#fandom: do no harm

[thisstableground]

lo this many years of complaining about how terrible ruben’s workplace is in DNH and i fully stand by the fact that independence memorial is a horrible lawless nightmare hospital but it did just occur to me that this is possibly why ruben has worked there for so long. because he too is, in fact, a fucking nightmare. 

oh, his research papers are important, he’s already made a name for himself in the journals. but his second, anonymous legacy is the paper trail of extremely bizarre and specific rules that pop up in his wake at anywhere he’s ever studied or worked, the kind that make you go “why do they need a rule for this?? who would do that anyway?”. ruben. ruben would do that. he already did. and for every new rule instigated because of him, there are three more things that should also have been banned, it’s just that nobody caught him doing them.

he's been finding ways to chase his own personal research interests regardless of the assignment since the very first time they set a bunsen burner in front of him in high school lab. he wasn’t the well-behaved teacher’s pet, he was the reason that the entire science building got evacuated again. he wasn’t the one getting friendly with all the professors over coffee, he was the one that gave them a creeping sense of dread when they’d come into the lab and find him working there - hey, buddy, is this your final project?? it just doesn’t look like the outline you submitted for approval? did anyone authorise you to do this?

so of course he works somewhere that is both incredibly well-funded and incredibly poorly managed. his ideal workplace is obviously the one that doesn’t pick up on five years of him randomly requesting incredibly specialist equipment for experiments that in no way need it, because he wants them for his personal projects or because he thinks the equipment is cool and will come up with a reason to use it later. of course he works somewhere that apparently doesn’t give a fuck about him running around getting access to lockdown rooms and the MRI machine and whatever the hell else he’s got no justifiable reason to go anywhere near. of course he’s working somewhere he can literally call in a meeting with a pharmaceutical company on hospital grounds to sell the drug he’s been illegally developing on his off hours and apparently literally only one entire guy in the entire godforsaken building is like ...hello when did you make this??? who said you could do this???

(of course, too, it’s the exact same kind of place that jason would be attracted to working. and of course ruben feels a connection to him. they’re both brilliant. they both decide their own rules. they should both have been given stricter discipline years ago, but dammit, they get results that nobody else gets, so maybe we all turn a blind eye. they know what they’re doing, they’re on another level, so everyone will look the other way for them, and pretend they don’t see anything amiss, and surely nobody will get hurt.)

[cxrrodedcoffin]

i like my men well-armed.

need him to point that thing at me sometime

inspired by this post by @an1t4k ♡

[the-great-kraken]

if you see a male character kiss a male character, you assume they are gay.

if you see a female character kiss a female character, you assume they are a lesbian.

if you hear a character say they don't feel like their gender, you assume they are trans.

so why do a-spec characters have to jump through so many loops?

a character saying they've never had a crush or don't want a relationship or that they don't understand romantic love is so often ignored or used as fodder for other queer or autistic headcanons (reinforcing stereotypes that aroace people are secretly gay or always autistic)

why is it that our stories are always "up to interpretation"? why do we have to wait for the words aromantic or asexual to be said to be taken seriously? why is it that even when characters say they don't want relationships, fans will scream and cry about sex/romance favourable aspecs and qprs?

when it comes to gay and trans characters, even the likes of bisexual lighting is often treated as though it canonises their sexuality. for aroace characters, even the most explicit coding possible is swept under the rug in favour of other "interpretations"

i'm so tired of fighting for representation just to have it ignored and minimised by fans. let characters be aroace. please.

[bookshelfdreams]

oh for fucks sake

no, seeing someone in their undies is not, in general, sexual harassment. someone alluding to the fact that they think they're sexy or like to fuck is not sexual harassment. making lewd jokes in public, in front of an audience, isn't harassment either.

Sex and nudity aren't harmful on principle. You can say you disagree with someone without accusing them of very serious crimes. Like, I get that people are upset about a dude's opinions, but ultimately, it's not that important, you can't stop people from Reading The Text Wrong, and it would be extremely cool if we could all just chill.

[dunmeshistash]

Fandom hot take: maybe you don't need to do "what other people like" vs "what I like" comparisons, what is this 2013 me vs other girls?

[nekropsii]

RUFIOH PROPAGANDA: Literally everything he has ever done to and about Damara - cheating on her and lying to her for years, seemingly never standing up for her when Meenah was terrorizing her, still chasing her image as a sex object to this day (particularly Aradiabot, who he says acts “just like the real thing”), and calling her his “psycho ex” behind her back constantly while acting nice to her face.

KANKRI PROPAGANDA: Straight up doesn’t think Misogyny is real and denies its existence outright, calling it a meaningless pseudoscience not worth any concern, discussion, or consideration. Slutshames Porrim directly to her face.

[is-the-fire-real]

Another bit on the pro-Pal fandom, this one axiomatic

Being a good person is not the same thing as pretending as though you believe you are a good person.

Being a good person takes work. You have to do stuff. Doing stuff is hard. Doing good stuff is harder, because you have to put thought into determining what you think is good beforehand. That requires self-reflection, honesty, a willingness to challenge oneself, and taking in information from other people to verify that your concept of "good" is, well, good.

The nice part is that once you evaluate what is good and start doing good things, it becomes easier. You gain inner calm, peace, and even joy.

("Good" is not always the same as "necessary". Necessary work can be a slog, or it can be horrific. But there can still be a calming satisfaction at the core, the security that this is necessary and therefore worthwhile.)

Pretending to believe you are a good person takes less immediate work. You don't have to do anything that positively impacts the real world, and you don't have to do any of that annoying, time-consuming self examination. But in the long run, it's more exhausting. By far.

You are insecure about whether or not you are a good person. You're pretending to believe you are good. You can't feel secure in something you pretend to believe. That insecurity gnaws at you, especially when you engage in bad behavior--harassment, doxxing, posting gore, swarming tags, encouraging and promoting suicide among your fellow "activists", telling your opponents to kill themselves, stalking, spamming unrelated content with literal Nazi propaganda.

None of those are good things good people do. And you understand that. You would think someone was bad if they did those things to you. The cognitive dissonance between who you want to be and who you really are, as determined by your actions, is scary. It's painful. It rears up every time someone you have labeled a Zio colonizer scumbag asks you to please just stop and you remember a time when you begged someone--an abuser, a troll online, a 4channer, your parents--to just stop please just leave me alone.

That must feel terrifying, and again, it makes you insecure. It makes you question if you're doing the right thing.

So you do the work to pretend to believe you are good. And that's far more work than goes into being good.

You recruit others, and all of you agree that you will pretend together. Tabletop gaming has taught us how powerful this imaginative play can be. You all reassure each other that you are good and you are right. But since you're all lying to each other, that means you must spend more, and more, and more time every day telling each other that you are good, chasing that high, that feeling that you are a good person and your actions are justified.

You tell each other that your "opponents" in this "battle" are not people, so anything you say or do to and about them is okay. You look at lists of "dehumanizing tactics" and instead of internalizing what those lists are teaching you, you go: "Ah, so if I don't use the word 'vermin', anything I say should be fine!" And then you say it.

You do not smile over good news. You only smile when one of your opponents logs off Tumblr because you made the site unusable and unsafe for them. (The expression you make there isn't really a smile, but we'll call it that, since the corners of your mouth do turn upward.) You tell yourself you're just attacking Zionists and pretend you do not see how you're really going after Jews.

No self-examination; that would mean admitting that you're lying to yourself and others. Instead, you traumatize and exhaust yourself until you're psychologically incapable of self-examination. You watch snuff films. You stare at mangled bodies until you're weeping and physically ill (certainly, you're too ill to check whether the video is real, or if it was taken from this conflict).

You force your beliefs into your fandom spaces so that others, the bad people, cannot escape their complicity in genocide.

But more importantly, you do that so you can't escape.

You cannot engage in any fandom but the pro-Pal fandom because that takes imaginative energy away from your biggest pretense--that you're a good person.

You are NOT hurting people because you are striking a blow for Palestinians. You are hurting people, including yourself, because you do not want to do the work of becoming a good person. You are afraid that self examination, at this point, will reveal to you that you are exactly the sort of person you believe you are fighting.

That fear, that insecurity, that dread, that restless sense that if you ever rest or stop or think for just a moment, you'll discover something awful? That's your conscience.

I do not ask you to change your mind about your political opponents. Your defenses are already on your lips and in your mind; a thousand How Dare Yous for me hinting that you look at other people as people. What I will ask you is to consider this.

I came to young adulthood just as Bush was elected, and the Iraq War post-9/11 was the first war I really followed as an adult. I did what you're doing now. I forced myself to look at photographs of destroyed bodies. I looked at photographs of torture perpetrated by US soldiers. I blogged about it obsessively.

I told myself that I was Doing My Part to end the war. But really, it's that the anxiety of being an American during the war made me insecure over whether or not I was responsible for all of this, and therefore, a bad person. If I pretended my looking at snuff photos was activism, and that it was good, then I could pretend to believe I was good and shout "Not in my name" at protests. I could deny my responsibility.

What I really did was traumatize myself. It's been almost twenty years. I can still see some of those torture pictures in my head. In the end, that is the extent of the impact of my online activism. The blogs are all long deleted, and nobody remembers them.

Only my trauma remains.

I do not want this for you. I want you to be wiser. There is still time. You can stop.

Stop hurting yourself and other people. Do the hard work. Examine yourself and your actions. Consider what your own heart is trying to tell you whenever you start to get the shakes and your throat gets tight. Do not take that feeling out on random people online because they have a Magen David in their pfp.

Once you have done the hard work, it gets easier. You will be able to advocate and work for whatever causes you believe in because you know they are good, not because you're joining your friends in cosplaying goodness. You will still be traumatized, and you will still be sad, and you'll definitely still get angry. You will have to face how you've acted exactly like your own past abusers, and that's a real tough row to hoe.

But at the end, you will be able to advocate and work because you want to, instead of feeling as though you must in order to keep up the masquerade.

[tallsiriusblack]

When headcanoning Remus as a person of colour next to a white Sirius, be mindful that:

• Remus is not tall

• Sirius is not short

• Remus is not aloof or dominant

• Remus is not rude

• Sirius is not dainty. He was only skeletal during his time in Azkaban. He was emaciated, not a twink. He is not physically weak even when severely malnourished. He’s also a head taller than Peter, and utilises his tall stature to intimidate Snape. Harry mentions that he is tall multiple times in the series. Remus’ height is never mentioned, while James is stated to be tall, and Peter short. Use deductive reasoning to come to a conclusion.

• Remus isn’t overbearing physically in comparison to Sirius. There’s utterly no evidence for that whatsoever and changing that to make Sirius white, short and fem and Remus darker skinned, dominant, taller, buffer, is very, very weird.

[bonefall]

i found a god awful doc about this one person (who, too, is a god awful being) trying to reason why mudClaw would be a bad leader. I'ma try to find the doc but meanwhile I'll submit this because someone could have the link, I'll need your honest thought about it bcs why are we defending oneWhiker now

Anon, buddy, I'm gonna have to sit you down and gently discourage you from casually calling random human people "god awful beings" in my inbox like this. Not when you're just talking about relatively basic media analysis. That isn't ok or normal.

I hope that when I speak harshly, it's coming from a place of condemning hurtful actions and the tangible harm that they cause. I don't appreciate people trying to get me to directly beef with other people directly by requesting I break down their individual posts or analysis documents (when I ask for people to share links, it's so I can see and prepare to counter the ideas because they usually "float downstream" if they get popular); but in a second ask, you linked this document and there's nothing harmful in it. In fact, it's got a far more neutral tone than I'd take if I was writing an analysis about Mudclaw.

If you couldn't tell the difference between a document like this and one that contains active abuse apologia rhetoric, I would be filled with concern. But I don't think you read it. I think you maybe skimmed it and stopped reading, or just heard the title.

Because this document literally says this;

and your takeaway, something you felt so strongly about that you came to me hoping I'd validate it, was "Why Are We Defending Onewhisker Now."

Art is a tool we can use to explore our own biases, and teach us something about ourselves. That overwhelming sense of anger and disgust that you probably felt when you saw "Mudclaw Would Be A Bad Leader" made you jump to an emotional conclusion and you assumed something that was not said. I know the feeling. You might have had a reactionary impulse.

You are not a bad person for doing that-- you're human. You can grow.

Why did it upset you this much, though? Is there something very personal about this that set you off? ...are you spending a lot of time in spaces online that keep you angry? These are questions for you to reflect with.

I do not know the owner of this document or "what they've done," if anything, so I will not link it, because their Discord is at the bottom of the doc. If they are truly a "god awful being", please do not engage, just block and move on. Nothing is accomplished by following around 'A Bad Guy' and boosting their cat takes.

But something VERY bad WOULD be accomplished if I indulged an anon for a situation I know nothing about and unwittingly became part of a harassment campaign. How do I know that you've got good intentions?

I usually just delete unsolicited links to docs and videos that are 'fightbaiting' like this-- trying to get me to beef publicly with a 3rd person. But I've seen more of these than usual lately so I would like to try and cool it down.

[withthewindinherfootsteps]

…What’s this?? WWX not being a self-sacrificial idiot??

It’s almost like… that isn’t a personality trait…

[lostinthe--stars]

Do us all a favour and kill yourself, proshitter. You’re fucking disgusting for liking children. How can you think it is ok. The world is better off without you in it

How can you POSSIBLY think it is ok to say this to a person? How are people like you the ones who preach about morals and things being illegal, while telling people to off themselves? Excuse me?

Yes. I am a proshipper. It doesn’t and shouldn’t affect you in any way, so get the fuck over it.

Being a proshipper DOES NOT mean I am into children. Far from it. Just because I think pieces of fiction deserve to exist does not mean I consume those pieces of fiction.

There are many tropes, pairings, etc. within fiction/fan fiction that I do like not, but I don’t go around harassing people who do like it, and I don’t think that those things I dislike should be removed from existence.

Anti’s will never cease to amaze me.

Ship and let ship. Let fiction exist. Fandom is supposed to be fun!! Let it be fun! Like what you like, don’t like what you don’t like, and MOVE ON!

[ot3]

Now I don't think there's anything wrong with kinning however such people are collectively responsible for many of the worst fandom posts ever written

[dawnbreakerluna]

The mischaracterization of Sylus aside from him being compared to b00ktok characters who are abusers is really frustrating to see & albeit almost immature. The fact that the introduction to his character is focused on and 'romanticized' above the overall of who he really is. It is perfectly okay to not like him because not everyone is going to like every single love interest in this game, but condemning people for being drawn to him is definitely not okay.

I'm no longer surprised yet am disappointed at what fandom has become for its severe stress of characters only being able to identify in a black or white scale of morality/appeal. Granted, I've learned a lot from my own mistakes of how to interact with fandoms over the past few years. However I don't ever recall fandom policing ever being this bad at ALL.

People severely dogging on Sylus for choking out/kidnapping the MC is, to me, the equivalent of the flock of BG3 players saying they killed Astarion because he had a knife to their throat when they first met him. Please make this make sense, LMAO. Especially considering that the new Star Wars Acolyte series involves a similar moment between the two lead characters, whose relationship development appeals to a significant amount of the audience and as far as I have seen, doesn't wander from the chemistry later on.

Anyway, my point is: trust, there are people who are sensibly consuming the content they're into. People understand the depths of the media they're consuming. As a Sylus fan myself, I understand that choking/kidnapping/handling with force is very much not an ideal encounter for a first meeting in real life.

However, because this is a fictional character in a fictional space, I'm considering and taking my appeal to it as a means of exploring what it is I like. Think of it as exploring kinks. I'm dipping my toe into the water safely where there's no life-threatening obstacles, so I can gauge how deep I am willing to go and not go.

(I will briefly mention my months-long infatuation with Johnny from the Texas Chainsaw game. There's a myriad of Johnny lovers who have explored more extreme umbrellas of dark content with him, because they are comfortable doing so. While I had made my own content, I simply left the topics I didn't like alone because at the end of the day, most people consuming the content related to this character/franchise are aware of their limits. The same can be said with any character, Sylus be damned.)

((Also, many have made Sylus out to be worse than he really is. I promise you he is the most tame of very extreme characters you're thinking about!))

[sammygender]

i’ve said this soooo many times but i cannot believe the widespread fandom take on nightmares is ‘episode that proves john didn’t hit the kids or at least that sam didn’t know about :)’ NO??? that entire episode is to directly parallel sam to max??? i really hate to break it to you guys but sam being like Damn at least we weren’t and aren’t still being regularly beat to shit by the two male parental figures in our lives 🙏 lucky to have dad fr is not the same as him saying Wow i’m so grateful dad never hit us at all. essentially he is literally like ‘if dad had got drunk more often and hadn’t channeled his energy into hunting maybe we would’ve ended up like max. guess i should be grateful he didn’t”. hello. how does that endorse an entirely violence-free parenting style. like have your own interpretation. but the text of the episode isn’t saying John didn’t hit them. the text of the episode is intentionally bringing up the concept of john hitting them, withholding direct judgement/confirmation on whether it happened and keeping it ambiguous, sure, but still bringing it to our attention.

[braxiatel]

Having been in that place of “so many long distance friends all in one place!!” A couple of times I just can’t help but feel so much second hand happiness for the cc hermits. You could tell the entire weekend that they were all so giddy - from raising $800k for charity over two days, yes - but also from just being in the same space. Getting to hug and play fight and shoot each other with nerf guns and bringing treats from home for everyone to try.

It just makes you think, you know. I mainly deal with the characters they play, and try very hard to separate those characters from their creators, but at the end of the day all of the love that they pour into their characters and the world they make together is all down to how much they also love each other irl. And good for them, good for them. I hope they had just as much, if not more, time off the clock to just hang out together

[dustykneed]

Hello! Random whipper snipper! Share a WIP of your work!

ooh, with pleasure. six the musical araleyn fanart? in the year 2k24? more likely than you think xDD

i realize this looks finished, but technically i'm still deciding whether to add a background or not lol. still, for the sake of sharing a proper WIP, here's a line or two from an araleyn brainworm WIP that i started reworking yesterday (mild tw for religious guilt and period-typical internalized homophobia from aragon's pov):

She remembers sharing her bed with Anne at Henry's behest, remembers the nights of tossing and turning and trying not to think about Anne asleep next to her-- remembers waking up to dark hair spilling across her pillow and the press of blood-warm bosoms against her own, softer than sin, as hot as the Devil, remembers lying still as death, mouthing prayers into the heat of Anne's neck like an act of penance.