[ SECRET POST #4250 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4250 ⌋

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

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[Abraham Benrubi on Parker Lewis Can't Lose]












Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 05 secrets from Secret Submission Post #608.
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

[(Anonymous)]

the shit of trying to adjudicate fandom arguments where I can see reasonable points on both sides but everyone is extremely emotional and committed to their position

[(Anonymous)]

Has anyone actually asked you to adjudicate this debate, though?

[(Anonymous)]

No one's asked me to adjudicate this and no one's asked you to respond to my posts

[(Anonymous)]

Lol, OK. I'm just trying to understand why you involve yourself in a debate you supposedly are soooo tired of instead of doing something else. Seems like you could easily solve this problem for yourself... if you truly wanted to.

[(Anonymous)]

Considering that there are no good points on the side of ship policing, I would recommend your current path of passive aggressive righteousness rather than making yourself more tired.

[(Anonymous)]

yes, exactly, that's a great example of what I'm talking about

[ninety6tears]

You're not talking about anything. Make a point or stop whining.

[(Anonymous)]

Talking about the problematic aspects of characters and ships, and being able to have those conversations, and having that as a component of fandom, is a good thing in general. It's not something that exists only to ruin OP's fandom experience, and it's garbage to treat it that way. Moreover, the idea that there was some golden age of fandom where everyone shipped for sexual tension reasons and fandom was only a fun hobby that no one took seriously and there were never vicious, paralyzing, awful, wanky debates is a completely untrue and fallacious one. Presenting all of this as "ruining my fun hobby" is not at all true, and it's not at all useful. OP's framing of the issue is just garbage.

At the same time, ship policing clearly does go too far all the time, and fandom - as well as social media and society in general - frequently is toxic, damaging, and stupid, including much of what goes by the name of social justice. In defending the importance of social justice perspective in fandom, and the continuity of wank in fandom, it would be easy to pretend that there aren't toxic trends in fandom. And of course there are, and of course it's wrong when it happens. The reality is that both of these things happen at the same time.

So to have this conversation requires constantly hedging between the correctness of some of the criticisms, and the incorrectness of the broader framing. And it's exhausting to constantly have to point out that, yes, fandom is frequently toxic, but that doesn't mean that people who have social and political conversations are out to ruin your fun. And what's particularly frustrating is that none of these points are new. None of these things should be as complicated or weird to point out as they apparently are.

[(Anonymous)]

this. all of this. i love you, anon.

[(Anonymous)]

This is a secret venting a frustration. Not some declaration of truth.

Your double use of the word "garbage" makes me think you have some heavy emotional investment here as well.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I'm venting a frustration too, and I never said otherwise.

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, you said you were "adjudicating" despite being tired of having this argument, clearly more because you don't win it than because other people are the irrational ones.

[(Anonymous)]

If "adjudicate" was the wrong word, then I apologize.

[ninety6tears]

The OP is not saying anything I would interpret as wanting to silence any and all discussions pertaining to the morality of the characters, just not wanting to be judged for what they ship. That judgment does exist completely to ruin their fun, and is not only unimportant but counterproductive to any good kind of discussion of society and morality in fandom.

I agree that ship wars have always been around, but I can't agree that they were always as heavy on the moralizing and the illusion of activism. I just can't. The debates have always been vicious somewhere, but they've gotten harder to avoid, and more often are about ships being "abusive" etc. rather than bickering about what's suggested by/going to be canon which was stupid but less personal. I actually felt like the closest thing to a "golden age" was when social issues were becoming more widely discussed and the criticism of a canon on the basis of its treatment of women or whatever was a discussion you could actually have with the general sense that at the end of the day we were all still fans, you could still like the thing, and rarely was it about ship wars. I had fandoms which were definitely imperfect but were like that. But shortly after we began to slide into the fandom activism fallacy and people were using the same critical perspectives and buzzwords that became popular in meta to argue their ship wasn't just narratively better but morally better, and since that's a cheaply heavier attack in the current climate, it's now everywhere. And since fandoms aren't as compartmentmentalized as they used to be, norms are somewhat more aggressive. I am one of SO many to have observed this, along with the OP, who isn't even claiming all that strongly the "garbage" idea of the Golden Age you felt the need to respond to with notable bitterness after your posture of measured rationale.

[(Anonymous)]

The OP is not saying anything I would interpret as wanting to silence any and all discussions pertaining to the morality of the characters, just not wanting to be judged for what they ship. That judgment does exist completely to ruin their fun, and is not only unimportant but counterproductive to any good kind of discussion of society and morality in fandom.

And this is another part that's so fucking frustrating! Because this isn't really a hard-and-fast line that you can actually draw between those things, where you can make your statements only apply to people who are being wrongly judgmental and not to people who are talking about social justice issues more generally. Whether someone is doing one of those things or the other is as much about who's doing the observing as anything else - one person's "reasonable discussion about fandom issues" is another person's "overly judgmental and critical".

That's a huge part of the reason why it's a tiring conversation and why it's generally bad, and frustrating, to talk about these things in terms of broad generalizations. I'm not trying to deny the frustration that people feel, because it's real and it's merited. But it is really tiring to talk about it, and have that conversation not be terrible, when the conversation gets framed in this way.

[ninety6tears]

In many contexts it's hard to give people the benefit of the doubt or understand their main point when there's so much wank out there. But "Ship and let ship" and acknowledging that there are many kinds of ships and many ways to ship has not been a super complicated line to draw for me. Like I can easily think of a ship that personally bothers me because, let's say, John doesn't seem like he could easily forgive Jay for being a bullying asshole, but I can voice that opinion without necessarily implying I think the people who ship it think bullying is okay, or that I haven't considered that people just want them to have hate-sex or that other people just have a different suspension of disbelief than me or are willing to slightly mischaracterize, etc. If they denied that Jay ever did anything wrong, I'd argue with that. Ultimately I just think there are good and bad or just right and wrong opinions to have about characters or events or pairings, but I don't like to dismiss overall ships or their shippers as problematic.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree that fans should be able to criticise canon relationships and characters without being to shut up and judged for starting 'discourse', but I'm not sure I feel the same about criticising non-canon ships tbh? It's something that the fans have interpreted in their own personal ways and what I might see in a certain ship is not how another person interprets the same ship. People can have their fun. Giving someone unasked for criticism about their fanwork feels to me like barging into a party uninvited and telling everyone why the host is garbage.

So Idk, criticism is good because that's how we improve understanding and our skills, but time and place is important. Sometimes I just want to see some mindless fluff with my ship you know? Not engage in a discussion on how they only work if they're headed down a downward spiral.

[(Anonymous)]

nah if you can crit canon ships then non-canon ships are fair game too. it may be fan-interpretation but that doesn't mean it's somehow exempt from any analysis just because people like it.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean




Shipping a lesbian with a guy character because you think it'd be hot if they fucked is kinda fucked up given how few lesbians there are. Especially ones that aren't fodder for straight men to jack off to. That's an example, coming from a lesbian, because I've never NOT seen that attitude of thinking my sexuality is more flexible than it is carry over to real life.

[(Anonymous)]

Ehh, be careful with generalizations, though. I've shipped lesbian characters with men because I felt their relationship was more believable on the page/screen, and I'm also a lesbian. Shipping really isn't that big a deal. That character is still a lesbian, regardless of what any group of fans thinks or produces.

[(Anonymous)]

Well put. Fanon =/= canon.

[(Anonymous)]

Exactly. Slash, femslash, het, we're shipping what we want.