#but i have never encountered a shittier fandom (i know of other but it never happened to me specifically

[sherlock-is-ace]

i was looking for an old ask i remember getting (couldn't find it, damn you tumblr) but i had to go through the absolute shithole that was my time in the lcdp extremely acephobic fandom...

But one ask that made me laugh was one anon saying that ace people are not part of the queer community because "your attraction makes you LGBT"... what did this person think asexuality is?! dfkjghdkfg

[duhragonball]

Disinterpretation

I finally finished the Sarah Z video about “pro vs. anti”.   It’s pretty long, and I ended up watching it in chunks over several days, but I think it’s worth watching, especially if you’re sort of partially connected to online fandom, but not enough to be aware of all the lingo. 

As I expected, the whole thing was vague and confusing because the people involved in the conflict made it vague and confusing.   In theory, the full terms would be “pro-shipping” and “anti-shipping”, but it seems like it’s more about particular kinds of ships that could be considered controversial.  But that’s a slippery slope, and apparently the whole conflict mutated into both sides deciding that every hypothetical relationship between fictional characters is either equally valid or equally dangerous.  

Long story short, it’s just purity culture, which was what everyone on Tumblr was calling it around 2012.  But now, if you’re a sane person who genuinely asks: “Who gives a fuck about Voltron?”, these people will jump your ass and accuse you of being on the side of their enemies.  “Children have died over the importance of Lotor/Hagger!   Your callous indifference proves that you yourself must have murdered children!” 

I think what Sarah Z really hit upon in this video was that media consumption has become so ingrained in our culture that people feel like it has to go hand-in-hand with our morality.   That is, it’s not enough for me to watch Star Trek, I have to justify Star Trek as evidence that I’m a good person.  Maybe this is where the expression “guilty pleasure” comes from.   Conversely, it’s not enough for me to not watch Dr. Who, I have to somehow convince everyone that Dr. Who was invented by the devil.

I’m pretty sure the Reylo ship has a lot to do with this, since it’s kind of understood to be a dark, problematic concept, and fans either embrace its flaws or recoil in horror because of them.   Star Wars itself is a dumb story about space wizards, so people try to give the debate more weight by linking it to freedom of self expression and/or enabling real world harm.   Suddenly it’s not enough to just think two actors would look cute making out instead of fighting.   Now it’s this battlefield for the soul of civilization or something.

I grew up in the 80′s, when “concerned parents” and grifters would accuse the Smurfs and metal bands of promoting satanism and witchcraft.   I used to hear stories of teens going out into the woods in the middle of the night to do occult stuff, and all I could ever think about was: “Why would anyone bother wandering out in the woods in the middle of the night?”  Which is why “concerned parents” turned their attention to things that were closer to home, like Saturday morning cartoons.   It had nothing to do with the content; it was just about finding a safe, accessible target for their hysteria.   Some people want to go on a crusade without leaving the house, so they pick a fight with Papa Smurf instead of confronting the real evils in the world.  Even as a kid, I knew this was a con, because I’d watched the show for myself and knew it was too saccharine to be threat to anyone.

The pro/anti folks have tried to disguise this with a lot of terminology.   I wondered why they seemed to reluctant to use the full terms “pro-shipper” and “anti-shipper”, and it’s probably a couple of things.   First, the word “shipper” is basically an admission that this is pointless bullshit that doesn’t matter, and they’d like to avoid that connotation.   Second, they seem to have decided that this goes beyond shipping itself, into practically anything else they want it to involve.  It’s all part of the con, which is to make you believe that it’s “us vs. them”, and you can be part of “us” by curating specific attitudes about Steven Universe.

Seriously, “about Steven Universe” is such an incredible punchline.  You can make anything funnier by adding those three words to the end of a sentence.   “Do not interact if you blog about Steven Universe.”   “Hey, what’s up, YouTube, this is SSJ3RyokoLover69, and this is going to be kind of a serious video about Steven Universe.”   “Mrs. Johnson, the results of your biopsy are in, and I have some bad news about Steven Universe.”   It’s a fucking kids show.   “Oh no, all the characters look like the characters in all the other kids shows!”   Yeah, that’s because it’s a kids show.   Marvin looks like Garfield, this isn’t new.

The common denominator here seems to be that both sides try to wrap themselves in the flag of vulnerable groups: impressionable minors, trauma survivors, harassment victims, etc.   The “pros” want to protect those people so that they can feel free to explore weird subject matter on their own terms, and the “antis” want to protect the same people from being exposed to weird subject matter that they might not want to see.   It’s all about establishing a moral high ground.   Back in the day, it was called “sanctimony”. 

But people get roped into this, because at their core, people want approval, and this stupid conflict offers them a sense of community.  As long as you support the cause, whatever it may be, you’ll have this online friend network that appears to support anything you do.   But if you deviate from their norm, you’ll be cast out.    Does this sound familiar?

To use a more familiar example, I still sometimes find people clamoring about Gochi vs. Vegebul.   I’ve never understood this, because both ships were canon, and I never saw much direct evidence of a war between them, but people would still talk about how crazy the Vegebul shippers were, and how crazy the Gochi shippers were, and it was like some huge thing going on just over the hills.   It’s the same idea, since the idea that you could like both or neither never seems to occur to anyone involved.   I never gave a shit, because I used to see the same dumb agendas in the Harry Potter fandom.

Okay, so let me take you back.  It’s 2005 through 2011, and I’m hateblogging all seven Harry Potter novels, because fuck you, that’s why.  The funny thing I encountered was that occasionally fans seemed to want to pretend like my bashing of certain characters was proving them right somehow.    They were like “See?  He hates Ron Weasley too!  That proves that Seamus Finnegan is the coolest guy ever.”   The Slytherin stans would do this all the time, because I would constantly take the piss out of the Gryffindor characters for being self-important dopes.   I think they just liked hearing it from an outside perspective.   But I had to keep reminding them all that I hated all of them.   Every character from Harry Potter sucks ass. Voldemort was my favorite, but only because he was the one guy who wanted to kill all of the others.   But he sucks too because he failed. 

And the shippers were the same way.   I’d say something shitty about Ron, because Ron sucks, and some smartass Joss Whedon fan would be like “Yes!  Boost the signal!  That is why Harry/Hermione is the best ship!”  And I’d be like “No, Harry and Hermione suck at least as bad as Ron does.  They’re all terrible and I hate them.”   I really do think there was some sort of Stockholm Syndrome going on with Harry Potter books, where everyone secretly knows they suck, but the fans sort of latch on to one or two characters and go like “Well, he’s not as shitty as the rest.”   Like finding spaghetti in the trash and picking out the meatball with the least amount of lint on it.   Then you’d go and start a flamewar with some other starving person over whether your meatball is shittier than theirs.  This is what people mean when they say to read another book. 

Anyway, the big thing I picked up from Sarah Z’s video is “disinterpretation”, a term coined by MSNBC columnis Zeeshan Aleem.   The Twitter thread is worth a read, but the short version is that he once remarked that a Julia Louis-Dreyfus routine wasn’t very good, and someone got mad at him for insinuating that women are incapable of being funny.    They just took his dissatisfaction with one performance by one comedian as being a universal condemnation of women comedians in general.  And this sort of thing is all over the internet.   Everyone sees what they want to see and then they take it as permission to overreact.  

I ran into this myself a while back, because someone saw who I interacted with on Twitter and decided that they’re all bad guys and if I have any interaction with them, then that makes me a bad guy too.   At the time I tried to play it cool, but the more I think about it, the more it ticks me off.   And over the course of that conversation, it was said that I don’t talk about myself much, and that’s kind of funny, because all I ever do on social media is write long-ass blog posts like this one.  I don’t expect anyone to memorize them, or even read them all the way through, but when I write all this stuff and someone goes out of their way to say they don’t know anything about me, the message is that they just didn’t pay attention to what I was saying, and they didn’t bother to try.

So I’m a little jaded from that, because I got called out for a bunch of stuff I didn’t even do or say, and apparently that’s just a thing that happens.   People will reject you for completely arbitrary reasons, not because of anything you actually said or did, and you’re left thinking you made some terrible mistake.   Except, no, I’ve seen it happen to other people, people a lore more conscientious than I am, and if they can’t satisfy the bullshit purity standards, then I never stood a chance.   If the game is rigged so I can’t win, then I’m not going to play.  

And it’s that same condition that probably draws people into these online holy wars, because if you declare yourself for the pro or anti side, at least then you’ll have a posse backing you up.   Only they don’t support you, they support your willingness to support them.    Once your commitment to their agenda wavers, even in the slightest, they will turn against you.   

Sarah Z suggests that both sides of the war drop the pro and anti terms, since they lost all meaning long ago.   But that just invites a new set of useless terms to perpetuate the same cycle.   Her more useful advice is for fandom people to broaden their horizons.   She got a lot of flak for tweeting “Go outside” once, but the ironic thing is that it’s sound advice.   I had lunch with my mom yesterday and it was just nice getting away from things for a while.   People need to do that more often, and unfortunately it feels like it’s harder to do than ever before.

But “go outside” isn’t just a literal thing.   It can mean going beyond your usual haunts, reading the same books, watching the same shows, rehashing the same conversations.   I think the reason this stuff always revolves around “shipping” is because there seems to be this deep-seated compulsion to pair fictional characters off like this, and for a lot of folks it’s the only way they can consume a story, so they do.   And they do it lot, and there’s a lot of them, and they do it the same way every time, and lo and behold the same old conflicts start up.   So maybe “go outside” should mean “go outside of that cycle once in a while.”   Just a thought. 

[musashi]

as someone who hasn't watched pokeani but loves seeing you talk about it... who's paul?

sweet jesus. also, ‘i dont watch pokeani but explain it to me’ asks are my favourite so THANK YOU.

paul was this rival ash had who was hilarious foreshadowing of the competitive pokemon scene. and i DO mean foreshadowing–he debuted in the gen where competitive online play did as well. paul’s like, introductory scene is him catching like 3 starly and releasing the two with the shittier IVs. like that’s how youre introduced to him.

he’s meant to be a stark contrast to ash’s follow-your-heart-and-be-a-ray-of-sunshine style. ash is a bright eyed protag who befriends everyone who breathes near him and raises his pokemon based on strategy rather than strength, advantage, etc. paul just sees pokemon for their inherent strength. theyre the typical karen player/smogon player aesthetic, long before it existed.

paul isn’t like, a terrible dude to his pokemon generally, but one sole exception puts a pretty glaring blemish on his overall character–chimchar.

paul encounters this wild chimchar who’s literally backed onto the edge of a cliff by this pack of zangoose, and in its weak and stressed out state, its ability blaze activates and it unleashes a decently powerful hit on the offending pokemon and manages to escape them. he sees this and catches it, impressed with its strength. he quickly learns, however, that chimchar isn’t... always like that? blaze only activates when fire pokemon are on their last legs, that’s the whole point. they have to reach a certain threshhold of pain to get stronger.

so paul is like... oh that’s no problem. i’ll just create that threshhold myself.

most, if not all of his ‘training,’ involves throwing his other pokemon at chimchar and pushing this young pokemon to its absolute limits to the point of collapse. chimchar is literally traumatized from its encounter with the zangoose, it has a morbid fear of all zangoose, and paul is insistent on recreating that trauma as often as possible in the hopes it will bring out chimchar’s strength.

for most of the time paul & chimchar share screentime, paul constantly calls chimchar weak and a disappointment. he does this for about 50 episodes before outright abandoning chimchar entirely, releasing it back to the wild. ash, who has been watching paul abuse this pokemon for quite a while, asks chimchar if it would like to be his pokemon, instead. paul makes sure to let them know this arrangement is perfect, as they are ‘both worthless scum.’

ash takes chimchar under his wing and raises it. what i personally find to be the most chilling and true to life scene in chimchar’s entire arc, ash lets it out of its pokeball to eat and play with all their other pokemon, and chimchar starts outright bawling. it sees how happy all these pokemon are, how much their trainers love them. how they’re fed, and playing, and smiling, and having fun--and how that is okay, encouraged even. chimchar literally starts sobbing because it hits it all at once that this is the life it could have been living all this time. it’s hard to watch. it’s one of the realest abuse survival stories i have ever seen, and it’s from a children’s anime, and the victim is a small baby monkey that can shoot fire out of its ass. 

it’s not subtle. it’s on the nose and it’s about abuse.

ash raises chimchar all the way to its final evolution, infernape. infernape takes on paul at the league. the resolution to this arc is when its about to faint against paul’s last pokemon, and as its vision is blurring, paul calls it pathetic and weak one final time. it rises to its feet, the music kicks up, it gathers all its strength, and it absolutely crushes the last of his team, earning ash the win.

this whole arc is, essentially, the pokemon equivalent of the news stories you hear. of a beaten dog on trial because it tore out its abusive owner’s throat. 

paul is an abuser. and abusers can be written well, abusers can be redeemed. paul isn’t. for the entire show, when paul is actively abusing this pokemon, even the wisest of characters (sideyeing brock, mostly) continuously comment on the fact that paul “just has a different training style!” they never punish him, or demonize him, or outright SAY that what he’s doing is unforgivable, unacceptable. they laugh him off as someone who is “just a little more strict!” than someone like ash. throughout the entire arc, ash is the only person who seems to really possess the vitriol paul deserves--and ash is more or less quietly shut down by his older, more level-headed friends the entire time. brock is telling him WAY too often to “consider where paul is coming from” and shit in that vein. there is no consideration to be had. paul’s an abuser.

the closest thing paul gets to punishment from the narrative for being an abuser is that he loses at the league to two people he spent the entire show calling weak and useless. other than that one moment at the end, his actions rarely have negative consequences. he is allowed to flourish and grow stronger and is rarely knocked down a peg. ash and team rocket are the only people who really denounce him at all. his exit from the series is similarly underwhelming. him and ash have a moment where ash is far too forgiving of him, and paul leaves without much word.

to make matters worse, the pokeani fandom is equally content to ignore all this. if you mention paul is an abuser, you’re usually just laughed at and told to stop exaggerating. if you bring up the very real trauma you watch his pokemon go through, you’re told to stop projecting and making everything grimdark. the people who DO acknowledge that paul’s abusive rarely do it without tacking on a ‘he’s just a kid.’ to the end of it. which is fair, he is, but that doesn’t mean the damage he did goes away.

all this being said, paul is an INCREDIBLY compelling rival. my favourite pokeani character is ALSO abusive. my favourite pokeani rival literally spends his entire time onscreen making a sweet little girl half his age cry just because he’s an insecure trainwreck with a bruised ego. abusive does not equal irredeemable, unlikable, etc. i honestly am not surprised at how many fans paul has, because without him DP would be WAY weaker of a series--he MAKES it. i love the ways he infuriates me and makes my blood boil. i love to hate paul. the more i hate him, the more satisfying it is when ash DOES destroy him at the league.

so, ‘paul fan’ doesn’t really make any alarm bells go off in my head. but when you start calling yourself ‘paul apologist’.... like. i’m not interested. i do not want to be your friend, i do not want to interact with you. nothing, literally NOTHING can justify the shit he did in his time on the show. he traumatized an innocent creature that relied on him to keep it safe, and healthy, and happy. 

if your favourite character has done bad things, and you love that character, you should be the last person to be an apologist for those bad things. you should be the first to acknowledge, to analyze, to craft scenarios on where they go from there, or to know they’re terrible and enjoy them for what they are. 

if you ask me, apologists & stans are probably the worst ‘fans.’