#so that people can block the tag if theyre not comfortable with that specific material

[the-unicorn-system]

Can people properly tag their risetober day 9 stuff please if its from that fic. one of my headmates just got severely triggered over this art because people didnt properly tag their shit. he's sourced from this. he is the character/person depicted in this art. please be more careful for alters as well as people who just dont want to see it

[kuromichad]

like tbh at this point i think the general sort of Anti Movement has accomplished basically all it’s ever going to and maybe it’s time to like. not ‘calm down’ as in ‘i’m condescendingly telling you not to be upset that abusive/exploitative content exists’ but just like... at least... stop actively hunting for it!!! stop making it such a huge part of your identity and what you do online!!! stop lying your way into people’s private accounts and servers just so you can spread around the content that they obviously know is not something that should be spread around??? like it just does not have to be this way... 

the thing that i wanted to accomplish when i was actively identifying as an anti, the whole reason i started being that way, is that at the time 5+ years ago fandom culture was still extremely “always be nice, never ever criticize or ‘shame’ anything, we’re all oppressed loner geeks here and being ‘mean’ to each other would be the worst social crime possible, worse than racism, worse than anything!!! boo hoo hoo!!!” and THAT is what created a really unhealthy passively-grooming environment. because expressing discomfort with things it’s literally normal to be uncomfortable with was met with “how dare you be shaming people, you’re a bad person.” 

there wasn’t the same kind of content warning culture we have now, the edgy problematic shipping was literally just mixed in with everything else, people would presume comfort with all sorts of subjects and bring up edgy shit unprompted in response to non-edgy works. that’s the kind of shit that creates normalization, that’s what i grew up with: “i hope ron and hermione will be married with babies in the epilogue <3” and “it would be hot if snape sexually abused harry <3” were literally both just What Shipping Is and there were too many spaces where they were talked about side by side. the casual attitude was what was actively dangerous and unhealthy. 

things are a lot fucking different than they were 5, 10, 15 years ago now!! there’s CONSTANT discussion of which subjects are harmful and why, there’s well-understood pressure to tag and warn for things, a lot of nsfw fandom accounts actively block any minors they encounter. there’s like, an actual divide now between ‘normal’ shipping and nsfw content and ‘problematic’ content. wahoo we won!! literally just this amount of separation wouldve resolved massive chunks of what was bad for me and so many others as a kid/teenager in fandom! 

but like i have to be honest bro a lot of antis are on a fucking power trip and they dont want to stop getting that constant reward of righteous anger being validated. it was obvious to me like, immediately, only a few months into me being actively an anti i would see people all over who would parrot talking points without actually understanding them, invent new ‘rules’ tailored to ridiculously specific situations so they could ‘call out’ a person or ship they didnt like for petty reasons, arbitrarily enforce standards based on their own preferences... not everyone is righteous, not everyone is a wounded person trying to protect others. a whole fucking lot of antis are just people who love the thrill of Being Right at all costs. (and like, obviously also a lot of proshippers/anti-antis are just people who love being contrary, edgy, obnoxious. i’m not like coming out as anti-anti here i’m just expressing frustration with the side i’ve been involved in.) 

and i just think it’s getting really fucked up and overboard and awful that people are so addicted to this War they think theyre in, and Being Right, being the Safe and Righteous ones, that they have to constantly escalate the dialogue and make everything so absolutely fucking urgent and awful, it’s not fun enough to have a thoughtful discussion about how tropes in media (even fan-created media, because fandom can encompass literal millions of people, and you literally spend more time socializing in fandom + consuming fanworks than you ever would just straight up rewatching/rereading the source material over and over) can contribute to abusive and exploitative relationships irl, what’s fun is the adrenaline rush of calling someone a literal pedophile over suggestive art of an anime 17 year old (with the same face and body of another character that’s 25, and another character that’s 13, and another that’s 21, etc etc), what’s fun is self-righteously insisting that the fandom term made up to say “i don’t care that you think reylo is destroying society” is actually a secret code name for “out and proud literal irl pedophile.” it’s fucking absurd. i’m so sick of it dude you’re not helping anyone. 

we are so, so, so far past doing anything actually helpful for protecting kids from media they’re not ready for and people who aren’t safe for them. if anything i think it’s just its own new brand of deeply unhealthy to constantly be going LOOK, look over there, inside that locked account, there are horrors i’m going to describe to you in great detail, and that person is a bogeyman who wants to hurt YOU, personally, you the 14 year old reading this callout, you are never safe, even when people are purposely locking their accounts to keep you safe from the content they acknowledge is triggering to people, those people are deeply inherently sinful and evil and they are GOING to hurt you, look at the evidence right now, they’re hurting you. like. anti culture is sick, it’s decaying and poisoned and fucking obnoxious. i’m not saying that that means all proship people are perfectly innocent or morally in the right or whatever but i find it acutely more upsetting when the side that’s claiming to be all about Protecting The Children and being the ones that are morally good is behaving fucking absurdly and escalating conflicts on purpose. trying to shock people into agreeing with you by throwing out the word Pedophile every five seconds is not the fucking way to do things. cut it out.

[kienansidhe]

hewwo i just sent an ask abt this to a kpop fandom writer and wanted to talk abt it here:

idc abt rpf rlly cause celebrities are fucking rich and they can just refrain from reading ppls fantasies on the internet and it doesnt affect them, but!! real, regular korean ppl in the diaspora are affected by the way kpop fandom talks about and writes about korean characters. obviously were not a monolith and some korean ppl dont rlly care but its deeply hurtful to me, as one queer korean american.

the writer in question runs a very enjoyable trans porn writing blog, but they recently made a post to check on interest in them posting some of their kpop fandom writing, with the names removed, but specifically because they wanted to use words like hyung and unnie. they said they wouldnt be fetishizing koreans or korean honorifics because they are actively studying korean.

studying our language and using our words correctly doesnt make cherry picking cute korean words for an otherwise english fic not fetishization, whether its porn or sfw. fetishization is not sexualization. it can be sexual, but fetishization is about the removal of pieces of a culture you think are cute or exotic or fascinating or what have you and using them for your purposes without the context of the people of that culture, their customs, their history, their lives, and their personhood. writing fic using korean words is literally just for aesthetic. its like kpop artists stealing black aesthetics and styles. its like nonblack people putting on aave to sound cool while disrespecting actual black people and having the ability to code switch back to sounding "respectable" and having the privilege from doing so.

writing vapid stories about supposedly korean characters where the only reason people know theyre korean is their names and a sprinkling of korean words is fetishization! its pasting a korean aesthetic on characters you have otherwise put no thought and research into.

and like. at the end of the day its not that huge a deal in fanfic spheres. ppl writing for fun on ao3 does not really materially affect the korean diaspora, a fic doesnt rlly need to be as heavily researched as a for profit novel going through a commercial publisher. but its incredibly alienating to find a space that is comfortable for my trans identity and then find that its weirdly obsessed with the aesthetic of my ethnicity. if they go forward with posting their fics im sure ill find other blogs, tho ill def miss their writing style and good trans porn is slim pickings already lol. like ill live. but its one more thing. one more thing in an ongoing stream of alienation ive dealt with my whole life, you know?

im not gonna harass and fuck with ppl who wanna write their fun little fantasies on the internet, esp if its on ao3 and properly tagged. but like. i rlly wish the kpop fandom would think harder about how theyre conceptualizing korean people and how theyre presenting us to others, and about how we feel when we see them trying on our aesthetics while if we have too heavy an accent or our names are too foreign we lose out on jobs. i rlly wish theyd think abt the way they shape a view of koreans as milky skinned half moon eyed skinny pretty boys and long legged dream girls, while everyday non-celebrity koreans are discriminated against, and admitting were korean almost invariably results in people asking what we think of x kpop group or kdrama, when we are so much more as individuals.

fetishization is pervasive and can seem trivial, but it truly blocks our ability to be seen as people, our ability to talk about our struggles in the diaspora, and our day to day mental health.

i am sick to death of kpop stans.