#purity brigade

If you feel kind of threatened and uncomfortable by women expressing their desire to be rawed by the hot fictional villain du jour, that's kind of a you problem, and it’s not exactly new either. If your first impulse, after being confronted with women expressing sexual desire for a fictional character you think is inappropriate, is “this needs to be controlled” - you’re not as progressive as you think.

Especially if it never occurs to you to do the same thing for cishet men.

(cont) and then charmingly telling older fans they don’t belong in fan spaces and should go pay their taxes; especially cute if it’s for a fandom the older fans actually grew up with. Did the concept of “prog het” merely swing the other way, where only “sufficiently gay” content is “valid?” I also often see a lot of the same bad actors involved in “anti” wank. 

I did not observe that one happening in the wild, but can venture a few guesses.

My training in mental health taught me to focus on the process, not the content. Which is to say: To look at patterns of whether people are impulsive or thoughtful, tolerant or judgmental, empathetic or merciless, balanced or polarized. To see if they’re able to build identities and relationships that slowly change as they learn and grow, or if those identities alternate between extreme rigidity and absolute breakdown. That’s far, far more important than what they’re concerned about.

Because yeah, if someone has the tendency to hold a really strict dogmatic belief, and to judge people on how well they conform to that ideal, and to flip out and cut ties with anyone who begins to question them, they are way more likely to just switch dogmatic beliefs, than to learn how to be okay with ambiguity and not-knowing and people who aren’t on the same page. When they’re presented with unequivocal proof that their old set of ideas doesn’t work, they can just jump to, “Okay, this OTHER set of extremely rigid beliefs will be Much Better!”

Partly because distress tolerance and comfort with ambiguity and telling people what you want and need and are okay with, without being aggressive or abusive, are all really complicated skills that need to be modelled for you; they’re incredibly hard for someone who doesn’t have them to just intuit them out of thin air, and then deal with the really painful process of practicing and fine-tuning them enough to make them useful in day-to-day life.

And age is partly to do with it. These are skills that humans aren’t really equipped to start mastering until we’re teenagers, and they don’t really solidify for most people until their early-to-mid twenties. So it is in fact REALLY NORMAL for teenagers to go through periods of being super rigid and extreme, and to flip back and forth between different positions and concerns as part of their development, and not to have developed the ability to predict other peoples’ reactions or future consequences enough to understand the effect they’re having on other people.. The best thing for them is honestly contact with grounded adults who can say, “Huh, that’s an interesting opinion. I’m not sure I agree with all of it, but I’d be interested to hear how you got there,” and, “I don’t care how problematic she is, you can’t be viciously mean to your friend.”

Which, you know, in a PERFECT WORLD, they would have. They’d have teachers and professors and mentors and group norms and, who knows, website moderators, to help the discussion from getting too overwrought and out of hand. But on the Wild West that is Tumblr, that does not happen, and every mood swing and black-and-white mindset gets amplified to an incredible degree.

Good. I have no interest in interacting with Puriteens and Fandom Frollos (I didn't coin these terms, sadly). They can sip their misery juiceboxes in their cult clubhouse far, far away from me. Why does death game media about nuanced, deeply flawed individuals attract these Save the Children via Pure Shipping types every time? Who knows.

It's actually even funnier because my Sara/Nao/Reko polyship revolves around Nao, not Sara, haha.

I appreciate the advertisement though. Yes, come my way for all manner of femslash!

Anyway, I did a KGS ship post awhile back that should be tagged, if you wanna take a look. As for specific scenarios, the only one I had come up with was a joke one with Jou teasing Ryouko about also being into Sara and how he'd be perfectly fine being a sister-wife (i.e., I see Jou and Sara as bffs who both love Ryouko).

One thing that I think is really important is to step away from fandom for a bit and spend some time with friends and/or family to give yourself some perspective. 

Shipping on Tumblr is Serious Business™ but in the physical world it’s really not. As long as you are tagging for things so that people can avoid what they don’t want to see, and you’re aware that stuff like abuse and violence and sexual abuse etc shouldn’t be replicated in reality, you’ve done your due diligence.

It certainly seems like they’re in the right when they’re screaming at you and hurling death threats, but take a second and think about explaining the situation to your boss or teacher or therapist or whoever if you had to: which of you is going to look worse, you for enjoying a fucked up fictional dynamic, or them for taking someone else’s taste in fiction so seriously that they become obsessed with anyone who disagrees with them and wishes death on them?

The best remedy for abuse is education and teaching people who to recognize signs of abuse and ill-intent, even in their own actions. If you want to “give back” as it were, you could always spread awareness about these topics in addition to your fandom activity.

Basically parts of the fandom have gone off the deep end and threaten cast and crew members publicly on Twitter. There were death threats sent to voice actors’ families, rumors started about them being bigoted, and attempts to dig up dirty laundry to air out all because they didn’t like the direction the shows were going. Sometimes it was just because of the lack of outright condemnation for shippers they disagreed with.