a short informal essay on orientalism in fantasy fandom culture and tolkien fandom and a demonstration of the impact such perspectives can have on actual people (named balls)
ok i have to get this off my chest because i have been thinking about this for a while and multiple friends have pointed it out to me as something they have noticed so i am now confident i’m not being insane. so. my most controversial opinion is that nowhere but here on this website have i received this level of extremely racialised comments about my appearance as compliments, which is one of the main reasons i stopped posting face pics/pics of me doing anything or selfies with the cat or whatever.
which isn’t to say you cannot call me hot. you can and should call me hot. i am extremely hot. and i also really don’t mind comments like that even out of the blue if we’re friendly or DM-ing or whatever, of course not. i mean the public comments aka written on my posts or in reblog tags in pics that have literally nothing to do with what i look like, or repeatedly and publicly bringing up my appearance when my face is visible in contexts that are ‘professional’ or i’m giving a talk or whatever (like come on man, legally blonde came out 20 years ago). i also think there is a difference between calling someone hot and extensively commenting on the racialised aspects of their appearance.
an example: a dm saying someone was going to use a pic of me, a full body one i posted months ago, for [character] drawing reference, which is very flattering of course and i said yes, because said character is canonically very hot. and then finding out that the fanart in question pretty much went 1-for-1 with the reference image, except [character] was straight up wearing what i can only describe as a belly dancer outfit lol, even though none of their other fanart had this element or theme.
and the fact that it was clearly done unintentionally by a well meaning person is exactly what shows how automatic such acts are. the artist didn't need to see me in orientalist costume to see me in orientalist costume if that makes sense? aka my body, by being racialised in a particular way, already signalled to "exotic”, even though it was literally just me in jeans.
i think the worst part of this, compounding to the racialised aspect, is that even the few times i professed i don’t actually want to be commented on in that way in cases where i am not exactly posting a thirst trap, the implication has been very ‘oh hot girl problems’ ie not real problems, or that i shouldn’t show my face (even in situations that were accidental or unavoidable) if i didn’t want that or the worst, which is that such comments are fair game because i am clearly ‘leveraging’ the way i look and dripfeeding selfies for ‘BNF clout’. essentially making me out to look like a fun sponge or a prude (MY NAME IS FUCKING BALLS!!!!!!!!! 😭)
like i knew coming in that fantasy fandom has always had a thing for the "exotic" baked into which characters get popular, which settings get explored, which bodies get eroticised or demonised and how… the genre has this long history of treating non-euro cultures as aesthetic buffets, picking and choosing visual elements while stripping away any actual context. when that gaze gets turned on real people, it's the same logic: flesh and blood people are turned into a collection of features that signal something foreign and therefore sexually interesting, rather than just... a person who happens to look a certain way.
this phenomenon absolutely happens to white women irl as well but this specific audience (ie tumblr fandom folks, who tend to be left leaning, feminist usamericans/brits etc) would either not likely do this to white women very much, or at least would stop if discomfort is expressed, instead of finding ways to justify it or convince themselves i enjoy it because why the fuck would i carry myself like this if i didn’t.
and this all connects to what i was talking about earlier, aka is reflective of broader patterns in how fantasy fandom consumes non-western aesthetics. because these are often the very spaces where people will correctly identify sexism or orientalism or what not, a fantasy book or film or what not, but then turn around and reproduce exactly those tropes when it comes to actual people. there’s this cognitive dissonance where the critical framework just... switches off.
and something about fantasy fandoms that makes this worse, which is that the genre trades so heavily in the language of the exotic and far-away, especially ‘older fantasy’ like tolkien stuff. there's this built-in permission structure for orientalist thinking. and so when your source material is already doing the "mysterious desert kingdoms" or "sensual eastern courts" thing, it creates this atmosphere where irl orientalism gets laundered as just genre convention. people are so used to consuming non-white aesthetics as flavour or set dressing for their favorite characters' adventures, that they forget to turn that off when engaging with actual humans.
which is to say the fantasy setting provides plausible deniability: i’m not being racist, I'm just really into this aesthetic that happens to correspond exactly to colonial fantasies about certain types of bodies, and if you complain about that then you’re just a purist who wants all-white fantasy. also, acting like people are trying to censor you or take offence to you drawing from nonwestern cultures to develop your fanwork (nobody said this! this has been done so much in this fandom in so many fantastic ways!).
and i have been beating this drum for a while but this all also has to do with the specific way fandom conceptualises "representation." all that discourse about wanting diverse characters, wanting to see representation in media and fanart, etc etc, but it stops at the level of presence rather than personhood. aka representation as aesthetic diversity, visual variety in the character lineup, rather than actual engagement with different experiences and subjectivities. so you get this weird space where people are genuinely pleased to see a brown face, but that pleasure is still operating within an orientalist framework: people are happy to see "exotic" beauty represented, not to see a full human being, flaws and all, before them.
representation discourse, for all its good intentions etc, can end up just being about expanding the catalog of fantasy types available for consumption, which means that when a real person shows up who fits that visual category, they get slotted into the same role: a beautiful object that enriches the aesthetic landscape of the fandom space, rather than a participant with their own interiority and boundaries.
this all works as a form of social policing that's almost impossible to call out without being dismissed or demonised. because the racial fetishisation is dressed up in the language of progressive fandom: body positivity, sex positivity, celebrating diverse beauty standards. any pushback gets reframed as you being the problem. you’re being ungrateful for compliments, you're being puritanical about desire, you're the one making it weird by "seeing race" where people were just being nice.
and it is BAFFLING lol. the same communities that have spent years developing frameworks for analysing representation and power dynamics will suddenly develop collective amnesia when it comes to their own behavior. thousands of words about the male gaze or colonial tropes in media, but the moment you suggest that leaving racially coded comments on someone's casual photos might be reproducing those exact dynamics, you're being a killjoy.
and this is deliberate, I think… not consciously necessarily, but structurally. because actually reckoning with how hella orientalist logic shapes fandom desire would require people to examine and potentially give up something they enjoy. it’s much easier to position the persons pointing it out as oversensitive or calculating, to suggest that if you didn't want to be exoticised you shouldn't exist visibly in fandom spaces. TLDR: we've built a culture where your participation is contingent on accepting a certain level of dehumanisation, and we'd like to keep it that way.
like this is NOT me moralising or being a prude (my name is Balls for fuck’s sake). i am truly not saying ‘don’t do XYZ’ i am saying try to think deeper about why this is the case. i would LOVE to see more indian or middle eastern inspired elves or whatever, i am just saying pay some attention to how you’re doing it instead of that you are. desire often gets treated as this apolitical zone where normal rules don't apply: if you're attracted to someone, surely that's just natural and innocent. except desire isn't actually outside of culture and power. the things we find attractive, the way we express that attraction, the assumptions we make about who exists for whose consumption, all of that is shaped by the same hierarchies and histories that shape everything else.
and like at the end of the day it is just sad lol. like this 1000% not something i have never heard before. one of the (many) reason i left academia so young was because this exact thing happens there too: i can never forget the time i entered a lecture theatre to give a seminar and a group of freshers wolf-whistled. except those people were like 18 so honestly whatever, but this fandom skews much older and have on more than one occasion done the same thing. like imagine giving academic conference presentations after slogging through three degrees only for the primary topic of discussion on multiple fronts to be about your appearance instead of anything that you actually said. like it is well meaning, i know, but it did very much sting lol.
i have had multiple adult men comment on my appearance or attire when i used to do student activism, a relatively famous professor once referred to me as ‘tarted up’. and from both friends and strangers, the implication that the only reason this happens is because i mastermind it all by curating my appearance and performing a role in support of a progressive cause. and like yes i absolutely have performed palatability for that reason, but i have not exactly deliberately sold my tits for no-fracking funding. in fact the entire narrative thread in Prayers about maedhros and arwen’s relationship with their bodies is based on this very eroticisation or vamp/vixen lens levied on certain types or bodies.
ok i am done now i think thank u for letting me yap. and once again disclaimer this really isn’t a ‘no more brown elves’ post so please do not take it as that, all i am saying is think harder about your brown elves.
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Please forgive me if this is a stupid question, but what exactly is the issue with the nblnb and associated tags being only full of smut? Hear me out; I'm saying that if those tags are full of posts purely by nonbinary people, then... it feels kind of victim-blamey to point at them and say "hey, why are you only posting smut, that's fetishizing yourself" y'know? I highly doubt that's what you intended, so, I feel like I'm definitely missing something here, because I don't go through any of those tags basically ever. If it's full of mostly Binary people making smut posts and cross-tagging or something, then I absolutely get where you're coming from. I'm not saying that you're wrong, it's just a bit confusing to understand your point without the full scope of context.
(I'm nb myself btw) (also if those tags really are full of mostly smut then I'm not exactly interested in looking into them myself, y'feel? That's why I'm turning to you for the context. Okay thank you have a good day)
It's not a stupid question! It's a very good question actually, thanks for asking 😊
When you see the more binary associated tags, there are many facets of the binary t4t experience. Binary trans people between themselves see themselves not only as sexually valuable, but as platonically, romantically, humourously, theoretically, philosophically. There is a sexual side, but it is clear that there is other forms of value binary trans people have when attracted to one another. It's also a more nagivateable experience for anyone looking for t4t relationships and relatable content that is aiming to not only see sex. Contrastingly, the nb4nb tags are basically only nonbinary people posting only sexual context about ourselves.
Keep in mind, non-binary people knowing their sexual value within themselves and other enben is not a bad thing. However, it becomes a problem when you seek multifaceted representation and community in nb4nb as a diamoric person or you are repulsed by constant sexual imagery and the community is just about sex. It reflects how as an enban you are sexualised and comes across as enben only valuing themselves and other enben through their sexual worth. It can feel dehumanising and potentially exclusive for enben too. This is a learned form of exorsexism; in a world that oppresses and discriminates against you, you are desexualised but also hypersexualised. You may lean into either one for survival. It's not a fault of the individuals, the problem will always lie with the system. Enben are allowed to express ourselves sexually, and this is very important to note. But when you are attempting to seek a multifaceted community that is meant to show the multifaceted nature of enben and our different experiences of diamoric/enbian attraction, it kind of hurts to only be sexualised and see only sex. It reminds of how there is an effort to show the nuances of binary trans life, relationships, love and humanity, but how that effort hasn't been extended to diamoric experiences.
It's not a matter of pushing out or marginalising the sexual side of our community, but bolstering the fact there is so much nuance to enben, our lives, our relationships, our love and our humanity that is outside of sex too.
“bl manga helped a lot of queer trans men/transmasc people realize their queerness” and “there’s a lot of white women that fetishize and objectify queer asian men” are two statements that can coexist
this has been said before, but I think the reason girls are often fascinated by romances involving gay men (canon or not) and focus their fantasies on them is that they're a way to explore their sexuality through characters presented as equals, where power exchanges are not insidiously impacted by gender,
what can (and often does) turn into fetishizing, I believe stems from a need for relationships where both parts are percieved as equals "by nature" no matter the role they take in the relationship
I think that, especially for younger women, there's something freeing in escaping the stereotypical treatment of women in fiction by erasing them from the equation and focusing on male characters who often get more development, are less objectified by the narrative and allow them to take control over what a relationship could be to them out of the sanitized frame of what it should be
I believe that girls don't fantasize about mlm relationships specifically because they involve two men, but because they're the kind of relationship that virtually allows them the most freedom cause while they are plagued with stereotypes, those stereotypes don't seem to involve them directly (though misogyny has an impact on gay stereotypes of course, it's easy to pretend it doesn't)
to the question why don't lesbian couples get the same treatment ? I can only answer that I think women are often writen as women before theyre written as protagonists, and as lesbians they're often fetishised and objectified by the story itself, or it may come back to the idea that turning to male characters distances the spectator from the object of it's interest in the way this chatacter is percieved and sexualised, it neutralizes it, makes it more maleable
not saying any of this is right or universal, I'm just putting out some thoughts
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If you are out here sexualising Pedro Pascal, Oscar Isaac, Tenoch Huerta, Diego Luna and any other latino - to the degree of the recent article by Rolling Stones with the interview of TikTok user dvcree - and you see NO fault in the article. You are the problem.
Reading that article, made my skin CRAWL. I have been fetishised countless times for my ethnicity & race and fetishising (especially white) latinos in the media like this is contributing to the sexual violence statistics towards us AND Actively dehumanising and objectifying us.
I have been sexually assaulted because of the fact that I am latina. The white man who did it said that it was directly BECAUSE of my ethnicity & race.
