#twittersphere

[ramyeongif]

I’ve been encouraging folks to try out promotion on Twitter, and I can’t wait to see more writers join the Twittersphere.

#MediumWriters

[secriden]

They're all laughing, but the vibe is very much *side-eyes the fandom semi-threateningly*

I'm not even an FK girlie and I already feel like I will throw hands if I ever see someone actually hating on First. D:<

[mistressemmedi]

F1 fans doing all the marketing for Brad Pitt the abuser's movie is so crazy to me especially after there was all this (understandable) outrage about Horner. Brad Pitt beat his ex wife and children what the fuck are we doing here, people?

Doing the marketing for it? 🤔 Idk on here all I've seen so far is people expressing how ridiculous the whole project is looking.

Sure, it's getting its 15 min of fame with the memes but I don't think that signifies that the movie will be a success. If anything, it's backfiring on the production because everything seems so... half assed lol.

I think the expectation is that this movie will be the motorsport's equivalent of Top Gun, and a certain demographic is falling for that sales pitch, but I wouldn't call it "free" marketing.

That being said, the average F1 fan does not give a shit about Brad or his personal life 🤷🏻‍♀️

[estercity]

my twitter got shadowbanned for wanting to wank off cis men do i live in the fucking Stone Age

[emtmercy]

Everyone on my Japanese twitter dash is talking g about JKR/transphobia but I can’t figure out why

[zerothefool0]

In the event that someone gets gotten after for pressuring someone into playing into a fetish even after expressing discomfort, please keep in mind that it's not about fetishes, it's about consent.

[rainbowharadise]

Hiiiiiiiiii beautiful Sushi Slices 🍣✨

It’s been a while since I’ve been over here, but I also feel it’s for the best to pop back. I am sending all my American beauts the biggest amount of love, wrapping you all up in the biggest squishiest hug, and sending alllll the sparkle✨

If you need to vent and all that jazz, feel free to pop into my DMs. I’ll make sure I check back here so I don’t miss anything. Hopefully this can be a safe space for everyone when they need it the most.

I’ll be here spreading the daily HARROTONIN☀️

Sending Bunches of Love 😘💖🌈🫶🏻✨ xxx

[bibimbinge]

twitter has the absolute worst takes on bl plots 😶 liike i got shivers by just how BAD they are

[autistichalsin]

In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?

Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.

More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.

But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.

A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.

Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.

So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.

Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.

It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.

There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”

A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.

It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.

And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.

Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.

Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.

So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.

Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.

So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.

And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.

And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.

And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.

Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.

Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).

It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.

[funamblrist]

posting Paul Massaro is bad sportsmanship. the man’s embraced egregious behaviour and bad takes for twitter clout.

is it really 'bad sportsmanship' if the tweet i used is a very common, non-egregious take for his side? would you prefer i use this less contemporary image to illustrate my point?

[momochanners]

When your scrawny wizard frame, Gets embraced by a muscle dame, That's Amoreeeeee~

---

So! In the last week, a new viral sensation appeared on the Twittersphere (sorry, still not calling it X); The wedding photos of Nguyễn Hồng Hạnh, featuring the muscular bride and the enamoured groom.

Naturally many artists were inspired by the amazing photos, Yours Truly included. I just felt that the couple vibe perfectly fit my Dorf Barbarian Irona and Gale ship in my 2nd Baldur’s Gate 3 playthrough, hehehe. I’ve also decided to finish up an earlier sketch of them from last year, making this art update a love story in two pictures XD

These pieces are made possible by the support of my patrons: Thank you so much!

[tmmyhug]

lowkey part of me thinks he butted in the drama at that specific time because he saw a chance to maybe convert some of xqc/mizkif fans into being on his side. especially with the use of the r-slur. because there's no way he thought that would go down well with his own core audience. it felt like he was signaling to ppl outside his community, "hey im edgy i use slurs that are much more prevalent in your gaming community im one of you guys." like he knows things like the r-slur are not prevalent in his own community, because the explanation of his confusion around its usage specifically boiled down to "why is it ok that my haters use slurs at me?" (which isn't ok either). rather than "why is it ok for other ppl in my community to use slurs?"

like this whole thing sorta reminds me of how matt rife (tiktok comedian) built a social following that was primarily young women who found him really hot and kinda funny. but then matt rife basically went on some podcasts and said he didn't want a majority women audience, he wanted to be "one of the guys". so he does a stand-up special that has some incredibly misogynistic jokes in it right off the bat, hoping to turn his audience into a more male-dominated one.

but idk i could be losing it after being way too online these past few days.

you make a great point anon. idk matt rife but that sounds very similar. i wouldn't be surprised if dream has some resentment for his audience in a similar way and wants to break out of that. not his dedicated fans, bc they always go back to adoring him, but his position in the twittersphere as someone with progressive politics and the expectations that come with that (such as, yknow, being a generally kind person who treats women with dignity and doesn't use slurs). whereas creators who are known to be dicks and rightwingers can do more whatever they want without consequence bc no one expects anything better of them and their core audiences don't care. like mizkif and xqc. maybe he wants that.

[rosetta-j-stone]

Ah, ah, ah, ah

WELCOME!

Are you looking for thighs or are you looking for hips

Are you averting your eyes or are you licking your lips

On the Slutty Side of Tumblr we encourage your ships

No one cares about the drama in the Twittersphere

Thirstposting and memes are our lingua franca here

So welcome to the Slutty Side of Tumblr

All you gotta do is reblog, is reblog, is reblog, is reblog, is reblog

(blog blog blog)

Reblog as fast as you can

Spam your mutuals with that new gifset

Link the best fics that you find on AO3

Lather, rinse and repeat

Are you online instead of sleeping? Are you buzzing as you binge?

On a scale of "fine" to "feral", what's your level of unhinged?

Are you cosplaying as "normal" or will you embrace the cringe?

There are whispers on the net

They say this site has died

But if you stick around you'll see

We're very much alive

Just find the sign that says

"Welcome to the Slutty Side of Tumblr"

All you gotta do is reblog, is reblog, is reblog, is reblog, is reblog

(blog blog blog)

Reblog as fast as you can

Spam your mutuals with that new gifset

Link the best fics that you find on AO3

Reblog as fast as you can

Spam your mutuals with that new gifset

Link the best fics that you find on AO3

Lather, rinse and repeat

[sergeifyodorov]

from the twittersphere: people are having hot captain discourse and they're NOT talking enough about ovi

[bigfan-fanfic]

One of the most famous "Bruce Wayne is batman" video is one where they compare the way Bruce stares at his husband's ass and the way Batman stares at Batdad's ass ( Bruce tells the fam he's not sorry about it)

The Gotham twittersphere is all up in arms claiming that of course Batman stares at Batdad's ass - who wouldn't?

[zerothefool0]

Rather than being "instantly heals all afflictions and leaves no sign of damages behind", healing magic in the St. Animaverse is more "speeds up the body's natural healing process".

Hence why things like Sylph's bad knee can't be magic-ed away: her body's already healed from it.