Stuff... and Things!!!

The absolutely pervasive mentality that unwanted criticism or critique shouldn't be given and should be ignored is why fans of color don't stay in fan spaces.

And I am not going to mince words here:

A lot of you are racist. A lot of your fan works are racist.

That might have been difficult to hear. And if it was, you should probably reflect on why that was.

"Fandom etiquette" has created a space where fans of color either bite our tongues and eventually leave or say something, get dogged on, and then eventually leave.

If I say "I am uncomfortable with fandom's tendency to write trans men as feminine and submissive" I do not mean "I think every person who writes feminine submissive trans men should be chased with pitchforks". I don't even mean "any cis-person who writes feminine or submissive trans men should be chased with pitchforks". I mean "I would like writers to seriously think about why this is so common, why they write that, and if it fairly and genuinely engages with what it means to be a trans man, or if they just think it's hot when submissive people have vaginas and didn't want to write omegaverse of m/f".

Similarly, when people say "fandom is systemically less interested in black characters, less willing to give flat black characters rich fanon than flat white characters, and less interested in black characters in ships", the response is not to explain why you, personally, just happen to like popular white guy in that fanon. Your job is to look at yourself and ask if you tend to "just happen to be more interested" in the popular white guy across fandoms, be honest, and start unpacking that. Sometimes it's easier to love the flat character who's already getting 10,000 fics with headcanons and art and meta.

If somebody says "I wish there were more gluten free options at the potluck. I hate always showing up and not finding anything I can eat*", they are not asking you to throw your cake in the trash and weep. They do not want to hear your long speech about how actually this is your grandmother's recipe, and you've tried it with rice flour actually, but it just didn't work. You think about what you can do, and you listen to how they feel.

i frequently miss previous food service jobs, not because i don't enjoy what i do now, but because i did genuinely enjoy those jobs too. the reason i left is because the expectation was that i either sell 40+ hours of my week to the job, regularly be physically injured with no support, either no or abysmal workers comp, inconsistent scheduling so it meant i had little to no life outside of work... and still, the actual labor of the job, i enjoyed. i enjoyed the people. i liked working with my hands and making people happy.

and you know, people often bring up customers as the reason to leave food service - this was part of my reason as well, but how much of that - like the unsustainability of working food service itself, bodily and monetarily - is manufactured? many of the people who were terrible to me working food service were often people working office jobs only marginally 'above' mine in pay and support, miserable with their own work, looking to exert some level of power they could over someone else.