#rpf for blocklists i guess

[doonarose]

Inevitably, I have stumbled on the hardcore tinhatters corner for Good Omens/Staged and it is... quite something...

[ellieellieoxenfree]

22, 24, 25

22. your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores

canon is not always great at doing this either, but trauma and disability. i look at some of my faves — rita farr, josee, vegas theerapanyakul, ai di, hartley rathaway, teresa mendoza, rita west — and they’re fucking absolute messes, all defined by some brutal shit. their respective canons have handled this with varying degrees of sensitivity (you know exactly who i’m subtweeting) and i don’t participate in all of the fandoms for these pieces of media, but i turn into an absolutely wild beast when people gloss over that because it’s too much of a challenge to include. people who faced years of childhood abuse or who were suddenly confronted with an unexpected, uncontrollable loss of autonomy are going to struggle with those things. one of these characters got shot multiple times in the abdomen, for chrissakes. and people are like ‘idk i guess he can have a marathon fuck sesh it’s cool this won’t interfere with his life in any way’ like YES IT WILL YES IT IS FUCKING PERMANENT, DIANE. there are physical effects and limitations that never go away. there is an ongoing, volatile sense of loss that will body you over and over again for the rest of your life. i love josee for tapping into the anger of disability (you know how i feel about my best girl) but i also love characters whose canons force them to grapple with a reality thrust upon them at a point in their lives when they can draw a clear delineation between Me Before and Me Now, rather than those who have never known the grief of your bodily function being ripped from you unexpectedly. and that isn’t just disability. that’s betrayal and abuse and loss of security and stability and identity. and if you can’t actually deal with the whole of a character’s raw ugly misery and anger on top of the fun fluffy bits to read or write then MAYBE the messes are not your arena.

24. topic that brings up the most rancid discourse

ooooh i’m gonna get canceled for this one but i will block people who get into internet slapfights about gender and sexuality. i’m an old shithead so i find the trend of needing to affix 500 microlabels to every character exhausting, especially in canons where none of these people would have the remotest fucking idea what you’re banging on about. and further, i find it extremely off-putting when a male character expresses traits that aren’t in lockstep with stereotypical or toxic masculinity and immediately gets painted as trans. i see one of these essays where you spend 10k assigning things to a character that are really just you projecting your own identity onto your fave and onto the blocklist you go. some of y’all make me miss fucking kinnies.

i also cannot fucking abide ship wars, because i came from a fandom where people got so mad about a pairing taking up too much screen time they engineered a plot to ruin a real person’s career over it (that was wave one of the bullshit, but i digress). i have watched that shit happen for years and years and yeaaaars — usagi/mamoru and seiya/usagi fans used to throw temper tantrums at each other like they were getting paid to, way back in the day — and it has never gotten any less noxious. it has, in fact, just gotten fucking worse with the increasing curdling of twitter and stan culture. it was bad enough when it was just screaming at each other over which boring girl harry potter should bone but now people have let that shit spill into the real world. now it’s just a normal thing to try to affect someone’s careers, or discuss your rpf ships in front of the people involved. FUCKING BOUNDARIES. LEARN THEM. RESPECT THEM. what the fuck is wrong with you people. stop sharing your fics with them or tagging them in your art. and yes, that even goes for bryan fuller. just because he’s a freak who probably beat off to all the hannibal/will art you sent him doesn’t mean you should have sent it in the first place.

25. common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing

since you’re my BTS buddy…i wish for a meteorite to strike everyone who identifies as an army because if i’m stupid enough to go into the tag, 99% of the posts are ‘hybe/bighit is out to sabotage (fave’s) career’ or ’this is why (ship) is the only truth and everyone else is a dirty sinner going to hell for wrongthink’ and holy shit TAKE A MIKE’S HARD LOOK AT YOURSELVES FOR FIVE MINUTES. if you are so deeply invested in the sex lives of some random korean guys that you are getting legitimately angry at other people on the internet about them not thinking your preferred boy is making the sign of the two-backed aardvark with your other preferred boy, log off. go the fuck outside. i’m not above cracking jokes but some of y’all are rolling out the murderboards and obsessively documenting every single moment their faves happen to be in the same area of the stage to explain why one of them moving their little finger an inch to the right means he’s gonna get his ass eaten after the show.

the career sabotage shit i don’t even know, understand, or care to know. i see it in the tag fucking constantly and it exhausts me. i need to not engage in baseless conspiracy theories. i’m not here for this. just like i’m not here to figure out who in the group is taking a ride on the humpatron 3000, i’m not here to go through a million posts on 50 social media sites every day combing every single word choice for evidence that my faves are one wrong step from being put to death by bighit management. i just want to enjoy myself for five goddamn minutes.

as a very casual new fan, my experience has been 1% gifs of people whose faces and talent i enjoy and 99% screeching harridan drama whose point entirely eludes me. i hate all of these people. i hope they fall into the ocean. maybe the fish will be a more receptive audience than i am.

[ingravinoveritas]

Ok that was saltier than necessary. But when you're an old-as-balls gay then everything is political. Surely you can see that rpf is distasteful to the vast majority of folk anyway?! Putting it under a cut is a matter of courtesy. I still had to scroll to the bottom in order to block your tags. If I had to go blocking every _fandom name_rpf tag it would take forever. rpf alone is good enough but I guess you won't use it because of my shitty tone *sad trombone*

Also your sexuality doesn't matter here whatever it is, because you're still not a gay man, and don't know what it's like. And I mean that as neutral a statement as possible.Flicking your bean to slash rpf doesn't make you a gay ally. Sorry. Do what you like and be happy, but don't try and pretend that this is progressive. I don't wish you ill, it's just frustrating to being able to avoid seeing mlm being fetishised. Take care x (2/3)

Okay okay I checked my blocklist and I'm a fucking idiot. I am guilty of being an technological idiot. But I stand by everything else I said abt mlm rights and using cuts etc 100%. But we'll get nowhere on that I think. Enjoy your slash rpf I guess. c ya. (3/3)

There are so many things I want to say to this, Anon. So many thoughts I had as I read your messages, emotions ranging from revulsion to disgust to just plain sadness. I will start by saying that you’re right about one thing. I am not a gay man. I am many different things, and a gay man is not one of them, that much is true. So I won’t sit here and tell you that I have so many gay friends and what a great ally that makes me, because that’s just tired, and it doesn’t prove a damn thing.

What I will tell you is that I am someone who is on the autism spectrum.

I am someone who knows what it’s like to be different, and to be hated and rejected for something that is a part of who you are. Something that you can’t change, even when you go to bed every night praying like hell to wake up as someone else--anyone else--in the morning, because growing up all I wanted was to be dead instead of being who I was.

I know that feeling very well, and I have found a tremendous amount of friendship in the gay community as a result, friendships with some of the kindest and most wonderful people I have ever known. People that I treasure and cherish and would fight for any fucking day of the week, even when I sometimes barely have enough strength to fight my own battles. I don’t know where exactly that puts me on the ally spectrum, but I also won’t sit here and be accused of not caring about the people I love.

I’m also not sure where you get off claiming that I’m pretending to be progressive. I do not write RPF out of some misguided belief that it makes me enlightened or advanced about LGTBQIA rights. Nor do I write it to fetishise gay men, because I don’t write it because Michael and David are gay...I write it because they’re them. If all I wanted was to see two men fucking, I could watch gay porn and be done with it. Right? Easy-peasy. But what captivates and fascinates and inspires me is relationships. The dynamic between two people, the chemistry, how they interact with each other. Hell, I actively avoided shipping Michael and David when I first got into GO last year, until the Great “He’s My Lover” Incident of June 2019 occurred, followed by the Press Tour of Endless Mouth Staring, and then it was all downhill from there.

But I can understand RPF not being everyone’s cup of tea, Anon. I can understand folks not wanting to read it (even if the majority of responses to my fic have all been pretty positive) and wanting those posts to be tagged as such, so if I failed to do that or didn’t put it behind a cut, then that is on me.

What I cannot understand, however, is you nearly torpedoing any valid points you set out to make by coming at me with some seriously misogynistic language and a clear dislike for women behind it. “Flicking your bean”? I realize that you are not inclined to see the appeal of female masturbation, Anon, but your disdain is more than palpable.

Your phrasing also reduces my arousal and why the thought of Michael and David together turns me on to something completely base and simple...when in reality it’s anything but. So, yeah...I have a bit of a problem with that, and while I know you said that you don’t wish me ill, surely you can see how language like that is insulting at best, and at worst, downright dehumanizing.

I truly am sorry for your frustration and what you have been through, Anon, but that does not give you the right to take it out on me. I just hope one day you’ll be able to find some peace and better outlets for your anger than fanfic writers on Tumblr.