Hamilton Kitty Blathers

tumblr: oh! so he’s gay!

writer: uh…no, he’s attracted to women.

tumblr: ….so he’s bi!

writer: uhh…no…….he loves his guy friends but he’s not romantically/sexually attracted to them.

tumblr: ….so you’re homophobic.

writer:

Honestly, the entire history of Western art is devoted to promoting male friendship.

Male friendship is held up as the single purest, most epic emotional bond that exists. Our canon (in the non-fandom sense) is rife with this. Most of our most popular modern media is this. We’ve been churning out male buddy movies since movies were a thing. Our great literature is a catalog of men having intense–but definitely no homo! HDU imply otherwise!–feelings.

Male friendship is in no danger.

So why would they be defending something that needs no defending? This behavior should set off warning bells to anyone reblogging a post. The original poster was, according to a bunch of reblogs, someone who had religious anti-gay shit all over their blog.

OP is a homophobe. This is not a surprise.

I know that tumblr falls for the fujocourse easily: “Women oversexualize gay men!” Yadda yadda. A lot of people espousing those views are young queer women who think they’re doing something positive.

The reality is these posts come with a nasty subtext that you learn to spot once you’ve been in fandom for a while.

“Why can’t they just be friends” is the constant refrain of every religious homophobe and uptight straight fanboy any time a character is made canonically gay. Mainstream audiences are horrified when gay coding is pointed out to them and will go to hilarious lengths to deny that it exists. Whenever you see a ‘why can’t they just be friends’ argument about something gay–fanon or canon or anything–you should be suspicious.

Tumblr does like to over-apply the term ‘queerbaiting’ and to see gay coding where none was intended and people outside of tumblr, including queer media scholars, would generally not see any. (It’s possible for coding to be unintentional, such as when villains have stereotypical villain traits that are also stereotypes of gay people.) But it’s still a real thing. Here’s the prototypical Swiss Watch scene from Red River if anyone needs an example of what actual gay coding looks like:

You’ll see old homophobes trying to deny the really obvious gayness of old movies like that. You’ll see young homophobes in denial about Black Sails.

A canon like The X-Files that starts with a male-female buddy pair who TPTB said they would never get together will, with enough installments, end in het romance. Asking “why can’t they just be friends?” about a man and woman is in a context where they usually can’t, by fiat.

Asking “Why can’t they just be friends?” about two men is in a context where thousands of homophobes ask this about every gay thing that ever crosses their path. We are bombarded by this question, inside of fandom and out, for canon ships and ones that only exist in fanworks or in an enthusiastic tumblr post.

It is not a neutral question.

One target of this discussion is fans who ask for their ship to be made canon or their favorite character to be confirmed queer in canon. I agree that demanding things from the canon creators can be rude. However, this has been a thing with straight ships for decades. Fans of straight ships have been far worse about this for far longer, yet tumblr is not full of callout posts for them. There is a double standard that asking for more straight characters and relationships is normal, but asking for more gay characters and relationships is problematic.

This is reason #1 why the post is homophobic.

OP seems to be addressing fans who interact with canon’s writers, but those fans are few compared to all of the fans who make fanworks or just reblog shippy posts on tumblr. The way that OP refers to tumblr collectively and refers to these practices as extremely common makes it clear that they are talking about shipping in general, not just people harassing canon creators.

Thinking that the majority response to anything is “It’s gay!” is only possible if you’re cloistered in a tiny tumblr/AO3 bubble. The majority of people who watch a TV series or a Marvel movie do not think this. Even in fanworks fandom, the majority of works are very likely het. This is because AO3 represents only one part of fanworks fandom, a part that skews very heavily towards m/m content. The venerable fanfiction.net has lots of het and gen compared to AO3. Wattpad, which dwarfs AO3, is overwhelmingly het.

When someone comes to AO3 or Tumblr to whine about m/m, it’s like posting hate in the tags: You’re mad that there’s even one place where that content is popular.

This is reason #2 why this post is homophobic.

OP also suggests that shipping characters is equivalent to assuming things about their canonical orientation. Some parts of fandom are very into their ships and their headcanons being validated by actual canon. Lots of us don’t care. We ship characters who have a strong emotional bond in canon or whom we find attractive or whose dynamic we happen to like.

The idea that shipping is inherently about the canon’s writer or a writer-fan interaction and not about fans having fun in their own way in their own space is nonsense. OP knows this perfectly well.

They are suggesting that any writer would be offended by fans “misinterpreting” a character as gay. Often, that’s true: because many writers are homophobic just like OP, but that doesn’t mean we need to validate such attitudes.

This is reason #3 why this post is homophobic.

Beware, tumblr. I know you guys like to think you’re fighting the good fight and protecting fragile mlm from ravening fujoshi strawomen, but the fact is that posts like OP’s come with nasty baggage attached.

99% of Western culture is about celebrating the nonsexual bonds between men. Again, male friendship is in no danger. M/M shipping does not promote toxic masculinity, but…

Some examples of homophobia on the OP’s blog, as proof for the above claims of this being a very intentionally homophobic post.

I’m also copy-pasting my response from earlier today, too, just so my rants not wasted.

I really hate seeing this post.

It’s stupid.

Entirely.

Let’s not act like straight men’s internalized homophobia is the fault of shippers on the internet, okay? The reason they don’t want to be seen as gay is because they think gay people are bad. They’re afraid of society, not shippers. I doubt most straight men even know shippers exist.

If a straight man isn’t homophobic, then he wouldn’t see being thought of as gay as a bad thing.

Let’s not act like fictional male friendships are more revolutionary than mlm relationships.

And let’s not act like headcanons are being unreasonable, or as if someone needs to be canon gay for the fandom to enjoy them as mlm.

Or that an author being so threatened by headcanons and ships that they feel the need to say “HES STRAIGHT” isnt them being homophobic. Newsflash: if someone is offended by seeing their character be portrayed as mlm… theys a homophobe babey! If they care enough to say it, it’s because they’re disgusted!

And for god’s sake can we not reframe the old “yaoi ships are bad because they’re just friends” argument as progressive? I remember when “they’re just friends!” was smth I heard from homophobes on deviantart who had “anti-yaoi” stamps on their pages and not ppl claiming to be progressive. 

Straight guys feelings aren’t my problem, and they aren’t the problem of other fandomites. If they’re afraid to be affectionate, to be seen as gay? That’s society’s fault. Not mine.

Why is it that in May, 2020, I am still seeing queer, “progressive” tumblr users reblogging this homophobic drivel?

OP is a conservative Christian as should be obvious from what they wrote.

Self-deprecation isn’t a healthy coping mechanism. Coping mechanism? Yes. Healthy? Absolutely not. Saying bad things about yourself seems harmless or even good in the moment but if you do it enough you will reinforce negative beliefs about yourself and the world around you. Say “I’m the worst” enough times and you will believe you’re the worst. Say “everything sucks I should just die lol” enough times and you will come to believe that too. 

I’m not pulling this shit out of my ass either, by the way, this is coming direct from when i was an outpatient at a psychiatric hospital, way back when i did this EXACT THING CONSTANTLY and ended up suicidal. This is what I was taught there, and this is how I dragged myself out.

The best way to combat this (very unhealthy) coping mechanism is really just to force yourself to say good things about yourself, and shut down the bad ones. It feels stupid, it feels like you’re lying, it feels like it will never work. But over time, if you keep at it, and with the help of friends, the new words will replace the old ones.  If you replace “i’m terrible” with “I’ve made a mistake, but that doesn’t make me a bad person” that is what you will come to believe, and make it 1000% easier to actually fix the problem because you won’t be bogged down with self-hatred. 

Except it wasn’t criticism, it was constant daily harassment. Look, I’ve been making comics for the internet for 10 years. I made comics for BuzzFeed for about two years, but people love to focus on those comics for some reason. They were simpler and quicker because I needed to publish at least one thing a day. And I loved it! I learned a lot!

At some point when I was getting really popular, Reddit and Tumblr decided they’d had enough and launched a targeted campaign against me. Tried to doxx me multiple times. Sent death threats. 4Chan threads started popping up for the sole purpose of spreading rumors that I’m a pedophile. All because I was making “lazy” comics and getting a salary for it.

Also, it’s always the same 10 or so comics that got posted as proof of my laziness. I made 1,008 comics at BuzzFeed (I counted). I worked really hard for my extremely mediocre salary.

Artists know other artists. If I'm having trouble with something specific, I can actively say "who do I know that does this really well?" and immediately come up with a shortlist of names belonging to people who I 1)trust to be honest and helpful and provide me with actual solutions to the problem I'm having, 2) know what they're talking about, 3) are at least somewhat familiar with my workload and process and 4) have time for my questions. If my issue is more involved, I will even offer to pay them for their time!

Most artists will not take unsolicited advice from random people on Tumblr or in their comments, and they shouldn't! You have no way of knowing if the person giving you critique has any experience, has any insight into what might work better, has any familiarity with anything about how you work, and so on. You also don't know anything about them personally, so you really can't trust that someone has genuinely good intentions towards you and isn't just fucking with you--that even if you did everything they said they wouldn't just move the goalposts until you finally realised that their goal wasn't to help you improve, it was to waste your time and jerk you around for as long as they could get away with.

Also, you never want to give people who consume your work the idea that they have power over the decisions you make, because then you set yourself up for caving to audience whim in a time and place where collective hate-reading is a thing that people do.

That's not to say that your readers shouldn't call you out if you say something shitty or racist or genuinely harmful, but that is an entirely different situation from constantly being hounded by a group of assholes who are all saying 'you're doing it wrong, do it a different way because I say so, and if you don't I'm going to tell everyone that you just can't take criticism!' Fuck that.

Every time I adjusted my art to fit the needs of some random critic, more would just take it’s place. Nothing I did was EVER good enough, and I eventually ended up burning myself out trying to accommodate everyone. I was getting hundreds upon hundreds of comments a day, and what did I get for listening to the feedback? Branded as “unable to handle criticism” by those whom I missed or didn’t listen to. It didn’t matter that I listened to feedback, because the second I didn’t listen to one person or they felt slighted by me for whatever reason, it was all over 4chan and SomethingAwful and the trolling intensified. It’s physically impossible to listen to hundreds of criticism and adjust our work to them all equally, yet we’re treated like that’s a fundamental aspect of our job.

This doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of why random criticism from online fans is kinda useless. The best type of criticism happens DURING the making of the work, when you still have time to change the art and adjust things easily. Once the work is completed and put out there, it’s not viable to go back and change things because you’re got other projects to work on and you can’t get hung up on what’s been done. There are deadlines to meet after all. But fans can only realistically comment on final works of art. They can’t usually comment on the behind the scenes process and influence the art in any meaningful way.

My longest paying gig was a 2 year stint drawing “the Brentalfloss Comic.” It was weekly, and I got scripts sent to me. I would draw up the comic, send it back, get notes on it, change things, and make adjustments. It was rough, but it worked because I was getting feedback BEFORE I finished making the comic. And it yielded some of the best work I’ve ever done. But when people criticize my work, they conveniently ignore those 378 comics. Strange...

Also, speaking personally here... the best type of feedback I could get is someone telling me what I did RIGHT. Not mindless “praise,” mind you... but what did you LIKE in my art? What did I do that you ENJOYED? I know what I did wrong. I drew it, after all. I don’t need the negative pointed out, because I know eventually I will overcome it. But I need positivity. I need people to tell me why I should keep making the art I do. If all an artist ever gets back is negativity and harsh criticism, they’ll quickly fall into depression and despair because they’ll feel their work is never good enough. So why bother? If every work of art is just going to spur more negativity, why bother making new work?

If his whole addition to this post isn’t just one giant piece of revisionist history and flat out lying, Jesus Christ.

Anyway, if you’d like to see the REAL reason’s @adobsonartworks has the history and reputation he does, I recommend looking here:

This link that you've dropped in here? The fact that it exists and you presumably curate it is unhinged. I do not know how you can keep adding to this thing and not feel like a stalker, because that is literally what you are at this point--you, or you and a small group of people, are literally stalking this guy's social media and waiting to pounce on any inconsistency in the things he says so that you can add to this list, and I just...

I am at a loss for words, you know? This is the exact thing I was talking about when I said that you do not want to ever let the people consume your content think that they can control it, because they will absolutely start to feel entitled to your time, they will feel like you must be accountable to them, personally, and they will absolutely try to ruin your life if you do not give them those things.

Can you just take a step back from your computer and consider your Tumblr that exists only for this purpose from the perspective of an outsider? Is this what you're spending your free time on? The hours you have poured into this could have been spent on so many other things, like making your own comics that don't do all of the things you think that Dobson is doing wrong. You could be taking whatever disappointment you have for him and instead be channeling it into showing him up by showing him how you think it should be done. Spite is a powerful motivator and plenty of people make their own comics for exactly this reason.

Honestly, I glanced over that whole list, and all it really made me do was wonder if I'd crack under the kind of pressure that probably comes with having people document every shitty moment you've had publicly, every thing said in anger or in frustration that would have just disappeared into the twitter abyss after 24 hours if there wasn't a dedicated person or persons dogging your every move, reading your every word, just waiting for you to fuck up.

I love you Pikachu

Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:

That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!

You might be seeing this:

While someone else will see this:

Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.

Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!

Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!

Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:

Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.

tl;dr

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans resort to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:

The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds

Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):

It’s not just on tumblr either. I’ve seen this sort of cycle repeated on many sites, from Twitter to 4chan to Reddit to Facebook. The way the internet is designed right now is to create hundreds of isolated pockets of people. And with no way to universally confront or moderate all these isolated pockets, they quickly become breeding grounds for hate and harassment (or worse).

As I’d pointed out above…

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist.

And as @treefrogsoup​ pointed out in yet another thread:

Look at how disorganized and chaotic that is - and that’s just the first six hundred reblogs. As of right now, I’m seeing that this post has at least eighty-four thousand notes! Even if you assume only a tenth of that is reblogs (which is unlikely), that’s still at least 840 reblogs, far more than this chart.

If you assume something closer to a quarter of the notes are reblogs…you’re looking at several thousand nodes in that map.

And no way to tell which ones have have comments on them and which ones don’t, without individually visiting each one, or happening to be online to see it in the notes yourself when it actually happens.