#fandom activism

Just one: like I posted on Xitter and Bluesky last night, as of yesterday afternoon, the links to individual works as they were listed on WordStream are gone from both Google and Bing. Hurray, right? Surely we’re all sick of this whole debacle and there’s far more important things to worry about. If all is well that ends well, surely there’s no need to still be angry.

Well, I am. Here’s why:

So @/estarguarstia on twitter recently emailed the folks at the SAGAFTRA on how fan creators/influencers can support the strike (also what should aspiring members follow to not impact their future membership) and here’s what they said.

“We are asking folks not to do cosplay if it would promote struck productions. Yes, you can promote comics, books, and games, as this is not struck work. That being said, performers are being asked to refrain from promotiong struck work, including past productions that would have been struck if produced today.”

@/KlaudiaSays clarifies further what this means as they’re a producer/writer

Furthermore here’s what SAGAFTRA has told deadline news

From the article

“And even if a social media influencer isn’t getting paid to push on social media for a studio/streamer, it’s best not to do so, even as a fan. “Influencers should refrain from posting on social media about any struck work regardless of whether they are posting organically or in a paid capacity,” reads Sagaftrastrike.org.”

So please support the WGA and SAGAFTRA strikers by not doing promo for stopped works.

Here is a current list of struck companies

And here’s the strike FAQ.

While yes the strike does specify not cosplaying for struck companies under their “influencer” page, it also does say non-members should not render services to struck companies either if they plan to be members in the future. And from the emails from SAG-AFTRA with suggestions I linked above as well, maybe just don’t do free promo for struck companies right now.

Reeks of white privilege or privilege in general.

Not being an activist in every single space you exist within 24/7 is actively contributing to the continuance of the problem(s).

Some people never ever for a single second of any day get to have respite so neither should you.

All art is inherently political. All of it. Also art is therapy so you have to see it or you're a cunt.

You're a cunt anyway.

HAHA. Yeah this is a good summation of where I am at as well. The thing is omegaverse has always been up its own ass just a little, in Strange Aeons oral history of Dashcon someone at the con had made a presentation about omegaverse that said "omegaverse has six genders, here's what the six genders are" and it was about relating these fictional six genders to the IRL queer experience? Or at least that's how i interpreted it from the video. And the thing is this was almost at the very beginning of omegaverse as a trend and users were already trying to gentrify it into something that it isn't.

IMO omegaverse appeared at the same time that tumblr slacktivism was being heavily criticized. Don't know if anyone else remembers this but there was a viral tumblr post that had British protestors out with placards and signs and they were protesting in favor of gay marriage, and one of the signs said "let John and Sherlock get married." And the tumblr post absolutely exploded because people were mad (for good reason) that someone was bringing their fandom attitudes into IRL activism. And people were mad because gay marriage was something was desperately needed for legal protection and there was a lot of outrage that a fujoshi instead decided to make it about Johnlock, because that was the only way she could relate to gay marriage activism.

The problem though is that this viral post was like, a nuclear bomb in the tumblr consciousness. The website never recovered. That's where the idea of "minority representation" took off, because fujoshis were bullied and made to feel ashamed of liking gay ships and were accused of being "slacktivists" by writing fanfiction or whatever, even when we were not actually interested in doing activism. (I think some poor idiots tried to say that "writing slash fanfic means I'm fighting for gay rights" which got skewered.) So the idea of "representation" was dreamed up as a response to it, because no one likes being accused of being a ~fetishizer~. Saying "well actually me writing this fanfiction is good because I'm being Representational" was a way to politically justify your gay cocks rubbing together fetish. Tumblr was totally overrun with keyboard slacktivists screaming at and bullying each other over gay ships which made the "representation" and "fanfiction as queer activism" thing really take off. It was really just a way to avoid being bullied and in many ways it still is.

And while all of this was going on, omegaverse was born! So maybe in hindsight it did not stand a chance, no one wanted to admit that they just had a fetish for werewolves and noncon because that would get them bullied. Like I cannot stress enough that I was in Ground Zero for this shit so I remember when omegaverse fans were fielding accusations of "fapping to bestiality" and other horrible fucked and untrue things. So they were desperate, absolutely DESPERATE to put a respectable coat of paint on their porn so that Tumblr would stop bullying them for it. (There was a scat component to it as well but that wasn't as prominent as the bestiality themed noncon that came out of it. And I mean...both of those things are fine because it's fiction, so whatever, but it's not shocking that anything that was adjacent to those things would get pushback.)

In a way, fans did not have a choice except to pretend that the porn was actually Queer Empowerment and Feminist Empowerment and how it was Totally Liberating to read about men with dog dicks raping other men with anal fissures. They had to do it in order to protect themselves. This resulted in entire essays being written about how being anally impregnated by a guy with a dogdick who "ruts" like an animal is, like, suuuuuch a female experience you guiz!!!!!!! We gorls have all been there amirite!!!!! And if you didn't take that view and said "who is 'we' in this equation, you're not affiliated with me and I don't recognize these experiences" you received some online hate for Not Being With the Feminist Cause. In time that has metastasized and now there are omegaverse fans who, as you indicate, decided to start bullying other queer people people for not liking it.

(And you know, as I'm editing this, I'm realizing just how insanely transphobic that kind of stance was! Incredible erasure of trans people took place in those "why Omegaverse is the peak of feminism" essays.)

The lesbian omegaverse stuff is basically the purest form of it and hence it's the most tolerable. Yuri fiction gets so little attention anyway, yuri writers basically have carte blanche to do whatever they want. There's very little infighting in comparison to slash fandoms. Funnily enough when women are involved as characters no one wants to read about the Feminine Political Experience and no one cares enough to turn it into activism. It's only slash ships that get that projection and its 100% due to the "oh shit we need to pretend this is Representation so that we don't get bullied for having a fetish" deal. (This has since spread into most aspects of fandom and even IRL discourse! Do what you will with that information.)

Massive +1 to your note about how it affects queer people. I can't imagine what it's like to be a transman and be told "umm ackchually sweaty being impregnated with a dog cock is the HEIGHT of the transman experience and if you don't like it then you can get out." When I was weirded out by the book I cataloged that was an omegaverse romance, one of the rhetorical lines that got flung at me was "straight people aren't going to like you!!! they're always going to hate you!!!! you're never going to not be disgusting to them!!! you have to like it or else you're a bad queer person!!!" Because I had said that I found the material grotesque and I didn't like it being marketed as "LGBT fiction."

But that was never the point, the point was that I, a queer person, do not want this material anywhere near me. Like, why would I want to be associated with bestiality, even if it's fantasy bestiality? This ain't about the cishetties, this is about me, how I feel. I don't want to be told that it's inherently queer fiction and queer romance, because why would I want dog penises and the captivating aroma of poopy buttholes (sorry, "slick") to be associated with my queerness and my sexuality?

But those are the wages of omegaverse being born in the times that it was born in. It's most likely permanently baked into the structure, even when people are just wilding out with their Ids and going "oh teehee I forgot to take my suppressants and now my reproductive anal glands need to be expressed." You are still going to get the "my werewolf themed fanfiction is ACTIVISM, we are HERE we're QUEER and you need to GET OVER IT" even when you yourself are queer and have been persecuted for it in the past. Either jump on the dogdick carousal or you're queerphobic.

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