i'm having awkward silences with god!

but i know calls to action without any kind of instruction aren't very helpful so here are some tips that i think you can easily do yourself with your own circles:

1) Staring off simple: Look around. Are there any BIPOC girls in your friend group, or are all of you white? Why? Do you often joke about everyone in your friend group being white? Why is that funny?

What to do: Examine why there are no people of color in your group. Examine why people of color may not be comfortable enough to hang out with you & your friends. Correct these, where possible. Do some reading on anti-racism. Talk to more people.

2) Examine how you talk about people of color & racism. Are you downplaying racism in your community? Are you treating women of color as dramatic or unreasonable for bringing it up? Do you find yourself only defending white dolls, always defending them from claims of racism, but never defending BIPOC dolls? Why?

What to do: Think about why you care more about accusations of racism than protecting the women of color in your community. Make sure you're making your space safe for BIPOC girls. Speak openly and loudly about anti-racism. Hold your sisters accountable- they should be apologizing when they say or do something wrong.

3) This one might sound silly, but as we often meet each other over fandom and roleplay- how are nonwhite characters treated in your circle? Are they always aggressive, angry, or antagonistic? Do you find yourself putting nonwhite characters in more roles like cops, dictators, sex pests, etc?

Additionally: If your circle shares sexual content, is there a lot of art where there's a pale/blonde character on the bottom, and a darker character on top? Are you and your friends always drawing darker characters as more dominant, more sexually aggressive, or promiscuous, while the white/pale characters are more innocent, submissive, modest, or clueless?

What to do: Examine how the way your group approaches fandom & art with nonwhite characters in it may make people of color uncomfortable. Examine why your art may make people of color feel unsafe or awkward hanging out with you. It's not wrong to have the occasional character of color be more antagonistic or dominant, but it's a problem when this is a pattern. If it's happening All The Time, question why!

4) Be honest with yourself: Did this post make you feel defensive? Does it make you feel defensive when people say something you did was racist? Why?

If a person of color tells you your actions were racist, they trust you to improve. I don't tell people they're being racist if i think they're going to hurt me for bringing it up. I know many like me. Don't prove us wrong- take these criticisms into account and work on it. You aren't cursed to be some kind of terrible bigot forever because you messed up- panicking without action is useless. Just be sure you examine the behavior in question and work to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. Okay?

And all I could think of was this dude

The next day he was called into a meeting where he was insulted and grilled about “ruining the party” and “stealing his co-workers’ joy”, which caused him to have another panic attack and start doing coping behaviours like hugging himself, at which point his employers decided he must be angry and was going to turn violent. They then suspended him for days and later told him he’d been fired.

So yeah, it’s not over an “unwanted birthday party”, it’s over employers repeatedly failing to accommodate someone’s disability, trying to frame them as the villain for having accessibility needs, and firing them for not conforming to some stupid office politics.

Happy Pride month🏳️‍⚧️✨

And after getting over my initial (rather emotional) response, I wanted to reply properly, and explain just why that hit me so hard.

So back around twenty years ago, the internet cosplay and costuming scene was very different from today. The older generation of sci-fi convention costumers was made up of experienced, dedicated individuals who had been honing their craft for years.  These were people who took masquerade competitions seriously, and earning your journeyman or master costuming badge was an important thing.  They had a lot of knowledge, but – here’s the important bit – a lot of them didn’t share it.  It’s not just that they weren’t internet-savvy enough to share it, or didn’t have the time to write up tutorials – no, literally if you asked how they did something or what material they used, they would refuse to tell you. Some of them came from professional backgrounds where this knowledge literally was a trade secret, others just wanted to decrease the chances of their rivals in competitions, but for whatever reason it was like getting a door slammed in your face.  Now, that’s a generalization – there were definitely some lovely and kind and helpful old-school costumers – but they tended to advise more one-on-one, and the idea of just putting detailed knowledge out there for random strangers to use wasn’t much of a thing.  And then what information did get out there was coming from people with the freedom and budget to do things like invest in all the tools and materials to create authentic leather hauberks, or build a vac-form setup to make stormtrooper armor, etc.  NOT beginner friendly, is what I’m saying.

Then, around 2000 or so, two particular things happened: anime and manga began to be widely accessible in resulting in a boom in anime conventions and cosplay culture, and a new wave of costume-filled franchises (notably the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies) hit the theatres.  What those brought into the convention and costuming arena was a new wave of enthusiastic fans who wanted to make costumes, and though a lot of the anime fans were much younger, some of them, and a lot of the movie franchise fans, were in their 20s and 30s, young enough to use the internet to its (then) full potential, old enough to have autonomy and a little money, and above all, overwhelmingly female.  I think that latter is particularly important because that meant they had a lifetime of dealing with gatekeepers under our belts, and we weren’t inclined to deal with yet another one.  They looked at the old dragons carefully hoarding their knowledge, keeping out anyone who might be unworthy, or (even worse) competition, and they said NO.  If secrets were going to be kept, they were going to figure things out for ourselves, and then they were going to share it with everyone.  Those old-school costumers may have done us a favor in the long run, because not knowing those old secrets meant that we had to find new methods, and we were trying – and succeeding with – materials that “serious” costumers would never have considered.   I was one of those costumers, but there were many more – I was more on the movie side of things, so JediElfQueen and PadawansGuide immediately spring to mind, but there were so many others, on YahooGroups and Livejournal and our own hand-coded webpages, analyzing and testing and experimenting and swapping ideas and sharing, sharing, sharing.  

I’m not saying that to make it sound like we were the noble knights of cosplay, riding in heroically with tutorials for all.  I’m saying that a group of people, individually and as a collective, made the conscious decision that sharing was a Good Things that would improve the community as a whole.  That wasn’t necessarily an easy decision to make, either. I know I thought long and hard before I posted that tutorial; the reaction I had gotten when I wore that armor to a con told me that I had hit on something new, something that gave me an edge, and if I didn’t share that info I could probably hang on to that edge for a year, or two, or three.  And I thought about it, and I was briefly tempted, but again, there were all of these others around me sharing what they knew, and I had seen for myself what I could do when I borrowed and adapted some of their ideas, and I felt the power of what could happen when a group of people came together and gave their creativity to the world.

And it changed the face of costuming.  People who had been intimidated by the sci-fi competition circuit suddenly found the confidence to try it themselves, and brought in their own ideas and discoveries.  And then the next wave of younger costumers took those ideas and ran, and built on them, and branched out off of them, and the wave after that had their own innovations, and suddenly here we are, with Youtube videos and Tumblr tutorials and Etsy patterns and step-by-step how-to books, and I am just so, so proud.  

So yeah, seeing appreciation for a 17-year-old technique I figured out on my dining-room table (and bless it, doesn’t that page just scream “I learned how to code on Geocities!”), and having it embraced as a springboard for newer and better things warms this fandom-old’s heart.  This is our legacy, and a legacy the current group of cosplayers is still creating, and it’s a good one.  

OP also invented armsocks.

#nothing is above critique but also so many ppl are dogshit at criticism so here we are

#nothing is above critique and that includes your critiques