Chaotic Illusion

Zodiac Arrows 

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”

The originals fallen children xDD

The Anti Mentality and how equating emotions with reality makes fandoms turn toxic

One thing I have noticed when interacting with antis of all kind.

1. They are highly abusive in their behaviour, going as far as telling people to kill themselves

2. They believe their abuse is justified, because they perceive other people’s shipping preferences or fanworks as an attack against themselves

3. As a rule, they never address arguments made questioning whether their perception and their accussations are actually rooted in reality.

It is all about “Seeing this upsets me, so it must be wrong and the people doing it must be bad and evil….otherwise I wouldn’t be upset.“

Thing is….an while back, there was an excellent article on abusive parents and how they bond together in “estranged parents forums”, and the patterns are surprisingly familiar.

Here too, we have abusers, who believe that they are the injured party, NOT based on what has happened or what the facts of the situation are…but on how they feel about the situation.

Here too, we have people pulling a DARVO, denying the attack, and then reversing victim and offender.

Here too, we have people who believe that it is other people’s responsibility to cater to their feelings….and that if other people refuse, this must be because the others are the evil ones….NOT because they themselves are in the wrong.

But take a look at this excerpt from issandei’s article yourselves:

“Posts in estranged parents’ forums are vague.

Members recount stories with the fewest possible details, the least possible context. They don’t recreate entire scenes, repeat entire conversations, give entire text exchanges; they paraphrase hours of conversation away. The only element they describe in detail is their own grief or rage. Nor do the other members press them for more information.

Compare this with the forums for adult children of abusers, where the members not only cut-and-paste email exchanges into their posts, they take photos of handwritten letters and screenshot text conversations. They recreate scenes in detail, and if the details don’t add up, the other members question them about it. They get annoyed when a member’s paraphrase changes the meaning of a sentence, or when omitted details change the meaning of a meeting. They care about precision, context, and history.

The difference isn’t a matter of style, it’s a split between two ways of perceiving the world.

In one worldview, emotion is king.

Details exist to support emotion. […] Context is malleable because the full picture may not support the member’s emotion. […]

Emotion creates reality.

In the second worldview, reality creates emotion.

Members want the full picture so they can decide whether the poster’s emotions are justified.

Members recognize that unjustified emotions (like supersensitivity due to trauma, or irritation with another person that colors the view of everything the person does) are real and deserve respect, but they also believe that unjustified emotions shouldn’t be acted on.

They show posters different ways to view the situation and give advice on how to handle the emotions.

In short, they believe that external events create emotional responses, that only some responses are justified, that people’s initial perceptions of events are often flawed, and that understanding external events can help people understand and manage emotions.

The first viewpoint, “emotion creates reality,” is truth for a great many people.

Not a healthy truth, not a truth that promotes good relationships, but a deep, lived truth nonetheless.

It’s seductive.

It means that whatever you’re feeling is just and right, that you’re never in the wrong unless you feel you’re in the wrong.

I am still not quite sure what an unjustified emotion would be since there is no source outside this paradigm. Anyone deciding which emotions are justified is simply declaring a personal preference. I suppose there are people out in the world who have no experience of  trauma - or who have shut their emotions down so that they always maintain perfect rational judgement. But I don’t think that would be a sign of a healthy psyche.

The problem arises when people use their feelings as an excuse to abuse, harass and bully others, taking offense at things that aren’t there and accusing others of things they haven’t done.

Criticism is based on facts and on fact and on sound argument.

But this is NOT what’s happening in fandom.

What we get in fandom is verbal abuse, people getting told to kill themselves and people having their inboxes spammed with anon hate.

To illustrate this further:

Veterans, due to the trauma they’ve suffered, might be highly uncomfortable around 4th of July fireworks.

People who have gotten bitten by a dog might be wary and afraid of all dogs, even the most well-behaved and friendly lab.

Parents who grieve the loss of a child might find it hard to watch a movie where a child dies.

And yet, we do not ban fireworks, or dogs, or movies where children die.

And we would NOT find it acceptable if people who liked fireworks, dogs or sad movies got harassed or abused.

Somehow though, in fandom these days, doing exactly that seems to have become acceptable.

You create fanworks around a fictional villain?

You write about bad things happening to characters? Why the mere depiction must mean that you endorse all of that in real life!

Strangely enough, that kind of thinking only happens within fandom.

All those horror flics and crime novels centered on serial killers?

Why, that’s just fiction and going after crime novel authors or horror film movie makers would be rather stupid.

So yeah, some people in fandom, if they see something that makes them uncomfortabel? Can and will abuse and harass fans and fanwork creators for daring to like something that squicks them.

And if called out for their abusive behaviour? Well….they’re hurt aren’t they? Their buttons were pushed.

So any criticism of them and their abusive behaviour can’t possibly be right, can it? And so, they keep on attacking, abusing and bullying people, because to them, facts don’t matter.

What matters is that they feel hurt, and they take it as sufficient reason to also feel entitled to abuse and harass others.

And that?

You MIGHT be truly helping people. And if you are, that is really good.

You also might be letting yourself be co-opted by an abuser to do their dirty work for them.

Remember that bit I wrote about DARVO?

Denying the attack, and then reversing victim and offender?

Here on tumblr, what we often get is the following kind of interaction:

A: I am victim of X. Knowing that fanworks that I associate with X exist is really painful to me. If you are creating such fanworks, then you are gross and disgusting and excusing X and you need to self-censor yourself and stop.

B: I create / enjoy the fanworks you are talking about.

You might associate X with the painful thing that happened to you, but it has entirely different meaning Z for me and others and above all, it is NOT an endorsement of thing X that hurt you.

Here, have evidence 1, evidence 2 and thought-out-argument 3,4, and 5 showing this. Also, could you please stop verbally abusing me?

A: I don’t care about your arguments and your evidence. I am a victim and I am in pain. If you even dare to question if my emotion is based in reality or take issue with my attacking you, then that is only proof of how you are an abuser and endorsing X.

B: ???? WTF???

Thing is, in this kind of interaction, A is the aggressor, using their victim status as a tool to silence anybody who might question their reasoning and their right to attack others.

Basically, it is a cognitive distortion where people believe that their negative emotions reflect the way things really are, regardless of actual facts.

Often, it is negative thinking, applied to oneself (e.g. “I feel stupid, so I must be stupid”) but of course, it can also be twisted in a fashion that bolsters a person’s ego and validates them (e.g. “This grosses me out, so it must be bad…and if I attack the people doing it, then that makes me a hero, fighting the good fight.”).

The thing is though, that like Don Quixote, who rode into battle against windmills, thinking they were evil giants, the “good fight” that antis believe they are fighting, is often no more and no less than bullying and harassment of other fans.

There are many ways antis manage to delude themselves into believing that such harassment is justified, one of the most prominent probably being the refusal to acknowledge that things in fiction usually carry a vastly different meaning than they do in reality.

And that not only people will enjoy the heck out of things in fiction which they would totally abhor and shrink from in reality, but that people are also very well able to tell the difference between fiction and reality.

It’s why some of the most best-selling novels of all times are crime-novels featuring serial-killers, with their deeds explored in gory detail, and why movies and series featuring everything from vengeful ghosts, to hungry zombies to even more serial-killers are so immensely popular.

This is not to say that there aren’t things out there that might actually fit the definition of “problematic”.

But the way to deal with such things is NOT to attack and harass other fans.

If someone thinks something is wrong, they can still go ahead and write meta about it. Do some research on the issue, gather some supporting evidence, make a good argument.

A good place to start learning about how to make a good case for your ideas is  Graham’s Hierarchy of disagreement, which is further explained here:

Oh, and one should also strive to avoid logical fallacies.

That said, it would make fandom a safer and overall kinder place, if people learned to block / filter any content that squicks them (a good how-to guide can be found here), instead of screaming for censorship and about how people who create things that make them uncomfortable are evildirtybadwrong!1!!!! and if we returned to respecting what is generally referred to as “The Three Laws of Fandom”:

Don’t Like; Don’t Read (DL;DR)

Your Kink Is Not My Kink (YKINMK)

Ship And Let Ship (SALS)

Is that it want to make you want to explain love a billion different ways.

They make you want to talk about love in the form of simple kisses underneath foliage of trees but also in sprawling metaphors of the universe’s energy and celestial bodies.

They make you want to define love through the the written word, the spoken word, the sung word, the drawn word. And you write a hundred thousand sentences, and you sing their ‘i need you’s, and you immortalize their faces on paper, and you speak in the tongue of the greatest love story that has ever been told.

They make you want to find love in a monstrous world; or in classroom halls, or in warm coffee shops, or in a little house with a garden, or by the ocean or maybe sea.

And the greatest thing, really, is this:

They make you want love to happen. Not even to yourself. But to somebody else. 

I don’t know about you.

Guys who complain about the friendzone often don’t care about their female friends’ personal boundaries, forcing their female friends build more walls up. A good cartoon.

Resignedly, I placed another layer, voicing a quiet, repeated prayer, “This dude thinks he’s a player, but I am not a point to score, he should fuck off and bother me no more.”

Quoth the friendzoned, “Fucking whore.”