#fandom commentary

This Meta Monday, we’re spotlighting “What Fandom Racism Looks Like: Beige Blank Slates”, an essay by Stitch posted to their website in 2019. It covers the largely disproportionate focus on white male characters, and the inclination to consider them blank slates, occurring within Western media fandoms.

The essay explains that blank slates are not problematic on their own, and have the potential for good within transformative fandom. The issue is the tendency to brush aside women and characters of color, no matter if they are part of the main cast or blank slates themselves. Stitch adds that white maleness is considered “neutral” and “apolitical”. Meanwhile, characters of color are never viewed through that lens.

She provides examples from multiple fandoms, and outlines the popular fanon traits given to white male characters, even when they are not truly underdeveloped in canon. A call to action concludes the essay: for fandom to meaningfully engage with characters of color, changing the broader trends that surround blank slates.

Want to learn more about this meta essay? Visit its Fanlore page!

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Wonderland/Looking-Glass are books of weird nonsense. That's all. The most violent thing in the books is the Queen of Hearts shouting "off with their heads!" but it's also stated in the books that "it's all in her fancy," no one ever gets executed. They just play along to placate her temper. It's hilarious. A close second would be the entire Duchess, Cook, and baby/pig sequence, which definitely showcases domestic/child abuse, but again, is played off so comedically, it's hard to justify the other Violent and Dark variations of Alice, which rarely feature those characters anyway.

Whereas Oz and Peter???? Murdering, kidnapping, and horrific imagery left, right, and center! Both intentional or otherwise!

Peter cheerfully terrorizes Captain Hook on the daily, nearly loses the Darling children in the abyss of space on the way to Neverland, and is canonically described as "thoughtless" towards others because to him, it's all a game.

Dorothy, while innocent in her own right, unwittingly kills a woman upon entering the Land of Oz, and we later learn that the Tin-Man was literally chopped to pieces and slowly rebuilt into a body of tin to stay alive. Not to mention the horrifying lady with the room full of heads that she wears on a whim! (Anyone who's seen Return to Oz knows I'm talking about Princess Mombi; in the third book, Ozma of Oz, her name is Princess Langwidere.)

idk as someone who was around when third life came out the fun of it was that the ‘source material’ (for lack of a better word) was super silly and fun and so taking it way too seriously in fandom had ridiculous implications. same vibes as trying to make teletubbies into some dark story about government and experimentation. it’s funner if the original is super silly, then it becomes a game of ‘how can I make this angsty’ when you’re working with a group thats entire deal is making bad aha!! puns.

Well, it happened. I can't say that I'm surprised that KAOS has been cancelled by Netflix. I am a little surprised at the speed at which it was axed. Only a month after it aired, and it's already gone.

That has me wondering if the decision to cancel was made before the show even aired. We have to remember that marketing is the biggest cost after production. If the Netflix brass looked at the show and either decided (through audience testing, AI stuff or just their own biases) that it wasn't going to be a Stranger Things-level hit, they probably chose at that moment to slash its marketing budget.

That meant there was pretty much no way that KAOS was ever going to hit the metrics Netflix required of it to get a season 2.

What makes me so angry about this (other than the survival of a show relying on peoples' biases or AI) is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you decide before a show is ever going to air that it won't be a success, then it probably won't be. If you rely on metrics and algorithms and AI to analyze art, you will never let something surprise you. You'll never let it grow. You'll never nurture the cult hits of the future or the next franchise.

Netflix desperately needs people behind the scenes that believe in stories and potential over metrics. Nothing except the same old predictable dreck is ever going to be allowed to survive if you don't believe in the stories you're telling.

The networks and streamers have a huge problem on their hands. They need big hits and to build the franchises of the future to sustain their current model (which is horribly broken.) But people have franchise fatigue and aren't showing up for known IPs like they used to. The fact that Marvel content is definitely not a sure thing anymore is a huge canary in the coal mine for franchise fatigue. People aren't just tired of Marvel, they're tired of the existing worlds both on the big screen and the small one. Audiences are hungry for something new.

It is telling that the most successful Marvel properties of the last few years have been the ones that do something different. Marvel is smart to finally pull out The X-Men because that is a breath of fresh air and something people are hungry to see more of.

There's pretty much no one behind the scenes (except for maybe AMC building The Immortal Universe) that is committing to really taking the time to build these new worlds. Marvel built the MCU by playing the long game. That paid dividends for a solid decade even if it's dropping off now. That empire was built not with nostalgia for existing IP (don't forget the MCU was built with B and C tier heroes) but with patience. Marvel itself seems to have forgotten this in recent years.

Aside from that, I think people really want stories that aren't connected to a billion other things. That takes commitment on the part of the audience to follow and to get attached to. People WANT three to five excellent seasons of a show that tells its own story and isn't leaving threads out there for a dozen spinoffs. We're craving tight storytelling.

KAOS could have been that. Dead Boy Detectives could have been that. So could Our Flag Means Death, Lockwood and Co, Shadow and Bone, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Willow, and a dozen other shows with great potential or were excellent out of the gate.

If you look at past metrics, you only learn what people used to like, not what they want now. People are notoriously bad about articulating what they want, but boy do they know it when they see it. Networks have to go back to having a dozen moderate successes instead of constantly churning through one-season shows that get axed and pissing off the people who did like it in a hamfisted attempt to stumble on the next big thing.

When I say this I’m of course meaning the whole “they would not be that good at negotiating and talking about their feelings” and the like but I’m also talking about another phenomenon that has stood out to me in otherwise very queer, trans- and ace-focused fandom spaces, and I have very strong feelings on this that I’d like to share for anyone prioritizing writing trans and asexual characters in any smut or work with erotic scenes:

They Would Not Have That Kind of Sex.

There is a prevalent dichotomy in the way people write trans and sex-neutral or -positive ace characters in intimate scenes. Very frequently, the smut ignores the identity nuances altogether— the asexual character has sex the same way an allo character would, the trans character has sex “typical” of whichever binary their anatomy leans more towards, give or take a few anatomical descriptions. The other option, which is commonly written by people with the identities of the characters, is going into extensive depth about every choice of sexual act the characters partake in, usually complete with traumadumping or vulnerability about sexual attraction or dysphoria. This is definitely an important narrative to tell, but there also needs to be a place for erotic works that do not take the reader out of the scene or tone switch that still leave the reader feeling represented.

Which means sometimes they really should Not have that kind of sex.

What kind of sex? Normative sex. Almost all popular erotica views penetration as the ultimate culmination of the experience. Regardless of anatomy or character energy or identities, time after time the end goal seems to be putting something in a hole. Even works that contain oral or hands tend to only incorporate it as foreplay or a step towards The Ultimate Act. Beyond ace and trans characters, I also see this a lot with cis lesbians— not everyone needs to use a strap! I’m not denying that penetrative (specifically, PiV or an@l) sex is objectively the most common, but prioritizing this Ultimate Act neglects a lot of real and important queer experiences, and if you’re writing queer characters with identities that may change how they are intimate, you need to take that into account. A lot of smut ends up being simplistic, single-track, and quite frankly heteronormative.

They Would Not Have That Kind of Sex.

Now, I think a lot of this is dependent on where people are getting the information on the experiences they’re writing about, and people only exposed to sexual material via common online mainstream forms are certainly primed to write more simplistic and heteronormative sex. This is not me putting down virgins or saying virgins can’t write smut, or that you need to have experienced the activities you write about, far from it. People just need to expand their references. There are so many blogs and accounts online that post about queer sexual education, the perspectives of queer people on intimacy, stories about past encounters and lessons learned. Read an autobiography or a coming-of-age book even if (especially if) it isn’t supposed to be eloquent or erotic. These are the real experiences to build your foundation upon. Real experiences aren’t always hot, but you can absolutely still write sex that’s incredibly hot while being realistic and true to the characters you’re writing about.