#fandom antis

oh sorry lemme just fuckin

Under a cut due to length.

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(cw discussion of sexual assault in media/fiction, and right-wingers and such on twitter, as well as mention of nazis)

like, maybe a decade and a half or so ago, i remember a push to never write rape into stories because there's 'never a need for it', which at the time when i was much younger, seemed like it made sense. people argued that sexual assault never, and could never, provide anything to the plot and there was no reason to include it

this is, of course, in hindsight, completely bullshit

there's no reason for lots of things in fiction. the recent thing that's being declared as pointless and unnecessary by puriteens and their ilk is sex scenes, with the declaration that they are never important, never push the plot forward, contribute nothing and shouldn't exist ever

also bullshit! it entirely depends on how something is written whether a subject was unnecessary (not always a reason to leave it out) or important to the plot and/or development of characters

but the root of 'stop putting rape in your fiction 😠' started, i think, from people who were very tired of people who treated it with no respect and offered no warning shoehorning it into things and startling victims with it

there's a line that goes: rape victims exist and can be triggered by rape in fiction, murder victims dont so that's fine

also bullshit, really, considering how many people survive attempted murder, but i can see where they were coming from with it. getting triggered out of nowhere by a rape scene you didn't expect, weren't warned for, and is written poorly at best must be incredibly triggering

(which isn't to say you cant write it poorly, or write it for a kink (especially considering a lot of the people who write it as a kink are survivors themselves and use it to cope and express), or write it for any number of reasons, it's actually just to say it should be warned for. trigger warnings should exist on every piece of media, and should be available but optional for those who dont want spoilers/warnings)

the problem is that this 'dont write rape' i think has snowballed slowly over time from 'writing rape is unnecessary and harmful' to this bizarre notion of 'depiction is support and endorsement'

i saw someone on twitter today mad that neil gaiman included the nazi minisode in good omens season 2, a minisode in which the nazis were doomed to an eternity in hell, struck a deal to get out of it, and then were, when they kept to their side of the deal, basically told they were doomed to zombify to bits on earth as punishment for being the worst ever and really, did they expect anything else considering they were going to hell? lol

but this person was really mad he'd given screentime to nazis because surely this meant something really bad about neil gaiman, like that he supports nazis or sympathises with them or something

(the minisode wasnt even written by him and cast the nazis not just in the bad light of being horrible people but also in the bad light of being incompetent idiots)

to a lot of people now, who seem to completely lack media literacy, depiction == endorsement, and i just find that bafflingly weird

similarly i've noticed a trend where observation is also endorsement? if you watch or read or listen to something or someone who has bad opinions or bad points of view, you must be bad yourself

this one i think i can trace back to twitter being twitter. for example, if i get a copy of some right wing nazi twat's book from a charity shop, and i read it to understand their point of view to better counter it, the only one i am offering any support or endorsement to is the charity shop who get a couple of quid for me buying the book from them

however, on the hellsite that is twitter, if i follow John Right Wing so i can observe his opinions and better counter them, or prepare countermeasures of some sort in an activist way, or write scripts for video essays like the kind Shaun on yt does, twitter assumes that this means JRW will get them more ad revenue - after all, someone is following him - and pushes him to more people

observation is not endorsement, but twitter's algorithm doesnt know this and responds by giving JRW more engagement and pushing him to people who may not know he's a shitbag and may internalize his messages

in this way, i can understand why when someone sees that Supposed Leftwing Youtuber follows John Right Wing on twitter, they immediately declare this is bad and proof that SLY is actually a nazi in disguise - after all SLY is endorsing JRW's bad ideology by engaging on twitter!

for the same reason, i can understand why people do their, "72 of my mutuals are following JRW, who recently posted this crap about marginalized people. block him!!!" bullshit. they dont want to be complicit in helping JRW reach more people, possibly vulnerable people, and spread his ideology

it just totally forgets that being aware of things and understanding things is one of the basic requirements of being able to fight those things effectively

to me both these things come down to the same thing that's permeating how everyone approaches, well, everything at the moment: to see something and not look away from it is endorsement of that thing. if you're watching a tv show and the tv show includes a rape scene or a nazi and you continue to watch it, you are endorsing rape and nazis, even if the nazi is shown as stupid and evil and the rape is shown as a terrible, horrifying act. if you're watching a person or a character be disgusting and bigoted and you continue to watch, to engage, to even consider maybe things could change there, you are implicitly supporting that bigotry

after all, in the world of twitter if you reply to a bigot and say, "hey, you're wrong actually, and here's sources on that" or "hey, this isn't cool, can we discuss this?", even if there's a miniscule chance that you might change things (and, after all, isn't that what, to an extent, activism is? not everyone should be expected to engage with bigots in a vain hope of changing their minds, but some people should, because if we can change even one or two minds that aren't completely rotted to the core, that have a chance of change and evolution, that's an actual real positive effect we're having on the world, and even the smallest change can grow and develop into something more, you just have to nurture the seed of it, rather than throw the entire garden away as corrupt) you are engaging with a bigot, and thusly a bigot yourself because engagement is support. engagement is endorsement.

engagement brings ad revenue and encourages the continuation of bad behavior, so it's better to stick your fingers in your ears, go "LALALA" and pretend it isn't happening at all.

i think this might also be why when a section of a fandom decides Mr Character is a Bad Person and has Innate Bigotry, if some other section of the fandom engages with that character - whether the bigotry is real or imagined - they are seen as bigots themselves, because engagement and depiction are endorsement, and engaging with such things means you support it, even if you really, really don't

on the same vein when someone says something dumb they are often written off instantly as irredeemable - much like certain media are painted as if they have one subjectively 'bad' quality - because continuing to engage with that dumb thing will likely boost that person in the algorithm and no one wants to risk being why they double down on their dumb thing so their account gets more traction in the online space

for the same reason they dont want to continue to support writers who write 'bad things' or 'irredeemable media' because gasp what if the algorithm thinks they're supporting the bad parts of the media and that means more things include that bad thing they want to see less of?

i don't have a conclusion for this, it's just some thoughts really. i think the latest iteration of the internet has completely warped how we engage with everything, to the point people act like a single thought leads to endless undoable corruption out of sheer fear of nurturing those things simply by dwelling on them