theskeletonflowers - Tumblr blog

[theskeletonflowers]

what forms of art, activism, and literature can speak authentically today?

[theskeletonflowers]

for those of you who participated in the recent doxxing of AOT fan artists:

Block me. You’re a bully, a harasser, and a horrible person. 

If you’re a minor, don’t you dare for one second think that your age absolves you of consequences. I don’t care if you’re 15- you need to learn to be responsible for your actions and how to function in a world that can’t, will not, and will never cater to you specifically. 

Also, don’t you dare think that going on twitter/tumblr crusades against content creators does anything for REAL VICTIMS. Hi, hello, BSc and MSc holder here, an adult who works in irl settings with marginalized folks- these folks really don’t give a single flying fuck about fanart or ships or fics. You aren’t doing ANYTHING to help them. 

[theskeletonflowers]

i think that the way tumblr and twitter at large interact with media—trope-lenses, romantic shipping, memes, incorrect quote dialogues, aesthetics, opinion echochambers, discourse about whether a piece of media is good based on whether it is ‘safe’ and harmless by virtue of showing nothing bad— is inane. seeing media this way sanitises, cauterises, and makes fiction barren and superficial. you are not allowing yourself to be moved by art or literature anymore, only forcing your will on insisting it reflect a world you want. media has become a means of self-expression—where what you engage with says something about you as a consumer— which of course means that now there are trendy and non trendy ways to interact with media that keep changing, and these different ways of engagement separate people into factions based solely on the media they consume, which is ridiculous. life and stories and people are not like this; not neat lists of good and bad to quickly categorise to be saved the work of thorough, in-depth judgment and understanding. i’m annoyed that i let site culture convince me this all was normal. it’s absolutely not. many of you are misguided. some of you are just stupid though

[theskeletonflowers]

oh god it's that time of the year again, so here are some quick reminders:

The content allowed on AO3 is legal according to American law. This is a sensible place to draw the line when your explicitly stated aim is to have a fanfiction site where the content is not subjected to random purges for obscure reasons

AO3 is run by a non-profit organisation. Nobody is making any money out of this, and when the donation drive goal is exceeded, excess money will go to running the site in the future and fighting potential legal battles for the right to create fanworks

It's possible to donate to AO3 and various charities etc, stop acting as though every cent donated to AO3 is a cent taken from "people who need it more"

"Fiction affects reality" yes but the fiction that actually has a societal impact is the latest heteronormative, subtly racist, mass marketed drivel from Disney, not that one properly tagged incest PWP fic with 150 hits and 40 kudos on AO3

[theskeletonflowers]

If you send hate or harassment to an author because they write something you don’t like, fuck you. You are a bully, you are entitled, and you need to learn to have responsibility over your own health and well being.

Inspired by the recent events of an incredible author who posts the most THOROUGH content warnings and authors notes and is 100% transparent about what their work entails getting harassed into privating all of their work.

I hate how minors (yes! Minors! What the fuck?) on Twitter/Tumblr/Tiktok (man, fuck that app honestly) have taken it upon themselves to completely bully and harass adults into removing their work all because they feel as if they should have a whole internet platform cater to them. No, you are being a bully.

I will say this again- if an author has tagged their work appropriately, if they’ve written out a whole author’s note detailing what’s in their fic, and if their profile says to NOT INTERACT IF YOU’RE A MINOR, then....

Listen. To. Them.

Sorry (but most definitely not sorry), people are allowed to write whatever the fuck they want. People are allowed to fantasize in fiction about whatever the fuck they want. No real people are harmed via fiction. You are not doing anything remotely socially conscious or social justice oriented by harassing people on the internet. Take your slacktivism and fuck off.

[theskeletonflowers]

shinee world v (bangkok) ♡ 170624 (i / ii / iii)

[theskeletonflowers]

Kirby Yuuji? Kirby Yuuji. (PT. ½)

[theskeletonflowers]

Atsumu Miya x Place Beyond The Pines 

[theskeletonflowers]

hello! PSA time!

Recently I’ve seen an influx of blogs without their age explicitly stated and/or minor blogs who have been interacting with 18+ blogs despite their Minors DNI rule!

I can respect not wanting to post your age online, that’s completely fair and valid. Frankly, I couldn’t care less whether youre 52 or 21, all that matters to me is whether you’re a minor or an adult.

All I ask for is to know whether you are over the age of 18, or under.

It’s a clearcut line, there’s no grey area. You don’t have to have your actual age in your bio, you can state it in your about/rules; I just need to it to be there. It needs to be explicitly stated if you’re a minor or an adult. No number necessary.

After the fake pedo allegations and threats to make grooming reports because blogs had interacted with minors who didn’t have their age up, I’m really just not trying to get involved with discourse. That aside, I, along with other creators, feel insanely uncomfortable interacting with minors about nsfw content. Please respect our wishes and do not interact.

If your blog states to be 18+, and your content also preceded with 18+, you are falsely claiming to be an adult. You can not be an 18+ blog, if you yourself, the owner and creator, is under 18.

So please, for the love of god, put on your blog whether you’re a minor or an adult. That’s all I ask for.

[theskeletonflowers]

Question:

Why does anti hate aged-up so much? Isn’t it actually better than with the original age? For example: Bildip. I get why people don’t like it (and your not obligate to like it). Yes Dipper is like 12 in the show and I can understand why people are against it with THAT age, but most work I see about that ship are later in Dipper life (which mean he’s older), in a AU where he is again older or then it more close to friendship than anything else. Most people age up Dipper so it fit better and not as bad. So why people hate aged-up character so much?

[theskeletonflowers]

Is it me or is the anti movement... really american? We have that stereotype over here that americans are super uptight about sex and super shy about it and obsessed with purity and hiding it from the children and stuff. Idk as a european it always striked me as a product of american culture

it’s very, very American. While there are certainly antis who aren’t American, many of them are.

I have a lot of theories as to why this is, but a lot of them are covered in this post: anti-shipping as the cool new trend (while it’s mostly about the age bracket of anti-shippers as of June 2017 (this time last year), it’s an americentric post talking almost entirely about US phenomena).

tl;dr version? anti-shipping is:

the natural result of growing up both LGBT+/queer and marinated in American-flavored Puritan Christianity/purity culture 

with a side order of valuing safety over freedom 

b/c you’ve always had freedom of information 

but you’ve never known a sense of security 

thanks to lifelong internet access 

paired with post-9/11 paranoia.

add a dash of radical feminism/exclusionist thinking

never being taught how to think critically, and

zero education on sex of any kind, and

viola: anti-shippers. 

[theskeletonflowers]

there was a post going around saying ""dldr is meant for things like, “if you don’t like coffee shops, don’t read this coffee shop AU,” not, “i can be as racist as i want and you have to deal with it because i used a disclaimer"". a lot of people in the tags argued that this is what they mean when they say incest/p*dophilia/abuse portrayed in a positive light in fanfic is problematic. whats your opinion? xoxo

… phew. this ask almost passes as a legit question, but the ‘xoxo’ at the end is a little much.  still, what a great opportunity to talk about this ongoing problem of people ignoring warnings that a work contains content that upsets them, then complaining that they were upset when they viewed it.

(first, a side note: don’t censor the word ‘pedophilia’. It’s not a slur - it’s a content warning. If you censor it, the blacklists of people who don’t want to see posts that mention pedophilia won’t catch it and they could be harmed. Just use the word.)

anti-shippers who look at a fic or fanwork’s tags and say ‘this has problematic content! I better go tell the author how problematic their content is!’, I have news for you:

warnings on fanworks indicate that the person creating the work knows the content is ‘problematic’, not for all audiences, and may hurt people if they view it unsuspectingly.stop taking fanwork warnings and tags in bad faith and using them as an excuse to harass and harm creators.

warnings aren’t ‘disclaimers’ (and aren’t used as such). they’re the CONTAINS NAPROXIN. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN sticker on painkillers. The content is good, even helpful, for some people, but for others who don’t need it or are too young to understand what they’re consuming could be harmed. take the warnings seriously and if you don’t like what they say the fic contains, you really are better off not reading/viewing it!

‘they’re not warnings, they’re advertisements!’ they can function as both! people who want to read that content can find it and people who don’t want to read that content can avoid it. everyone is happier, except anti-shippers who are mad that people are enjoying content they don’t personally approve of.

‘If the creator knows their content is problematic, then they shouldn’t have created it in the first place! Or if they did, they shouldn’t have put it on the internet for people to see!’ well that’s a very different conversation. What you’re saying is that you advocate for censorship, and in that case ‘don’t like don’t read’ would be worthless: only things you like would be allowed to exist in the first place.

But let’s talk about how ‘they shouldn’t have put it on the internet for people to see.’ the basis for this is, I know, that it could corrupt the unsuspecting youth who read the bad content. But isn’t this a bit contradictory? if a fanwork is tagged with a warning that it contains abuse, everyone who looks at the fanwork is going to know that 1) the author believes that abuse is bad and needs to be warned for, and 2) the work contains abuse. Taking these points together, no matter how positively the abuse is depicted, a viewer has foreknowledge that it’s abusive and the creator thinks abuse is bad.  It’s simply insulting to imply that viewers will look at the abuse in the fanwork so uncritically as to not think it’s horrible after receiving such a warning.

In fact, I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that people who have been raped or abused (or still being abused) or undergone other harm have read fics with these warnings and because of the warnings, realized what had happened to themselves was not okay.  If anti-shippers had their way, those fics wouldn’t even exist, much less be warned for.

I’m about to say something radical, so brace yourself: 

because tagging warnings is the accepted way to warn people about dangerous content in fandom, the things more likely to cause confusion and harm in fanworks are the things that aren’t warned for.

Even the most positive depiction of abuse would be spoiled by a warning. Can you imagine if the beginning of every copy of Nabokov’s Lolita started with ‘Warning: this work contains depictions of csa, abuse, and child grooming.’ It would force readers who are blind to the hints that the narrator is unreliable to read the work with a very different eye, and I doubt most people would read it and conclude it’s a love story the way many people do today.

Now Lolita was intended to be a kind of monster story from the point of view of the monster - it was never meant to be a positive depiction at all. Nabokov’s work was too subtle for most people, but he was a master storyteller. I think if he could, he’d go back and add a warning so people would stop getting the wrong idea.

In fandom, where we have a widely-accepted tagging system, potentially harmful content that the creator adds deliberately will be warned for. But the potentially harmful content that the creator doesn’t know about won’t be - and that’s the stuff that tends to be a lot more sneaky and insidious.

Let’s take your example: 

“i can be as racist as i want and you have to deal with it because i used a disclaimer".

Racism does crop up a lot in fanworks, but not in the way this implies.  There’s a huge difference between a creator recognizing racism exists and utilizing it as an aspect of a setting or acknowledging it in a respectful, truthful way and a creator who does not recognize their own racist blind spots and therefore ends up perpetuating harmful stereotypes or providing racist narration without realizing it.

The former tends to be warned for; the latter never is because the creator doesn’t even know they’re being racist. The former may be painful, because racism is shitty and harmful and real, but a person can steer clear if they want to avoid it and the warning shows the content is known to be bad. The latter is more painful because it’s not just depicting racism: it is in fact perpetuating racism.

So which is actually worse: the fic that has a warning for racism or the fic that doesn’t?

And this can be applied to anything. A fic that depicts a character being abused but doesn’t warn for abuse tells me that the author doesn’t know the work contains abuse (which is worrying for the safety of the author). A fic that contains dubious consent but the author doesn’t warn for noncon/dubcon/rape tells me that the author has a poor understanding of consent.  These are the fics that are more likely to be dangerous. Fics without content warnings are also the ones most likely to unironically and uncritically depict the bad behavior in a positive light - because the authors have been taught by the rest of society outside fandom that what they’ve depicted is normal/not harmful. They are victims, and they need help, not people yelling at them about how problematic they are.

Two last notes, which I’ll try to keep short:

If a fanwork depicts a relationship that’s canonically unhealthy in a world where it’s fluffy and healthy, they are not responsible for putting warnings on their fic that pertain to the canon version of the ship.  For instance: Kylo and Rey are enemies in current Star Wars continuity and Kylo tried to torture Rey for information. But if a fic is set in a future where Kylo is well-adjusted and happy and dating Rey in a non-abusive relationship, the fic does not need to warn for ‘abuse’. the fic doesn’t contain abuse. Let it go.

No creator is beholden to using anti definitions of words like ‘pedophilia’, ‘abuse’, and ‘incest’ for their warnings. The definition of what antis call ‘pedophilia’, ‘incest’, and ‘abuse’ varies from fandom to fandom - sometimes from pairing to pairing. While tags will always be somewhat subjective, the wide variety of definitions these words have in anti-shipper parlance makes them all but meaningless, so use them when you see fit, not when antis demand it.  If antis have a problem with it, they’ll just have to start treating ship tags as warnings* and avoid all depictions of ships they don’t like. (which is what we all wish they’d do anyway.)

And now for the final irony: every time anti-shippers use warnings as a reason to go yell at people about how their fanworks are bad, antis give creators less incentive to tag warnings. People might start to hope that if they just don’t warn up front for the potentially dangerous content people will stop yelling at them without even looking at the work itself. Or if the work is borderline (’maybe this is abusive but maybe it’s not’), they may opt to go without the warnings so they can avoid the extra trouble. this is already happening with dubious consent depictions. If a noncon warning gets you yelled at, then fics where the consent isn’t completely denied will just not get warned for at all, and that’s fucked up.  And when the warnings aren’t there, people are way more likely to stumble on something of a nature that upsets them! 

So as usual, in their crusade to eradicate all content that isn’t unquestionably wholesome and pure antis make everything a little less safe for everyone. Thanks, guys.  (please stop.)

and creators: please, depict terrible things in your fanworks in whatever light you choose - and warn for them. you might accidentally help save someone from a real situation that’s terrible.

*ship tags also work as both warnings and advertisements, as it happens. Funny, isn’t it?

[theskeletonflowers]

a worthy disciple.

[ID: A four panel, black-and-white comic starring Bokuto, Hinata, and Akaashi. In the first panel, Bokuto smiles at Hinata, shouting, “Hinata!! Question!!”; Hinata answers eagerly with balled fists, “Lay it on me, Bokuto-san!” / In the second panel, Bokuto points at Hinata and says, “Let’s name the best Pixar movie on 3.” Hinata perks: “Oh, easy!” / The third panel is a close-up on their excited faces as they shout in unison, “1, 2, 3, CARS!” / In the fourth panel, Akaashi watches as Bokuto and Hinata bubble over about how much they love Lightning McQueen. Akaashi’s face is completely neutral; a small descriptor next to him reads, “loves A Bug’s Life”. end ID]

[theskeletonflowers]

if a blog!!! has an age requirement!!! please respect it!!! and follow it!!!

blog makers aren’t requiring you to be over 18/over 21 to interact wit them to be exclusive or mean, they’re doing it to protect themselves and you especially if they have nsfw content on their page!

in some states, minors possessing any form of pornography or any nsfw content can result in their parents getting charged. The blog owner can also face legal charges seeing as they are an adult and are responsible for their content and who it’s being distributed/seen by under the lies of the law.

do not fight with these blog owners for protecting themselves.

do not get mouthy and disrespectful with them for setting their boundaries and act all uppity like you know everything because in all truthfulness, if you did, you would know how much of a serious matter this is.

this stuff shouldn’t even need to be said!! respect people’s boundaries the way you want yours to be respected!!

if you can’t deal with that, you should probably get off the internet and fuck off to a library to read a book or scholarly article about the consequences YOU could possibly face too.

[theskeletonflowers]

@anime writing fandoms, bc I see y’all do this shit all the time:

and quoting from a lovely reddit comment that pretty much knocked this concept out of the park:

“Social justice isn’t some clubhouse that you get to bully people in and out of.”

If a writer has put up tags and warnings, exercise your ability to have responsibility over yourself and listen to them. You are not an animal. You have a working brain, you probably know how to use a smartphone, and you know how to make twitter/tumblr account- that means you can read tags. 

I feel like this current generation has been given access to social justice concepts that some of you have no idea how to use or critically think about- and that is an abuse of your privilege. 

It’s pretty common fucking sense that a dark content writer who writes about non-con doesn’t actually wish that everyone in society experiences non-con. Just because some writer writes about...idk, Dabi or Atsumu or Tartaglia doing some heinous shit doesn’t mean they actually endorse that happening in real life, holy shit. You’re telling me that Suzanne Collins actually wants all of us to gruesomely die in a survival game? You’re telling me that Rumiko Takahashi believes that we should find an adult demon to save our life when we’re 10 years old and then follow them around until they marry us? No! 

“Fiction affects reality!!” Do you even know what that means? Like, actually? 

Of course fiction affects reality- we feel things when we read fiction. We laugh, we cry, we get aroused, we get uncomfortable...fiction is affecting our reality. 

But you know what it doesn’t fucking do? Create pedophiles and sexual abusers. Pedophiles and abusers are seriously ill people who have had far worse trauma inflicted on them well before they would have ever come near a ‘pedophilic’ fic. Bullying fic writers does ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING for victims of pedophiles or abusers. NOTHING. 

When Stephen King published It, was there a sudden abundance of people dressing up as clowns and killing young children? No! When Game of Thrones was released, did the prevalence of relationships between 13 and 30 year olds increased (Hello, Daenerys and Khal Drogo)??? No! 

And it’s really made me think- some of you want to be ‘woke’ and get social media cred and want to act and play pretend that you’re conscious of social justice, but don’t want to actually do any of that work yourselves. 

You’d rather bully fic writers off the internet, but you don’t hold published authors to nearly the same expectations. You whine and complain about how dark content writers are horrible messed up people and “Oh no what about the children and the sexual assault victims!” but none of you have the guts or the energy to go actually volunteer for a shelter. Or be a part of a civic change cohort. Or sign a petition. 

tldr; if you bully people off the internet in the name of ~social justice~, you’re nasty. 

Also, grow up. 

[theskeletonflowers]

xiao 🏮 doombane.

[theskeletonflowers]

xiao: doombane