Goddess Of Dumb Ideas

No. Just NO.

And I really feel like there are parts of fandom that don’t get or don’t believe this, and I think that’s troubling.  I’ve seen arguments that people shouldn’t have dark fantasies, or that bad impulses in themselves make a bad person.  I’ve seen so much shaming over thoughts.

It isn’t meant to be a social commentary unless you create it to be. 

It isn’t meant to be educational unless you create it to be. 

Sometimes a story can be just that, a story. Entertainment. Nothing more, nothing less. 

We can have conversations about patterns we see in fanworks. We can discuss how we portray characters and relationships, how to effectively convey what we want to in writing, how to sensitively approach representations of marginalized characters. But having those conversations productively requires that we approach each other in good faith, and it requires the ability to self-regulate–including recognizing that often there is no hard line, no black and white answer, and we won’t always come to the same conclusions.

It requires an understanding up front that eliminating all fanworks we don’t care for is not the end goal of these conversations.

I’ll give a personal example. There is a ship that deeply, viscerally upsets me in like 95% of its iterations. I can explain why I don’t like it if asked. I’ve written about why I don’t think it’s handled well in canon.

And if I wanted to–if I wanted to–I could make a very convincing-sounding argument for why that ship is objectively bad and wrong and no one should ship it. Not because that’s objectively right, mind you, but because I’m good at arguing. I could slap that together in like… ten minutes, probably.

I don’t do that. If I vent about it on my own blog, it’s as infrequently as I can manage, because I do my best to avoid the content that upsets me. I don’t seek it out to get riled up about it. I don’t seek out content that upsets me, read it in its entirety, and then leave angry comments and send my friends to harass the author. I don’t choose a high-profile writer for the content I don’t like and engage in a targeted campaign of harassment against them all while claiming to be addressing a general problem.

If you are deliberately seeking out content that you know will upset you and reading it anyway and then feeling that you need to take those bad feelings out on the creator, you are not taking care of yourself. You are not engaging in healthy behavior or productive coping mechanisms. You are not keeping yourself safe, and you are not helping to make fandom safer for others. You are not engaging in good faith.

If you find that you do this and you can’t seem to stop, you may need to take some kind of further steps up to and including taking a break from fandom. I’m serious. I’ve taken breaks myself for that exact reason. There’s no shame in it. 

People Are Reading Media With Problematic Themes, They Should Stop Doing That

This Media Has Special Meaning To X Group Only, Y Group Has No Reason To Engage So Why Do They Anyway

People Are Getting Into Media Specifically To Engage With The Fandom And I Don’t Like That

People Are Shipping Things That Aren’t Supported In The Canon

People Are Reading Media They’re Too Old For

People Are Reading Media They’re Too Young For

People Are Reading Media That Depicts Harm Similar To Harm They’ve Experienced, Why Would They Do That

People Are Reading Media That Isn’t Realistic Or Correct, They Will Get Wrong Ideas

People Are Creating Stuff I Dislike

Sex pollen? Trekkie house wives invented that trope.

Going into heat? Tekkie wives said were gonna write it.

Fuck or die was basically trademarked in Trekkie fic

Any common lewd or ship trope in fandom existance? Thank some 25yo+ ladies who were really into Star Trek.

Mary sue is literally named for a (i believe) self insert into Trekkie fic.

Sex Pollen: 50/50 credit between canon Poison Ivy and Star Trek (1966/1967)

Heat: Star Trek’s Pon Farr, but also canon elements of Sime-Gen (which, haha still draws from Star Trek) 

F/uck or die: see Pon Farr again 

Mary Sue: was coined in 1973 by Paula Smith who wrote a parody fic entitled “A Trekkie’s Tale” in her zine Menagerie, basically as a rant response to a trend in characterizations.

“Any common lewd or ship trope in fandom existance? Thank some 25yo+ ladies who were really into Star Trek.”

So as I’m apparently in A Mood Today, let’s talk about callout culture and fucking drama a little.  Via a story.

So once upon a time I followed a person on here.  They posted about stuff I had an interest in.  And every once in a while they would go all manic about something that pissed them off.  Something someone said on the internet that was Wrong about their favorite topic.  And sometimes I read these rants, amused, and decided to avoid the person they were talking about.  And sometimes I just ignored them.  Sometimes they got annoying when it was post after post about the same damn thing..   You know how it goes, the Tumblr posts of “…and ANoTHeR ThInG…”

And then one day, the rant of the day was about….me.

Someone on the internet, they wrote, had recommended at Thing That They Liked and in so doing had compared it to a Thing That They Didn’t Like.  And it was like 1-2K about how idiotic the comparison was and how inexperienced you had to be in the genre to even make that comparison, and how it was borderline homophobic and emblematic of everything that was wrong with….fuck I don’t know. 

So I read this, bemused, going…is this about me?  It has to be about me, right?  I did that.  Could someone else have made that same comparison?  Maybe…but no, pretty sure this is About Me. 

So I commented.  Yeah, that was me, I said.  I wrote that in a post three years ago.  I was trying to get my followers, who are fans of That Thing You Hate, since that’s the fandom I was in and the main topic of my blog, to consume this Piece Of Media You Like by making comparisons between them.  I was trying to encourage people to support this indie creator and expose them to new art.  Uh, sorry?

And I got a private apology and they took down the post, which, you know, good.  I just sorta went okay and kept following them.  But then I couldn’t react the same to their one-sided rants about How Wrong Other People Were anymore.  Because I’d seen the people reflexively agreeing on their post about me, without any of the context that made the central OMG Wrong Thing make sense. 

And finally this person went on a multi-day rant about someone else, a creator who I happen to know from a fandom.  They were complaining about how terrible their work was, how offensive because of this one small aspect of it.  An aspect that they found horribly objectionable because it reminded them of their own past abuser.

And you know, I didn’t have that reaction to the work.  I didn’t see the horribly offensive flaw.  I mean, I saw a character who did bad things, but I didn’t see that it completely morally compromised the whole work, the creator, and everything they would ever produce ever. 

So I stopped following this person, because it wasn’t contributing to my enjoyment of the internet anymore. 

But I was thinking about them today. Not only the way they took my own post out of context and made it a Whole Moral Deal, but the way they were personally triggered by a work of art due to their specific life history and then used that to label the work and the author Objectionable.