!READ THIS!

As of December 31st, 2009:

David Tennant was still The Doctor

The latest Harry Potter movie to hit theaters was Half-Blood Prince

Yeah…..yeah…

Aang was the only Avatar (Korra wouldn’t exist for two more years)

THE LAST AIRBENDER MOVIE HADN’T COME OUT YET

Sherlock didn’t exist

Some top songs were Owl City’s Fireflies, Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, Kesha’s Tik Tok, and Miley Cyrus’ Party In The USA

The first Avengers movie was still two years away

The blue Avatar movie had just been released

So had The Princess and the Frog

So had Zombieland

So had Hannah Montana: The Movie

Regular Show had just come out

Adventure Time was still a few months away

Glee was in its first season

Windows 7 had been launched a few months prior

Playstation 4/Xbox One wouldn’t exist for a few more years

The BP Oil Spill hadn’t happened yet

Obama was in his first term

The Supernatural fandom was still starting to wonder when Supernatural was going to end…

Let me tell you what I know about this after living here for nearly thirty years.

This is a modern European country, the home of hot net startups, of Internet giants and (in some places, some very few places) the fastest broadband on Earth. People here live in this century, HARD.

Yet they get nervous about walking up that one hill close to their home after dark, because, you know… stuff happens there.

I know this because Peter and I live next to One Of Those Hills. There are people in our locality who wouldn’t go up our tiny country road on a dark night for love or money. What they make of us being so close to it for so long without harm coming to us, I have no idea. For all I know, it’s ascribed to us being writers (i.e. sort of bards) or mad folk (also in some kind of positive relationship with the Dangerous Side: don’t forget that the root word of “silly”, which used to be English for “crazy”, is the Old English _saelig_, “holy”…) or otherwise somehow weirdly exempt.

And you know what? I’m never going to ask. Because one does not discuss such things. Lest people from outside get the wrong idea about us, about normal modern Irish people living in normal modern Ireland.

You hear about this in whispers, though, in the pub, late at night, when all the tourists have gone to bed or gone away and no one but the locals are around. That hill. That curve in the road. That cold feeling you get in that one place. There is a deep understanding that there is something here older than us, that doesn’t care about us particularly, that (when we obtrude on it) is as willing to kick us in the slats as to let us pass by unmolested.

So you greet the magpies, singly or otherwise. You let stones in the middle of fields be. You apologize to the hawthorn bush when you’re pruning it. If you see something peculiar that cannot be otherwise explained, you are polite to it and pass onward about your business without further comment. And you don’t go on about it afterwards. Because it’s… unwise. Not that you personally know any examples of people who’ve screwed it up, of course. But you don’t meddle, and you learn when to look the other way, not to see, not to hear. Some things have just been here (for various values of “here” and various values of “been”) a lot longer than you have, and will be here still after you’re gone. That’s the way of it. When you hear the story about the idiots who for a prank chainsawed the centuries-old fairy tree a couple of counties over, you say – if asked by a neighbor – exactly what they’re probably thinking: “Poor fuckers. They’re doomed.” And if asked by anybody else you shake your head and say something anodyne about Kids These Days. (While thinking DOOMED all over again, because there are some particularly self-destructive ways to increase entropy.)

Meanwhile, in Iceland: the county council that carelessly knocked a known elf rock off a hillside when repairing a road has had to go dig the rock up from where it got buried during construction, because that road has had the most impossible damn stuff happen to it since that you ever heard of. Doubtless some nice person (maybe they’ll send out for the Priest of Thor or some such) will come along and do a little propitiatory sacrifice of some kind to the alfar, belatedly begging their pardon for the inconvenience.

They’re building the alfar a new temple, too.

Don’t go near big trees in the night

If you live on a farm, don’t look outside the windows at night

I have broken all these rules.

I’ve seen some shit.

If it sounds like your mom, but you didn’t realize your mom is home…. it’s not your mom. Promise.

One walked onto the porch once. Wasn’t fun. But they’re not super keen on guns. Typically bolt when they see one.

You think it’s the neighbor kids.

It’s not the neighbor kids.

Might sound like coyotes but you never really /see/ the coyotes but then wow that one cow was reaaaaaally fucked up this morning. The next night when you hear another one screaming you just turn the tv up a little more. Maybe fire a gun in the air but you don’t go after it. If it is coyotes then it’s probably a pack and you seriously don’t want to fuck with that and if it’s the other thing you seriously REALLY don’t want to fuck with that.

So in the south, especially near the mountains, you just go straight from your car to inside your house, draw your curtains and watch tv.

If you see lights in the fields just fucking leave it alone.

Eyes forward. Don’t be fucking stupid. Mind your own business. Call your neighbors and tell them to bring the cats in. There’s coyotes out. Some of them know. Most of them don’t.

Other than that everything’s a ghost and they died in the civil war. Literally all of everything else is just the civil war. We used to smell old perfume and pipe tobacco in the weeks leading up to the battle anniversaries.

We had ‘witches’ in the mountains (more like ghost-women who will snatch you up by making you wander in a daze around the forest like the Blair Witch before killing you or letting you back out into society but you’re… different). Or devils in springs or abandoned wells (don’t look too long into one or something will follow you). 

But we also had the cornfield demons. I’ve witnessed this many times. You’ll be in the passenger seat looking out the window and see red glowing eyes in the cornfield. No light shining in that direction. Just two red dots a few inches apart faintly glowing in a pitch black cornfield. They’re not the glow of deer eyes in the headlights. More like the embers of a dying fire. Sometimes, as you drive away, you’ll look out the back window or side mirror and you can see the eyes have moved to the edge of the corn field, still watching you. If you bring it up with the driver, they’ll call you paranoid, but grip the wheel a bit tighter and driver a little faster.

I just…yes. This. All of this. And then some.

You don’t have to understand it. You don’t have to believe in it.

Like

I have seen something that was 100% Not A Human Being or an Animal with my own two eyes

So ye, even if I don’t personally believe in every superstition at the same time I’m not gonna take chances with this stuff

Because maybe it’s obvious and the Good Parlor is the one with the really comfy chairs with gilded armrests and the cool knicknacks to look at, and the You’re Not Special Parlor has chairs that look awesome but are uncomfortable as shit to actually sit in and the lampshades are slightly askew so when you’re sitting in your uncomfortable chair you also have the light shining in your eyes and the statuettes on the tea table are eyeing you dubiously, and the Fuck Off Parlor has chairs that stab you with springs on purpose and shadows keenly engineered to hide a table at prime shin-barking height and that picture is sure as shit following you with its eyes and there’s an hourglass that somehow feels like it will set an ancient and dire curse on you if you’re not gone before it runs out.

Today, the only passenger getting off at the Diagon Alley stop was an elderly man— though not as old as you might think, for a wizard— with snow white hair that still never lay flat, bright green eyes that looked out through round rimmed glasses, and a lightning shaped scar on his forehead.

“G'bye Mr Potter!” the conductor called out.

“Cheers Ted!” the old man called back, “And hey, tell your Grandad I said hi!”

“I will Mr Potter!” the young man said, grinning widely. “He’ll be right chuffed at you remembering him. He still talks about the war, y'know. Says you and him were instrumental in defeating Voldemort… oh, sorry.” he paused, clearly having only just remembered that you weren’t supposed to say his name in front of the older generation.

“It’s fine, Ted.” Harry said. “Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself, after all.” and he walked down the steps, only just resisting the urge to laugh. Stan Shunpike obviously hadn’t changed a bit if he was going round telling people he’d been instrumental in ending the war. Harry was only surprised that he wasn’t claiming to have won the whole thing single-handedly.

He waited, under the pretence of reading a poster some muggle had stuck on what they thought was a brick wall— something about a missing cat— until the bus had hurtled off again, down the road and round the corner. Then he reached inside his bag, a new one that Hermione had bought him for Christmas last year— “it’s the latest one, Harry. You could hold a house in one of these things! Makes that one I took horcrux hunting look like a cupboard.”

“Yeah,” Ron had added, giving Hermione an affectionate kiss on the cheek as he did so, “who know? Maybe some day they’ll finally have invented a bag big enough to carry all your books.“— and he pulled out his invisibility cloak.

He didn’t really need it all that much nowadays. Gone were the days when he couldn’t walk down a street without being begged for autographs. People who didn’t know him didn’t tend to recognise him much now. Sometimes he felt sure that, no matter how much he aged, in the public eye he’d always be the tall, skinny teenager who defeated Voldemort. He couldn’t really blame them for choosing to stop time there. Occasionally— but more often when he visited Diagon Alley, where the ghosts were particularly strong— he’d find that he started thinking of himself, not as the young man he had been, or the old man he had become, but as a boy. A small, skinny, rather undernourished boy in hand-me-down clothes and broken glasses fixed with tape.

“You look just like your father,” he remembered someone— so many someones— saying to him, “except for your eyes,” an image pops into his head, of a pale man with greasy hair dying on the floor of the Shrieking Shack (now the site of the Remus Lupin Werewolf Support Society, another of Hermione’s projects, he’s still got his badge somewhere)— “you have your mother’s eyes”.

The eyes, at least, are the same, but nobody’s said he looks like his father for decades. Not since his once jet black hair turned first grey, then white, and his face gained one too many wrinkles to ever again remind anyone of a man who’d died at 22.

Besides, there was nobody left now who had known his father. The last of the Marauders had died in the war, the few teachers, classmates and Order members who might remember him were long gone. Perhaps there were a few left— wizards live so much longer than muggles— but, if so, Harry never met them, and if he did he doubted that any of them would connect the laughing boy they had known with the old man they saw before them.

It was strange to think how much the likeness had mattered to him once. He used to feel like it connected him to his father in some way, felt proud when people commented on it— now he was almost glad they’d stopped.

The shadows of the past hung over him far too much already.

He hestitated, making sure that he was fully covered by the cloak, and then walked through what any muggle would have seen as just an ordinary, rather grubby, brick wall with a cat poster on it, and what anybody with even a trace of magic in tgem would have clearly seen as the doorway to the Leaky Cauldron.

It was, as always, rather crowded in there, and Harry had to make quite an effort so as to avoid jostling someone and possibly causing a panic. He did end up accidentally knocking over a pint glass, so that it’s contents spilled all over the table and dripped onto the floor, but luckily the owner didn’t see who did it, and so instead of panicking merely started a rather loud argument with the man standing directly behind Harry. Harry himself made his way out of the back entrance and into the alley, before he could cause any more trouble.

At first glance, Diagon Alley was the same as it had been that first magical day that Hagrid had taken him to buy his school supplies.

There was still the same atmosphere of freedom and excitement— it would have reminded Harry of the end of term, if that time hadn’t always been associated in his own mind with grim despair and a longing to go back to school— that you always got in those few places where witches and wizards were free to use magic without worrying about running into muggles. Still the same tempting but (Harry had to remind himself even now) totally unecessary magical objects placed tantalisingly in the windows of shops— including a solid gold and silver chess set, and a globe that not only rotated in midair, orbited by a miniature moon, but also appeared to change cloud formations depending on what the weather was like in different parts of the world.

Hell, since wizarding fashions seldom changed dramatically, instead cycling through endless variations on the theme ‘cloak and pointy hat’, it could even have been the same people passing by him now as had passed by him all those years ago, if it weren’t for the fact that they would all be much older now, and a lot of them were probably dead.

But there had been changes as well.

Olivander’s was still there, only now it was not run by an Olivander, but by somebody else— Harry couldn’t remember the name now, but there’d been a thing about it in the ‘Prophet a few years ago. Some ex-Durmstrang student had decided to reopen it under the old name. There had been complaints at the time, but they had since died down. Apparently she made very good wands.

Madame Malkin’s was gone though, replaced by Wizwitch, a shop that according to the sign, sold “all the latest fashions, at all the lowest prices”.

Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes was still doing good business— nobody had even heard of Zonko’s Jokeshop nowadays— but the site of Flourish and Blotts was now home to Longbottom’s Garden supplies (young Frank Longbottom had inherited his father’s love of Herbology, if not his talent for teaching).

And, of course, the space that had once been set aside for Florean Fortescue’s Ice Cream Parlour (and now had a small plaque mounted outside it to commemorate that fact) was now occupied by a great stone building, with a mural of a golden bird painted over the doorway, flapping its wings in the flames, and below it the words: ORDER OF THE PHEONIX MUSEUM.

As always, Harry had to pause for a moment upon entering the museum (it was free admission, of course, Hermione had been very insistent about that). No matter how many times he visited, he never got used to it.

In front of him, behind a wall of glass not disimilar to the one he had one vanished to free the python at the zoo, stood sixth plinths. On them, in order, stood an old diary with a hole through the middle; a ring with a cracked stone (a replica— Harry had never told anyone where the real one was); a broken locket with a serpentine ’S’ engraved on it; a golden goblet; a silver tiara set with a blue gem in the middle, and, on the last and largest plinth, the reconstructed skeleton of a simly enormous snake.

In front of the display, an eager looking museum attendant was talking excitedly to a group of children and their parents, telling them about the origins of each horcrux and how it had been destroyed.

These attendants were the reason Harry was wearing the cloak. They tended to be Wizarding War enthusiasts, and tended to be knowledgeable enough about it that they might just be able to recognise him even if he didn’t look much like the pictures on the Chocolate Frog Cards anymore (did they even still do Chocolate Frog Cards? Now he came to think about it, he hadn’t seen a Chocolate Frog on sale for years).

He didn’t mind them too much, but he knew that if they knew he was here then they would insist on making a fuss, dragging him around all the displays and showering him with questions about the old days.

Ron had refused to set foot in the place since the first visit, and nothing he, Hermione and Ginny could say had been able to persuade him otherwise. “Theykept following me around,” he complained, “asking what it was like. So I told them: it was bloody awful and we kept nearly getting killed— and they laughed, like they thought I was joking.”

“Well,” Hermione had said, “you can’t expect them to take it as seriously as we do. Most of that lot weren’t even born when You-Know— when Voldemort was defeated. It’s all ancient history to them.”

“It’s payback, Ron,” Ginny had said, “for all those times you didn’t pay attention during Binns’ history classes. Somewhere, up there,” she pointed at the sky, “a thousand goblin rebels are laughing at you.”

“Whatever.” Ron had been adamant, “I’m not going back in there again.”

Hermione and Ginny didn’t visit much now, either.

“You’ve got to let go.” Ginny always told him, whenever he suggested it. “Yes it happened, and yes it was dreadful and important and we mustn’t ever forget it— but it’s over. And it was all such a long time ago. At some point, you just have to accept that, or you’ll go mad.”

“I’ve managed to avoid insanity so far.” he’d said the last time, trying to lighten the mood.

“Yes.” She’d replied, but she’d looked doubtful.

It wasn’t a question of forgetting it, he thought as he walked by Gryffindor’s sword in its glass case, and the portrait of Albus Dumbledore mounted on the wall (he could have sworn it winked at him as he walked past). There was no chance of him ever forgetting it. He still had the scars, for God’s sake. He still woke up screaming sometimes, convinced that it was all happening again and that this time he wasn’t going to be able to stop it, clutching his forehead against phantom pains in his scar.

He’d walked past quite a few exhibits by now— including reconstructions of the DA room and the Chamber of Secrets, and a gruesome replica of Mad-Eye Moody’s enchanted glass eye, swivelling round to glare at the small children who came to gawk at it. Harry occasionally thought about complaining about that— it didn’t seem quite respectful enough, somehow— but, on reflection, he thought as he watched a little girl tap the glass of the case and squeal as the eye turned and fixed upon her, he couldn’t really think of anything Moody would have liked better.

“Keep them on their guard!” he’d have said, what remained of his mouth smiling in approval. “Constant vigilance!”

Harry almost laughed, but the sound died in his throat when he caught sight of the next exhibit.

‘In Memoriam’ the black banner read, over the wall of framed photographs of everybody who had fought and died in the first and second wars against Voldemort. Fred, Tonks, Lupin, Snape, Dumbledore, Colin Creevey… all the people he couldn’t save.

Was it worth it?

That was the question he kept asking himself, the question that always drive him here, searching the past for answers.

Was it worth all the death, all the pain, all the fighting? Standing here, invisible, with a crowd of the dead waving at him happily from their frames, Harry wasn’t so sure.

They all looked so young.

Then, in the centre, was photo that was different to all the others. A group photo, rather than one with only one or two subjects, a photo that reminded Harry of standing in the house that had become his godfather’s prison, in the conpany of a man who had seen so many terrible things that his sense of perspective had been skewed to the extent that showing a boy the faces of his dead parents and their dead friends could be seen as a treat.

There they all were, still smiling. Lily and James, Frank and Alice, Sirius, Remus, Wormtail, Mad-Eye and all the others. ‘The Original Order of the Pheonix’, the label underneath read, followed by a list of names and birth and death dates. A lot of death dates.

For a moment Harry envied them their frozen moment of happiness. There were horrors in their future just like there were horrors in his past, but at least they didn’t have to remember them. The woman who had his eyes, and the man who looked so much like he had looked that it was as if he was looking at his 21 year old self again, had no idea that their son would be an orphan mere months after the photo was taken.

Suddenly, he heard a patter of feet behind him, and only just managed to leap out of the way before their owner— a small boy, about four years old, wearing a bright green cloak and clutching a toy wand— barged right into him. As it was, the boy ran past him, eager to get a closer look at the pictures.

He was young, probably much too young to know what he was looking at, andHarry watched him as he peered into the frames, waving back at all the funny little people inside.

“Phineas!” Ah, and here were the parents. “Phineas! Wait for Mummy and Daddy!” a flustered looking woman in a pale purple cloak was running after him, followed by a dark grey cloaked man who must have been her husband.

The boy continued studying the pictures, when suddenly simething seemed to catch his eye. “Mummy! Daddy! Look!” he said, jabbing a finger at the photo in the centre.

“Yes, sweetheart.” the woman said, “that’s the Order of the Pheonix. Remember, we told you about them? They helped defeat Voldemort.”

The child nodded, and Harry looked down in amazement at this child who would never know what it was the flinch at the name ‘Voldemort’. Who would never be told that his value was reduced down to his blood status. Who would never need to cling to photographs and stories and likenesses to feel a connection to the oarents who were now standing in front of him.

Yes. It had been worth it.

… phew. this ask almost passes as a legit question, but the ‘xoxo’ at the end is a little much.  still, what a great opportunity to talk about this ongoing problem of people ignoring warnings that a work contains content that upsets them, then complaining that they were upset when they viewed it.

(first, a side note: don’t censor the word ‘pedophilia’. It’s not a slur - it’s a content warning. If you censor it, the blacklists of people who don’t want to see posts that mention pedophilia won’t catch it and they could be harmed. Just use the word.)

anti-shippers who look at a fic or fanwork’s tags and say ‘this has problematic content! I better go tell the author how problematic their content is!’, I have news for you:

warnings on fanworks indicate that the person creating the work knows the content is ‘problematic’, not for all audiences, and may hurt people if they view it unsuspectingly.stop taking fanwork warnings and tags in bad faith and using them as an excuse to harass and harm creators.

warnings aren’t ‘disclaimers’ (and aren’t used as such). they’re the CONTAINS NAPROXIN. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN sticker on painkillers. The content is good, even helpful, for some people, but for others who don’t need it or are too young to understand what they’re consuming could be harmed. take the warnings seriously and if you don’t like what they say the fic contains, you really are better off not reading/viewing it!

‘they’re not warnings, they’re advertisements!’ they can function as both! people who want to read that content can find it and people who don’t want to read that content can avoid it. everyone is happier, except anti-shippers who are mad that people are enjoying content they don’t personally approve of.

‘If the creator knows their content is problematic, then they shouldn’t have created it in the first place! Or if they did, they shouldn’t have put it on the internet for people to see!’ well that’s a very different conversation. What you’re saying is that you advocate for censorship, and in that case ‘don’t like don’t read’ would be worthless: only things you like would be allowed to exist in the first place.

But let’s talk about how ‘they shouldn’t have put it on the internet for people to see.’ the basis for this is, I know, that it could corrupt the unsuspecting youth who read the bad content. But isn’t this a bit contradictory? if a fanwork is tagged with a warning that it contains abuse, everyone who looks at the fanwork is going to know that 1) the author believes that abuse is bad and needs to be warned for, and 2) the work contains abuse. Taking these points together, no matter how positively the abuse is depicted, a viewer has foreknowledge that it’s abusive and the creator thinks abuse is bad.  It’s simply insulting to imply that viewers will look at the abuse in the fanwork so uncritically as to not think it’s horrible after receiving such a warning.

In fact, I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that people who have been raped or abused (or still being abused) or undergone other harm have read fics with these warnings and because of the warnings, realized what had happened to themselves was not okay.  If anti-shippers had their way, those fics wouldn’t even exist, much less be warned for.

I’m about to say something radical, so brace yourself: 

because tagging warnings is the accepted way to warn people about dangerous content in fandom, the things more likely to cause confusion and harm in fanworks are the things that aren’t warned for.

Even the most positive depiction of abuse would be spoiled by a warning. Can you imagine if the beginning of every copy of Nabokov’s Lolita started with ‘Warning: this work contains depictions of csa, abuse, and child grooming.’ It would force readers who are blind to the hints that the narrator is unreliable to read the work with a very different eye, and I doubt most people would read it and conclude it’s a love story the way many people do today.

Now Lolita was intended to be a kind of monster story from the point of view of the monster - it was never meant to be a positive depiction at all. Nabokov’s work was too subtle for most people, but he was a master storyteller. I think if he could, he’d go back and add a warning so people would stop getting the wrong idea.

In fandom, where we have a widely-accepted tagging system, potentially harmful content that the creator adds deliberately will be warned for. But the potentially harmful content that the creator doesn’t know about won’t be - and that’s the stuff that tends to be a lot more sneaky and insidious.

Let’s take your example: 

“i can be as racist as i want and you have to deal with it because i used a disclaimer".

Racism does crop up a lot in fanworks, but not in the way this implies.  There’s a huge difference between a creator recognizing racism exists and utilizing it as an aspect of a setting or acknowledging it in a respectful, truthful way and a creator who does not recognize their own racist blind spots and therefore ends up perpetuating harmful stereotypes or providing racist narration without realizing it.

The former tends to be warned for; the latter never is because the creator doesn’t even know they’re being racist. The former may be painful, because racism is shitty and harmful and real, but a person can steer clear if they want to avoid it and the warning shows the content is known to be bad. The latter is more painful because it’s not just depicting racism: it is in fact perpetuating racism.

So which is actually worse: the fic that has a warning for racism or the fic that doesn’t?

And this can be applied to anything. A fic that depicts a character being abused but doesn’t warn for abuse tells me that the author doesn’t know the work contains abuse (which is worrying for the safety of the author). A fic that contains dubious consent but the author doesn’t warn for noncon/dubcon/rape tells me that the author has a poor understanding of consent.  These are the fics that are more likely to be dangerous. Fics without content warnings are also the ones most likely to unironically and uncritically depict the bad behavior in a positive light - because the authors have been taught by the rest of society outside fandom that what they’ve depicted is normal/not harmful. They are victims, and they need help, not people yelling at them about how problematic they are.

Two last notes, which I’ll try to keep short:

If a fanwork depicts a relationship that’s canonically unhealthy in a world where it’s fluffy and healthy, they are not responsible for putting warnings on their fic that pertain to the canon version of the ship.  For instance: Kylo and Rey are enemies in current Star Wars continuity and Kylo tried to torture Rey for information. But if a fic is set in a future where Kylo is well-adjusted and happy and dating Rey in a non-abusive relationship, the fic does not need to warn for ‘abuse’. the fic doesn’t contain abuse. Let it go.

No creator is beholden to using anti definitions of words like ‘pedophilia’, ‘abuse’, and ‘incest’ for their warnings. The definition of what antis call ‘pedophilia’, ‘incest’, and ‘abuse’ varies from fandom to fandom - sometimes from pairing to pairing. While tags will always be somewhat subjective, the wide variety of definitions these words have in anti-shipper parlance makes them all but meaningless, so use them when you see fit, not when antis demand it.  If antis have a problem with it, they’ll just have to start treating ship tags as warnings* and avoid all depictions of ships they don’t like. (which is what we all wish they’d do anyway.)

And now for the final irony: every time anti-shippers use warnings as a reason to go yell at people about how their fanworks are bad, antis give creators less incentive to tag warnings. People might start to hope that if they just don’t warn up front for the potentially dangerous content people will stop yelling at them without even looking at the work itself. Or if the work is borderline (’maybe this is abusive but maybe it’s not’), they may opt to go without the warnings so they can avoid the extra trouble. this is already happening with dubious consent depictions. If a noncon warning gets you yelled at, then fics where the consent isn’t completely denied will just not get warned for at all, and that’s fucked up.  And when the warnings aren’t there, people are way more likely to stumble on something of a nature that upsets them! 

So as usual, in their crusade to eradicate all content that isn’t unquestionably wholesome and pure antis make everything a little less safe for everyone. Thanks, guys.  (please stop.)

and creators: please, depict terrible things in your fanworks in whatever light you choose - and warn for them. you might accidentally help save someone from a real situation that’s terrible.

ok: i’m scared to exist online right now, even in what we should be able to consider safe spaces for queer folks

i’m scared because we are all watching continually as more and more of us are violently picked off and destroyed

by other queer folks, and by people who claim to be sympathetic to us, utilizing the same rhetoric that should be helping and empowering us

the word “discourse”, at this point, is only ever used sarcastically and with a kind of quiet dread by my friends

we joke about being problematic, but me, my peers and maybe you too, live in a state of constant low anxiety

over the fact that we don’t get second chances to make mistakes. if you’re a queer person of any kind of visibility, it’s one and done

the well of patience and compassion runs deep for our cis/straight allies, and we reserve NOTHING for ourselves

this is assuming you even make a mistake. we target each other for complete bullshit just as often

weeks ago i was chased off twitter for using the word “queer”, before that i was getting death threats over fabricated purity politics

friends of mine have been targeted with callout posts over things they didn’t do or for weird fandom drama with zero material impact

i’m not trying to absolve any of us of guilt. we’ve all done and will do wrong things, we’ll hurt each other, again and again

it’s easy, because we’re all a little bit fucked up over here. we’re carrying wounds we’re weird, we’re not always presentable

but that’s exactly why we need patience and compassion for each other more than anything else

because those wounds make it so easy for us to destroy eachother, and some of y'all may be tempted

it’s easier. when it’s some 20-something queer artist struggling to meet half the poverty line, it’s easy to run them off for hurting you

i GET why it’s tempting for some folks, because this is power that you can exert, a situation you can change

when we’re all so tired and so used to being powerless

but please understand that the folks you’re targeting may not come back from it. they may not ever come back. it’s happened, it will happen

when you mark someone as unsaveable and irredeemable in the only space they have to exist in, they can’t exist anymore

This is what it means to be a TERF, a transmedicalist/truscum, or an ace exclusionist. This is the environment they’re trying to build, one where other people in the LGBTQ+ community have to live with fear and anxiety of the kind of authoritarian bullying that these people try to create.

It’s really important to push back on this stuff anytime we see it, because authoritarians actively work to spread their malfeasant ideology. They lie and manipulate in order to spread their message because they honestly believe that anything, no matter how immoral, is justified in pursuit of their core goals. And their core goals always involve hurting us, all of us. They only see three types of people; those that agree with them and are allies, those that don’t agree with them and are enemies, and those people who they hate and will only ever attack.

We fight them by not letting them get away with it. We fight them by educating people about their tactics and their evil. We fight them by protecting those of us who are young enough or immature enough to still be vulnerable to their recruitment tactics. And we win by never giving them an inch, ever.