#badwrong discourse

[olderthannetfic]

What do you think about the whole re-traumatizing yourself discourse? I got dogpiled by "helpful" individuals that said, by having SA fantasies and writing noncon, I was re-traumatizing myself and other victims, and that if I went to therapy they would help those thoughts and fantasies go away.

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I think it's dangerous nonsense, that's what.

"Bad" sexual fantasies are not going to go away with therapy. Feeling bad about having them is an actual problem that therapy can address, but the fantasies themselves are commonplace and harmless aside from any mental anguish they cause you.

We have known this for literally decades. Every reputable sex educator will tell you this. Nancy Friday's work in the fucking 70s revealed all the horny badwrong floating around women's heads in particular.

Most of the people who push this "re-traumatizing" anti rape fantasy rhetoric are spewing toxic radfem crap. They're dangerous because they teach people to hate themselves for how their brains work.

[aronarchy]

Tired of these well-meaning centrist takes on shipcourse & youthlib. Fantis started it first. Fantis made it into discourse first. Fantis politicized fandom and shipping first. Fantis claimed children’s rights are linked to shipcourse first.

Correcting harmful rhetoric is not Badwrong just because that ~turns it political~ (as if it wasn’t politicized in the first place).

It’s willful ignorance at this point to ignore how shipping has become a relevant topic in the culture war around child abuse and moral panics and pro-family reaction, and it lies adjacent to several common issues in contention (sexuality, fantasy, fiction, thoughtcrime, carceralism, misogyny, queerphobia, parental control vs youth’s autonomy, Othering of a supposed shadowy predator threat etc). This is only overlooked because people refuse to discuss it bc it’s “trivial” or whatever, even as its impacts absolutely are not.

[measuringbliss]

Shipping discourse has reached some HEIGHTS.

People started calling some ships "proships" because they thought "pro" stood for "problematic" in "proshipper", and to differentiate their *pure* ships from BadWrong ships, they started calling some ships "comships", for "complicated", and at this point I'm truly baffled because god damn, y'all wouldn't have survived two minutes on the Internet from fifteen years ago.

Like seriously, what is this?

See, this is why we're a lot to advocate for spaces with adults only and preemptively blocking a lot of accounts: those stupid talking points are really, really baffling. I could do without. It's not just teens though. I'm tired of seeing some people MY AGE spout complete nonsense, use buzzwords having no idea what they mean, and generally prove themselves to be extremely clueless.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

i actually think we tend to see more private property fetishism from the online artist crowd than can be written off to like, anti-ai sentiment alone. art style theft discourse, anti-piracy discourse, and a general tendency to present supporting small businesses as a moral good are very petit bourgie aligned stances. those are also in contrast to like the actual conditions of most waged artists- who are generally made to conform to the stylistic sensibilities of their employers and who aren't necessarily the primary profiteers of their work, also they're kind of contradictory stances to hold from ppl who make their names and careers off of derivative works. like you say, its false consciousness, but i think the online artist archetype has primed a lot of ppl to jump to ip as a first defense against any perceived threat to their career prospects

Mm you make a fair point but I still think this tendency isn’t reducible to petty bougie class striving

First, often the animating concern isn’t even directly economic except in some extended sense. When someone writes “OC DO BOT STEAL” [eta: lol that was a funny typo so I’m leaving it] under their fan character sketch or expresses fear of Literal Nazis using their art, I don’t think their worry is they’re not going to get a cut of the money the proud boys make off their fantroll. It seems more analogous to ppl worrying that ppl who make them uncomfortable will sexually fantasise about them against their will; there’s I think(?) a Lydia xz brown post I can’t find rn that expresses this as horror at acquiring a theory of mind, bc it reveals others’ fundamentally dangerous ability to think of you without your consent. Money does not even have to enter into it in order to fear badwrong representation by ppl you don’t like or trust!

Second, even when the anxiety is economic, it doesn’t have to be petty bourgeois. You can see this clearly w some writers who panic about piracy and exalt ip law as a noble protection of human dignity while frankly acknowledging they are not the ones principally profiting off of their sales. They’ll instead point out, I live and die by contract work from the publishers who actually enjoy the proceeds of my ip, and precisely bc of this they will refuse to keep contracting with me if my work is pirated instead of purchased bc the value to them of the product of my labour is how much it sells for, not how much it gets read. Same for waged artists who treat much of their work as exposure in hopes of getting further hiring offers from it, who again have an economic incentive to resist unattributed “art theft” fully consistent with never expecting more than wage labour as artists. Which seems more analogous to store clerks bristling at shoplifting since they’re threatened with punishment for letting it happen under their nose than it is to the classic image of the independent artisan with aspirations to medium-sized business ownership

[asroarke]

I recently read your post about writing fic to cope and I agree to some extent with it but also a lot of people who do ship abusive ships (see: pretty much most reylos) ship it without acknowledging the abusive elements and even romanticizing them to hell and back. I get that some people do use it to cope. But it’s still triggering to some people when they see it completely glorified and told that it’s romantic and canon. (1/2?)

And i know that blacklist is a thing but even though I do use it because it’s so pervasive and “mainstream” i still see it everywhere in every tag. It’s unavoidable and it’s made me start to actually dislike all of Star Wars. Which i never thought would ever happen. Sorry if you don’t care about this stuff I ended up venting about Star Wars instead of making a point lol. I guess how would you classify those that actively deny or glorify abuse in fandom in that respect? Thanks! Sorry it’s long!!

Listen, I’m in the mindset of live and let live. Sure, there is some content or pairings that make me go yikes, but I just accept that it’s not for me and move on. I have no authority to classify anyone for the content they consume or create. I don’t know their lives. I don’t know their business. I just don’t engage if it’s a ship or tag that will be a problem for me.

I mean, if a work is properly tagged, the author has done everything they can to warn and protect those who would have a problem with it. And if it’s the ship itself that you find problematic, then that is more than easy to avoid as well. 

I do understand where you are coming from. But I also know that people like pairings and types of fics because something about it appeals to them. Maybe it’s because something about it is familiar to them, or maybe it’s so unlike anything they’ve ever experienced that they’re curious. Maybe it’s just two pretty actors whose characters are fun to explore in fanon where the circumstances of canon can’t touch them. Maybe my fourteen year-old-self thought Twilight was the greatest love story of all time because I longed for someone, anyone really, to pay attention to me with the intensity that Edward gave to Bella. Maybe I’m obsessed with Garcia Flynn because something about his eyes reminds me of a boy I loved in high school that I lost touch with. Maybe I cling to Bellamy Blake like my life depends on it because there’s a part of me that wishes that all the bad boys I fell for secretly had a heart of gold instead of just being assholes who didn’t care about me. Or maybe, I just find them all hot. Who knows? Certainly not anyone but me (well, maybe my therapist), and I am under no obligation to acknowledge whatever might be “wrong” or “problematic” with the content I read, write, and consume because it’s nobody’s business but mine.

Let me use a relatively harmless personal anecdote. My sister is the biggest defender of Ross and Rachel in history. I loathe Ross, and I think he was regularly horrible to Rachel. I’ve tried over and over again to make my case to her, and while she sees what I’m getting at, she still likes Ross and Rachel. She’ll never agree that their relationship is awful. She’ll stand by them until the end, because they are her OTP. It used to bother me. But now I know that the way Ross pined over Rachel reminded her of how her husband had pined over her and the adorable will they won’t they courtship they had in college. The important takeaway for her was not that Ross was awful, but that their relationship dynamic was familiar and comforting to her. And I have no desire to tear that apart just because I want to be proven right about a fictional pairing. I can just stay in my own lane, ship Rachel and Joey because let’s be real that ship was soft as fuck, and let her find happiness in her own pairing.

I know that’s a very tame example in comparison to the ship you have a problem with, but the larger point still stands. There are people who get great joy, comfort, and catharsis from content others can’t stomach. So, why should we condemn people for that? Fiction is our lovely escape from this wretched world. Why use your energy hating on someone else for a fictional pairing when it would make you so much happier to just focus on the fiction you love?

My point is that we are not gatekeepers who decide what is okay to ship and write and what is not. The beautiful thing about this day and age is that the content is available to those who want it, and the rest can steer clear.

[emperorren]

An observation, from someone who multiships Kyl-x and Reylo: The hate and dismissive attitude some KH shippers have about Reylo has nothing to do with Reylo itself, at least for most of them. It’s regular, spiteful ship war business, the only difference being that Reylo’s notoriety as a “bad ship” after TFA (which itself was facetious and dumb wank) gave them a convenient woke excuse to hate on Reylo. The Kyl-x fandom isn’t all ship hate at all, and it’s just important to find your niche in it.

I know there’s a large portion of decent and supportive k/ylux shippers; I follow some. But forgive me if I’m a bit bitter and disappointed about them as a whole. K/ylux was the first fandom juggernaut to come out of TFA, and it involves two white villains. K/yluxers had the numbers and the ability to potentially dictate the direction of the sw discourse, at least here on tumblr and on other female-oriented fandom spaces. Yet, collectively, they did absolutely nothing to speak against the rabid toxicity and rampant purity culture spreading in the fandom; at best, they insulated themselves and closed their eyes on the shitshow that was happening around them, and at worst they sided with purity wankers in their bullying of reylo shippers because it was convenient (reylo’s being the only other relevant kylo ship, and one with more canon potential, made it a target). 

The fact that they were motivated by petty reasons rather than by a genuine belief in woke culture isn’t going to make me sympathize with them more.

[anghraine]

The one thing that genuinely surprised me in TLJ (because I’m a spoiler hound and knew most everything else):

I’d gotten the impression that it nourished Rey/Kylo with Rey shutting him down in the end, with Finn/Rey and Finn/Poe disregarded. And while the first definitely happened (and I’m happy for Reylo shippers after everything they’ve had to deal with), we also get all these reminders from both Finn and Rey about how they’re the Most Important to each other, which is pretty much what I’m here for in a pairing. And Poe saying “Finn, naked?” is now gloriously canon. More seriously, we didn’t have much more than a name and a lipbite before, but Poe’s reaction to seeing Finn is A+++. 

I also thought Finn/Rose was adorable, so ... like, a whole shipyard going on here.

[fernacular]

I sometimes think modern fandom may have gone a little overboard in the “this would actually be messed up in real life” discourse because like- I DO get where it’s coming from, I 100% agree that there are some things that media habitually makes light of that speaks to our culture as a whole not taking it seriously. Certain kinds of verbal abuse, many types of sexual assault, racism in general, etc. etc. And I myself often enjoy fanworks where people explore themes of truma where they are like “Let’s take this event that was no big deal in the show and handle it seriously”  It’s a fun thought experiment and makes for a good transformative work. But god guys sometimes someone tries to kill another person in a show and a couple scenes later they’re hanging out and having fun and it’s not the show condoning attempted murder it’s just the TONE of the SHOW.  Sometimes getting in a bar brawl is FUNNY when they’re two fictional goofballs.  Sometimes someone being a cool leather wearing assassin isn’t a sign they’re a badwrong murderer it’s just SEXY.  Sometimes it’s not that deep.

[olderthannetfic]

So a popular artist on twitter just been outed as a predator with 9 fucking victims that are all minors and said artist is the proship and pedo freaks dni types that constantly shit on proshippers and the freaks™. People have made valid points how using proship dni and shitting on proshippers plus moral ranting xyz fictional porn is badwrong, the whole mindset of someone being anti proship = good and safe person - Have created a perfect disguise for predators to hide among fanti spaces with a ton of minors that belive in all of that.

As clockwise, the proship dni users came out of their hivemind being mad that proshippers and others, "Why are freaks bringing up op dni?! Stop making it about yourself and ship discourse!! Freaks only using this as gotcha and don't care about the victims!!" As we all damn know if op was proship, fantis would be eating that shit up with, "See!! Of course a proshit freak that into cp and pedo ships turns out to be pedo groomer!! Why are people acting surprise over it?!" This literally happened a while ago with that FNAF artist that got fired by ~god loving~ Scott Cawthon let her go over badwrong art and fanfic and not her being transphobic and groomed minors. Which fantis and others cheered Scott for and didn't care what the predator done to minors.

At this point, if you're an adult with proship dni and get mad at people pointing and warning others for predatory signs, patterns, and behaviors in your damn group, I'm going to assume you're either a predator yourself or a creep. Don't get fucking mad about it since y'all view everyone as pedos and view everything as pedophilia over fictional shit!

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It is profoundly upsetting to people stuck in the social modes of fundie religious spaces to be confronted with the fact that up is down and down is up...

Or, rather, that their most cherished signs that a person is safe are instead red flags.

[theophagie-remade]

Tumblr recs + stupid curiosity combo strikes again but sometimes I see posts by people who are outsiders looking in regarding the anti/pro ship discourse and what these posts boil down to essentially is "both sides are useless and wrong and you need a mature balance" and idk I find them really funny because like. 1) This is the fandom site 2) Why should I tolerate people who think that liking badwrong (or wrongly perceived as such in some cases) fiction implies anything about someone's irl attitude and things like that. lol

Also often times they're just plain obtuse and act as if the random anon they once received asking them about they opinion on the matter murdered their firstborn or something, as if most people on this site weren't strongly opinionated about stuff that the average person completely ignores in the first place

[bettsfic]

do you know anything about like, the development of the purity rhetoric that now seems to be ubiquitous in fandom and how it got there? i used to be on tumblr in like, 2014 and only recently came back to fandom and i remember everyone being generally kind of cool with things like incest ships and morally grey characters (speaking specifically re the frozen fandom and elsa/anna here lmao) whereas now it seems like the conversation about those things has drastically shifted and i am..puzzled by it

this is what i imagine that experience was like for you:

according to fanlore, purity culture started in the homestuck fandom which. based on what i know of homestuck, that tracks. however i’ve never been in homestuck so i’m not sure what that transformation was like. all i know is my personal experience with the disk horse. afaik there’s no cohesive timeline of events across fandom, and i lack the time and resources to be able to make one myself. if anyone knows of one, or wants to make one, please let me know.

i do know that purity culture is a movement started by very young teenagers, who were maybe 13-15 in 2014 and are now 18-20. they were 8-10 when ao3 was founded, and therefore seem to have a limited knowledge of fan history, censorship, and critical thinking. i’m hoping that since they’re now entering college, they’ll get some insight and broader social awareness, and this movement will finally die out in the next few years. 

on any other platform, at any other time, their toxic rhetoric would not have gained traction. but here and now, on tunglr dot com where anyone can gain a platform, where mob mentality thrives and inciting an anonymous dogpile is as easy as hitting Post, where the brokenness of this place makes it difficult to control the content you’re exposed to -- it’s the perfect storm. we live in an age of hopelessness. young people grow up with social media as an extension of their identities, tethered to devices that hold all the information in the world. i think it’s fair for them to be afraid of their futures, and i can understand the desire to control the online spaces where they have the most agency, where their voices are the loudest. 

that may explain why, but not how. as in, where did they pick up this mentality at all? @freedom-of-fanfic (whose work is a necessity in understanding the disk horse) connected anti-shipping to TERF rhetoric. i’ve linked the fanlore page because it has all of the links and some of the responses. i honestly do believe that the language surrounding purity culture has its ugly roots in TERFdom. at its core, purity culture -- the policing of female and queer sexuality -- is misogyny. 

when i started writing destiel circa 2014, fandom was as you described. wincest was a juggernaut on par with destiel. teen wolf was full of underage and noncon. a/b/o was on the rise. it seemed like fandom was a genre without restraint -- anything you wrote, if it found the right audience, would be celebrated unabashedly. people who have been following me for a long time know that i was addicted to adderall at the time and pounding out all sorts of manic nonsense. i remember living on the validation of comments (and at the time, there were lots of comments. not so much anymore, but that’s another story). i got critical comments only rarely, and they were the type that i admired -- readers without judgment thinking through the story, reacting to it earnestly. i made some of my best friends because they left long, critical comments on my work. sometimes they didn’t like it, sometimes they did, but ultimately, they were engaged, and that’s what counted.

i remember my first policing-type comment, i think at the start of all the purity nonsense. it was a destiel fic, and someone very angrily told me i should tag my bottom!cas because it was triggering. i’ve thought about that comment a lot over the years. top/bottom discourse is nothing new, but to say that bottom castiel is triggering? that was ridiculous. but then i realized -- there was a writer in fandom at the time i won’t name, who was known for being extremely sensitive (for bottom!cas especially, which they found triggering), and their very dedicated following offered fic that was safe for their fave to read. i have nothing against this person at all. they were not part of the purity discourse, they were up front about their sensitive nature, and as far as i knew (i believe i met them at a con once?) they were very kind. 

but that commenter had been clearly influenced by this person and believed that a specific fictional character receiving anal sex from another specific fictional character was actual, real triggering content, and it was my obligation as a writer to tag for it. which i did, because i felt bad, and i was baffled by that request. at the time, i wanted more than anything to be liked, and conformed wherever i could. if i got such a request now, i would ignore it because it was rudely written and honestly kind of bonkers. i’d happily add a tag for something i may have missed, or even something i’d never considered before, but there’s no reason a person can’t make that request politely. 

this situation isn’t about purity discourse proper (the commenter didn’t tell me not to write the fic, and it had nothing to do with morality), but it’s the earliest example i can think of where the process of policing had occurred: a person of influence on tumblr affected their follower’s thinking, and that follower felt entitled to command another writer to conform to that ideology.

i could be completely wrong about making these connections. maybe that commenter truly believed bottom!cas was a legitimate widespread trauma. they did not say the fic was triggering to them, but that it might be to some other people, in the same way purity police say “think of the CHILDREN” when in fact they don’t give a fuck about children at all. 

after destiel i moved to stucky, which was, at the time, a juggernaut ship where anyone could write anything. this was also the time when the term “cinnamon roll” became incredibly popular, circa 2015. it was a fun and seemingly innocuous meme, but it positioned the ideas of “purity” and “wholesomeness” in sharp relief, and cemented these ideas by beginning to give it a distinct vocabulary. “trash” was pitched as its opposite. stucky is where i first came into contact with “antis.” in destiel, there had been ship wars, sure, but it was of a different flavor than antis. destiel vs wincest wasn’t about morality in 2014. it was about everything but.

in stucky in 2015, however, the disk horse was running rampant. the MCU had a sub-section of fandom called HTP (hydra trash party) in which steve and/or bucky have dubious or nonconsensual relations with various or many members of hydra. this is the first time i remember being aware of morality becoming a cornerstone of shipping. HTP was loathed by purity police. by the time i wrote a stucky bdsm au, i’d accumulated multiple nasty anons, rude comments from entitled readers, and other nonsense that all said the same thing: your filth is not welcome here in our space of purity. go away.

but the release of the force awakens is what really turned the tide. TFA offered three major ships: stormpilot (as it was called at the time, now finnpoe), reylo, and kylux. the fandom that developed around the sequels was firmly divided. franzeska wrote an amazing meta about this phenomenon which gives some insight into the seeds of purity policing. in short, stormpilot should have been the primary pairing of the sequels, but instead many of the badwrong writers from other fandoms (and HTP specifically, which was how i entered the fandom) flocked to the blank slate of kylux. 

it took a long time for the ship to gain traction. a friend told me that kylux had started with angry star wars racists who hated that there was diversity in the sequel trilogy. and i told them no, i was there, there were twelve of us and a cornchip, and all we cared about was the dirty/darkly comedic potential of these two ridiculous villain characters in one of the biggest franchises of all time. it wasn’t that complicated. i don’t mean to dismiss the discussion of race in fandom; i think it’s important to acknowledge that racism, as franzeska describes far better than i can, plays a huge part in fandom, particularly in star wars, and it’s an important and ongoing discussion to be having, especially given what kelly marie tran has gone through, and how it affected (presumably) rose tico’s extremely limited presence in TROS.

the early fics of kylux weren’t particularly taboo. they were post-TFA hurt/comfort mostly, then slowly the bdsm and power dynamics crept in. those of us who wanted to get away from purity discourse had finally found a new home. for a while. 2016 was the golden era of kylux. we were all very happy.

i remember talking to a friend about how there were certain things i couldn’t write in certain ships. being from ye olden days of fandom, she was appalled by this idea, and told me i could write anything for any ship i wanted, wasn’t that was the whole point of transformative works? and i agreed! but i tried to explain, if you post badwrong for a fandom of purity police, you’re going to, at best, get dogpiled in your comments/inbox. at worse they will find you, call your employer, and try to ruin your life. people will tell you to kill yourself. they’ll report your tumblr and try to get your blog shut down. there are real-life, harrowing consequences to writing taboo fic, and many who write fic as a hobby don’t have the emotional energy to field these risks.

around this time, discord became popular, which offered a private space for badwrong writers to congregate. i had started grad school and didn’t have much time to write fic. metoo was happening. tromp got elected. kylux was slowly turning mainstream so a lot of us turned our attention to gradence in fantastic beasts. some went on to hannibal and other fandoms that hadn’t yet caught the attention of purity police (but it was, as it is now, just a matter of time). kylux, i feel, was specifically decimated by a single fan creator, who was like a police chief. they would get wind of someone writing underage or noncon and write a call-out post about them, and that writer/artist would get pitchforked. a few times, my comments or posts got screencapped, and posts were written urging people to stop reading my works because of how heinously immoral i was. this happened to several of my friends too. 

the great tumblr tittyban of 2017 happened, which only added fuel to the fire and further legitimized the purity movement. i shifted hesitantly to the 100 fandom, which seemed small in comparison to supernatural, marvel, and star wars. i thought it was a chill place. i was wrong; it was just as toxic as other fandoms. but i also didn’t care anymore, and i appreciated that i was mostly left alone. more importantly, i found a lot of support from other people who were as tired of the purity as i was, and @the100kinkmeme was reborn. 

the state of things is pretty abysmal. there are some really amazing writers out there writing under multiple sock accounts, keeping their fandom identities shattered so as not to call attention to themselves. as much as i understand why writers do that, and i respect that decision, i also think it’s sad. it deprives readers the chance to read that author’s other works. it limits the sense of community and our ability to make friends. it fractures the future of the genre.

what’s most important to acknowledge is that none of this is happening solely in fandom. i went to a writers’ conference where 2 of 3 panels were about the history of moral policing and censorship in art. it is worth noting that of the 40-ish visiting writers on faculty, only one (1) was a woman of color (jaimaica kincaid). naturally, older rich white people who have spent their life in the arts are all about death of the author, separation of art and artist. they’re on the total opposite side of purity police, and they won’t acknowledge at all that racism and sexism are a problem in the creative world. they don’t have any nuance on the discussion, or modern perspectives in light of metoo or popular culture. 

this went on longer than i anticipated. i neglected to mention YFIP (your fave is problematic) an old blog that started the idea of call-out culture by pulling receipts on celebrities, and how call-out culture led to cancel culture, which also aided in the purity disk horse. i think a lot can be said about how some of this stuff is genuinely good (metoo and holding men accountable for their bullshit) while also being profoundly toxic (punishing criminals via mob mentality, ruining their careers and livelihoods through social media, rather than giving them their due process in court. i understand it -- the judicial system is built by the hands of the very predators we seek to condemn, but still. the jury of the internet is never a fair trial). 

if you want to read more, my tag is tsatp (the sacred and the profane). i’m sure i’ve left out a lot, but i can only speak to my experience. i think it would be good if people would share their experience dealing with purity policing, too, so we might get a cohesive timeline in place. feel free to reblog and add your story.

[heroes-never-discourse]

I demand to know your opinion on the discourse! Is a stuffed animal a plushie? Is a plushie a stuffed animal? If you answer wrongly, your inbox will be filled with squishies, and no one likes those!

Boooo, squishies are amazing anon, don't threaten me with your badwrong opinions!! My squishie triceratops Tristan is baby ;w;

Also a fool's question, stuffed animals and plushies are the same thing. Though plushie is clearly the superior word in this case >:3

[janiedean]

serious talk but i’m honestly stumped as to why jcs are the ones sending hate. i’m not saying anyone should send or receive hate but in every other fandom i’ve been in the ‘problematic’ shippers are generally chill and stay in their lanes, while being the ones getting sent hate. i’m not saying jcs never get hate but i’ve never seen taboo shippers be the ones doing the harassing before.

*shrug*

I had an anon addressing that at length in june so if you want that entire discussion it’s here https://janiedean.tumblr.com/post/185642667908/hello-im-sorry-for-disturbing-you-but-im-quite

that said I’ve been considering it for years bc honest I never was in the situation where I argued with **problematic shippers and like you can ask anyone in the theon corner who’s also in th/ramsay fandom that I’ve defended them countless times regardless of the OMG YOU’RE SICK people coming from (sadly) my side because they got trashed to hell and back, and like… I have it on record that even if I’m not into badwrong stuff I will defend people who ship it bc everyone should ship what they want. and everywhere even within this fandom **problematic shippers usually stay in their lane - I mean ffs I don’t think I’ve ever ran into anyone shipping idk th/ramsay or sansa/lf or whichever other badwrong ship being like that. and jcs get way less hate than any of them and half of that is jb people telling them to can it after they crosstag hate on purpose and then pearl clutch that ohmygod we’re so hateful, but if you want my two cents, under the cut bc it’s long and is2g if someone shows up telling me this is me accusing jc shippers as a whole of whatever I’m blocking on sight:

that part of jc fandom has done that since I remember being in this fandom, and with that part I mean that there’s a bunch of jc people who either multiship or are like sane people who aren’t partaking in fandom or left bc they didn’t want to be associated with that attitude

that part of jc fandom has spun a narrative since 2011 that if you didn’t like c. or thought j. was a better person than she was (or tyrion too) you were a closeted misogynist and like… a lot of those people were bnfs back in the day so basically criticizing c. and/or saying that jaime isn’t a bad person now automatically means that you’re problematic/a misogynist/hate women and no one countered it bc apparently saying that grrm is not necessarily misogynist for writing c. as a villain is a controversial opinion which means that if they coat their analysis in performative feminism they have the upper hand *shrug*

in this context c. being the abuser/bad person is downplayed/turned over on its head and no one recognizes that jc is indeed an abusive rship where j. is the abused/wronged part and you can see that because 90% of the meta published in this fandom villainizes j. in nonsensical ways just so it’s an argument that he’s as bad as c. if not worse and jc is seen as codependent toxic but not as abusive with power imbalance which means that it’s not seen as necessarily *problematic* or badwrong which means they don’t get the shit that everyone else shipping badwrong gets which… good for them bc no one should get shit for shipping what they want but basically they never were on the side of receiving anon hate all day long and they actually were on the side of sending it all day long

and like sorry but that’s factual, some people in that side of fandom were making burned ground around jb before S2 and the moment jb became popular they were on us/the ship like woah because obviously if people shipped jb they should buy the narrative where j. is redeemable/not a terrible person, and the moment people buy that narrative then theirs is automatically put in question, and so they started painting us as the problematic straight women who are homophobic bc they don’t think brienne is lgbt and want her with j. bc we want to fuck him and we’re projecting, which at the same time makes us sound like we’re making shit up and have no textual analysis to base stuff on when in fact we do, but again in this climate where saying c. is terrible = you’re a misogynist you’re automatically discredited the moment you say that and that j. isn’t as horrible as she is

also, since the people enabling that shit in jc fandom were bnfs (like there’s… one bnf in jc fandom who’s an a+ person and didn’t engage in shitting over us at least but everyone else enabling it was a bnf) it meant that the ‘let’s shit on jb shippers’ behavior was always condoned/let slide, so basically if anyone wanted to get popularity points being asses to us was the best way to go at it, and that’s why 90% of what’s remained of them rn is more interested in sending anon hate to jb shippers than producing content, and every single time it’s turning things over on their head making it sound as if we started it or anything of the kind. too bad that I’ve been here since before jb was a show thing and I can 100% remember the times people asked me privately questions aimed into guilttripping me from having jb as a sideship in t/hrobb fic and I was terrified of what would happen when I put it as a sideship in sfbd which is btw one of the reasons I dropped it for a year the first time round *shrug* (yeah it’s been long enough that I think I can say that *shrug*)

basically: I think that those specific jc shippers have…. issues in the sense that they’re caught in some very unhealthy internet presence thing in which they’ve been doing this thing since like 2013 if not earlier and now they can’t stop and the new ones who fall in that crowd follow suit and no one ever told them to can it or that it wasn’t okay or whatever, and now it’s too late to do anything except waiting for grrm to publish wow, have c. die somewhere j. is not and have the entire ‘they’ll die together’ discourse die and maybe they’ll stop. but like… again: i made the blog private for three months, I put it back to public, before I could even make the post saying it like three minutes after I went public again I got a jc anon. within the first week I had twenty. and they showed up the moment I put it back to public. just that is a level of unhealthy that should be enough to state whoever’s doing this needs help like very much because it’s like basically stalking, but hey, it’s all my fault because I said jc is an abusive rship and he’s not the abuser. *shrug* like: at this point I’m legit worried for them because this isn’t healthy and I really hope they get help because there’s no reason why they should come at me like that when I’m in my lane all the damned time except for the single occasions pointed out in the first linked post. the only explanation is that they can’t handle the fact that I’m existing and expressing an opinion they disagree with when I don’t even know them so if it’s the problem………. I really hope they get a grip. because it’s not healthy. period.

[greyjedireylo]

Do you think people will get over the “Ew, no, Reylo badwrong/Reylo is an example of emotional abuse and is bad socially” handwringing eventually? I feel like these reactions will explode after TROS if Reylo is endgame in any visibly romantic way, or Kylo gets a happy ending. One of my fears has been that Lucasfilm will make Kylo’s ending separated from Rey or not give him a happy or hopeful ending because they want to avoid or curb backlash like this

the people that do that handwringing are a small and inconsequential part of the overall viewing audience, and most of them will get over it once the story is over because they currently have a case of Mid-story Myopia SyndromeTM. this exact same sort of discourse happened over Z/uko and now we have the collective internet crowing about how his redemption arc is The Only Good One. and it’s the same phenomenon of how you don’t have people hand-wringing about Anakin’s redemption because it’s already over.

of course there will be the usual bitter suspects who won’t shut up about it for a while, but the myopia thing is responsible for most people’s push-backs against redemption arcs--if they see a well-done one play out onscreen, and Ben’s will be well-done, and then the story is over and they have no power to change it--they can either stay mad at SW or get onboard and most people will do the latter.

[emperorren]

When it comes to post-TROS discourse, I still think there’s a strong possibility that there will be serious Reylo backlash, from people who haven’t said much about the dynamic now because they think it’s fanon and could never happen, but who have said they would be furious if it did happen in canon. And some of these people have relatively large followings, so if Reylo does happen, we’ll probably have widespread thinkpieces and everyone weighing in on how Problematic it is to deal with.

I’m not terribly worried about that---even if there’s backlash, it won’t be anywhere as virulent as it would have been three, four years ago. Professional discoursers tend to follow trends, and handwringing over Problematic Female Gaze Romance, as a trend, reached its momentum in 2014-2015 and is now fading into irrelevance. Female fans are learning to fight back and call this sort of arguments out. YA novels based on heroine/villain romances are growing in number and popularity. The backlash against Twilight is finally starting to be examined critically. Everything comes to an end, and frankly, purity culture as a trend has already lived past its expiration date. It doesn’t have enough intellectual substance and the stakes in this fight aren’t exactly so high that they can justify being perpetually mad at mainstream fiction, especially when there’s so much irl to worry about. Maybe in a pre-Trump, pre-rise of populism and alt right, pre-climate change emergency world we could afford wasting our time and resources on badwrong fictional romance, but now, not so much.

[frumfrumfroo]

I'm looking forward to Reylo finally getting over some of that "universal badwrong" stigma (seriously, I can't go on Twitter without some YA author or pop culture critic talking about how Kylo is an irredeemable abuser) at some point after IX, even if there will be a "why it's societally bad for us that Kylo got redeemed' backlash at first, but I'm not looking forward to the ship getting co-opted by purity discourse once it becomes "acceptable" to ship, like how some new Loki fans are also antis

Yeah, I feel you. There will definitely be a bunch of hot take bullshit right after IX, but the shift in popular opinion will probably be surprisingly fast. I’ve been shocked a few times before at how quickly the ~righteous outrage~ completely disappears and normal people adjacent to fandom will suddenly have no idea it was ever there. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll have some who hang on forever and ride that ‘Kyle Ron is the worst evil in history and Rey was supposed to be a Skywalker’ train into the sunset, but it won’t be cool any more and they’ll be ignored.

Yep. And it will happen. It’s infuriating and it will definitely happen. We’ll get lumped in with those people, fans will hilariously mischaracterise the ship and the shippers in their dumb purity arguments, etc. (Also you can’t imagine how salty I was reading terrible unfounded posts from the reylo/Ben fandom about why antis/the fanbros were okay with Loki but hated Ben where they listed literally exactly the same qualities in Ben that I used to see in Loki meta to explain why he was so hated. It was like being in a Twilight Zone episode.)