And this terrifies me.

Because at some point, I'm going to get impatient with one of the more rude or entitled asks that I receive on this site like every writer does, and I'm going to be short and dismissive in my reply, and that person is going to decide they want to retaliate by trying to ruin my life. And they're going to write a stupid callout post. And these very nice but somehow also very judgemental readers of mine are going to see it.

I had people sending asks to my daughter when she was 16, saying horrible things to her and telling her that she was abused.

My brother deleted his Tumblr account because he gets really, really upset at how cruel people have been to me. Tumblr is the only social NerdyKeppie media account which I manage entirely on my own, because Jake just refuses to be here.

By now you have, no doubt, heard all about the dangerous new TikTok trend sweeping the nation. China’s great and powerful cyber weapon has convinced the innocent teenagers of America that Osama bin Laden was actually a pretty cool guy and now they’re all sharing his 2002 “Letter To America”. Well, first, just to get it out of the way, Osama bin Laden was actually bad. Also, a nepo baby.

After spending most of yesterday digging into this, I’m pretty convinced that this was never a real thing on TikTok. Even though it has since snowballed into a full on moral panic that is beginning to feel dangerously unstable. The Biden administration released a statement about the supposed trend and alarmed big-name creators and actors also reportedly met with TikTok this week to discuss the rise of antisemitism on the app.

Baseless generational in-fighting, aging millennials who refuse to accept the new status quo of the internet, easily monetizable rage bait, lazy TikTok trend reporting, and bad faith political actors swirled together to create a perfect storm this week.

The story has morphed from what should have been a weird curiosity — and perhaps even a moment to reflect on America’s post-9/11 legacy — into a full-blown national scandal with dumb-dumb headlines getting written about it, like CNN’s “Some young Americans on TikTok say they sympathize with Osama bin Laden”. I mean, I haven’t even had time in this piece to point out that a lot of the people I saw sharing the letter were millennials! But, yeah, teens fucking love Bin Laden. They’re saying 9/11 just hits different now no cap fr. Gen Z wants Baby Gronk to lead Al-Qaeda in a victorious jihad against the western imperialist hegemony gyatt!!

We have invented a version of TikTok that simply does not exist and now many people in power are ready to tear apart the foundation of internet to prove it does. And what’s worse here is that there are very real issues with how TikTok works. It is a major source of misinfo and disinfo. It still has a terrible bullying problem. And, ironically enough, it’s also one of the most oppressively censorious social platforms that has ever existed. To the point users had to create a puritanical version of leet speak to communicate on it. But we can’t even begin to address those issues unless we start to look clear-eyed at what is actually happening on the app. And it is most certainly not the digital hub of a large-scale Gen Z Bin Laden fandom. Be fucking serious.

The internet is an extremely chaotic living ecosystem and it’s constantly reacting to itself and all you accomplish by amplifying something like this is give more ammo to those who want to who want to take that away. You turn bizarre discourse into something bigger than it was ever meant to be. You pointlessly villainize normal people who aren’t public figures and don’t deserve this kind of scrutiny. And you help conservative political movements continue their culture war. You also just look like clueless boomer to anyone even slightly younger than you.

Sometimes the dirt uncovered is true, sometimes it's not. Often there is a grain of truth, blown massively out of proportion.

Crawlers would probably be more interesting if you gave them some more humanoid behavior, like a small, haunched figure that may or may not have once been human. And the Promethean Knights should use cover instead of skittering around until they charge you.

I feel like these things would fit well with their in-universe history of fighting the Flood. You've got a bulky Promethean Knight leading a gaggle of Crawlers on patrol, until they encounter Flood. Then the Crawlers mass fire on a target from every angle (including from the walls) while the Promethean Knight uses its light rifle to slag tougher targets. The flying units with shields work largely the same, but look more like their Sentinel counterparts from the original games.

Antis are an internet subculture primarily found on Tumblr and Twitter, along with a few other social media sites.  They are called “antis” due to being derived from “anti-[character relationship]” in tags--i.e. someone who didn’t like Rey/Kylo Ren pairing from Star Wars would tag posts with “anti-Reylo”.  Over time, this aggregated into “antis”.  

In general, the subculture has a strong pro-censorship slant directed against fandom production of content they dislike.  Officially they cite morality, personal disgust, ideological purity, and defending against sexual predatory behavior (especially directed at children) as their motivations for promoting this censorship.  In essence, their viewpoint is more or less identical to that of Conservative Christians (especially American Conservative Christians) in terms of what materials they feel should be censored in media, which leads to a great deal of irony in dealing with them, as many antis are members of minority groups oppressed by Conservative Christians.  

However, since they grew out of fandom ship-wars, a lot of the moral outrage is simply cover for attacking fandom-based character relationships that they dislike or disagree with.  This is revealed by simply showing what the focus is of the group as a whole; above, I stated that they have a strong pro-censorship slant directed against fandom production of content they dislike.  Not mainstream materials.  Fandom.  

To expand on this, I will give an example; one of the primary points that antis are ostensibly opposed to is “pedophilia” and “child pornography”, which have a literally bewildering degree and range of possible definitions.  To give examples, a story that contains characters in a relationship with an age gap of two years at ages 17 and 19 is ostensibly “child pornography” and the author a “pedophile”, as one of the characters is under the age of majority and is still a minor.  Likewise for stories featuring characters of different heights (because the shorter character is apparently “minor-coded”), or even adults with age gaps are also similarly classified.  Incest is also loosely grouped in a similar manner, to the point that fictional childhood friends in a romantic relationship is akin to incest, due to them having grown up with each other.  

While these loose definitions already strain credibility (and cause real harm due to alarm fatigue--i.e. crying wolf--and thereby giving cover to actual predators going after children), antis justify their stated position by insisting that “fiction affects reality”--i.e. writing about something in fiction can and will cause people to endorse it and emulate it (The “Jaws” Effect is frequently cited, despite being inaccurate, as to put it bluntly, the film didn’t make sharks go out and start biting more people).  Despite this premise and stated position of being against any and all production of such materials, though, antis will not harass mainstream writers and producers of stories about relationships--for example, George RR Martin or the scriptwriters for Game Of Thrones, despite there being several such relationships in that setting that would qualify under those criteria.  

Instead, antis focus on policing the people they can touch and bully in fandom, harassing individuals who write stories featuring relationships they don’t like, and then extending the definitions of the “bad ships” to cover the target in the manner outlined above by the examples given.  Said harassment constitutes death threats, telling people to kill themselves, and accusations of child molestation, which is then extended to anyone coming to the target’s defense, either directly or through implication.  I myself have been repeatedly accused of being a pedophile for simply pointing out that fiction does not directly affect reality, and told to kill myself, so I am hardly unbiased here.  However, the fact that they have nothing to fall back on other than personal attacks on their critics is telling.