Every now and then some discourse pops up around a queer ship consisting of a pair of fictional characters who are not blood related, but refer to themselves as “brothers” or “sisters,” or are in some way, according to the fandom, “sibling-coded.”
Every time I see that discourse, all I can think about are the very real queer men I once knew, who, before their deaths, lived their lives posing as “stepbrothers.” The only way to avoid suspicion for being two older unmarried men living together in a rural conservative area was to pretend they were from the same family, even though the truth was that they were lovers.
They were never out in life. Their relationship was a strict secret to nearly everyone. They never knew that I knew, and sometimes it fucks me up inside that they never got to come out to me. It fucks me up that they had to hide behind a fake “brotherly” relationship for their own safety. It fucks me up to look at a gravestone that reads “beloved brother” and know what it really means, and what it could have said if they’d lived under different circumstances.
In another world, they could have been husbands, but they never had the opportunity. The world will remember them as brothers, because, even in death, that is what was safest.
The freedom to declare queer love openly is something that not everyone has. And I think more people could stand to remember that.
profictionpuppy-deactivated2022:
Someone: [Ages up a character]
Antis: YOU CAN’T DO THAT!
The creators of the character: [Ages up the character]
Antis: Oh, look, they aged them up. :)
Antis who think they like Cardcaptor Sakura are funny
Both the manga and the anime are Problematic As Fuck and that’s why I loved them as a kid and still love them now, get your moralistic age gap fiction discourse outta here
I’m definitely here for adorable kids media that don’t bat an eye at “sus” stuff and play everything off as wholesome and precious
“Be critical” yeah right either you’re a massive hypocrite or you reblog cutsey anime content without knowing anything about the source material, and neither of those things are critical thinking
(Source: miseriathome)
Next level tumblr discourse will probably be like “stories written in a 1st person perspective are emotionally manipulative because they’re being told by an unreliable narrator and are forcing me to believe a subjective experience is actually fact :(”
(via problem-haver)
Interesting to know that my “how to draw chibis” books from my “I want to be a manga artist” phase would probably earn me a callout for condoning “pedophilia art,” aka lolis, aka chibis
(Source: miseriathome)
(Source: miseriathome)
A word on trauma and reactionary movements
Transcription with pauses:
oh i do not like this article not one bit. this makes it seem as though the people getting harassed are minors who are writing about people their age (which i’m sure happens in small percentages), when in reality the hate is mostly directed towards adults who create content that sexualizes minors or puts them in age gap relationships in a way that gets them off, which is indisputably pedophilic behaviour and incredibly dangerous to minors who may see this content and think it’s ok, or at least become desensitized to it (speaking from personal experience from when i myself was an abuse victim on the internet at an early age). this article is literally just abuse apologist rhetoric
See this? This is the steady escalation of a relatively innocuous thing into a quintessentially demonic, absolutist horror.
- Minors writing stories about minors –> Adults writing stories about minors
- Presumed: the article ignored instances of adults as targets for purity wank (false)
- Adults writing stories about minors –> Those stories sexualizing minors
- Presumed: sexually mature/explicit stories, rather than merely stories
- Those stories sexualizing minors –> Adults getting off from it
- Presumed: adults getting off specifically to the involvement of the minor, as opposed to any other part of the story
- Adults getting off from it –> Pedophilic behavior
- Presumed: attraction to/enjoyment of something involving minors is indicative of or analogous to attraction to minors
- Pedophilic behavior –> Desensitization of/acceptance from minors
- Presumed: minors as an audience to the reactions of adults
- Desensitization of/acceptance from minors –> Dangerous to minors
- Presumed: minors respond to social norms rather than critical thought or intuition
- Dangerous to minors –> Abuse apologia and/or abuse
- Presumed: minors who think stories about minors are okay will be abused
This is a trauma response. Trauma responses are not rational. This progression is not a syllogism, it’s absolutist catastrophizing. Note just how many assumptions you have to buy into in order for this escalation to be coherent. This is precisely the kind of spiraling, fixated boogey-man spotting chain of thought that most kinds of cognitive behavioral therapy will seek to address and cut short. A feedback loop of perpetually inflating rhetoric which only stops when the greatest and most horrendous absolute has been reached is not an argument.
I, myself, am traumatized. I, myself, do not have the resources I need to seek out professional therapy at this time. I mean this with all sincerity when I say that if this is where your brain brings you with only the slightest provocation, you need to stay away from discourse and from the people who tell you that the world really is as dark and bad as you think it is. There’s a reason why people with intense climate grief are so easily swayed into ecofascism, there’s a reason why people who were hurt by transness get taken in my terfs, there’s a reason that anti-Clinton psyops so effectively achieved a demographic of leftists who supported Trump in 2016; people who tell you that everything is irredeemably bad and unfixable are preying on your vulnerabilities and priming you to hurt others.
Reactionary movements rely on trauma to suck new people in. They keep you in their grasp by stoking your most primal concerns and convincing you that the rest of the world is cruel, immoral, corrupt, fearsome… but that you’re safe with them. You’re safe with them and you have access to their love, their community, their affirmation, their protection… so long as you inflict new trauma onto others and browbeat them into submission as well.
Your mental health is more important than being judge, jury, and executioner. You do not need to be a martyr for your cause by putting yourself on the front lines again and again. It’s not noble to put your traumas on display over and over again for the public to fear–it’s just painful. And airing out your traumas to the world as a gotcha for discourse sympathy authority points isn’t coping or processing, either. Being praised for being traumatized and learning that being traumatized is an admirable trait will eventually hurt you and your relationships beyond measure. Trauma is a fact of life and we should neither pedestalize it as a knowledge base nor expect to ever eradicate it completely. But we do have a civic responsibility to create a society which can support people and minimize the damage done to them by traumatic experiences.
However, meaningful conversations about ethics cannot happen without measured responses. Measured doesn’t mean tone policing, but rather a meaningful effort towards being articulate, precise, practical, unobfuscating, etc. Continually burying ideas by using the most reductive and affronting turns of phrase possible doesn’t contribute to progress or good faith philosophizing–it just diverts resources to having to disentangle and deconstruct the misinformation in order to proceed with talking about it. Antis don’t want to talk and they don’t want to collaborate on a functional plan of action–they want to scare people away and shame them for thinking meaningful conversation was ever on the table. Antis don’t believe in following evidence-based protocols or understanding the wealth of life experience that exists within society–they merely want everybody to shut up and be what they’ve declared is right. And that is puritanical authoritarianism in a nutshell, and that kind of reactionary idealism which falls apart as soon as you account for the diversity of real people.
Links:
- What purity policing fans get wrong about censorship (the article in question)
- The Alt-Right Playbook: The Ship of Theseus (the entire series is worthwhile for understanding radicalization, but this video in particular deals with moral outrage via inflation of rhetoric)
- The Alt-Right Playbook: Endnote 4: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship (live)
- Fiction is Not Reality on Dreamwidth (18+)
(Source: miseriathome)
Just in general, any argument against some kind of fanfiction or another also tends to erroneously presume that that brand of fanfiction is only ever created under one disagreeable circumstance/for one disagreeable purpose, which has the negative effect of delegitimizing the other potentially agreeable functions of that fanfiction type.
(Source: miseriathome)
Anonymous asked: The same people dissing on pillowfort because it's 'full of porn' are the same people harassing artists for shippy art and sending death threats lmao
Uggggghhhhhhhhh I’m seeing people react to the flagbot gone wild with “but remember, if you see real child porn, report it to the fbi, don’t just report it to tumblr,” which demonstrates that they know the shit they get all worked up about isn’t real child porn, so whY THE FU–
Actually, antis should keep trying to scare people away from alternative platforming sites, because then all the antis will still be on tumblr when the flagbot finally gains some chill, and they can have all their PG-13 fandom wank over here (including having community drama when some controversial shipper’s innocuous totally sfw peach-toned ship fanart gets flagged, proving the inherent problematic nature of that ship), saving everybody else from tumblr anti wank down the road.
(Source: miseriathome)
I find it laughable that there’s an anti-pillowfort crowd who keep trying to add commentary onto the pillowfort tumblr’s posts by calling it a scam and saying that it’s going to be full of cp. The same bloggers who snarkily look down upon people leaving tumblr with “um, just don’t post porn, duh” attitudes have a huge problem with pillowfort’s policy of “if it’s legal under US law, it’s okay with us.” Perhaps they realize that most of the things they like to call cp are do not actually fall under the legal jurisdiction of such?
(Source: miseriathome)
i ended up deleting the post about how i generally approach content re fandom stuff. it was my mistake for formatting it like a big writing tip from sang, when it’s really dependent on your creative vision and intentions from the start. misunderstanding and hostility was pretty inevitable.
and if it’s mostly just going to end up striking the wrong chord with people who both agree and disagree with me and sending a completely different message than what i voiced, there’s no reason to keep it.
reblogging because it appears to be spreading again, without the explanation above for later context. i got an anon upset that i was implying people with disabilities shouldn’t make stories about their disabilities, without following up with how, or making reference to a sentence in particular. if they could explain in more detail i would understand, but otherwise i don’t know what i did get that impression. was it me saying not to romanticize pain and suffering? if people are going to message me to criticize the post, i sincerely request that you at the very least explain how so i can examine my own potential faults.
so, here’s another statement - the ‘general techniques to avoid gross shipping of your characters’ post i made a couple days back was removed because i realized it was poorly worded, was only a real reference point for my personal style of writing, was only aimed at other people concerned about content response, and could easily be interpreted in ways nearly opposite to what i was intending. here’s what it said if you’re curious. i deleted it at around 200 notes the same day and now it’s nearing 3k, and i don’t want to know why. i’m sure plenty of really serious writers and weird anti-sjws are using it as a punching bag. so, again, i’d discourage people from spreading it around more.
Because you said you wanted people’s honest issues with your post that is going around and you want to be careful about in the future (because I mean this in the nicest, most genuinely helpful way possible), I think something that struck a chord with some people, self included initially, was the focus on how people might hypothetically write fanfiction of your story instead of more generally, ie, saying people shouldn’t rely on racist or sexist tropes, not because those things are lazy at best and because racism and sexism are generally bad things, but because someone might write a bad fanfiction about it some day. I hope you can see why that rubbed some people the wrong way, the idea that hypothetical fanfiction alone should stop a writer from being racist and sexist. I was hoping that was what you were referring to in your follow up post where you mentioned that your wording wasn’t the best for all situations because you were writing specifically from a fandom perspective, where obviously things like fanfiction are higher on people’s list of concerns, but in case no one said this, yeah, I think that was one of the more valid concerns (and a non “weird anti-sjw” opinion). As for some of the other things people said, I think it was more of an issue of people responding to the way they’re used to being interpreted, so people who are used to being told “you’re romanticizing suffering” for simply talking about their life struggles might have a knee-jerk reaction to that statement, even if that’s not how it’s meant.
that… actually makes a lot of sense considering what i’ve been told about people getting a racist message from my post. i added the last two bullets partly because i was tired of pervasive fandom racism and sexism that arises from the content leaning into bad tropes, but i thought it would be obvious that, yeah, regardless of what reception you want, you shouldn’t be perpetuating offensive tropes in the first place.
i wasn’t trying to sway people to thinking fandom shipping was such a huge issue so follow these tips, or giving a shallow incentive to not be racist/sexist. i was trying to articulate how i personally try to minimize it through a certain storytelling style as well as general awareness and mature handling of race and gender.
and i apologize if people got the wrong message because, again, the post wasn’t perfectly put. i get it if it may have rubbed people the wrong way. but i would also wish that people wouldn’t respond so immediately harshly and jump to conclusions based on assumptions about op’s intentions. i took down the post and put myself at fault when people messaged me about confusion (or explained it straight like you did) but many, many others have turned this misunderstanding into grounds for malicious accusations or used it as an example of a problem they thought i was contributing towards.
if you think i’m trying to say or promote something harmful in one of my posts, please let me know directly and talk to me about it instead of spreading said post around and making claims about me through your impression of it! someone saying, hey, here’s a flaw i found in that post you made instead of saying you’re a stupid idiot actually results in me realizing what i might’ve done wrong and learning from my mistakes. and while a lot of this mess stemmed from my own flaws in that post, a lot of it also came a recurring trend here where people grossly misinterpret intentions and resort to claims instead of discussion.
thank you for the reply. it was good to finally get some insight on those two interpretations in particular, as well as explain my side of the ordeal. if there are any other issues you found with the post that haven’t been brought up, feel free to let me know.
Ok, here is every single flaw with your post.
OP, even if you only meant your post as “this is what I do, personally,” it absolutely comes across as “here’s what you should do,” complete with lots of really ugly judgement values about what kind of fan engagement you think is acceptable or desirable (see: calling stuff you don’t like “gross” even though it’s entirely within your power to avoid it and there’s nothing harmful about it except that it bruises your ego, I guess), which in turn become judgement values about the people behind it.
You can’t control how people engage with art. That’s just… it. That’s the whole of it. Trying to limit yourself as an author because you don’t want to deal with certain responses–and not even mainstream, widespread consequences, like say censorship campaigns or news media controversy–is going to seriously stunt your development and quite frankly… it’s an immature response to a pretty wild hypothetical. You really think you get to have any say in what something means to another person? Not to mention that the implication of “there is something tangible that authors can do to prevent ‘gross shipping’” is that other authors have brought this undesirable consequence upon themselves by not taking all the preventative measures that you, genius upon genius, have taken. Notable example: don’t call other writers’ work edgy because they write about darker topics than you do and then expect people not to point out their justified annoyance about it.
It’s also a laughable ineffectual approach which reveals a huge misunderstanding in how fandom works. Here’s a list of some fanfic tropes/approaches/au’s/whatever that absolutely exist:
- Inflation of age gaps (especially common when paired with things like teacher/student au’s)
- Age-shifting characters downwards (like “what if they met as kids and grew up together?” au’s, for example)
- Making canonically non-relatives related (both biologically and also through adoption)
- Incorporating OC’s, including ones who are related to canon characters (and sometimes they even become fanon and end up occurring repeatedly throughout different peoples’ fan content… also includes giving your ship a kid)
- A N G S T. Oh my god, did you seriously forget angst as an entire genre of fanfiction? It doesn’t matter how ~wholesome~ your original content it–people are gonna inject whatever ~gross~ dynamics or suffering that they want
- Giving characters illnesses, disabilities, dysphoria, unhappy marriages, debt, and other states of being which are not necessarily wholesome or healthy
- Rape!fic, fics about murder, torture fic, just dark!fic in general
- Swaps/bends/play of race, gender, etc
- Character bashing (especially girls)
- Sex that isn’t even about relationships (fuck or die, sex pollen, etc)
- Group sex, orgies, ot3′s, polyamory, sex parties, other situations which may incorporate multiple ships/ship dynamics
- OOC fic in its entirety, which makes your careful curation of character traits/histories utterly irrelevant
- ETA: Also crossovers with other universes, which means incorporation of content you can’t control for
And any of these types of fics comes with the potential to incorporate elements of shipping which directly relate their ~gross~ natures, and none of it is going to be prevented by you consciously refusing to feed into it.
Not only will people ship what they want, but they’ll create contexts around it which you are utterly powerless to control. Not to mention that shipping something says nothing about the shipper or why they ship it or what they get out of it or what it does for them. Plus a lot of these things aren’t even exclusive to shipping; if somebody takes one of your characters of color and writes a solo masturbation fic but utilizes racist language, are you just going to stop writing characters of color that can be used as fetishization fodder? Is it okay if somebody ships something which is canon and completely morally acceptable by your own standards, but they enjoy fics of that ship which incorporate the bullet points above?
It really is purity wank all the way down.
[ETA: However I would like to acknowledge that OP seems to be very gracious about recognizing how and why people have been reacting so strongly to the original post in question.]
Also ETA: You got this anon and tagged your response with “no creator deserves to experience uncomfortable responses,” which also highlights some of your fundamental misunderstandings about how fan culture works. Shipping something is not a response that is given to an author/content creator, nor is fanwork. Sometimes people will present fanworks to creators when they think it will be appreciated, but by and large, what goes on in fandom is for the sake of fandom, and not related to what the creator will think about it. You, as an author, finding content about a ship you don’t like related to your work isn’t an attack on you or praise for you or any kind of statement at all about you. It’s nothing at all like a professionally-produced spinoff/adaption or fanmail or a published academic literary analysis. It’s only a response insofar as it’s a reaction, and reactions are not only inevitable, but also not necessarily detectable. You can’t tell what somebody ships in their head just like you don’t know how small-scale individuals are repurposing your work unless you go out and look for it.
Some more points: Tumblr making the search pages for certain tags inaccessible doesn’t make that content or anybody’s interest in that content disappear, much like removing certain kinds of fodder from fiction does nothing. Likewise, people who take stock photos can’t prevent if a stock photo gets repurposed into a meme, and quite a lot of stock photo memes are based on pictures which are originally fairly mundane or innocuous.
(Source: miseriathome)
(Source: miseriathome)
(Source: miseriathome)
