fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #5429 ]

[ SECRET POST #5429 ]

⌈ Secret Post #5429 ⌋

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

01.

__________________________________________________

02.

__________________________________________________

03.

__________________________________________________

04.

__________________________________________________

05.

__________________________________________________

06.

__________________________________________________

07.

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 221 secrets from Secret Submission Post #777.
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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

03. https://i.imgur.com/4XB1h5f.png

Symptom. It existed long before all the "anti" and "pro" stuff

early aughts fandom had some real hot takes from people who didn't grasp nuance, corners of prequel SW fandom were ridiculous.

+2

People have always had issues dealing with nuance in fiction, people have been doing this for decades and I doubt it will ever stop.

Definitely symptom. Maybe effect, not cause. If you lean into the idea that what you like in fiction defines your real-life morality, yeah, you'll get antis. It's like spilled sugar in the kitchen that no one cleans up. The antis come marching one by one, hurrah. (I like using the ant emoji because it's such an apt analogy. One or two ants is no big deal. When you get the whole colony swarming and biting you, yeah, that's a problem.)

Yeah I remember seeing "if you like this character/thing your real life morals are questionable" review flames on ff.net in the early 00s so I assume that attitude has always existed. It's just there's ways for it to seem noisier and more prevalent these days.

I think it depends on the fandom. In a lot of fandoms People only like anti-heroes and think straight-up heroes or villains are boring and always one-dimensional and that the only way a character is interesting is if they are "grey."

I basically agree with you, there's so often a huge lack of nuance when discussing characters and morality and it's both baffling and annoying.

But separately, I'm just so annoyed with this "antis" stuff now. People keep insisting that it's only used specifically and exclusively to refer to people who engage in death threats, doxxing, or mass organized harassment. Then you see it in actual use like here, where it's just used to mean, essentially, people in the discourse who have vocal negative opinions about specific ships for moral reasons in general. Nothing in the way this secret mentions antis has anything to do with death threats, doxxing, or harassment. It's purely about about general discourse within fandom. And we just had another secret the other day where it was used the exact same way. To be clear, I don't think OP is wrong here, I think they're using the word the way that it gets used. What annoys me is this insistence that this isn't actually how the word is used. OK that's my rant done with.

I'm the OP of the Dune secret the other day.

When I used the word antis and discourse, I was referring more to the discourse around liking gray-area characters - "antis" was interpreted as people objecting to problematic aspects of the material. For what it's worth, I don't consider that kind of criticism "anti" unless it involves actively harassing fans or telling them not to like it/that they're bad people for liking it.

(I saw a post on twitter along the lines of "don't compare Paul to Kylo Ren" and my reaction was roughly "you're new here, aren't you?")

So I think I should have used a different word to mean "people who are hostile towards folks who like morally questionable characters", but "anti" is so broad it's come to mean many things. You have a god point.

Nayrt

"Don't compare Paul to Kylo Ren"

LMAO!!!!!

Twitter OP is in for a rough time if the rest of the series makes it to screen.

I think the reason why is because there is a lot of overlap in terms of opinions and social networks between people who do the first thing (death threats and doxxing) and people who do the second thing (have moralized negative opinions about ships). For example, I recently ran into someone who unironically believed that writing aged-up teenagers having sex was a strong indication that you are sexually attracted to the teenage characters and that aging them up was just a fig leaf to make that attraction seem more "legitimate." As far as I know, this person has never sent a death threat or harassed anyone. But I feel safe calling them an anti anyway because if you truly believe that writing fic of aged up teenagers having sex is an informative signal of being a real! life! pedophile!, and most people view pedophilia as one of the worst and most severe sexual transgressions, I get the feeling that person would feel death threats and doxxing are completely justified, because that is far less severe than letting pedophiles walk around fandom unharassed. There's a whole continuum of behavior that starts off by warning people about pedophiles and collecting lists of fans that post pedophilic content and ends with doxxing and death threats. This isn't a slippery slope argument -- it's an argument about what people view as morally justifiable given the stakes that they believe are at play (which is "real life pedophiles regularly posting and interacting with people in fannish spaces").

I kind of blame the Twilight discourse for really inflating this. There was so much allegedly feminist (lmao, it's not, it's neo-Victorian bullshit) handwringing about "Don't these stupid girls know this would be abuse in real life?" and "bad boys in romance is ABUSE APOLOGISM and will lead fans into toxic relationships. (Giving young female readers no credit for intelligence or discernment whatsoever - and basically victim-blaming any fan who did get into a bad situation, not because of the books and movies they like but because abusers are fucking everywhere and will take any opportunity).

This got weaponized by people who are BIG MAD that anyone could like a character they hate (Kylo Ren, Severus Snape, etc) and rather than just backbuttoning and walking away, had to make it an entire performance about how it's a moral issue, not just the matter of taste that it really is.

There has also absolutely been justification of fictional relationships that are abusive in fandom at times. It's deeply ahistorical to pretend that no one ever justified or romanticized abusive relationships.

AYRT

Who cares, though? Why does that even matter, if people like dark twisted romance? If they want the couple to get a happy ending (for them at least) anyway? If they think their bad-boy fave isn't as bad as all that?

It's okay. Fiction is at least partly for catharsis of the taboo, and I think that's a much more important role for it than simplistic moral instruction.

I think it's part of the nature of fandom that people are going to talk and argue about media and interpretations and relationships that they like. That's just inevitable. If - in those conversations - you have people who keep making arguments about how an abusive relationship is in fact totally romantic and great, people are going to respond to that and make the argument that no, actually, it's abusive. That's just a natural inevitable reality of the way that fandom works. People have different interpretations of characters and relationships and they argue about it. In this case, some of those arguments justified and romanticized fictional abusive relationships.

The reality isn't, you know, everyone had this great nuanced understanding of fictionality and taboo, and then a bunch of jealous haters who didn't like Kylo Ren and Severus Snape came in and ruined everything.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2021-11-17 04:01 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2021-11-17 05:30 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2021-11-17 05:40 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2021-11-17 09:01 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2021-11-17 04:42 (UTC) - Expand

I don't think there's anything wrong with liking dark twisted romance, as long as you understand that the romance is dark and twisted. But that's not what is often happening. There's a huge difference between enjoying a ship despite the red flags, or for the red flags, vs not seeing the flags at all. And there's a surprising number of people in fandom who fall into the last category.

There was someone on f!s who was a SessRin shipper and who insisted that there are no red flags in that relationship, even despite - in their own words - the relationship starting when she was 8. They literally said "grooming is when an ugly 40 year old guy grabs your junk, not when a nice youngish man is acting sweet and romantic to you!". What do you think a person like that is going to do, when she sees her nice youngish adult neighbor being this sweet and romantic towards her 8 year old daughter?

I've also seen countless times incest shippers say that there's nothing inherently wrong or abusive about incest in the real world as well. Hell, I used to be one of them. They'd post links with studies on birth defects (as if it was the only problem) and I completely bought into it for a long time.

The Loki Wives forum had a thread, where people were debating whether they should continue to take their anti-psychotic medication, because they feared it would make it harder for them to meet their husband in the astral realm.

My own mother had unprotected sex with a random guy she met on a party, because he had the last last name as the love interest in her favourite harlequin romance novel.

There really are untold numbers of romantic idiots out there, who badly need a reality check. I don't condone harassment, but if I see someone say that a 19 year old hitting on an 8 year old isn't grooming, don't tell me that calling this attitude unhealthy is equal to harassment.

But showing abusive relationships to young girls can affect them. Like I hate 50Sog far more than Twilight, but I don't care about it being an abusive mess as much because the people engaging with that are adults and have a better fiction/reality separation. Teen girls actually don't, teen anyone won't actually, and Twilight is another issue in a long line of romances peddled at young girls where they're shown over and over and over again that a domineering jackass of a boy is the 'ideal' partner and it's 'romantic' to put up with that abusive shit.

Whether it's meant to or not that will affect them subconsciously, just like how racist text and subtext can affect someones perceptions of an ethnicity negatively if all they see if negative actions being normalized as 'okay'. To act like fiction can't affect people at all, especially young people, is woefully incorrect.

I'm kind of wary of people who can't tolerate morally grey characters or villain fans at all. Because part of the reason I like characters like that is that I know I've done some shitty stuff in the past. I've hurt people. I've taken the wrong side. I try to do the right thing, but I haven't always succeeded.

People who can't tolerate that at all...do they ever think about the times they've been wrong? People they might have hurt? The possibility they might be wrong about some important things right now? The fact that they might be a villain in someone else's story?

Villains don't usually think they're villains. Most of the worst harm in the world is done by people who think they're in the right.

+1000

So much this. I finally left one of my recent fandoms when the anti argument finally evolved into "if you admit to having hurt someone in the past, you're disgusting and you should be shunned". These people have no self-reflection and their purity contest can only end badly for them.

That kind of thinking creates a strong incentive to never admit you were wrong about anything, and certainly never to apologize. (People already have natural resistance to this, no need to make it worse.) No wonder anti circles are so unrelentingly vicious and toxic.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2021-11-17 03:13 (UTC) - Expand

ngl but there are some villains that I just cannot cope with and I quietly, in my own head, judge the SHIT out of people who love them. Then there's others where I'm intrigued by them and/or actually like them and I'm absolutely certain people would judge me just as hard as I judge them.

But it's a very depends on the villain thing.

This is true: it's very personal and subjective.

I don't think most writers are able to handle these types of characters, honestly, and it just spills over into fandom.

But I can think of so many great writers who do handle them well! Including fanwriters. They're my favorite kind of character and they're really not hard to find. And sometimes fandom will take a character who's kind of a bland cinnamon roll in canon and give them more of a conflicted shady side, and that's good too. (I love a good corruption arc!)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only