Random Thoughts

I’m losing my internet services, and the other service company in town wants a deposit I can’t afford right now to hook me up.

Sorry. I’ve been told over and over that the things I do are a lifeline for some of you, and I’m so sorry I won’t be able to keep doing that for awhile.

Its been a brutal year financially​ so far, and I had to make some hard choices between food on the table, power flowing in the house, or paying my ISP. I’m surprised I’ve lasted this long with service tbqh.

I don’t know when I can get this worked out. Might be a week. Might be a month. I don’t know.

Fandom can totally do this!!

Booooooooost. :D :D :D :D

THIS.

Pulling together, throwing a little into the hat, because someone did it for you, or some day you might need it, or just because you’ve got it to spare.

Just because.

And that’s amazeballs and you should feel proud.

So boost, my pretties, boooooost. We can get there. We *can*.

I read this earlier today and tried to ignore it but I just can’t stop thinking about how absolutely terrible it is, so fuck it.

It’s a 16,000 word apologia for fandom’s racism and sexism with a bunch of extremely dubious “statistics” as evidence.

Choice horrors:

“It’s not unreasonable to think that some straight women are interested in m/m because they don’t find women erotically or romantically exciting. And, look, straight people don’t need anybody’s protection most of the time, but trying to shame straight women for their sexualiy isn’t activism.”

Het romance novels are a billion dollar a year industry. The most successful fanfic of all time is het. Lots of women like het romances. The question isn’t, “Why don’t women like pairings with women?” It’s “Why aren’t women who like pairings with women in fandom?”

“Why Are All The Slashers Sitting Together In The Cafeteria?”

What made the author think this was a good idea. Slash writers are not an oppressed minority. This is pure white fragility and entitlement, to imply that your fan fiction tastes make you oppressed and then take the name of a book about black people to explain why you need a safe space. I understand THINKING of this line. I don’t understand PUBLISHING it.

“Step outside of AO3, and you find a very different story. Media Miner, a major multifandom archive of the 00s that is (was?) a hub of Inu Yasha fandom, is 52% het, 37% gen, and only 10% slash…Media Miner: 52% het; 10% slash Wattpad: 89% het; 5% slash FFN: more het than AO3 and less slash, but percentages are elusive”

Media Miner has about 150,000 works. AO3 has over a million, Wattpad and FFN over six million. Comparing percentages across those populations is meaningless. More than FORTY PERCENT of the total analyzed fanworks are filed under “percentages are elusive.” The methodology for generating the stats across archives is not standard or randomized. These numbers are completely meaningless.

Cutting and pasting is a pain on mobile, so double fuck it. The race arguments include that American TV and movies are mostly white, so naturally fanfic and vids are white, but also, all of the shows with popular black actors are 90s sitcoms, and no one likes to vid 90s sitcoms; someone once complained that a vid exchange was too white, even though they themselves requested lots of white stuff, and this chaps the author’s ass because she made a vid of a black dude (as a personal challenge to herself to vid everything her recipient requested, of a canon she only watched for the challenge) and she thought the exchange was fine; diversity efforts in fandom are too “doom and gloom”; black characters like Sam and Rhodey aren’t shipped because they’re too emotionally stable; it’s too scary to write non-white characters because you might mess up and be racist (too late, friend!) and writing CoC is “defined by fear” with “no upside” (that is a really disturbing insight into this person’s writing process, actually) and an EXTREMELY creepy aside about how there aren’t enough hot black guys on OKCupid.

There are also a bunch of weird-ass arguments about het and fem slash that are basically, “Fans should stop complaining that there’s no fem slash in Fandom A because there’s fem slash in Fandom B” and “Fans should stop complaining that female characters in media fandom are sidelined because girls in boy band fandom write a fuckton of self-insert fic.” So I guess people who want to read Natasha Romanov/Maria Hill fic should just go read Xena/Gabrielle fic and readers who want Abbie Mills gen fic should just go read a 1D romance?

This meta is a 13-chapter disaster, is what I’m saying.

I have calculated that about 20% of my fic and 30% of my vids are about POC. You can go calculate your numbers and feel smug. Or not. I’m betting not. 

Translation: ”I don’t see POC as attractive but I’ve written 3 fics with characters of colour, where are my cookies?!!”

None of these points are particularly new, but seeing them outright stated without shame in 2016 is an Experience.

I have to share this one quote about femslash:

When I see someone haranguing a fandom like, say, MCU movie fandom for not shipping f/f enough, I don’t wonder what’s wrong with the fandom: I wonder why that fan hasn’t bothered to seek out the many popular f/f fandoms that do exist. Perhaps the joy of harassing other fans for their ignoble shipping preferences is greater than the joy of finding fellow femslashers to squee with? 

Franzeska goes deep into the history of AO3 to talk about why slash is represented heavily there, with lots of links and documentation and references to how she was there and “we” did this or that. Her stated intent in the very first chapter is “to educate by providing historical perspective and non-AO3 context that is missing from most of the frothing rants on this subject,” rants that she believes “[depend].on an ignorance of fandom history” and “[do] little or nothing to stem the tide of so-called ‘whitecock’ juggernauts while making it unpleasantly fraught to write about people of color.”    

But in 16,000 words over 13 chapters, there is not one mention of Racefail ‘09. Not a single reference to the time a popular Harry Potter LJ community used a racial slur as a prompt in 2007. Nothing about the Supernatural RPF Big Bang story that used the 2010 Haiti earthquake as a backdrop for a J2 love story (THAT’S A REAL THING THAT HAPPENED). Nothing about the time in 2006 that comics BNF Te (Te! Te of the roses, Te of my heart. Te is amazing. I don’t know her personally, but she was a fucking LIGHT ON A HILL in Smallville and DCU fandom) pointed out the marginalization black characters faced on two then-juggernauts of white m/m slash fandom, Angel and Smallville.

ALL of those things were happening roughly concurrently with the founding of AO3.* Going into extensive detail about the history of slash fandom without ONE SINGLE MENTION of the history of fandom racism, including in slash fandom, is an effort to erase that history for the comfort of white fans. Rewriting the founding of AO3 and ignoring this history paints slash writers and fans as victims who need protecting from other parts of fandom or fandom spaces (which, by combining this sexism and racism argument, can plausibly be said to refer to “non slash fans” but is in fact primarily fans who are women of color and their allies) and who shouldn’t be disturbed in their safe space while completely ignoring the many, many fans of color** who have made themselves incredibly vulnerable over the past decade to talk about how fandom generally and often slash fandom specifically has hurt them.

*Which Franzeska attributes to wanting “a safe place to post our kinky porn.”  I have a REAL problem with that, because while providing a secure forum for slash fiction and explicit fiction was one reason the archive was founded, it was not the only or main reason cited in early discussions about the archive. AO3 was inspired both by the creation of a for-profit archive run by non-fans who hoped to monetize and then profit from the fannish gift economy and by a desire for fans to be at the forefront of any efforts to legitimize fanfiction, confirm its legality, and bring it into the mainstream. Not only was “protecting slash from the rest of fandom” not identified as a primary goal, in the post archive founder astolat links to in her call to found what would eventually become AO3, slash is specifically identified as one of the BEST possible test cases to establish the legality of fanfic as a transformative work, which was then seriously in question (you would not believe the disclaimers writers used to use). (The author of that post on legality, someone whose fic I read as recently as last month and who I had previously admired, commented approvingly on The Horrible Meta, proving that rewriting history is a group project, apparently, and that there is nothing white people won’t excuse from their friends).

**I almost linked to some of them here but then I thought…why would I drag this bullshit back to their door? It’s time for this problem to stay in the family. White people need to start taking responsibility for each other, and hey, change starts with me. Please no one bother Te. My ask box is open.

This entire piece completely erases fans of color and their contributions to fandom over and over and over. When Franzeska says that anti-racist activism in fandom “prioritizes the ‘safety’ of fictional women over that of real women,” she means white women, because women of color have been expressing for YEARS, in very personal and painful writing, that they are hurt by the way fan culture works and that they are withdrawing from fandom because of it. Those women are completely ignored in this calculation. The dichotomy is between fictional characters of color and white female fans. Women of color in fandom literally don’t exist in this argument.

It’s so much better than that.

So once upon a time, goats and sheep were essentially the same animal, and all of them had hair. Now, you can do some stuff with hair, but you can’t do a lot, so mostly sheep/goats were kept for meat and milk.

Except then a mutation showed up, and some of the sheep/goats had WOOL instead. And someone realized that 1. you could spin that shit, and 2. then you could WEAVE that shit, and 3. IT GREW BACK.

Generations of selective breeding ensued. Two visibly discrete species emerged, one primarily for meat and milk, and the other primarily for wool. They also have different behavioural characteristics, because independence was not helpful in a sheep, so it was bred out of them. Sheep remain one of the few non-draft animals that we farm even though they are not delicious.

The most similar part of sheep and goats that remains today is their skeleton. On an archaeological dig, you find THOUSANDS of bones and bone fragments that can only be identified as “sheep/goat”. It’s incredibly frustrating, but also kind of hilarious after you’ve spent enough time in the sun.

Actually, DS Hathaway in the whole episode is my entire sexuality right now.

Okay, so I’m doing a ‘Lewis’ rewatch at the moment and James throughout the whole series, all 9 seasons of it, is my entire sexuality right now.

Basically I just really, really fancy Laurence Fox is what I’m saying.

Book Dinosaurs