[ SECRET POST #3328 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3328 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 069 secrets from Secret Submission Post #476.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

01. http://i.imgur.com/OphuBNv.jpg

[(Anonymous)]

I feel the same, anon. Plus let's face it, fandom is hardly composed of great thinkers.

[(Anonymous)]

It is composed of great wankers in more than one sense, though.

[blitzwing]

I wouldn't mind it so much if it were genuine analysis; instead it's just "These are my beliefs, let me ram them down your throat; and if you disagree you're evil/bad/wrong!"

[(Anonymous)]

I see you've read Mark Reads there.

[(Anonymous)]

It's an interesting question, which I am too high to talk about in detail. But I do think it's kind of a natural thing in some ways - I mean, our moral and ethical point of view is one of the things that we do bring to works, it's something that's part of us.

[(Anonymous)]

It is when you start insisting only you have a true sense of morality and ignoring all context that the problems begin.

[(Anonymous)]

"It's an interesting question, which I am too high to talk about in detail."

This is the best sentence I have read in weeks. This needs to be a standard phrase in online discourse.

[(Anonymous)]

It isn't about any sense of morality. It is about fans getting an excuse to be judgemental and claiming to be superior people to the author/creator/anyone that disagrees with their tattooed and bearded, fat-fairy, god, when they get all up on their judgemental high-horse.

[(Anonymous)]

I think there are people who talk about morality without doing that.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't like him either but the fact that you keep bringing up the fact that he's gay as a point against him tells me you're a legit bigot.

[(Anonymous)]

I particularly notice this tendency in discussions of villains - you have to disclaim that the character's a terrible person when discussing them and the "right" way to like villains in certain places is if you see them as amoral monsters. The problem is that sympathetic and complex villains do exist - while their actions still aren't justified, there's a tendency to act like the sympathetic elements don't exist at all.

There are also villains who do have a sense of ethics (warped or limited morality is different from true amorality), and Even Evil Has Standards and Noble Demon are things).

[(Anonymous)]

I spy a Snapewife here. Go on, tell us how your abusive bully is really a misunderstood victim. We're listening.

[darkmanifest]

My experience has been the opposite, some villains could drop screaming orphans into a meat grinder for laughs and people will fall over themselves exclaiming how it's really the precious woobie who is the victim in all this. They confuse "sympathetic but deeply fucked up" with "did nothing wrong". Or maybe fandom has begun to swing towards the opposite extreme since the Loki heydays, I dunno.

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's fine to examine media from a moral perspective, the problem is when people start taking it too far and think that every piece of media must essentially be a young children's cartoon and never contain anything offensive.

I have been seeing it more and more lately where people don't want to see anything "problematic" in their media which I don't necessarily agree with, reality is problematic, good villains are often problematic. I don't think stories should necessarily be censored in order to appease everyone's morality.

We need to make sure people understand context, like there is a difference between a writer making a character say something racist because the writer agrees with that standpoint and a writer who doesn't agree with that standpoint.

[(Anonymous)]

Its a reaction to years of shitty trends favoring the white male perspective. We need some heavy counterweight to correct this imbalance, but hopefully it will even out and be less forced with time.

[nightscale]

I feel this.

I think it's fine to explore the moral ramifications within the story itself, if anything that can be quite fun and interesting, but using it as a way to be holier-than-thous against other fans is fucking stupid and needs to stop.

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed.

but I have been struggling recently with the viciousness and hate in fandom.

It's toxic when it's meant to be something fun

[feotakahari]

This is something I've bitched about before in relation to Steven Universe. It sometimes portrays a character's actions as selfish, shortsighted, or pointlessly destructive, but it never really judges the characters themselves. I've seen fans wish it would come down harder on characters they dislike, but I think that would ruin the magic to some degree. There's something to be said for a show that gives you room to think for yourself.

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's a fad that will pass eventually, OP. It's just that the audience is questioning a lot of social issues in their own lives at the moment, so it's only natural they turn the same spotlight onto the media they consume. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing even though it can be annoying.

[(Anonymous)]

I think it has a lot to do with how young fandom is skewing right now. Whereas fandom was once a hobby that was mostly with 20s-30s and on because back in the 90s-early 00s there weren't smartphones, and internet was much, much slower. Back then computers were more expensive, there was a lot of "stranger danger' mystery on the net and most people never wanted to share anything about themselves. All the kids who got on would get booted from fandom spaces if they didn't pretend to be 18, so they had to behave or get kicked out. Fandom had a history of being worried that they'd get taken to court, so they kept it on the down low. Notice how the disclaimers went out of vogue and how the people are even going at the creators and actors on twitter.

So, you have all these very young (often as low as 13) people being introduced to complex things like feminism, but without the actual framework or nuance. So they rail at everything because they're tiny and feel powerless and unimportant, and are probably friendless, failing their classes and possibly being bullied, otherwise they'd be doing something else other than being on tumblr 24/7. And tumblr for some reason values rage. Calm, reasonable people don't get the kind of followers and hits the preformative frothing with joy or screaming with anger sorts get. So people put on a show to get attention, trade in actual valuable discussion for screaming memes like "you're just a pedophile supporter!" or "male tears!!" or "cis scum!!" or "kill all men!"

And the success of people being shut down in fandoms like Steven Universe are making them scream "this fandom is for CHILDREN, adults get out!" even when it's X-files, or Rick and Morty, shows that are absolutely not meant for children. Especially not the later which has very dark humor.

It also ends up with them screaming things like it's pedophilia for two adults with a mild age gap to date, because many of them can't fathom dating a thirty year old who seems impossibly old, and they liken a 19 year old dating a 23 year old to a 23 year old dating a 13 year old, even though there's quite a difference there.

Mostly it's just young people acting like they know shit and bullying people online to feel important. There's some older people as well, but they're usually really immature or so mentally ill/disabled that they never leave the house and their life is screaming at people on the internet to make themselves not feel like garbage about themselves. Or they're trying to play themselves up as the "cool dad" or "cool mom" and manipulating the teens to bully others by putting up things like "if you ever need anything, come to me!!" and "protect teen girls!!"

It's depressing, but you can't really fight the frothing mob of teenagers at this point. You either gotta blacklist and keep quiet so they don't target you, or move away from fandom and do something else.

[(Anonymous)]

SERIOUSLY. Holy shit, I can't wait for this phase to be over.

[(Anonymous)]

It certainly makes everything a lot more tedious and boring.
Also I'm getting really bummed out when i see readers getting angry at creators, saying they must believe something that a character has said or done. Demanding characters be preached at/punished/admonished immediately in universe (uh maybe give it some time? its a story not a sermon)
i keep seeing creators putting disclaimers on their work "these characters do not reflect my views"
it's really weird and stressful. it makes for dull and stifled stories.

[eyeshine72]

Totally with you on this OP. They're stories. They don't reflect the morality of the creators or fans.

[lady_dragoon]

I wouldn't mind it so much if the "discussions" weren't worshipping at the altar of Black and White Morality. Why yes, it's possible to find a character -- particularly a villain -- fascinating in their complexity while still acknowledging they're also an irredeemably terrible person. "Complex" doesn't have to mean "sympathetic."