#'what we're not going to do is persistently relitigate things'

[thedreadvampy]

Tbf on the Martin thing while i know that's not what you meant the reason alot of people got pussy was cause it was right about the time they'd been an issue with acephobia in the greater fandom already and the way you phrased it tbh did really feel like you were equating ace!Martin and Martin being infantilised in a post about martin being infantilised being bad. Basically it kinda sounded like you didn't want people hc-ing Martin as ace because it was infantilising (which also then linked back to some shit that happened with ace discourse) and the post blew up a bit and that mixed with you Knowing Jonny and you coming off pretty aggro or not wanting to give a straight answer on what you meant (or that's what people felt you were doing) yeah that's why that went that way.

Tbf I'm not really interested in relitigating who was right and who was wrong in that particular argument, I feel the way I feel and other people feel differently and I think everything's pretty much already been said like six months ago. I asked because I couldn't remember what happened not because I was longing for the days of pointless arguing.

however because I can't resist digging myself deeper Ever I'll relitigate it anyway under the cut

I have little to no involvement with the wider fandom so I'm not sure how their acephobia was on me in any way

I could have worded the post better but I maintain it takes a pretty bad faith reading of the post to think that my problem is with ace Martin hcs when I specifically said both in the post and the tags and further clarifications that I was talking about the way that people desexualise fat, queer and abused people OUTSIDE of ace hcs

I have said about a zillion times that me knowing Jonny doesn't mean I know shit about TMA and that we've literally never talked about it. which being the case it is pure wild that people think it's a reasonable reason to treat me like some sort of voice of authority.

I have also said about a billion times and will say again that people aren't in fact entitled to demand a full accounting of a stranger's opinions out of the blue. like it is, in fact, confusing and surprising to me the degree to which people took personally the idea that a stranger could be annoyed or disinterested in discussing something that they wanted them to talk about. that's why I keep thinking there must be more to the anger about me from certain users. but like nah apparently 90% of the reason people get pissed off at me is either a) Using The Wrong Tone To Talk To Myself On My Personal Blog which they interpret as attacking them personally or b) Not Being Constantly Available On Demand To Answer And Reanswer Questions That Shouldn't Even Be Questions In The Full Knowledge That Any Poor Wording Will Be Treated As Malice. Sorry, my tone's getting a tad aggro again, I do recognise that, but I find it really frustrating to have it consistently treated as deeply inherently suspicious and/or malicious to not immediately rattle off a perfect answer to "questions" which are fairly thinly veiled traps. like there is no good answer to "what's your opinion on ace people." "ace people exist" is not a matter of opinion and I could just say "ace people are valid and good and fine uwu" which is like. True. but also utterly trite and validates the idea that point in a random stranger's inbox to grill them about Which Minorities Are Valid Uwu is in any way an acceptable or boundaried way to behave. Which I don't believe it is, and treating it as if it's a totally normal and fine thing to do just to get people to leave me alone would be pretty unprincipled imo.

Like I say I've said all this before, I'm just retreading old ground. But in terms of the Why Did This Blow Up, yeah I hear what you're saying but even trying to step back from my own experience and view this from outside, I'm still pretty surprised that a kind of shittily worded post at a bad time (from a blog that was pretty detached from the wider TMA fandom) followed by an Insufficient Disavowal of extremely nebulous accusations of acephobia, ended up being such a big thing.

Like literally. the majority of the messages I was getting were i n c r e d i b l y broad and vague. they said things like "what's your opinion on ace people" and "are you an aphobe" and I repeatedly answered them saying "I mean ace people exist and are my friends and comrades, what's the question?"

And I hope that when people raised specific issues about my actual conduct I answered them. I certainly tried to, to the best of my abilities - like I got a bit defensive initially but I agreed that my wording in the Martin post was poor and I did my best to clarify my intention (which had been to say "IF WE ASSUME THAT Martin isn't aroace," which I thought was a fair assumption when from context I was talking about a Martin being written in sexual or romantic relationships, but which I phrased as "Martin isn't [list of items including aroace]" bc as with most of my posts I wrote it in one go without reading it back). I kept saying that if people were specific about what was wrong with my conduct specifically, what they wanted explained and what they wanted me to change, I was happy to discuss that, but I wasn't happy to give some sort of Simple Definitive Answer to broad questions that were not mine to speak authoritatively on and which I often was like "I can't even begin to tell you my opinions on the answer until we unpick the question a LOT" (like. yes I could say honestly that I believe that ace/aro people are queer as a topline answer but if we go any deeper than that then we need to unpick what queerness is, what aro/aceness is, what context we're talking in, what is meant by queer spaces, etc etc and it's not something I would feel honest giving a yes/no answer to when a lot of people mean a lot of different things by the question, some of which I agree with and some of which I don't.) And it's not helped by the fact that when I have tried to answer questions in a way which feels honest, which inevitably gets long and ramble bc that's how my brain works, people have repeatedly got really hostile not because of what I say but because I've written an answer longer than "yes I fully agree with every possible permission of your point." like literally I have had people rant about how I'm being defensive or dodging the question when a) they haven't actually read my answer by their own admission and b) I'm literally. answering the question. it's fundamentally baffling to me that giving a short unnuanced answer with the intent of getting someone off your back is seen as less "dodging the question" than giving a paragraphs-long thoughtful and inconclusive answer. like this isn't a fucking debate. I'm not here to win an argument. I'm here to think about what I believe and why, and sometimes an honest answer is neither simple or conclusive.

idk man this post is actively unhelpful to everyone but me, but while I don't WANT to relitigate this every time I mention it I DO want to be absolutely clear that I have thought about all these things at length. some things were my fuckup, some things I stand by, but I still think it ended up with a response wildly disproportionate to the actual mistakes I made.

(which were there. evidently. but it seems like a very strange and spiralling way to react to "person who words things ambiguously and doesn't always give immediate clear responses to broad questions about complex issues")