Hidden Fanboy

You? Me? A committee of my friends? Of yours? Of those who have the most kudos? Of those who have no interest in fandom, but want to protect other people from dangerous content, whatever it may be? Who gets that power, and how long will they have it?

Who are you comfortable with giving the power of regulating all the content? What happens in grey areas? What happens when something you like isn’t liked by the Decider? Is there an appeal? Who gets to make the arguments for and against something?

Certain people are screaming that AO3 is bad because it’s not a “safe space.” The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space - for writers. And it does a pretty good job of that. It was designed to be a place where writers are safe from arbitrary content rule changes, random and unwarned deletions, and abuse-report abuse (which is common on ff.net). The Four Big Warnings + CNTW system is beautiful in its fairness and simplicity.

I’m a member of the LJ generation, and when I first came to Tumblr (grudgingly and out of desperation, I might add, since it tragically seems to be the only place to really connect with other fandom peeps) I was horrified at how people here had established this sort of fucked up bully culture, where nobody is responsible for monitoring their own consumption, and rather they expect everyone else to custom tailor content to the whims and desires of the Shrieking Banshee Masses. And woe be to the person who doesn’t bend and break! “I’m going to bully you while accusing you and your Big Mean Poopie Content of being the actual bully, so I can hopefully distract you and others from realizing I’m being a royal intrusive asshat who failed Astronomy 101 b/c I clearly believe the world revolves around me.”

The irony here is that this in itself is an abuse tactic - victim blaming with a side of gaslighting. Pot, meet kettle.

And it’s the exact same mentality that drives right-wing lunatics to kick up a fuss about the existence of icky cootie gay people in media because we need to “protect family values”, or who take to screeching at Starbucks because their particular religious symbolism isn’t portrayed on the winter holiday cups and OMG WAR ON CHRISTMAS, STARBUCKS STOP OPPRESSING ME BY NOT CATERING TO MY PERSONAL TASTE.

The mentality is one and the same - “Cater to ME ME ME or FACE MY DIVINE WRATH even if it means taking away other people’s freedom!” while hiding behind a flimsy-ass shield of faux righteous anger.  

Well, here’s one thing I’m gonna need us to be critical about:

Every statistic I’ve ever seen says fanfic authors are heavily female (or nb)

And Tumblr, which is a fairly US-centric cross-section of fandom, is filled with this discourse about fanfic writers who create pornography

I need us to stop and think about why we’ve decided that fictional sex is the most damaging thing anyone could ever find on the internet

I need us to think about the culture we live in, which encourages us to be sexually available (to straight men) but punishes us if we (sluts) enjoy it

Because here’s the thing: fanfic is not coming from a position of power and prestige in our society

It is a niche genre primarily written by women, for women, for free

And it is a place where many of us do find power in exploring our own sexuality (or asexuality)

Even when that exploration takes us to gritty, horrifying (or cathartic) places

I’m going to need us to think long and hard about why we’re prioritizing fictional characters over the needs of real women

Just think about the hot-button issues in the fannish community, the topics that consistently and reliably get people worked up into a lather, the themes that provoke the nastiest conflicts and inspire the most dedicated resistance movements. Think about the fights that are most likely to spill out over their cyber boundaries and start affecting people in the real world - in public harassment at cons, in doxxing and ‘outing’ to family and employers, in malicious legal allegations.

It’s about sex. It’s always about sex. 

From the constant tantrums over ‘problematic’ shipping to the righteous doxxing of ‘pedophiles’ (which in current tumblr parlance means anyone who draws or writes canonically underage characters in romantic or erotic scenarios), fandom’s big efforts at moral reform always seem to revolve around restricting and controlling the sexual expression of the majority-women community. You won’t meet many people who stay up past their bedtime to scream at strangers on the internet about unethical portrayals of non-sexual violence - unless, of course, they suspect the women involved in its creation are getting off on it. You’ll struggle to find an anti blog dedicated to the insidious social ills of torture whump fic, or goopy hurt-comfort where all manner of human suffering is put on display for the viewer’s enjoyment. The purity crew dress up their agenda as a desire for collective self-improvement and raised moral standards, but they don’t seem too worried about aspects of public morality that don’t somehow tie back into sex. What they’re upset about is the same thing conservative minds have been upset about since basically the dawn of time - there are women out there in the world doing icky sex things without the permission of their communities.

And these people, these moral guardians, they’ve gotten really good at couching their fundamentalist views in progressive language. They don’t say ‘you’re to blame if you provoke men to rape’ - they say ‘your fic normalises sexual violence and contributes to rape culture’. They don’t say ‘women ought to be chaste’ - they say ‘your fantasies are socially harmful and you owe it to the world to be more self-critical’. The messages are the same and the desired outcomes are literally identical.

The core assumption underlying all of it - an assumption that I’m sure our puritan forebears would find deeply comforting - is that women’s sexual expression is a matter of public concern, and that women are directly responsible for upholding the moral standards of their communities by restricting themselves to a narrow repertoire of publicly controlled, socially condoned sexual outlets. Anything beyond that repertoire is a grave moral breach.

1. You are responsible for your own media experience. 

2. There is such a thing as a healthy level of avoidance towards topics that make you feel unwell or even (in a real-life clinical definition of the term) trigger you - but you are the one to actively take care of what you view.

3. Avoiding does not mean policing others.

4. You have no right to tell artists to censor themselves - you may criticize what others do, you may dislike it, that’s fine - but actively asking for censorship when you could easily unfollow or block a person just makes you look incompetent in your use of the internet.

no offence to young talents (and i use this word for a reason - young writers might surely have talent, but not experience) but i’d like to see anon enjoy a fandom where all the fic was produced strictly by 15 yr olds

I think a lot of younger fans have no idea what fandom was like before the internet.  Sure, you probably hear stories, and not to make “I walked fifteen miles both ways uphill to read my fanfic and I LIKED IT” sort of statements, but y’all realize that if it weren’t for the people who had come before, fandom wouldn’t be here, not in the incarnation it is now, not something that belongs to and is created by fans who exercise a fair amount of freedom to remix and re-imagine and rebuild the worlds we love, right?

When you talk to older fans, you’re most often talking to women who might have been the only woman in the fan spaces they had access to, who traveled to conventions or found ways to exchange letters in the regular mail with other fans.  You’re talking to people who had to bring their fic to the copy shop and print it out and mail it, who risked printers refusing to print it, who risked things getting damaged or destroyed. 

You’re talking about people who fought to get their slashfic printed.  Actually fought, had shouting matches, received threats, had manuscripts destroyed in malice, because it wasn’t acceptable then, in so many ways. 

You’re talking to people who, when the internet was still in its primordial state, risked C&D letters from companies and creators who tried to protect their copyrights with the most iron of fists, who saw every fan creation as an assault.

Again, you’re talking to people who fought, who moved from web host to web host as the people hosting their servers were threatened with lawsuits.  

These are things that happened, and, what, you’re saying the people who lived and fought to make fandom what it is today, to make it a space where people can talk about and write and draw more or less anything they want and find other people who want it to didn’t live their lives valuably?

They gave you this.  They fought sexism and homophobia and draconian ideas about rights.  They traveled miles and spent their own money for this.  

I’m not yet an Old Fan, but I’m not a Young Fan either, and I’m so fucking grateful to every fan who came before me for creating the place where I can do the things I love and be myself and where my experiences in fandom are respected by my colleagues and the people I care about.

These are the people you should be asking to tell you all about their lives, to share their experiences; these are the people you should be learning from and absorbing as much as you can from if they’re generous enough to share.  These are the people who can give us hope that even though we’re still fighting a lot of things, like companies who’ve now realized our value trying to capitalize unfairly on the work of fan artists, like continued sexist and anti-queer attitudes prevail and how they reflect on people’s attitudes toward fanwork and its value.   If you’re telling someone to get a life, if you don’t think a life in and of fandom is valuable, you’ve fallen for those lies; you’re discounting not only their value, but your own value as a fan.  

What a sad, pathetic, empty life that would be if you were forced to give up the things you love because you were deemed “too old.” And what a sad, pathetic, bitter little jerk you’d have to be to try and someone else what they are and aren’t allowed to like based on something as arbitrary as physical age.

Like the entire way you get a job writing for tv is by writing formatted fanfic, called a “spec script.” And there are few people under the age of 28 getting those jobs. 

Not to mention everyone directing, writing, producing, designing, and acting in franchises these days. Used to be they kept longtime fans out of that process, now it’s the norm to get a longtime fan to be in charge of a franchise reboot. 

Weird how men are often given a free pass to still enjoy the things they liked as kids, but women are urged to give up all their geek interests, and indeed their careers, to “grow up” and become mothers. Geeky adult men can make their passions a career, but apparently geeky adult women are “too old” to enjoy the things they love and need to “grow up.”

What it looks like to me is a very traditional, rigid, and frankly misogynist construction of female adulthood, policed with scorn by young, fannish women. 

Lots of heterosexual men are dedicated sports fans. Fantasy football, casual hockey leagues, superbowl parties, a beer at the ball game, courtside seats. For some reason, no one accuses successful, middle-aged men who enjoy sports events of not having a life. Why is that?

This fannish stuff is apparently fine when we’re teenaged girls, or even young women in our early 20s and still in school, but once we’re properly adults, our young fannish peers inform us that we need to “get a life.” What’s this life we’re supposed to get? Why do our creative, passionate, harmless hobbies have no place in it? Why is female adulthood so limiting, and why are young women the ones insisting it be so?

All I can hear when I see this criticism flung by young fans at adult fans is this: “You’re a grown up, that thing I’m soon to become! You’re supposed to be dedicating your life to housekeeping, gardening, baking, pleasing your husband sexually, and raising your children. How very dare you give any of your energy to fandom?”

1. The focus on whether or not a pairing will become canon as a reason people should ship something or not.  Do you not understand what the “transformative” part of “transformative works” means?”

2. This idea that saying “I ship that” means “I think that, as presented in canon,this is a perfect, healthy relationship that everyone should model their relationship after.” 

All of his characters are realistic and have complex personalities. They have good sides but they also have flaws. They have people they love and people they want to protect. But they also have people they resent, people they are jealous of. Sometimes they hurt others without intending to and do things without realizing what the consequences of their actions might be. But they are also capable of consciously commiting brutal and horrifying acts of violence. They make mistakes. Some take responsibility for their actions, others don’t. All of them are driven by different emotions. Some are fighting for the sake of love, some only care about themselves and their own selfish goals, and others are willing to risk their own lives for the sake of something bigger.  

The characters of Tokyo Ghoul live in a fucked up world but, of course, that doesn’t excuse their actions. Ishida does a very good job at portraying this – he does not hesitate to show us the ugliest sides of human/ghoul nature and how the struggle to survive might bring out the worst in an individual. But despite his story being filled with violence, he always presents everything so carefully and never glorifies the destructive behaviours of his characters.

Ishida shows us all of this through the eyes of Ken Kaneki – a completely ordinary person that loses everything not because he was ‘special‘ or ‘chosen by fate‘ but because of an accident. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person. And what’s worse – life hadn’t been easy on him even before his humanity – the last thing keeping him together – was stripped away from him. After that it all went downhill. Losing contact with his closest friend and being forced to ‘cast aside his weaknesses’ in order to become strong enough to fit in this world was all it took Kaneki to completely lose his sanity and along with it – his desire to live. He really is the unfortunate protagonist of a tragedy.

The world Ishida created is unfair to some and full of cruelty but it’s also very beautiful. His characters can’t simply be described as ‘good’ and ‘evil’. There’s more to them than meets the eye.