discourssion

[discourssion]

jds and lauren have described s and k as brotherly and have said s was acting fatherly towards k once. but you guys ignore that because you ship them

I realize you forgot to put any kind of sources to back up your claims here, so let me help you out–the show runners have mentioned Shiro and Keith’s bond in a brotherly context before, that’s fair–but that’s not at all unique to Shiro and Keith. Jeremy said Keith and Lance have a brotherly bond, which you can find here. Weird how no one says you can’t ship k/l because of that, huh?

Anyway, I’ve personally never heard Joaquim and Laure describe Shiro as some sort of father figure of Keith’s. And he’s clearly not. Keith saying Shiro’s like a brother to him rather than a father is a pretty clear indication of that. Also, reminder that Joaquim and Lauren have outright said the Space Dad thing is completely fanon and in no way their intention. Contrary to popular belief, Shiro is no one’s father. Especially not Keith’s:

Going back to the “brotherly” thing, it in no way invalidates shipping sheith. We know that, because plenty of the staff supports it. In fact, we’ve been given explicit fanart by the staff for it. Including Art Director Chris Palmer’s amazing Shiro loves you baby #he’s looking at Keith sheith art–

–as well as Supervising Director Kihyun Ryu’s lovely sheith sketches. You wouldn’t see this kind of content if they were literally meant to be seen as brothers. DW would never allow them to openly ship it. But the fact remains–the staff has literally no moral qualms with this ship. It’s just antis. It’s always been just antis. 

Obviously, the staff is capable of viewing them in a romantic context. Lauren even got shit from a bunch of antis early on because she liked a set of sheith fanart, including the two of them blatantly making out. Someone literally had the audacity to write an “open letter” about how “immoral” she was for supporting romantic sheith. As if somehow they know these characters better than their own creators. In fact, here is an entire list of archived sheith support from the staff to reassure you that they 100% support sheith in a romantic context. 

Returning back to Sheith in a romantic context, acknowledging them as being somewhat brotherly doesn’t invalidate the ship and demonize it anymore than k/l. Literally all of Team Voltron is found family, that’s the entire point. And people who don’t think feelings can evolve into something more? They obviously don’t know friends to lovers relationships. Take Avatar for example, since this is Studio Mir we’re talking about. They literally used to be “like a brother and sister,” but now they’re married with children. It’s almost like relationships can continually change and grow. I mean, if you’ll look at this one line from The Ember Island Players, it sure does seem reminiscent of that scene in BOM:

Aang: “Did you really mean what you said in there?…when you said I was just like a brother to you and you didn’t have feelings for me?”

Katara: “I didn’t say that. An actor said that.”

Aang: “But it’s true, isn’t it?”

You can also see this post here with lists of positive commentary from the staff about the very intimate nature of Shiro and Keith relationship, including commentary like, “Shiro was still [Keith’s] guiding light, things were good,” “Shiro and Keith have the closest relationship,” “Shiro loves Keith”–but sure, lines like that can only be purely platonic, right? 

No one’s saying you personally have to be comfortable with sheith. You’re allowed to not like it. But don’t you dare claim the show runners hate it or us the way antis do. They are not on your side. They are never on your side. Antis are the ones who had the audacity to harass Josh and his family. Antis are the ones that will talk about how much they hate Lauren’s guts behind her back and then go demanding canon ages and other entitled shit to her face. Antis are the ones who will claim to love Pidge but treat Bex like complete trash. Antis weren’t happy Joaquim didn’t get k/l so they tried to make the guy out so they claimed he was a queerbaiting homophobe and all other kind of awful shit. Antis are the ones continually harassing and alienating the staff. You are the problem in this fandom and you should understand that the staff will never support you harassing others. 

Also, here’s some kind words from Barlee. Understand that the staff doesn’t condone anti behavior and never has. Never will. It takes more effort to send pointless rude messages to other people than to just ignore stuff you don’t like. If you hate me or sheith, then fine. But don’t claim the staff will take your side, because you’re the ones making them too annoyed and stressed to even interact with this fandom anymore. 

[discourssion]

Sorry, hang on, I’m sorry, but we all saw when he murdered one of his closest confidants in cold blood, right? Like, I am the biggest Lotor stan, I love his character and the direction it’s taken and I’m genuinely hopping for Lollura, but “he’s never been an outright villain” is, in any respect, just not true. 

People argue that his killing Narti was out of self-defense, but was Narti an immediate threat to his life? To the point where simply leaving her behind or imprisoning her couldn’t have solved the problem if he’d given it an ounce of consideration? 

Lotor is by no means an impulsive character driven by his own emotions, but even if this was a rare moment of panic, lashing out and murdering somebody you’re supposed to trust implicitly on the suspicion that they might be unwittingly acting as a spy against their will... 

That’s not the reaction of a hero. Neglecting to explain your reasons to the rest of your team, which you’re also supposed to trust implicitly and would have every reason to understand, is not the course of action a hero would take. That’s enough of a villainous act to make it more than reasonable to consider him a villain of the series; whether or not this changes depends on how further seasons go.

I really hope Lotor doesn’t end up betraying Allura and everything, but I also see people bringing up Lotor’s lack of redemption arc and I’m just like…

First: Who said he needs a damn redemption arc?

Second: Why would he even need a redemption arc? He’s been manipulative and morally ambiguous but he’s never been an outright villain. Antagonistic? Sure. But a villain? No.

Third: Honestly if you’ve got such a hardon for redemption arcs, then did you ever consider Lotor helping team Voltron IS his redemption arc? Yes, he’s not as overtly good for the sake of being good, he has more pragmatic motivations and methods. He’s not just going to give things up if it doesn’t benefit him in any way, but what benefits him most also seems to benefit everyone else. I won’t deny he’s sneaky and shady but that doesn’t equal evil or in needing of a redemption arc.

Believe it or not, characters don’t always need redemption arcs anyway. And just because the character fights and screws with the heroes doesn’t mean they are villains who need to be redeemed.

[discourssion]

“yeah ship what you want but dont get mad when we call you out on it” is the most bullshit contradictory phrase i think ive ever read

“yeah, ship what you want. but we get to harass you, call you names, accuse you of serious life-destroying crimes, attempt to tarnish your reputation, make up lies about you, tell you you deserve to die, etc. and you don’t get to be upset about any of that. but sure, ship what you want.”

[discourssion]

After everything that’s gone down recently in the VLD fandom I’ve seen antis, especially klance-shipping people who consider themselves anti-shaladin, expressing that they don’t condone harassment but also want to make fandom a ‘safe space for minors’ or stop the shipping of ships they believe harmful.

Unfortunately for these antis, they cannot both stop shipping/prevent the creation of potentially harmful content and also condemn harassment and threats.

This is part of why anti-shipping circles both benefit from and silently invite abusive and toxic behavior in the name of their cause. By demanding/requiring that others change their behavior on sites where antis have no moderating authority, they create loopholes for and/or implicitly approve of action taken to force people to comply with anti-shipper demands. this silent approval gives antis unspoken permission to exaggerate, lie, and create scaremonger material about anything or anyone they disapprove of or want to silence. It also gives abusers in the anti ranks an overlooked ‘blind spot’ from which they are allowed to harass, defame, dogpile, threaten, blackmail, doxx, suicide bait, and assault people who don’t change in response to anti demands.

giving up the belief in or expectation of the right to force others to do what you want doesn’t mean that you can’t continue to say why you hate a ship or kink or whatever. You can still make an honest effort to convince others that your way of thinking is best. But it does mean that you have to actually be honest instead of exaggerating or lying to scare people, and you have to be responsible in how you frame your arguments. You have to allow others to disagree with you, even if you think that’s dangerous or ‘evil’, and you have to explicitly and repeatedly state that you don’t approve of people using your cause as an excuse to harass or threaten others.

fandom is on twitter and tumblr right now, and these sites are unmoderated and uncontrollable. Almost all of us dislike it. But when there are no moderators, you can only moderate your own space via blocking and muting. And to facilitate that, creators should tag and properly flag the work they share on twitter and tumblr (and any other viral sharing site.) asking people to tag to help you moderate your space is appropriate. Blocking people who don’t comply with your request is also appropriate. But you can’t ask people to stop creating content you want to avoid altogether. That’s inappropriate and invasive.

and if you can’t handle fandom on twitter and/or tumblr because of this, that’s okay! Join a discord of like-minded people! Make an amino app space! You are absolutely allowed to - and should - curate your fandom experience to make you happy. And if you’re concerned that unmoderated fandom will hurt or mislead fandom newcomers, you have every right to extend a hand in honest offer to help them curate their spaces too (HONEST being the key word here).

but if you try to force unmoderated fandom spaces to become what you want them to be, you are almost guaranteed to implicitly condone and encourage harassment and/or threats directed at anyone who disagrees with you.

be careful of what you encourage, even if you don’t mean to encourage it. (And this goes for shippers and anti-antis, too. We can all end up encouraging harassment if we’re not careful to be kind.)

[discourssion]

I feel like with the new ~fandom drama~ or whatever going around, I should re-introduce my favorite theory of fandom, which I call the 1% Theory.

Basically, the 1% Theory dictates that in every fandom, on average, 1% of the fans will be a pure, unsalvageable tire fire. We’re talking the people who do physical harm over their fandom, who start riots, cannot be talked down. The sort of things public news stories are made of. We’re not talking necessarily bad fans here- we’re talking people who take this thing so seriously they are willing to start a goddamn fist fight over nothing. The worst of the worst.

The reason I bring this up is because the 1% Theory ties into an important visual of fandom knowledge- that bigger fandoms are always perceived as “worse”, and at a certain point, a fandom always gets big enough to “go bad”. Let me explain.

Say you have a small fandom, like 500 people- the 1% Theory says that out of those 500, only 5 of them will be absolute nutjobs. This is incredibly manageable- it’s five people. The fandom and world at large can easily shut them out, block them, ignore their ramblings. The fandom is a “nice place”.

Now say you have a medium sized fandom- say 100,000 people. Suddenly, the 1% Theory ups your level of calamity to a whopping 1000 people. That’s a lot. That’s a lot for anyone to manage. It is, by nature of fandom, impossible to “manage” because no one owns fan spaces. People start to get nervous. There’s still so much good, but oof, 1000 people.

Now say you have a truly massive fandom- I use Homestuck here because I know the figures. At it’s peak, Homestuck had approximately FIVE MILLION active fans around the globe.

By the 1% Theory, that’s 50,000 people. Fifty THOUSAND starting riots, blackmailing creators, contributing to the worst of the worst of things.

There’s a couple of important points to take away here, in my opinion.

1) The 1% will always be the loudest, because people are always looking for new drama to follow.

2) Ultimately, it is 1%. It is only 1%. I can’t promise the other 99% are perfect, loving angels, but the “terrible fandom” is still only 1% complete utter garbage.

3) No fandom should ever be judged by their 1%. Big fandoms always look worse, small fandoms always look better. It’s not a good metric.

So remember, if you’re ever feeling disheartened by your fandom’s activity- it’s just 1%, people. Do your part not to be a part of it.

[discourssion]

I did a thing.

[discourssion]

I feel like a lot of tumblr culture, especially the particularly ineffective brand of Tumblr Social Justice™, has somewhere along the line lost track of the difference between something having the potential to be bad, and being innately bad. 

For instance, a white author writing a character of another race absolutely has the heightened potential for problematic portrayal, since that author lacks lived experience as a member of marginalized racial/ethnic group to draw on, and has a heightened chance to misrepresent that group. However, if they do their research, talk with individuals from that racial/ethnic group, consult with sensitivity readers, etc., they may still tell a very honest, sympathetic, good story with good representation. It is not innately bad, simply because of the author’s race; though I’ve seen arguments on tumblr insisting this is the case. 

Another example is relationship dynamics; couples who have an age gap or a power imbalance (such as one individual being lower on a professional chain of command from the other) might have an increased potential for an abusive dynamic to form. The couple with the age gap has to be more conscious of differences in lived experience, and the couple with a power differential in the professional side of their relationship needs to overcome more hurdles to equalize things in the context of their personal dynamic. But neither of these things is impossible. These dynamics are not innately abusive; they might make abuse easier, or more common, but they don’t guarantee it. Just as avoiding these dynamics doesn’t guarantee a lack of abusive behavior.

Some situations/dynamics/endeavors have a heightened potential for things to go wrong. And we should be conscious of that potential and keep an eye out for problems – not to destroy the thing, but to encourage course correction (an edit to a manuscript; couples’ therapy; etc.). Many of these things, however, tumblr culture has labelled as innately bad, rejecting any possibility of the thing being done well and thus shutting down that encouraged course correction in favor of flat-out condemnation, without nuance, thought, or consideration. And by drawing clear lines of what is ‘innately bad’ and ‘innately good’ we also avoid giving due criticism of problematic things that have been assigned as ‘innately good.’ 

This hellsite is allergic to nuance, but damn, do I wish we could all be better at it and recognize that few things are as black & white and simple as we’d like them to be. Shit is messy. Everything is problematic. But not everything that can be bad is, and not everything that’s less likely to be bad is perfect. 

[discourssion]

me: the “a boy is mean to a girl because he likes her” trope is harmful and we should stop supporting it in media

yall: mhm mhm yes good

me: the same logic should be applied to male/male ships

yall:

[discourssion]

heY I’ve made a few posts like these in the past but now that they’re becoming even more common I’m gonna say it again

stop reposting and/or editing Barlee and any of the other crew’s art

it’s not like official content all because they work on the show, they can still do fanart of something they work on. Reposting their stuff is taking someone’s art away from them 

especially if it’s editing/coloring it, like you wouldn’t do that to any other artists in the fandom, that doesn’t change all because they work on the show

she’s even said in the past that she didn’t want pictures from prints she did at cons to end up online and some people respected that but others scanned/posted them online and people made icons/edits out of it

[discourssion]

literally every time an anti or a shaladin does some fucked up shit, everyone from their side will leap to defend them like “well what about when the antis did blah blah blah,” “well what about that anti-anti that said blah blah blah,” guess what assholes? there are creeps and bullies and downright monsters on both sides, and pointing fingers at other people doesn’t absolve them of responsibility. saying “well what about (x)” is not a valid response to criticism, it’s a deflection and it’s gross, because it means you guys spend all your time trying to prove which side is the most morally pure rather than ever addressing or fixing a problem, this shit happens in politics and yet y'all drag it into the dumbest shit, you should all be ashamed of yourselves, seriously.

[discourssion]

New theme and a brand-spanking new about page for you to look over.

[discourssion]

New policy: The discussion is over the moment somebody jumps the gun and throws out “X, Y, Z apologist,” “abuser,” “pedophile,” or a good ol’ fashioned death threat in response to valid criticism. Goodbye.

[discourssion]

This is an awful lot of speculation, projection, and treating straight-up fabrication like it’s fact, and not a whole lot of evidence. It’s by no means inherently abusive to restrict an 11 year old’s access to make sure that they can’t go on sites not meant for them because of their age. It’s by no means "sexual harassment” to object when an 11 year old child is making and consuming content created by and for adults. There are laws against children under 18 accessing explicitly sexual content for a reason. Reasonable safety measures for young children on the internet =/= burning books for witchcraft and devil worship. Equating the two gets you nowhere and hurts your case. There are plenty of ways to find fault with ashkenazis’ behavior without resorting to stretching suspect wording to its absolute extreme in an effort to prove your point. You’re bending over backwards to make problems out of thin air when there are already real problems that need to be handled with every effort made toward preserving the facts and keeping baseless speculation out of it.

Like seriously a whole bunch of people who want to obsessively control what everyone reads and watches; their friends, their neighbors, their children, their siblings, their partners—how does that not strike fear into your heart?

How do you not imagine someone near them hastily hiding a book when they get home, praying they won’t notice the rectangular lump under the blanket and drag the book out and start screaming?

How do you not imagine a child scared to go to a bookstore or library, deathly afraid of punishment for unknowingly reading something that the anti has deemed bad (often without actually having read it)?

How do you not imagine a victim going glassy-eyed and limp as they brace for an hour-long lecture about how the book or TV show they were caught with is “abusive” or “pedophilic” or “fetishizing”; hoping maybe this time if they don’t say anything and choke on their own words until all they can think of is screaming, the anti won’t hit them or do or say anything graphically sexual?

This isn’t hyperbole. Just yesterday an anti boasted about sexually harassing his 11-year-old sister because he caught her searching for Voltron porn, and about how he’d tried to convince his parents to abusively restrict her internet access. Antis absolutely are and will be abusers to anyone they have power over, unless they change their beliefs. Justification to abuse and control other people is the core tenet of anti “philosophy.” They exist to spread fear and violence in the name of their own power and self-righteousness.

All the examples above? What I went through under conservative parents who hated the least bit of sexuality or “demonic” content in fiction. I’m talking “Pokemon will make your children devil worshippers” type Moral Majority nightmare fuel. I have every reason to believe that antis will treat their families no different.

I don’t want that to happen to any person ever again. Stop antis.

[discourssion]

Breaking out of my Angry Zone to say that I’m blessed and grateful to Allurance for allowing me to actually appreciate Lance’s character again. Seeing him grow to become so supportive and see her as a capable person of real value instead of an object to ogle? [kisses fingers] Perfection.

[discourssion]

@golbatgender

Show me the post where ashkenazis admitted to sexually harassing his sister. I’ve been keeping an eye on the incident since it started and while I saw a whole lot of “shaladins can go die” and an r slur or three, not once did I see anything resembling harassment of an 11 year old child. Where are your sources?

[discourssion]

@golbatgender 

Who are you helping by spreading false information and horrific speculation that’s based nowhere in fact? This is fearmongering and slippery slope mentality at its finest and whatever it is you think you’re doing, lying is just muddying the waters and making it harder for the people actually involved to be held accountable for their actions.

Block and report golbatgender for making false accusations and spreading misinfo on a situation and encouraging 11yr to look at porn

[discourssion]

I guess the discussion really boils down to whether you think there are circumstances that people should be allowed to tell actual, living human beings to go kill themselves, and if you think the answer is yes, then there’s nothing I can do to help you but hope that you grow out of it at some point and that you’ll understand how wishing death on people who are doing no actual harm is wrong and robs you of valuable energy you could be using to do something else.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But what do I know, it’s not like I spent the entirety of my teenage years deeply rooted in the anti community and have learned to spot the same circular patterns happening over and over again or anything.