#and protect fandom spaces

[poltergeist-punk]

in the wake of ao3 getting data scraped and the new weird purist mindset in fandom that’s making people harass creators, right now is a great time to remember;

- readers, make an ao3 account to look at fics, it’s free, encourages artist to privatize their work to protect it without fear of losing their follower base.

- comment! interact! if you liked something specific in the fic don’t be shy to tell the author, building and strengthening fandom community will help the authors and other creators.

- authors, lock your fics, I know it’s scary and it’s ultimately up to you what you think is right but locking fics discourages data scrapers, and if they do get the gall to make an account to steal fics it helps ao3 track data scrapers more efficiently.

- fandom, do not be afraid, i know its hard right now but ao3 is an amazing resource as an archive as well as an accessible library of amazing fan works and others. the community poured time effort and money into ao3, it’d be a shame if it had to be shut down over something petty as this, working together is how we will make ao3 a safer and stronger place for creatives.

- lastly dear authors, i know it’s the worst when your hard work is scraped and fed into something as soulless as an ai. two years ago my whole profile on instagram was scraped for an ai by one of my close online friends, that is the main reason why i completely transferred to tumblr. it hurts but do not give up, you have amazing creative souls, and despite everyone calling fanfiction cringe, authors like you breathe life into fandom and franchises altogether.

it is all up to you if you want to keep creating, but just know that us readers will miss you and we understand if it’s too much.

[chxxms]

the last thing i will say about the toxic racist nasty bottom of the barrel mcu fanboys is that i wish u lot nothing but the absolute worst. may all your lives continue to spiral downwards amen

all of this bullshit that’s going on is really just racism & misogynoir. white men hate seeing people of colour especially black women get any shine that’s why they are coming up with all sorts of contradictions to hate on the show 😂

do not let these nasty rotting racists ruin the experience it’s important to curate your own spaces online so u don’t have to keep seeing so many racist comments about your fav show. curate your own spaces, block & mute do what u gotta do to make your spaces safer

the fact marvel & disney has said nothing about the on going racist harassment & review bombing of ironheart is so weird but not surprising i can only hope that dominique thorne is getting some type of support behind the scenes

it’s crazy causes no one is forcing them to watch the show like getting angry over nothing stop watching the show and do something else worth your time

[unpopularfanopinion]

I got distracted earlier and forgot to include this.

Imagine you have someone who is morally opposed to alcohol and it’s consumption. Okay fine. They don’t have to drink if they don’t want to. Nor do they have to allow people to drink in their home or business establishment. That is a boundary they are allowed to set for themselves. But would it be acceptable or appropriate for them to go into a bar(a business pretty much dedicated to the consumption of alcohol in a safe environment) and start demanding that everyone stop drinking while they are there. Harassing and insulting the workers and patrons all while claiming that they’re doing this because of their morals, and they are just setting personal boundaries and how dare the patron disregard them? Or is this teetotaler just being a massive disrespectful asshole, violating the boundaries and safe space of the bar and its patrons?

The recent discourse is about DNI’s being put into the tags on Ao3. Ao3 a space meant to be a safe space for fandom to post all types of transformative works without fear of judgement. Tags meant to insult and intimidate other users of the site. The people using those tags aren’t setting boundaries or protecting themselves. They’re violating the boundaries and safe space of the other users and the overall intent of Ao3. This is not the same thing as putting a DNI on your own personal tumblr, Twitter, or any other website.

[the-deca]

in light of recent discourse

[drenched-in-sunlight]

i like ghostflower (hell I draw fanarts for them) but I’ve decided I like the version of them in my head more and will just stay away from the fandom in general cuz I’ve seen some discussion and they just make me go “what on earth are y’all on” 💀💀💀💀

[bitchesgate3]

I will always be in favor of playersexuality. Until the day game designers have more nuanced understandings of sexuality.

Game designers still only understand flamboyant gay, mean lesbian, slutty bisexual, and quirky queer. Any identities not those are not even recognized. And any complex characterizations are only afforded to "normal" straight characters.

While Larian gave us a step in the right direction, they are still coming from the above framework and trying to reiterate upon that. And you have to understand that framework in order to recognize why their implementation is still somewhat shallow while still being the best offered compared to other games in the genre.

In the past, every time I encountered a woman in a romanceable video game who correctly represents my own experience of bisexual/pansexual identity, she was only romanceable by male characters.

These are women who have tough exteriors on a spectrum of "bitchy femme", a midpoint of "aloof androgynous", to "tough masc". All points that are gnc in some way, but all are women who also have a soft interior that is interpreted as conventionally feminine.

Game designers interpret these two traits (outward gnc and inner softness) as a nullification to heterosexual woman. Time and time again. Falling into the stereotype of being a woman for a man to tame.

Will they ever understand? Or do people as a whole just don't understand the many ways bisexuality can take shape?

[bearofohu]

dimitri allen goes to bed crying and in tears wishing he could be as obsessed and unwell as whoevers currently spamming 300 alts in the prof layton tag every 2 days with some true gobbledygook of a callout post

[myheadsgonenumb]

me: I'm only interested in canon. I don't like what the tiktok side of the marauders fandom has done to the characters. I refuse to interact with it.

tiktok marauders fandom: *mischief productions scandal happens* *mischief productions actually post their ai film*

me:🍿 🍿 🍿

[stopallsnowblind]

It’s always a great day to remember that transphobia has no place in fandom spaces, but especially today. 🏳️‍⚧️🫶🏻

[anniedreamwilldo]

hey so ai shouldn’t be used in creative spaces (including and especially creative fan spaces) not just because of all the normal ethical problems with ai but because creating art is something so intrinsically human that ai simply cannot replicate it

and if you think it should be used then sorry but ur literally so cooked??

[moe-broey]

My therapist hasn't killed me yet 👍

[enviedear]

i feel like i should tell everyone that i finally watched jjk four years later…gonna read the manga now!

[aaaaamorphous-entity]

You when you see something representative of a larger problem in politics: damn it's just like those bitches who refuse to jork it to incest

Wow this is laughably Reddit-toned. Anyways I doubt you're the kind of person to engage in good faith, but I'm going to piggy back off your ask to clarify for anyone who might listen:

I assume you mean my tags on this post, which. First of all, I am the exact person those brain-rotted 'anti-woke' people would despise in a game. I'm queer in a variety of flavors, so I'm not someone detached from the 'larger problem in politics' that you're implying I'm not aware of or concerned with.

Secondly, claiming being pro-ship is just 'people who jork it to incest' is entirely reductive, untrue, and flat. It's boiling people you disagree with down to one morally objectionable tagline so you can quickly and easily categorize them as 'those bad people we can shun'.

I wonder where we've seen that move before. (Conservatives. It's how conservatives talk about queer people.)

Pro-ship is more primarily anti-censorship. It's 'live and let live', or 'your kink is not my kink/your ship is not my ship', and so on. And I know some are immediately jumping to argue that shipping incest or writing kids in sexual situations and so on is morally reprehensible and indefensible.

This is a conversation that can be had, and has been had by many people in much more eloquent ways than me. But that is not the conversation of this post.

The conversation of this post is the implication that likening antis to conservative queerphobic rhetoric is nonsensical, when, as I just pointed out a couple paragraphs ago, they use the same playbook.

They start with something that most people can nod to. "Incest is bad", for example*. Then they move the goalposts. Skipping a few steps for brevity, it goes from "Incest is bad (fandom)" to "Problematic ships are bad" or irl, "incest is bad" to "the gays are incestuous and thus, bad".

Noting that a 'problematic ship' might not even include incest, but someone might spin it with a tone of outrage that it's ~incest adjacent~ enough to be 'bad' (I'm looking at you, ppl who clutch their pearls about HS Jane/Jake). And of course with the irl example, it always starts with 'X morally objectionable thing is bad. This group of people we're biased against Tootaally does X morally objectionable thing, trust us, so THEY'RE all bad too'.

(*although fictional incest frankly harms no one and this also ties into the conservative talking points of 'if you read about something morally objectionable, you'll think it's okay in real life'. Which, if you're that easy to sway into doing deplorable acts, it really is not the fiction that's the problem.)

All of this to say: When I said that antis have the same tone as the anti-woke brainrotted people who make lists about 'woke' games that you can't touch because it contains ~woke~ (or in anti language, ~problematic~) content, I meant it.

Y'all sound the exact same, except one crowd is overt and the other hides behind much more pretty language and obfuscated talking points.

Because antis don't just go 'I don't like ppl who write incest' and shit, they start going "if you write unhealthy relationships between people of any age, you're a bad person", and then "if you write kink, you're a pervert and a bad person", and then "you shouldn't write anything with queer people", and then it's "we shouldn't allow any of this on our platforms", and then LiveJournal gets Thanos-snapped and guess what? All of the content on those sites, whether you consider it 'good' or 'bad', vanishes and everybody loses.

It all circles back around to puritanical policing of other people, because so often anti spaces will escalate from what sounds reasonable (even though again: writing fucked up things in fiction is NOT actually harmful to anyone in the real world), towards more and more controlling and harmful narratives that feel justified when you're immersed in it.

And then you end up in a queer person's inbox implying they aren't aware of how bad anti-queer conservative politics are 🙃

[catwinterberry]

Is déjà vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality?

-Blake Crouch

[allyricas]

people who get into fandom spaces and then invest most of their time to hating a character or ship (especially blogging and making content about it) just genuinely confound me

there's tons of shit i dislike, but i don't want to spend my time and effort on constantly posting about it

and better yet, there are so many younger members of fandom acting like the morality police about various ships and i'm sorry, do you really not have anything better to do?? these people would not have survived a day in the fandom spaces of yesteryear like be fucking forreal

if you don't like something, then fine but why ruin it for the people who do? why not filter the tag/cultivate your blog/engage fandom in a way that minimizes that content??

[stonerwitch]

this way of thinking is also how so many kids in fandom get groomed. the adults dont care about them and dont protect them. being 24 now and seeing adults way older than me have this opinion (especially when the og post was posted when i was 16) is worrying.

Stuff kids on tumblr better relearn

1. You are responsible for your own media experience. 

2. There is such a thing as a healthy level of avoidance towards topics that make you feel unwell or even (in a real-life clinical definition of the term) trigger you - but you are the one to actively take care of what you view.

3. Avoiding does not mean policing others.

4. You have no right to tell artists to censor themselves - you may criticize what others do, you may dislike it, that’s fine - but actively asking for censorship when you could easily unfollow or block a person just makes you look incompetent in your use of the internet.

5. Do not give people on tumblr or /any/ website the responsibility for your emotional well-being. Because these people do not even know you so no, you have no right to ask them to take care of you.