im-an-international-superspy

[im-an-international-superspy]

Full offense and pun fully intended, but I genuinely think the very existence of "dead dove, do not eat" was a fucking canary in the mines, and no one really paid attention.

Because the tag itself was created as a response to a fandom-wide tendency to disregard warnings and assume tagging was exaggerated. And then the same fucking idiots reading those tags describing things they found upsetting or disturbing or just not to their taste would STILL click into the stories and give the writer's grief about it.

And as a response writers began using the tag to signal "no, really, I MEAN the tags!"

But like.

If you really think about it, that's a solution to a different problem. The solution to "I know you tagged your story appropriately but I chose to disregard the tags and warnings by reading it anyway, even though I knew it would upset me, so now I'm upset and making it your problem" is frankly a block, a ban and wide-spread blacklisting. But fandom as a whole is fucking awful at handling bad faith, insidious arguments that appeal to community inclusion and weaponize the fact most people participating in fandom want to share the space with others, as opposed to hurting people.

So instead of upfront ridiculing this kind of maladaptive attempt to foster one's own emotional self-regulation onto random strangers on the internet, fandom compromised and came up with a redundant tag in a good faith attempt to address an imaginary nuance.

There is no nuance to this.

A writer's job is to tag their work correctly. It's not to tag it exhaustively. It's not even to tag it extensively. A writer's sole obligation, as far as AO3 and arguably fandom spaces are concerned, is to make damn sure that the tags they put on their story actually match whatever is going on in that story.

That's it.

That's all.

"But what if I don't want to read X?" Well, you don't read fic that's tagged X.

"But what if I read something that wasn't tagged X?" Well, that's very unfortunate for you, but if it is genuinely that upsetting, you have a responsibility to yourself to only browse things explicitly tagged to not include X.

"But that's not a lot of fic!" Hi, you must be new here, yes, welcome to fandom. Most of our spaces are built explicitly as a reaction to There's Not Enough Of The Thing I Want, both in canon and fandom.

"But there are things on the internet that I don't like!" Yeah, and they are also out there, offline. And, here's the thing, things existing even though we personally dislike or even hate or even flat out find offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable existing is the price we pay to secure our right to exist as individuals and creators, regardless of who finds US personally unpleasant, hateful or flat out offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable.

"But what about [illegal thing]?!" So the thing itself is illegal, because the thing itself has been deemed harmful. But your goddamn cop-poisoned authoritarian little heart needs to learn that sometimes things are illegal that aren't harmful, and defaulting to "but illegal!" is a surefire way to end up on the wrong side of the fascism pop quiz. You're not a figure of authority and the more you demand to control and exercise authority by command, rather than leadership, the less impressive you seem. You know how you make actual, genuine change in a community? You center harm and argue in good faith to find accommodations and spread awareness of real, actual problems.

But let's play your game. Let's pretend we're all brainwashed cop-abiding little cogs that do not own a single working brain cell to exercise critical thinking with. 99% of the time, when you cry about any given thing "being illegal!!!" you're correct only so far as the THING itself being illegal. The act or object is illegal. Depiction of it is not. You know why, dipshit? Because if depiction of the thing were illegal, you wouldn't be able to talk about it. You wouldn't be able to educate about it. You wouldn't be able to reexamine and discuss and understand the thing, how and why and where it happens and how to prevent it. And yeah, depiction being legal opens the door for people to make depictions that are in bad taste or probably not appropriate. Sure. But that's the price we pay, creating tools to demystify some of the most horrific things in the world and support the people who've survived them. The net good of those tools existing outweighs the harm of people misusing them.

"You're defending the indefensible!" No, you're clumsily stumbling into a conversation that's been going on for centuries, with your elementary school understanding of morality and your bone-deep police state rot filtering your perception of reality, and insisting you figured it out and everyone else at the table is an idiot for not agreeing with you. Shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and read a goddamn book.

[im-an-international-superspy]

Seeing a community made for my semi-niche favorite character that's not crowded, just the right amount of active and the type of posts I enjoy:

Seeing that the rules in the community say proship & those who support them dni you will be blocked and reported thrice before even stating the name of the character it's about:

[im-an-international-superspy]

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[im-an-international-superspy]

Really not cool how there is this trend of people telling *how* you should engage with the fandom/media if Mouthwashing.

Fandom especially are suposed to be transformative. If you are not "allowed" to do certain behavior (for exemple: shipping, silly fanart, au, etc), that is a LOT more concerning than any impact that your fanwork could have ever had.

Yes, you are allowed to do au and fanwork where everything is better. Or worst! You can make the toxic yaoi happen, or ship Daisuke/Swansea, or have Anya be happy with her baby, hell you can do an entire Jimmy redemption arc and be forgiven! You might not do those things well, they will probably not be to everyone taste, but that's ok! Fanwork is playing with art, and all those characters are, at the end of the day, *fake*. You are not doing a judgment call on rape culture, you, person on tumblr writing Jimmy/Curly kissing.

Don't say to people what they can and cannot do in fandom. Let people do their own damn thing.

[im-an-international-superspy]

many people see “pedophiles” as a type of villain to wish infinite angry death upon, as opposed to recognizing CSA as a preventable form of abuse. the former buys into moral panic and punitive justice; the latter is actionable, helpful, and much needed

when i went to conservative christian hell school, all we heard about was the evil scary men who wanted to snatch us up on the street. we learned about csa through strange, coded language. we were not taught how to talk about our bodies, and we were not taught what sex was. eventually, i was groomed and assaulted. so were an alarming number of my peers, often by teachers and religious leaders

then, as an adult, i got the opportunity to work at a summer camp. we developed an actionable plan to prevent campers from being alone with adult volunteers; we advocated for all of our campers to learn appropriate body part language; we led discussions about boundaries and consent; we answered questions about sex with honesty, care, and age-appropriate detail. and it was safe! the one time we identified shady behavior, there were so many safety nets and protocols in place that it never became a real issue.

so, having been in both situations, it’s frustrating to see 46387 threads a day of people angrily, viciously tearing apart the mere idea of a pedophile without ever stopping to ask “hey, what can we do about this? in real life? like, what are the advocates advocating for right now?”

i hate to break it to you, but 18+ daddy kink genshin yaoi (sorry idk i’m out of touch) isn’t the issue here, and it’s kind of silly and terminally online to pretend that it is. i would argue that adult-only erotica servers that block minors aren’t as big of a threat as, you know, “minor safe!! we are very safe for minors :) and we HATE the mean nasty scary people” communities that have a piss poor accountability system and no real mechanism for preventing abuse. there’s a huge difference between “weird gross thing that grosses me out” and “unsafe situation,” and the latter is far more worth emphasizing

[im-an-international-superspy]

There's something so dystopic about having to go camouflage on main because I am not anti-ship---

I am not proship but fr they have done absolutely nothing to you. No proship is forcing you to read or watch their things, no one's even asking you to. Putting proship dni everywhere, even on things that have no relation to shipping discourse, is ridiculous.

Honestly, just because of anti's behaviour, I would lean more towards proship. At least they have some respect. I have never seen a proshipper call an anti an "antishitter" and it is *very* revealing. I have rarely seen a proshipper send hate messages to anti much less start full on harassment campaigns.

The so-called "mean" proshippers are better than you at remembering there's a person on the other side of that screen. If you can't even show the bases of respect to the REAL ALIVE IN YOUR WORLD person you're talking to, maybe you're not qualified to talk about what is or isn't respectable. Empathy, compassion and respect don't only exist in fiction.