#I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter by ISABEL FALL | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

autistichalsin · 24 days

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In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?

Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.

More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.

But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.

A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.

Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.

So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.

Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.

It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.

There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”

A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.

It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.

And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.

Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.

Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.

So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.

Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.

So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.

And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.

And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.

And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.

Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.

Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).

It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.

#isabel fall #fandom #proship #proshippers please interact #proship please interact #profiction

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play-now-my-lord · 1 year

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serenely remembering the moment when isabel fall published "helicopter story" aka "i sexually identify as an attack helicopter", which instantiated harassment from her clouty new-wave scifi friends that radiated outwards into transmisogynist scifi normies and became so severe she wound up in inpatient. people took up the cause of the story in the name of "free artistic expression" and "speaking difficult truths", which was not incorrect but which was kind of missing the forest for the trees in that specific situation: the age-old game of "kill the baby trans girl out of professional jealousy, farm clout off of doing it". the roles could have been completely reversed - the transmisogynist acquaintances could have been writing edgy outsider lit and could have been encouraging mass harassment against her for being a tenderqueer sellout (i swear to god i have seen this shit too). effect would have been the same.

when trans women in FSF talk about this shit, they usually talk about it from the angles of "censorious tenderqueers tried to kill someone over a story" or, in the most sympathetic voice i've seen out of someone in journalism, "public pressure functionally forced this exciting trans writer back into the closet". but they generally miss the degree to which it was intimate, personal transmisogynist violence, which bled into and intersected with the logics of mob justice, of "community safety" (remember, part of the substance of the accusations was that she was a stealth nazi, which frankly knowing a little about both the accusers and IF herself I can say confidently was not just vacuous but knowingly vacuous, them lying through their teeth), and again, professional jealousy.

i have seen people who crowed the loudest about what got done to IF do it to other people. it's the easiest thing in the world, and it happens all the time, and you can do it whenever you want - try and have some weird tranny rival or inconvenient tranny ex-friend killed - and it engenders no moral stain, no whispers, no reputation. i think they don't even have a conception that they're hypocrites. why would they? nothing that happens to anyone like that is real. human life is cheap if it's in the wrong body. everything they hold is stolen, everything they are is negotiable, for everything they do someone else surely deserves the credit. why not you? don't you deserve it more?

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tpwrtrmnky · 2 months

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On the topic of the mech piloting as metaphor for painful dysphoria, Isabel Fall's "I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter" is your post to the absolute letter, except what if all of the above was 100% true and you still stayed locked in long enough to erode your own moral core. You may already be aware of it, or the drama around it, but then I remembered that XKCD comic about assuming everyone is familiar with a niche thing and felt compelled to mention it.

Yea I know of it, and the drama trainwreck surrounding it

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nateconnolly · 8 months

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“I have tried to show you what I am,” says Barb, the protagonist of one of the most controversial short stories ever written. “I have tried to do it without judgment. That I leave to you.”

Barb comes from I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter by Isabel Fall, a science fiction story about gender and imperialism. It was Fall’s first published story. There was no backlog of stories to analyze, and her author’s bio was sparse. Readers weren’t given any information about Fall’s gender identity, but that didn’t stop activists from speculating. “… this reads as if it was written by a straight white dude who doesn’t really get gender theory or transition,” complained Arinn Dembo, President of the science fiction writers’ collective SF Canada. The author Phoebe Barton even compared the story to a weapon against trans people: “Think of it as a gun,” she tweeted. “A gun has only one use: for hurting.” N.K. Jemison joined in, tweeting, “Artists should strive to do no (more of this) harm.” But Dembo and the hundreds of thousands of others were mistaken about Fall’s supposed cis identity. The publisher responded to the backlash by taking the story down and posting a statement about the author’s identity. Isabel Fall was a transgender woman, and self-identified activists for trans rights bullied her so mercilessly that she attempted suicide. Dembo later adjusted her criticism, saying “a lot of people might have been spared a lot of mental anguish” if Fall had made a statement about her gender identity. Meaning, Fall had a moral obligation to out herself as a trans woman. Both of Dembo’s comments reveal a preoccupation with the author that distracts from the text. The recent obsession with author identities is one of the great failures of contemporary liberal movements. In order to win liberation for any given group, liberal activists must focus less on who speaks and more on what is spoken.

Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay The Death of the Author argued that an author’s intentions and life experiences do not make the “ultimate meaning” of their text. The author might as well “die” once the text is in the reader’s hands. The text is “a multi-dimensional space” that one cannot simply flatten with biographical details about the author. Barthes has largely been vindicated among literary critics and theorists, but his idea has not been well-received among liberal activists. It is easy to refuse to acknowledge multiple dimensions of a text. Moralistic groups like liberation movements might even be tempted to sort texts into a simple dichotomy—“good” or “bad,” without any gray areas—on the sole basis of the author’s identity. That is exactly what Dembo tried to do: she suggested that Attack Helicopter was bad simply because of the author’s (supposed) gender.

I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter is not a transphobic story. Although an in-depth analysis would be beyond the scope of this essay, I can confidently say that Fall critiqued American imperialism, not transgender people. I think that would be clear to anyone who reads the story. But apparently, reading a story is no longer a necessary step in the process of interpreting it. Barton—who suggested her fellow trans woman was a “gun”-wielding transphobe—had not actually read the story. Jemison also admitted she had not read the story before tweeting that it was harmful. We now have a complete reversal of Barthes’ idea: this method of moralistic interpretation is nothing less than the death of the text.

Fall is far from the only queer storyteller to face backlash for allegedly not being queer. Becky Albertalli, Kit Connor (who was still a teenager), and Jameela Jamil all came out of the closet because they were harassed for telling queer stories as “straight” and “cis” people. It is a common talking point in activist circles that the government should not compile lists of queer people or forcibly out them. Why, then, do activists engage in the same behavior? It simply is not always safe to admit that you are gay, or trans, or autistic, or epileptic, or that you have had an abortion. The reason that we need liberation movements for these groups is the same reason that people might not want to publicly claim these identities.

You can read the rest on Substack

#nate's writing #substack

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wagahai-da · 6 months

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In January 2020, not long after her short story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” was published in the online science fiction magazine Clarkesworld, Fall asked her editor to take the story down, and then checked into a psychiatric ward for thoughts of self-harm and suicide. The story — and especially its title, which co-opts a transphobic meme — had provoked days of contentious debate online within the science fiction community, the trans community, and the community of people who worry that cancel culture has run amok. Because there was little biographical information available about its author, the debate hinged on one question: Who was Isabel Fall? And that question ate her alive. When she emerged from the hospital a few weeks later, the world had moved on, but she was still scarred by what had happened. She decided on something drastic: She would no longer be Isabel Fall. As a trans woman early in transition, Fall had the option of retreating to the relative safety of her legal, masculine identity. That’s what she did, staying out of the limelight and growing ever more frustrated by what had happened to her. She bristles when I ask her in an email if she’s stopped transitioning, but it’s the only phrase I can think of to describe how the situation appears. Isabel Fall was on a path to becoming herself, and then she wasn’t — and all because she published a short story. And then her life fell apart.

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gallium-spoon · 2 months

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July reading report incoming!

Books I read this month:

The Underland Chronicles by Suzanne Collins (books 1 through 5) (1500 pages total)

Pyramids by Terry Pratchett (360 pages)

I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter by Isabel Fall (30 pages)

The Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect by Martha Wells (350 pages)

I also read 70 pages of The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

My page total for the month is about 2300

#monthly reading report #monthly book report #books #reading

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artful-insincerity · 1 year

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all this horny transgender mechposting and not one person has referenced Isabel Fall’s I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter. know your history when you post about taking estradiol to be a better pilot

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thepeoplesboyfriend · 2 years

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some words about transsexuality, in honor of my recent deboobing/deboning:

“My cut is of my body, not the absence of parts of my body. The regenerative effort of my cut is discursive; my transfiguring cut is a material-discursive practice through which I am of my body and of my trans self. […] My cut is generative within material limits but not with affective fixity; my tissues are mutable insofar as they are made of me and propel me to imagine an embodied elsewhere.”

“Transsexuals do not transcend gender and sex. We create embodiment by not jumping out of our bodies but by taking up a fold in our bodies, by folding or cutting ourselves, and creating a transformative scar of ourselves.”

- Eva Hayward, Lessons From a Starfish

“I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.”

- Frankenstein’s Monster, Mary Shelly

“I will swim forever.

I will die for eternity.

I will learn to breathe water.

I will become the water.

if I cannot change my situation I will change myself.

In this active magical transformation

I recognize myself again.

I am groundless and boundless movement.

I am a furious flow.

I am one with the darkness and the wet.

And I am enraged.

Here at last is the chaos I held at bay.

Here at last is my strength. […]”

“Though we forgo the privilege of naturalness, we are not deterred, for we ally ourselves instead with the chaos and blackness from which Nature itself spills forth.”

- Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix

“Some people say that there is no gender, that it is a post modern construct, that in fact there are only man and woman and a few marginal confusions. To those people I ask: if your [male] body–fact is enough to establish your gender, you would willingly wear bright dresses and cry at movies, wouldn’t you? You would hold hands and complement each other on your beauty, wouldn’t you? Because your cock would be enough to make you a man.” - Isabel Fall, I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter

“God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason he made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine: because he wants humanity to share in the act of creation. I am only doing the Good Works here on Earth as intended!” - Julian Jarboe

“ i’m a 24 hour living art form, unique on to myself and that’s a damn hard thing to be!“

“I deserve to press a man against my solid hard chest, feel his against mine, and have him feel mine against his. That’s what my heart feels, that’s what I want to express to him. I have learned to love my body—to finally be able to touch my nipples while masturbating and feel sexual about it—and I think I deserve to have my body relax with me. It will be like a miracle to look at myself, to run my hand over my chest, and to feel me.”

“I lay in the sun on the weekend, my skin becoming rich and golden. My body is vibrant with sexuality and tingling with sensation, electrified by every touch.”

- Lou Sullivan, We Both Laughed in Pleasure

“To be able to enter a safe, you must be open to hearing what the safe has to say about itself. To be able to enter your gender, you must be open to hearing what your self has to say about itself. Inside: riches. Inside: sex. Inside: love. Inside: beautiful bloody art. Inside: the chrysalis cracks down the middle, and out springs out a sacred figure with a bird for a head and visible glue and maybe jackelope antlers rising high like TV antennae and maybe vampire fangs implying a sentimental attachment to the rich earth of home, and to this reflection, disco-ball- sparkling, dissolving into the boundaries of my flesh, I say, oh there you are oh there you are oh there you are, oh there—and let the ocean interrupt me as it smacks me full in the face, full of salt and life, my eyes open wide to its sting, its illumination of new worlds and realms of being.” - Raphael Rae, Introduction to Safecracking for Transsexuals

#resources #susan stryker #isabel fall #eva hayward #transsexual #transsexuality #top surgery #raphael rae #lou sullivan #julian jarboe

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lorenzobane · 2 years

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I'm not normally a "kids these days" person, and actually largely think they're right about stuff but man.... This whole "all media must be black and white" thing or "authors definitely believe every single thing they write" thing is extremely concerning. I mostly thought this was a phenomenon locked onto tumblr/AO3, and I was prepared to ignore it because they're kids, and I had/have a very "they'll grow out of it" mindset.

But I was talking to someone recently about how this type of thinking has invaded literature publishing, which is REALLY worrying. People are bombing good reads comment sections; they're quoting something the CHARACTERS said within the text and saying that the author believes it. They seem to think that a bad act needs to be punished immediately and obviously... If you want all those things, I completely support your right to read children's literature. But if you're engaging with complex themes and nuanced storylines of adult fiction, you need to be able to accept that the world is pretty gray. That the story may challenge you. That the villains may win. That is all a key part of storytelling.

Whenever I think about what happened to the trans woman Isabel Fall after she wrote her brilliant short story "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” (an interesting and award-winning meditation on gender identity and US militarism), it makes me want to die. They forced a trans woman back into the closet; she no longer writes and publishes, all because there was an absolute refusal to deal with the text as it existed. Even famous authors like NK Jemison piled on! This type of thinking is escaping containment. Coupled with the loss of phonics reading, I'm worried people are losing the capacity to even engage in texts more challenging than Percy Jackson. We need to really become much more comfortable accepting that discomfort does not equal harm.

(An article about the short story here)

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griseldagimpel · 1 year

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On Criticism

I've talked a lot about The Power of Stories, which leads to the question: well, what does one do about ~problematic~ stories. Now, government censorship isn't the solution - do I need to elaborate on this point, or are we all in agreement here? - so I tend to favor criticism and analysis. Being able to talk about why something is ~problematic~ can dull the negative impact it has.

But in the age of social media, there are some caveats that we have to consider.

First, it's really easy to drop one's criticism directly in a creator's notifications. If just one person did this, it wouldn't be too much of an issue, but since there's a lot of people on the internet, what happens is creators end up having to field a bazillion people's criticisms and Takes all the time, which is overwhelming and shitty.

If you have a criticism, remember that it is for other readers/watchers/etc, not creators.

For fan-level stuff, if you really want to help people improve, become a beta-reader, and then you can help any writer who solicits your help. Seriously, writers will kill for a quality beta-reader.

Secnd, okay, so there's a phenomenon of Mass Criticism where there's a flash of everyone criticizing the same thing at once, which happens because of how social media is designed to bring more and more people into the conversation. Every reblog and quote-tweet puts the conversation in front of more eyes, as do the Trending and For You features of social media.

This is what happened with Isabel Fall and her story "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" (later renamed "Helicopter Story"). This flash of Mass Criticisms is not good even if it's not going directly into the creator's notifications.

This is a problem with how social media is designed, and trying to fix it on the user end can quickly turn into toxic positivity and people being harassed for being critical in their own spaces.

But if one wants to avoid contributing to another Isabel Fall situation - and I want to stress that this section is about self-improvement only! - here are some things to consider.

A.) De-emphasize the importance of the creator's identity. Are you comfortable discussing the ~problematic~ elements of a piece of media irrespective of the creator's identity? Then do that. If not? Maybe unpack why you think it's ~problematic~. Sometimes a narrative is complicated and messy, and you can talk about it being complicated and messy without having to make some broad proclamation that it's Good or Bad.

B.) You can't be aware of what every person on the internet has written about something, but if someone has already said all the things you're going to say and you know this, do you actually have anything of value to add? And it's okay if you don't!

C.) Consider if the only reason you're aware this piece of media exists is because everyone is criticizing it. Again, it's okay if you don't have a Take.

D.) Following from above, think about the actual impact of the piece of media. What reach would it really have? Is the response [that you're aware of] proportional to that reach? The latest MCU movie? World-wide audience! Fair game for scrutiny. The readership of Clarkesworld? A lot smaller!

Someone's fan fic on AO3? Yeah, I think criticism of fan fic is valid (but remember my first point above about it being shitty for an author's notifications to be overwhelmed) but I'm skeptical that there's a fan fic on AO3 that merits the flash of Mass Criticism that social media platforms encourage.

(Some author's may welcome criticism, and if they're your friend, you'll know them well enough to know this or not. My post is discussing situations where the author and reader are strangers. No tumblr post is going to capture the full nuance of any topic.)

#fan fiction #media analysis #media criticism #fandom etiquette

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