#tagging for the haters to block this so they don't learn anything and continue being uninformed

[soaps-mohawk]

it's the anon who saw the post about Ghost mischaracterization, thanks for responding!

I just felt a bit demotivated writing after the post, I write what I feel like writing—its fun as you've said. And a really good outlet🙏

Before I even go to publish ANYTHING I think "what if people say mean stuff about it?" "call me horrible for writing a character this way?"

I've written a lot of OOC fics. I once wrote an HP fic where Tom Riddle (he who must not be named) wasn't evil and was living a happy life with his Muggle wife even if that seemed highly unlikely.

I wrote it because I wanted to. But with so many people going off about how inaccurate fanfic authors and artists are—well, that's where less and less fics and fanarts start coming out.

I just wanted to ask your opinion as another fanfic writer🫶 A very talented one, and we're a whole lot thankful you continued writing🩷

Sorry again for the bother!

You're not a bother anon!! Definitely not.

It's hard out here these days, I won't lie. Between interaction being down and this sudden wave of mainstream popularity, things have gotten rough in fandom spaces. It's not even just online spaces, I've heard people talking about how Cons are almost unsufferable now because it's gotten so mainstream, and no one is bothering to learn how to act in these spaces, or is refusing to learn.

I can't tell you whether or not to write and post things, that's up to you and what you choose to do, but the best advice I can give, is if you get people coming into your comments or inbox talking about how wrong your fic is or how "this wouldn't happen in canon", just delete it. Don't interact with it. Block that person if you can, if not just don't interact. Some of these people do this out of sheer ignorance for these spaces, and others do it to pick fights. They want the interaction, they want the argument. What I've learned over the years of dealing with people like that is to just not interact. Just don't respond, don't go trying to prove them wrong or change their minds. You won't. They don't want to learn. They just want you to engage. It's like rage baiting. They just want the attention and the controversy. Ignore them and eventually they'll run out of steam once they realize no one's listening.

It hurts when people say mean or awful things or give you "critiques" you didn't ask for, but in the end, just remember it's fanfiction. These people are getting upset over things that aren't real, for things that in the real world don't really matter. We do this for fun. We engage in fandom because it's fun, and it's free. It's a hobby. The internet has made far too many people think their opinions matter and that they should be heard. There are grown adults (and probably children) out here getting pressed over someone's take on a fictional character. Just do what I've seen people start doing and if someone sends you hate or gets mad, answer with a link to support Palestine, or Sudan, or Congo, or literally any fundraiser and tell them to put that energy towards real issues and not someone's take on a fictional character.

Write what you want to write for yourself, share if you want to, and shame the haters for not having better things to do than sit online and complain about some random person's take on a fictional character. It has zero effect on their lives. They can block, they can filter tags, or they can stay out of fandom spaces.

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

I just want to recap this whole situation from my POV actually because I think it would be useful at this point. And I actually want to start in 2014 on instagram during the spam ig era. I was a homestuck cosplayer on spam insta when I was 13 and dealt with the 4 chan raids, if anyone remembers those. So that's my background, just so you know. I got called a retarded dyke by proto gamergaters during my formative years, and it effected the way I engage online.

Anyway, hard cut to when I watched OFMD in April. I deeply related to Ed as a character. Most of my fan engagement for the first month or so was on tiktok, but I got off of it and went back to my social media of choice, Tumblr. I saw a lot of fucking Takes TM that I hated from a certain contingent of the fandom and I was critical of them, and so I started posting my own reading. Here's where the situation starts

I start posting my own reading of the show and I tag the characters that are in the show, hoping to find people who agree with my reading so I could follow them. I got yelled at for """maintagging""" which is an issue I've only run into before once, and the people who got mad at me about the """maintagging""" I received some agressive anons which I promptly deleted. I posted my Ed is Izzy's abuser post (tagged Izzy critical), got more aggressive anons, which I deleted for the most part. Had to tell some people how to block the Izzy critical tag. Cemented myself firmly in the izzy critical camp. I continued to see Shit Takes, in fact since the Izzy is Ed's abuser meta I've only ever made my Izzy metas in response to Shit Takes. I got on Calico Jack twitter, which I don't go on twitter all that often, and there's a lot of overlap between Izzy twitter and CJ twitter unfortunately, so that made me less likely to use twitter at all. I was mostly on there for the porn, so it's cool. I didn't interact with discourse hardly at all so twitter didn't feed me anything related to this.

Now over this period of time the situation on tumblr was getting completely unhinged actually. You couldn't post anything at all in the Izzy tag without someone crawling out of the woodwork to tell you that you were terrible for it. People did slowly learn to block the Izzy critical tag, but jesus christ it was a slow learning process for yall. Every day I'd get on here and post silly little posts, and then one of mine or my mutuals posts would be a little bit too mean to Izzy, and by a little bit too mean it would be something objectively true. And then people would just descend on it and there would be another fucking drama. And it's impossible to predict what's gonna set you off.

Now one drama was completely unrelated to Izzy at all. Stede Anon as we've been calling them, L as they've been referred to in that document showed up in june, left a few nasty anons, and then fucked off because the people that they were bothering turned off anon. Then they came back in October to bother me I played with Stede Anon until I got tired. I wished them a Karkalicious 2009 and sent them on their way.

Another drama I want to recap, which I hesitate to call a drama because of the racist under ... well... overtones is the "documenting of the Izzy haters" a couple of people made a whole sideblog dedicated to documenting the worst of the "Izzy haters". Except they didn't start out with the twitter doxing, or L/Stede Anon. They started out with a mutual of mine who is a black woman and who talks about racism in fandom. She has never harassed anyone to my knowledge and has had quite a bit of nastiness directed at her. I had heard some whisperings of potential harassment being directed at Izzy stans, and I had remained firmly out of it. This blog was too much for me. If they were dedicated to documenting the nastiness they were receiving in fandom, and their third post was about someone who posts metas and minds their own business, then there must not be real problems, especially since I'm catching all this fucking flack for simply posting things that aren't even mean. It may just be that I grew up on the internet but I can be real fucking mean, and I haven't been.

One instance of this is the Izzy isn't canonically queer drama. A mutual of mine posted that Izzy isn't technically confirmed as queer, his queerness is all subtext, that might be an interesting thing to analyze. Things got heated on my dash for a while. Since may there's been a problem in the OFMD community where people get yelled at for posting Izzy critical. And after a long argument with a certain Izzy stan in regards to the post in question I posted this because I was genuinely curious. Basically the argument consisted of us talking past each other, where I said "No one is calling Izzy straight we're just trying to analyze another facet of his character" and they said "You're doing harm to x y z group of Izzy enjoyers by saying that he's straight, and you're doing harassment." On that post that I linked I got told by one person that that post was "Doing harm" and that "hurt people hurt people" which is frankly the most absurd application of that phrase I have seen to date. I got told by a different person that I shouldn't have posted that because "izzy stans are receiving a targeted harassment campaign, worse than anyone else in the fandom" This was the final straw for me. If they think that that post is doing harm, they cannot identify harm. I made a passive aggressive post about curating your experience, blocked anyone who got mad about it, and my tumblr experience has been a lot nicer since I did that, because people blocked me and I blocked them. Everybody's happy.

So anyway then Stede Anon returned with a vengeance. My working theory is that this person is in school and they're on winter break and have more time to be a huge bitch. They accused me of being an Izzy stan I said "nice try you fucking idiot" in a way that was sort of dry, and I said Izzy stans have paper thin skin, and I refuse to loose sleep over them getting mean anons, but you still shouldn't harass them. That response got screen shot and lied about. Because of course it did. I was an idiot for thinking it wouldn't. I stand by what I said but if I could go back I would have been nicer I guess just because it would have caused me less drama. Some Anons came into my inbox and said hey you're a fake ally and you don't care about harassment and I was confused where they were coming from but essentially I said. "Girl, it's an anon" and then someone directed me to uselessheretics blog. And so I go check out the anon harassment that's got yall so worked up. And do you know what I see there? It's fucking Stede Anon!

So for a couple weeks I've been getting these vague messages about harassment and when I finally get directed to the harassment I see an anon that I have been fighting with and have blocked because of how fucking annoying they were. This, Stede Anon of Stede Anon Gate fame, is the unique threat facing the Izzy stan community. So of course I had a fucking field day with it. All of our fandom problems originate with this one shithead and I am going to hold hands with T*zzy*zzy and sing Kumbaya as we all collectively banish Stede Anon to the shadow realm. Hit that block button babes

And then today someone posted the link to the google doc receipts. And I realize now that there's actually been some harassment unrelated to Stede anon happening on twitter, and Stede Anon has been a real terror on IG. So perhaps I jumped the gun on casting doubt, but I maintain that I would not have said anything if not for certain people behaving completely out of pocket and crying about harassment on posts that are not harassment.

And I do want to address that actually. The reason for this whole thing, is because certain people are dragging up the harassment to try to get us to stop criticizing them. The undertone to all of this is very clearly "we're being harassed so you have no right to criticize us or talk about our blorbo in a way we don't like," which doesn't feel related, does it. I've seen the arguments that "they're using your rhetoric" but the thing is you're pointing me to a couple deeply mentally unwell people who I have no control over and you're saying "you should feel bad about this because you made a meta post about your reading of fictional characters that I didn't like" and getting mad when I'm confused that has to do with anything

So basically i retract my assertion that you're not being harassed, but you can clearly see how I got here, and also you keep bringing this harassment up to me in situations that have nothing to do with the harassment. And if you had fewer shitty takes I would make fewer metas.

I also do maintain that L/Stede anon is the source of most of our problems and we should be using the block button prodigiously

Here's how:

[permian-tropos]

daniilcourse keeps veering off into the worst directions... like I want to make arguments about whether its okay to enjoy problematic characters but I’m having to do cleanup duty on people’s actual misconceptions about the character where they think he killed everyone (no ffs lol the survivors of the plague shelter in the polyhedron in utopian ending) and like some new awful argument that the fact he uses the g-slur means he’s racist against Roma people in P2 when he’s literally saying how fucking disgusted he is at the town for having these predictable “medieval” prejudices 

I guess folks who might be swayed by it maybe are too young or under-informed to actually know what is being discussed here, when he’s talking about marginalized people being accused of deliberately poisoning water, but all the jewish and part-jewish fans projecting jewishness onto daniil because of that line know what the hell I mean lol... it literally IS a medieval trope and it was often levied against jews in particular but it has persisted in so many forms to this day and p2 daniil dankovsky in 1915 apparently knows that better than the woke ppl in 2020 who are calling him out for slur usage instead of reading the meaning of his words

the way he talks about marginalized people might not use sensitive language because he’s a snobby white guy from 1915 -- and I don’t know if in 1915 Russia the politically correct language necessarily was “g*psy is a slur if you say it you’re cancelled” cause back then it was just Correct to be racist, and remember how as recently as Disney’s Hunchback it was common to use the word even in stories about prejudice against Romani people and IPL has a history of being bad about anti-Romani racism in P1 so this is a believably clumsy course correction from that -- but that line isn’t proof he’s racist.... deeply it is the opposite........ 

and the fact that someone’s gotta go and misrepresent one of the most correct and insightful things the man says, means now I’m ranting about how he’s actually anti-racist when obviously he’s still prejudiced in many ways and I still would argue it’s fine to enjoy his character.

but I have to address the actual wrong things said about him. clearing his name now, so the bitchelor by his logic owes me

edit: the dialogue in question bc this post is just a messy rant