requiring her to care for them, or else risk being judged callous, even monstrous. -- Kate Manne, author of Down, Girl

Hm. So, okay, obviously you’re white and obviously you have some money to spare, or maybe you’re just ignorant and stupid and can’t use your brain (that happens, when you spend your time reading Sheith fanfiction), so I’ll try to explain this to you in as simple a way as possible. 

When people (especially people of color, especially Black people, especially Black LBT women) make donation posts, there is the risk of receiving little to no money, even in the case of emergencies. For the sake of argument, I’d like to use my friend Taylor (keepthatenergy) who is currently falsely imprisoned and whose bail is set at an astonishing $10,000. In the few posts made by other friends where they are distressed, pleading, begging for help because Taylor’s family is already under extreme financial duress, she is mocked, the friends are abused verbally and people get the idea that this is a scam, even though there is proof that it is. This isn’t irregular. Every donation post I’ve ever seen by a person of color is attacked by freaks telling us to ‘get a job’, ‘stop being so lazy’, ‘stop wasting money’, blah blah blah etcetera, etcetera

Compare this to the treatment of archiveofourown, a website which has been doing this weird ‘give us money’ thing for as long as I’ve known the site to be up. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, way over their goals, and no significant change to the website. It’s still, if I’m correct, in beta phases, and you can’t join unless you’ve been invited. It has a serious issue with child pornography and incest fics and rape and abuse and extreme racism, but it gets money, week after week, month after month, and people rush to defend tossing their money to a website that hasn’t changed a bit.

And then see the reactions to these two things—impoverished people in need of help, desperately in need of help have to ask over and over and over for just a few dollars to get them through the week and are abused; a website that’s hoarding a shit ton of cash is praised. It is an issue of racism. There’s no dissonance at all, you’re just not using your brain, beloved. Honestly, consider why people think it’s more important to donate money to a fansite that’s not changing and hosts child porn (and was created to host these ‘unpleasant’ fanfictions, let’s not forget) and defends its nastier fanfictions than to people of color. Consider what would make white people feel more comfortable giving their money to a collection of rape fics and racist fantasies over people who are starving, who are fighting homelessness, who are suffering, who are in of shelter and food and water and safety. 

Married straight ladies in their 30s-40s who go into slash/yaoi 15 years ago and are specifically into the shit that’s full of rape (oh I’m sorry, “dubcon”), large age differences, other big power differentials, strict seme/uke roles, etc. And when they get a show that doesn’t have any of that shit like Yuri on Ice, insist on making it like that in their fanfiction. And then they constantly fucking talk about it in any fan chat like Discord servers, and whine and pitch a fit and even cry “discrimination” when actual LGBT people or teens or just anyone with good taste doesn’t want to constantly hear about their fetishy rape fic.

Like it’s one thing when teens who are still in their edgelord phase don’t understand why people don’t want to talk about rape fic all the time, but increasingly the people doing this in fanfiction-focused chatrooms I’ve been in are like… 30-something moms? And that’s deeply disturbing to me. If you really can’t understand why this isn’t treated as a normal topic of conversation that you can just assume people are up for and you’re raising children like… I cannot help but worry for those children. And that’s not even talking about the teens you’re influencing when you act like a Fandom Mom.

They’re stuck in the past where, for some reason, there was more acceptance of fans getting off on stuff like rape, dubcon, porn w/ age gaps from hell, etc. They refuse to acknowledge that hey, maybe that wasn’t good, and instead cry censorship and oppression (even though no one is actually not allowing their stuff to be posted, as AO3 allows p much anything). They’re usually heterosexual, married, and mothers (which is like you said, so unnerving). 

this is what I mean when I say that anti antis are increasingly ageist. like well done blaming antis on minors when minors are also targeted and hurt by anti-shipping ideology.

  I'll be blunt: I don't give a flying fuck about teens in fandom, LGBT or not (and especially not "qweer" a/k/a asexy and other bullshit "sexualities"). Even less do I care about ~soft smol minors~ ages 18-25. I'm not in fandom for altruistic purposes — believe it or not, not everything women do has to be for others! And, quite frankly, I don't enjoy interacting with the vast majority of you. Stick to your own sites like Wattpad. If you're mature enough to lie about your age and not be a sexist asshole who insists that random adults and especially women act like your surrogate parents, then you can come to ours. Otherwise, you've proven in the aggregate that you're collectively a giant pain in the ass.

and chances are if a teenager is shaming you for being in a fandom, its their way of saying “i dont want you to interact with me. go away.” and thats that. dont try to start an argument or fight because there is a Very obvious power imbalance. just leave them be.

you, and all the other people in the notes saying similar things. you are adults. you hold higher societal power than teenagers and children. teenagers and children sometimes see adults in areas they consider “for their age group only” and their “stranger danger” instincts kick in and they immediately feel like that person is a predator.

its perfectly reasonable for those people to want to avoid ppl that are way older than them bc its uncomfortable, and bc theres an obvious power imblance.

like i said before, you are adults. you should know this. dont go off on me saying “what are you gonna? call your momma?” or some shit. dont do that petty shit.

i understand your frustration. but that doesnt mean you dont have to respect other peoples boundaries.

This person literally read my 18+ fanfic on ao3. They came to an adult fanfic space, and then told me I shouldn’t be in fandom because I’m 18+. The point you are making is very valid, but I’ll tell you something in my experience - adults tend to keep to themselves and avoid children in fandom where they are. My main fandom I’ve written, every single friend I’ve made in the fandom is 24+, and the ones who are my fanfic friends in particular are all 30+. Just naturally gravitated towards each other because of mutual interest.

There is a huge wave of puritanical harassment in fandom at the moment (which rose to prominence after I made this post as it happens) where minors go into adult spaces in fandom (on ao3 it warns you and they go past that anyway) and then callout those adults. If you want to talk about ‘staying in your lane’, please take note of this huge anti movement against adult content and tell me who is the one doing so.

This entire thread is full of adults all the way into their 70s who have had young, newer entrants into fandom mock them purely for their age. Ageism in fandom is unbelievably prevalent - younger fans misperceive a lot about their fellow fandom members. Someone commented on this thread yesterday and called tumblr (and by extension, fandom) ‘a place for children’ (largest demographic on tumblr is 18-29 y/o, second is 30-35 so not sure where that perception comes from - my own tumblr blog is over 9 years old and when I first joined it was all early-adopting adults posting images mostly, fandom hadn’t actually made the move over from live journal just yet, though it was beginning) and how this is purely adults ‘circlejerking’ who need to ‘get a real hobby’ and ‘go look after their children or cats or something’. THAT attitude is why I posted it in the first place - the VERY persistent attitude from newer fans that adults don’t belong, aren’t allowed, are creepy and weird merely for enjoying media the same way they do.

We do respect boundaries. We enjoy, we post, we have fun. We tag mature content, because we make it for ourselves and we remember a time where that wasn’t possible and we casually came across adult content and knew it was wrong (the first piece of porn fanfic I came across I was 12 and I backed out of it and didn’t come back for a few years but it was just on a list with other fic, no content rating, nothing). We do not think that younger people don’t deserve to be in fandom - we embrace people joining and loving the things we do. However, when so many, many people on this post share the same experience of having been on the end of the same attitude and behaviour, you need to listen and see that there is a problem. Ageism is rife in fandom, because of the perception that enjoying media enough to want to connect with others about it is ‘just for kids’ the way cartoons are ‘just for kids’ and anime is ‘just for kids’. It’s not. It’s for everyone.

When I was younger, the idea of being in fandom (and especially a woman in fandom - there was mainstream male nerdism and then female nerdism and especially queer nerdism was quite underground, still, in 1997) and writing fic and (lesserly) fanart was seen as strange - my peers made fun endlessly and I had no real life peers who had any interest in fandom the way I did. However, I kept going. Now fandom is mainstream accepted, to the point that voice actors in some fandoms casually name ships for the fandom to use! But now, as an older fan, the mocking comes from younger fans who see adults in fandom as weird, perhaps because they feel that the fandom belongs to them? I don’t know. I’ve never understood the malice that goes into when younger fans make fun of older fans, given that we are present and a normal part of fandom, that we create zines and run cons and organise so much of fandom.

What you read in the notes of this post is a large group of people who identify with having been on the end of abuse of some kind. That is something we do not have to put up with, do not have to ‘have patience for’. Coming as a parent, I would never let my kid treat someone like the way many people here have treated other fans - I would reprimand, educate. I’m not perfect though, and sometimes an off the cuff reaction to being made fun of is natural, especially to repeated offences. Expecting adults to put up with this kind of rude behaviour and just sit back and go ‘oh, they’ll learn eventually’ is cruel - you’re asking people who are being purposely marginalised to just shut up and accept it because ‘well, let kids be kids’. We’re not talking about 4 year olds. We’re talking about teenagers, who should know the basics of ‘don’t make fun of someone for simply enjoying something’.

  Too fucking bad.